If you watch TV, read the news, or follow politics, you’ve seen or read or heard Katrina vanden Heuvel, a true icon for the progressive movement and media. Vanden Heuvel is the editor and publisher of The Nation, the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, founded in 1865.  Vanden Heuvel’s blog “Editor’s Cut,” appears at thenation.com and she writes a weekly online column for The Washington Post. She is a frequent commentator on American and international politics on ABC, MSNBC, CNN and PBS. Her articles have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Foreign Policymagazine and The Boston Globe. Vanden Heuvel is a member of The Council on Foreign Relations, and serves on the board of The Institute for Women’s Policy Research, The Institute for Policy Studies, The World Policy Institute, The Correctional Association of New York, The Women’s Media Center and The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. She received Planned Parenthood’s Maggie Award for her article, Right-to-Lifers Hit Russia, the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Callaway Prize for the Defense of the Right of Privacy, The American- Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s 2003 “Voices of Peace” award, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund’s 2006 “Justice in Action” award. Vanden Heuvel is the author of several books including Taking Back America – And Taking Down the Radical Right,  Dictionary of Republicanisms: The Indispensable Guide to What They Really Mean When They Say What They Think You Want to Hear (2005) and The Change I Believe In: Fighting for Progress in the Age of Obama.

And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five with Katrina vanden Heuvel.

Katie Halper: What recent news story made you want to scream?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: It made me scream to see that even while austerity’s theoretical underpinnings have been exposed as flimflam, constructed out of spreadsheet error and goofy logic, austerity’s reign of misery continues– just the other day, unemployment in Greece soared to 60%, 20 million in our country remain unemployed or underemployed, our growth is imperiled, yet Wall Street, which blew up our economy, grows more concentrated and powerful. Could we break up the big banks, build coops and community banks and move from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism that prizes the  three “p”s….planet, people and profitability?

KH: What, in your opinion, is the greatest challenge facing feminism today?

KV: How do we ensure women control their own bodies — and thereby their own destiny. In the US and globally, if women control their own bodies, fates and future — whether it’s through access to birth control, education or economic independence, and by living in peaceful cultures, free of militarism and military occupation, all people are lifted up and it will be a healthier, more secure and just country and world. I think that we should pay a lot of attention to the rollback of reproductive rights, of women’s health. My good friend Ilyse Hogue, Nation blogger, now head of NARAL, has called it, “death by a thousand cuts” –of women’s rights to control their own bodies, which is so central to a democratic society.

[…]

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First, the chief of the Air Force sexual assault prevention unit was arrested for sexual assault. Then the Pentagon released a report showing that sexual assault had jumped from 19,000 cases in 2010 to 26,000 in 2012. Now, we have the Air Force’s top commander, Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, saying that sexual assault happens all the time outside of the military and that it’s because of a “hookup mentality.” 20% of women report they had been sexually assaulted,

“before they came into the military…. So they come in from a society where this occurs…. Some of it is the hookup mentality of junior high even and high school students now, which my children can tell you about from watching their friends and being frustrated by it.”

It’s nice to know that this general moonlights as a cultural anthropologist who studies his own children. Maybe his kids can  testify as expert witnesses and explain how sexual encounters between consenting adults is responsible for sexual assault and rape. I feel so much better knowing that military high ups have such a nuanced understanding of their institution’s rampant and systemic rape and sexual assault.

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n an interesting speech, Pope Francis urged 800 nuns representing  international women’s congregations  to be mothers and not spinsters.

1 : a woman whose occupation is to spin

2: a: archaic: an unmarried woman of gentle family b: an unmarried woman and especially one past the common age for marrying

3 : a woman who seems unlikely to marry

I don’t think The Pope is telling nuns not to spin. Nor is he telling nuns to get married of have children. He wants them to be chaste mothers. And if you think that’s impossible, just remember Maria, the virgin mother of Jesus Christ, provides us with the precedent. But in case they can’t achieve immaculate conception, The Pope is fine with a spiritual, if not physical motherhood, or as he describes it,

“a fertile chastity, a chastity which produces spiritual children within the Church…. The ordained woman is a mother, she must be a mother and not a spinster! You are mothers, like the figures of Mary and the Mother Church…. It is not possible to understand Mary without maternity, nor the Church without motherhood.”

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As Amy posted earlier today, Margaret Thatcher has died. She was Britain’s first and only woman Prime Minister, crashing the ancient iron gates of patriarchal politics. Though her actions can be seen as a feminist victory, she herself was not a feminist.  She oncesaid,

“The battle for women’s rights has largely been won. The days when they were demanded and discussed in strident tones should be gone forever. I hate those strident tones we hear from some Women’s Libbers.”

In case you need more proof of her anti-feminism, here’s another gem from the “Iron Lady”:

‘The feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.”

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Earlier today I blogged about Alabama’s new bill which places major restrictions on abortion clinics. Well, meet the man who will sign this bill into law, the charming champion of the war on women, Governor, Robert Bentley. Bentley is not only the duly sworn chief executive of his state, but a licensed physician, who like all physicians has taken an oath to do no harm and to only heal. But when he signs, he will be not only undermining the rights of women throughout his state but undermining their health.

Who is Robert Bentley MD? Well, he seems to be an equal opportunity harmer, degrading the lives of not only women but other groups that are not of his tribe—wealthy, white, male, and Christian.

