Ten Reasons Women Are Losing While Gays Keep Winning

[theHandpuppet]

I'm going to cross post this article to the LGBT Group because I believe there's a discussion here that's long overdue. Even though it's been shown over and again that homophobia and misogyny travel hand-in-hand via longstanding cultural and religious prejudices, at times it might appear the activists for women and gays operate at best under an uneasy truce. Perhaps there are some vestiges of old tapes lying about, ones of which I'm unaware. I do know that as both a lesbian and feminist, I sometimes feel as if I'm inhabiting some as-of-yet unnamed state of being, one foot staunchly rooted in feminism and the other in the LGBT world. Like the uncomfortable guest at a dinner party who's precariously seated between exes who grit their teeth and smile as I turn my attention one to the other, I find myself watching the clock and wondering if I can make it through dessert.
I'm very much looking forward to a discussion of this topic and why any of us believes the struggle for the rights of women and LGBTs is diverging. Or is it?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/06/ten-reason-women-are-losing-while-gays-keep-winning.html
Politics
07.06.14
Ten Reasons Women Are Losing While Gays Keep Winning
Even as gay equality becomes one of the fastest-advancing civil rights causes in history, reactionaries are still turning back the clock for women. Why?

The Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, among its many troubling consequences, is yet another entry in the latest disturbing trend of civil rights cases, in which gays win, and women lose.

Juxtapose Hobby Lobby with the recent fate of Arizona’s “Turn the Gays Away” bill. In Arizona, a religious exemption that would allow business owners to refuse to serve gay people died a fiery death. The issue was basically the same as in Hobby Lobby: when businesses can discriminate on the basis of religion. Yet gays won, and women lost.

This has been going on for years. Consider: in 2004, being gay was a fireable offense in a majority of states and in the U.S. military. The first same-sex marriage case, in Massachusetts, had just been decided. It had only been a year since “sodomy” was illegal in 14 states. Gay politicians were few and far between; gay celebrities were closeted...

... In the same 10 years, women’s autonomy to make their own healthcare decisions has been steadily eroded. Fifty-four abortion clinics have closed since 2010 alone, out of fewer than 800 nationwide. “Conscience clauses,” originally intended to allow doctors to refuse to perform abortions, have expanded to include entire health systems. Gag orders are in effect around the world. It hasn’t been this hard to get an abortion in 40 years....

MORE at http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/06/ten-reason-women-are-losing-while-gays-keep-winning.html

[niyad]

1. k and r and thank you.

[theHandpuppet]

2. Well, I tried

I guess this is a subject folks still aren't comfortable talking about. Thanks for your reply, though. I cross-posted this thread across two forums and yours is the only acknowledgement I've gotten. Sigh.

[niyad]

3. I know, the lack of response for something this important is disheartening, to say the least.

but, you never know who is reading it who just might find it useful, important, whatever, but just does not want to say.

[theHandpuppet]

4. Another article on this subject...

The Isthmus
Madison, WI
Women's rights, gay rights and Hobby Lobby
The recent Supreme Court ruling could cause problems for both movements
Judith Davidoff on Thursday 07/10/2014

(excerpt)
The Hobby Lobby ruling -- signaling to many a continued backlash against women's access to reproductive health services -- brought comparisons to the recent court decisions that have advanced gay rights. Why has there been such movement on marriage equality, for instance, while the women's rights movement is still fighting for basic health care?

Alta Charo, UW-Madison professor of law and bioethics and a former adviser to President Obama on women's reproductive health, says the gay rights movement transformed itself over the years from one that demanded sexual freedom to one that demanded what the majority of Americans, particularly conservative ones, already had and admired: a military career, children and a spouse.

Homosexuality is also now widely viewed as something that is intrinsic to one's identity. "So the argument that [gay people] are choosing something that is immoral goes away," says Charo. "But with women and sex, it's still viewed as discretionary."

Conservative America still sees sex without the goal of procreation as recreational and dirty -- "as opposed to something that is intrinsic to our well being," says Charo....

MORE at http://www.isthmus.com/isthmus/article.php?article=43142