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A new poll by the New York Times has revealed that 67 percent of Catholic voters support the federal mandate for health insurance plans to cover the full cost of birth control – only 25 percent of Catholic voters oppose it. In fact, studies show that 99 percent of American women and 98 percent of Catholic American women have used some form of contraception at one time or another during their lives. Yet, conservative voices have slammed President Obama on his recent compromise with the Catholic Church over providing contraception coverage to its employees. In fact, this week, two religious institutions: the Catholic Ava Maria University, and the evangelical Geneva College have filed lawsuits against the Obama administration over the ruling. Meanwhile, Obama himself has been boosted by the controversy, particularly among women voters: a Pew Research Center poll puts his support among women at 59 percent.

Republican frontrunner for the GOP Presidential nomination, Rick Santorum, has become the right’s strongest spokesman during this latest culture war, saying recently that female contraception “is a license to do things in the sexual realm that counter how things are supposed to be.” Santorum has also said that women who are raped should merely “make the best out of the situation.”
Additionally, Santorum’s prominent financial supporter, Foster Friess, recently generated his own controversy when he said on an MSNBC interview, “[b]ack in my days they used Bayer Aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees.”

Further revealing GOP attitudes toward women and women’s rights, a recent Congressional hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on contraception featured an all male panel of witnesses. The Committee, chaired by California Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, refused to allow a female student who was set to testify on the consequences of denied contraception. The all-male panel generated a national outcry, reflecting the liberal views of the general population. The contraception coverage controversy comes on the heels of the Susan G Komen’s decision to revoke Planned Parenthood’s funding, before they capitulated to an outraged public and rescinded their decision.

GUEST: Nancy L Cohen, historian, author, and contributor to The Huffington Post, author of Delirium: How the Sexual Counterrevolution is Polarizing America

The Purity Myth: The Virginity Movement’s War Against Women

In a video adaptation of her bestselling book, pioneering feminist blogger Jessica Valenti trains her sights on “the virginity movement” — an unholy alliance of evangelical Christians, right-wing politicians, and conservative policy intellectuals who have been exploiting irrational fears about women’s sexuality to roll back women’s rights. From dad-and-daughter “purity balls,” taxpayer-funded abstinence-only curricula, and political attacks on Planned Parenthood, to recent attempts by legislators to de-fund women’s reproductive health care and narrow the legal definition of rape, Valenti identifies a single, unifying assumption: the myth that the worth of a woman depends on what she does — or does not do — sexually. In the end, Valenti argues that the health and well-being of women are too important to be left to ideologues bent on vilifying feminism and undermining women’s autonomy.

Thank you Gifts:

The Purity Myth – DVD – $120

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