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All Politics is Loco: lgbtP

by Sean Kosofsky

This past weekend I spoke on a panel in Chicago for ChoiceUSA about the intersections of abortion rights and LGBT rights. Although most LGBT people are pro-choice it is clearer to me than ever before that our two movements must work closer together.
There are obvious parallels in major court cases. Critical victories for reproductive freedom and LGBT rights have rested on core arguments about privacy and control over a person's own body. The right wing does not want women or gays to have any control over how we form our families – whether it deals with our partners or when we become parents. They don't consider women or gays for the whole people we are, instead they drive wedges by trying to separate us from our behavior as if we can be neatly carved up that way. They "love the sinner" enough to keep valuable sex education from us, prevent us from parenthood or force us into parenthood. The politicization of basic health care and fundamental human rights links our two movements at the hip (and the pelvis).
Laws that ban "harm" to the fetus pretend to protect pregnant women, but they really hurt women and criminalize health care procedures. Anti-LGBT activists like Gary Glenn also try to "protect" gays from our own intimacy, as if being in love and making love were irresponsible acts. Extremists have also used false medical and scientific research to claim that being gay or having an abortion can lead to health risks like cancer. Both camps warp science to meet their needs. Of course they don't stop there. Anti-abortion and anti-LGBT leaders do not want young people to have any control over their destiny and do not trust them to even learn about what their bodies can do. It's like sending your beautiful children into traffic with the shiny new family car without insisting on some driving lessons. It is reckless – for every motorist.
Parental notification laws that require pregnant teenage girls to notify their parents before having an abortion are driven by the same fear-mongers that want to require LGBT teens to get parental permission to join gay straight alliances. Where the hell were these busy bodies pre-pregnancy or pre-coming out? Waiting periods, bans on later term abortions, bans on funding, and limits on which procedures will be covered by insurance companies all serve to create a web or restrictions that ignore what is in the best interest of the patient. Bans on marriage, military service, adoption and state funding for domestic partner benefits or gay friendly course at UofM all follow the same pattern. The same conservatives that want small government seem to want it just small enough that it will fit into our bedrooms or our wombs.
Then there are the dreaded refusal clauses – laws that allow medical and mental health professionals to deny treatment to anyone they have "moral objections" to. Designed to "protect" pharmacists from having to fill prescriptions for contraception or abortafacients, they have also been interpreted to undermine civil rights laws and the Hippocratic Oath. The same language has been used to "protect" adoption agencies from being "forced" to place children with gay families. Erecting barriers to contraception seems counterintuitive but no one ever claimed fascist policies were based on logic. The right says they don't want unplanned pregnancies yet they do everything in their power to limit access to contraception. They also worked to block FDA approval of emergency contraception (Plan B) and the HPV vaccine (Gardasil) because they claimed access to such treatments would increase promiscuity (with no data to back this up). Once again personal morals trumped public health. Luckily they lost both those fights. The same crusade continues for blocking comprehensive sex education in schools, access to condoms and public funding for HIV prevention. Instead we see increasing funding for abstinence based education, which doesn't work and may exacerbate the problem.
Remember "choose life" license plates. We don't have them in Michigan but we are subjected to "one man one woman" bumper stickers. In states with these plates the government sells them for extra and contributes the profit to anti-abortion "crisis pregnancy centers" that dish out medically inaccurate information. This is identical to the faith based initiative which continues to give millions of dollars to Christian evangelical organizations that run "ex-gay" ministries. In both cases we see public financing for a breech in the separation of church and state.
Sexual and reproductive rights are central to our common struggles. We must take into consideration the position candidates have on abortion rights the same as we do on LGBT rights.

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Topics: Opinions
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