In 2011, he signed into law an immigration bill considered at the time the most restrictive in the nation, bypassing even Arizona. The law obliges schools to investigate students’ legal status, and resulted in many immigrants not sending their children to school. The law made it illegal to give a ride to an immigrant, hire an immigrant, and just be an immigrant—in that police were able to arrest anyone they suspect might be here illegally.

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Bad News: Alabama passed a bill which pretends to be about protecting women but is actually aimed at shutting down abortion clinics on Tuesday. The governor has said he will sign the bill, ironically called the “Women’s Health and Safety Act,”  which requires that doctors preforming abortions be granted admitting privileges at local hospitals. Some of the doctors who perform abortions in Alabama are from out of state and thus aren’t affiliated with hospitals. The Alabama bill also requires that clinics meet standards of ambulatory surgery centers. Clinics would have to spend millions of dollars on unnecessary construction, equipment and supplies. These bills, which are less egregious and overtly anti-choice than the heartbeat bills passed in South Dakota and Arkansas are actually more dangerous, explains Carole Joffe, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco:

“Those other laws may sound more drastic… but one assumes the Supreme Court will not uphold them…. It’s the more reasonable-sounding things like hallway width, or requiring a doctor to have local admitting privileges, that some courts will possibly approve….These have the capacity to be much more devastating to the ability to provide abortion care.”

In case you have any doubts about the people behind the bill, they think they are doing god’s work and still haven’t gotten the memo about the separation between church and state. The governor, Robert Bentley, a… you guessed it… Republican, said, “We need to remember we are dealing with human life and this is what God expects us to do.”

Good News: The Kansas clinic operated by the tireless and valiant Dr. George Tiller, who was killed in 2009 by an anti-choice zealot (I mean, are we really going to call a killer “pro-life”? Sorry.) has reopened as the South Wind Women’s Center.

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Governor Jack Dalrymple of North Dakota, a Republican, (duh!) signed three bills into law that would ban almost all abortions. Here are the three bills, all of which were passed by the Republican-controlled (duh!) legislature:

1. A requirement that doctors who perform abortions get admitting privileges at a local hospital. This could have the effect of closing the Red River Women’s Clinic in Fargo, the state’s only abortion provider.

2. An unprecedented ban against abortion in the case of genetic defects.

3. A ban on abortion once a fetal heartbeat is “detectable,” which can be as early as six weeks into a pregnancy when a transvaginal ultrasound is used.

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Congress finally passed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in February, despite massive opposition from House Republicans; and President Obama signed it into law in March. But the International Violence Against Women Act (I-VAWA) has yet to be passed. It is expected to be re-introduced in Congress in the next couple of weeks. But will it pass? And what does it do? To find out I called into a phone conference with three women working to raise awareness about I-VAWA: Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida), member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, who is helping spearhead passage of the bill, Ruth Messinger, President of the American Jewish World Service, and Rupsa Mallik, of CREA, a feminist human rights organization in New Delhi, India, which works to advance the rights of women and girls and the sexuality and reproductive rights of all people.

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The Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments on California’s Prop 8, the law banning same-sex marriage in California. Because legalese is hard to understand, I’ve translated some of the arguments made against marriage equality, and one of the arguments made for it, from yesterday’s hearing.

1. Justice Samuel Alito kvetched to the Solicitor General Donald Verrilli,  “Traditional marriage has been around for thousands of years. Same-sex marriage is very new…. But you want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution which is newer than cell phones or the Internet? I mean we — we are not — we do not have the ability to see the future.”

Translation: Gay marriage is really new so we obviously can’t rule on it. Just like we can’t rule on cell phones or the internet. Whoops. Actually, we can. And do.

2. Attorney George Cooper defended Prop 8 by arguing that, “The concern is that redefining marriage as a genderless institution will sever its abiding connection to its historic traditional procreative purposes, and it will refocus the purpose of marriage and the definition of marriage away from the raising of children…”

Translation: Marriage is about having children. Which is why we don’t let people who can’t have children marry each other. Oh, wait, we do. People like Justice John Roberts and his wife who adopted their children.

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The saddest part of the story is the lost memory of what Iraqi women once were. I grew up in Baghdad with a working mother who drove herself to the office and always told me that I could anything I wanted with my life. My mother’s friends were factory managers, artists, principals and doctors.

It has been just over 20 years since I left Iraq. Today, female college students ask me if it is true that the streets of Baghdad were once full of women driving, that women could walk around in public at all times of the day without worry, that university campuses were once filled with women who did not wearing headscarves. –Zainab Salbi

Yesterday marked the 10-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. In the media, there’s much discussion about the impact of the war on America’s economy, politics and veterans, as there should be. But the war’s impact on Iraqi people and especially Iraqi women has received scant attention.

Though Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator (whom the United States was happy to support), he and his Ba’ath Party advanced women’s rights. The Constitution drafted in 1970 guaranteed women the right to vote, attend school, own property and run for political office. The Personal Status Law, enacted in 1958, gave women equal rights to divorce and to inherit property, restricted polygamy, and prohibited marriages under age 18. But the new Iraqi Constitution replaced these status laws with an article stating that “Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation” and that ”No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam.” Thus, the delineation of women’s rights is in the hands of religious leaders. As Hillary Clinton has explained, “Now, what we see happening in Iraq is the governing council attempting to shift large parts of civil law into religious jurisdiction.”  In the words of Iraqi feminist Yanar Mohammed, “We used to have a government that was almost secular. It had one dictator…Now we have almost 60 dictators—Islamists who think of women as forces of evil. This is what is called the democratization of Iraq.” […]

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