• From Daily Kos and Netroots Nation: activists from the Pretty Bird Woman House shelter speak about sexual violence against Native women and their struggle for justice. Because of jurisdictional uncertainty, the non-Native perpetrators responsible for 86% of assaults against Native women are rarely arrested or prosecuted. Video here (sorry, couldn’t get it to embed properly.)

• Politico “discovers” the pro-choice spiritual left. It’s actually a pretty savvy article. I think that it’s long past time the religious/spiritual left got some recognition as a political force–from everyone, including the spiritual left itself. Learning to approach reproductive justice from a faith-positive perspective can only help our movement. Some of us may have a hard time getting our head around this, in the context of so many decades/centuries of religiously-motivated attacks on women, sexual freedom, and reproductive rights. (I myself split from Christianity years ago, citing irreconcilable differences.) But as this article points out, the religious Right has done a very good job of hijacking God and spirituality for their own oppressive purposes, and as in many other areas of politics, the left has long allowed them to frame the discourse. Hopefully we’re now seeing the beginning of a push to reclaim it. Combined with the momentum towards framing reproductive rights as human rights, there’s a lot of space in that direction to movement-build.

• Most of the readers here have probably already seen this, but President Bush has proposed new regulations for the Department of Health and Human Services that, among other things, redefine abortion to include some forms of contraception. Under the regulations, health providers, researchers, and medical schools would only receive federal funding if they sign “written certifications” promising that they won’t discriminate against employees who would rather not perform essential reproductive health services. (Rep. Nita Lowey and family planning activists respond.) Looks like Bush is hard at work on his legacy, intent on leaving the country in as much of a mess as possible come January.

• Queen Emily, guest blogger at Questioning Transphobia, has begun a really great series on transphobic tropes. Her second post, Patriarchal Privilege, addresses transphobia in feminism. To some extent, this comes from a lack of understanding; women feel transwomen are “really” men trespassing in women’s spaces. Emily deconstructs this idea, outlining the discrimination and violence faced by trans people. As she says, “Trans people are systematically disempowered, on macro and micro levels. Why on earth does any of this sound like we’re getting monthly muffin baskets from the Patriarchy?” No kidding. The exclusionary “feminism” she calls out looks a lot to me like the operation of unexamined privilege. And like bisexual people facing monosexism, trans people fall into that interstitial space between hard and fast categories that makes them targets of prejudice from all sides–even within the LGBTQIQ community. Why is it that even among those claiming to fight for equality, there’s so often some group considered less equal than others?

–Erin Simonitch

Hi, folks. As Julie mentioned in her intro post, I’ll be guest blogging at Repo Repro this summer while she masters the bar exam. A little about me: I’m headed into my second year at UC Davis School of Law (King Hall) and will be co-chairing my LSRJ chapter for the 2008-2009 academic year. I’m also a news junkie, and blogging is one of the things I do for fun (yeah, huge nerd here) so I’m thrilled to have an opportunity to apply those dubious talents for a good cause. Thanks for reading!

–Erin Simonitch

Small changes can make a big difference.

It’s a principle that helps sustain and hearten those of us committed to social justice. Without it, the magnitude of the work would overwhelm us. But it’s a double-edged sword, because the principle operates whether the change is for better or for worse. So it’s also why law schools drill “baby lawyers” to obsess over details and precise wording. Use the wrong language in a contract agreement, leave out an important detail, fail to thoroughly define your terms, and sooner or later the consequences will explode into thousands of dollars of unnecessary expenses, while you’re stuck in court debating the meaning of the word “chicken.” (As my property professor likes to point out, litigators exist to clean up other lawyers’ messes.)

Members of Congress demonstrated their failure to understand this concept when they passed the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act, making a small change in federal Medicaid law that has a big impact on young women’s access to contraceptives. Before the Act’s passage, pharmaceutical companies could and did offer hormonal contraceptives at significant discounts. But in drafting the new rules for calculating Medicaid rebates, lawmakers left out a provision that would have preserved those discounts for campus health centers. Now, pharm companies must sell contraceptives to clinics at higher prices or suffer a financial penalty–a “business decision” that’s all too easily made by corporations for whom the bottom line is, well, the bottom line.

The result, of course, is that students pay the price. Contraceptive costs have risen dramatically on college and university campuses, sometimes as much as 500%.

(more…)

Here’s a not so hypothetical hypo (yes, I’m studying for exams, so I am awash in hypos): an LSRJ chapter plans an event called “Sex Toys 101″ in which they plan to bring in an educator from a local shop to teach students about sexual health and pleasure and to facilitate a discussion about state laws around the country concerning the legality of sex toys. Two hours before the event, the school’s assistant dean cancels it, citing some school regulation that bans the selling or promotion of commercial products by a private company. Except that no one was promoting or selling anything — anything, that is, other than a sex-positive attitude. The student group yells censorship. The dean says it’s just a simple case of misapplication of school rules.

Sound far-fetched? Think again. This is going on right now at the University of Wisconsin. And the school’s LSRJ chapter is in the thick of it. The chain of events might make more sense in, say, Alabama or Texas — states with a recent history of outlawing sex toys — but in Wisconsin? So it is.

Luckily, it appears as if the law school community is seeing through the dean’s flimsy reasoning. From the blog of one professor: “That sure sounds reasonable, and it might be if it wasn’t bulls**t!”

And so it appears. The person who came to speak at the event provided the education as a public service. Experts from Babeland have done the same thing at NYU without incident. They don’t bring anything to sell or push students to patronize the store. Instead, they come to promote safe and healthy sexuality. Shouldn’t a graduate school with a student body made up wholly of adults want its students to have access to all the information necessary to make informed, empowered, and healthy sexual choices? Wouldn’t a law school want to nurture the ideals of the First Amendment?

Wisconsin LSRJ thinks so, and the group is organizing students on campus to protest the dean’s actions. The major league blogs have picked up. And the pressure is mounting. But I guess this is the fight we a society can expect when we allow the government to fund abstinence-only “education” programs, which plant the seed of our dysfunctional thinking about sexuality.