CARSON CITY, Nev. — She didn’t plan to say it. Yvanna
Cancela, a newly elected Democrat in the Nevada Senate, didn’t want to “sound
crass.” But when a Republican colleague defended a century-old law requiring
doctors to ask women seeking abortions whether they’re married, Cancela
couldn’t help firing back.
Since Nevada seated the nation’s first majority-female state
legislature in January, the male old guard has been shaken up by the
perspectives of female lawmakers. Bills prioritizing women’s health and safety
have soared to the top of the agenda. Mounting reports of sexual harassment
have led one male lawmaker to resign. And policy debates long dominated by men,
including prison reform and gun safety, are yielding to female voices.
“A man is not asked his marital status before he gets a
vasectomy,” she countered — and the packed hearing room fell silent.
Cancela, 32, is part of the wave of women elected by both
parties in November, many of them younger than 40. Today, women hold the
majority with 23 seats in the Assembly and 10 in the Senate, or a combined 52
percent.
No other legislature has achieved that milestone in U.S.
history. Only Colorado comes close, with women constituting 47 percent of its
legislators. In Congress, just one in four lawmakers is a woman. And in
Alabama, which just enacted an almost complete ban on abortion, women make up
just 15 percent of lawmakers.
The female majority is having a huge effect: More than 17
pending bills deal with sexual assault, sex trafficking and sexual misconduct,
with some measures aimed at making it easier to prosecute offenders. Bills to
ban child marriage and examine the causes of maternal mortality are also on the
docket.
“I can say with 100 percent certainty that we wouldn’t have
had these conversations" a few years ago, said Assembly Majority Leader
Teresa Benitez-Thompson (D). "None of these bills would have seen the
light of day.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/05/17/nevadas-legislature-women-outnumber-men-first-nation-carson-city-may-never-be-same/?utm_term=.29cd4e820b3e
And a story especially for Tom
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/05/16/were-like-their-grandparents-when-retired-people-hang-out-with-retired-race-horses/?utm_term=.f6df53916e99
(Here comes Eeyore, Here comes Eeyore.)
ReplyDelete"Bills prioritizing women’s health and safety have soared to the top of the agenda." First, I agree that if Holy Mother Church were to trust women long enough to get just one of those kinds of issues right, I would send up rockets of glee. But, second, writing stronger anti-rape laws should be the easy part, and there is no indication here that the women are readier than men to take on the hard parts.
Leading the charge on updating the marriage question (and deciding whether doctors should be given the option of not asking or forbidden to ask or imprisoned for asking... decisions, decisions, decisions) will leave Nevada lawmakers presiding over the same old Nevada. We have a Legislature, mostly men, in Florida that can spend hours arguing about how to identify armed defensive shooters so cops won't shoot the wrong guy, a situation that seems to have possibly come up once. But when they solve that knotty problem, Florida still has more than 1 million people living in poverty in "good" economic times and after 20 straight years of economic-development-promoting, tax-cutting governors who created, they said, jobs, jobs, jobs.
Florida's poor people have a lot of jobs and are still in poverty.
What will the Legislature do about that? Would a Legislature with 60 percent women do better? Well, not if it were only prioritizing neglected "women's issues."
We hire these people to make democracy work for everybody, not take care of their tribe or the people who paid for their election. And democracy isn't working very well when they're privatizing the waterfront to make more room to dock yachts, and all anyone can think to do about it is to make rape convictions easier.
I am waving my arms about this because earlier I read a piece in Foreign Affairs about how Congress gave up legislating trade policy in 1934 and turned it over to the President, keeping kibitzing rights. They did approximately the same thing with foreign policy in 1949. Trade and foreign policy are hard, they bore constituents, and there are no votes in them. Slowly the first branch of government has been deciding that legislating is too hard in a democracy. That's why this democracy can take a flyer on "America First." It means anything the second branch of government says it does. And that's why this "nation of immigrants" doesn't have an immigration policy.
The boys are letting the girls into legislatures just as the legislatures are collapsing into the irrelevance the boys brought them to.
P.S. Thanks for thinking of me when you saw the story about the dodderers brushing horses. I can still dodder to the betting windows, but just barely.
Delete"Women's issues" are very often intertwined with poverty issues. So, let's wait and see what they do before assuming they will be just as bad as the men at addressing poverty. Most poor are women and children. If, for example, they could come up with a child care plan that would enable women with young children to work, they might start chipping away at the poverty rate. Oremus.
ReplyDeleteBesides, women won't really be equal to men in our society until they've had a chance to screw things up as badly as the men do and still get reelected
ReplyDeleteIf I could get used to women physicists and engineers, I can get used to them as priests. The whole gynephobia thing is so mindset.
ReplyDeleteJust to play devil's advocate: Comparing democratic government with the Church is a poor analogy, some would argue.
ReplyDeleteWithin the bounds of the state and federal constitutions (always subject to amendment), legislators are allowed fairly wide latitude for democratic social experimentation.
The RCC, as my conservative friends remind me frequently, is not a democracy. It is bound by centuries of sacred tradition and Scriptural authority. Its teachings are made with an eye toward identifying what is immutable truth and handing down teaching extrapolated from that truth.
From what I have seen of Church Ladies, women's voices in the Church are plenty loud enough.
I think that what I find hard to deal with in RCC teaching is a tendency to promulgate a lot of very detailed and confining "rules" from sacred tradition and Scripture that do not adequately address what I see as gray areas of modern life that didn't exist a few hundred years (or even decades) ago.
Should have said that what I find hard to deal with in RCC teaching is not the lack of women's voices but a tendency, etc.
DeleteJean, I think you are right about gray areas that didn't exist in the distant (or not so distant) past. I see a tendency to over-define and be overly detailed. Then when there is a need to revisit the issues, the PTB find themselves boxed into a corner of their own making.
DeleteWay back in he 1960s, when it looked like Pope Paul VI might loosen up on birth control, Bob Olmstead refused to predict the result, but firmly predicted that if the pope permitted contraception his encyclical's English title (from the first words in Latin) would be: "As the Church has always taught."
DeleteDoes anybody think about Dominus Iesus today? Does anyone even remember it? It was less than 20 years ago.
Katherine, there are also "freelancers" who like to make their own rules. A few years ago, Raber showed me an article by some priest who said that men should consider that they had sinned if they didn't ensure that their wives had orgasms. The poor dumbbell clearly thought he was being enlightened and feminist. But the underlying premise that men are somehow "in charge" of women's bodies in that way was just utterly ignorant and, at heart, chauvinistic.
DeleteI hope his bishop took him aside ...
I don't necessarily think the Orthodox churches do it better than we do, obviously they have some issues of their own. However, I do sort of agree with them in one respect. Many of them feel that the RCC creates heresy by trying to be too specific and too detailed in their prescriptions and proscriptions.
DeleteTom, yes, I remember Dominus Iesus. "The Church has always taught..." However as I remember it did break some new ground.
DeleteHeresy? Hmmm. Just seems to me that the impetus to "clarify" teaching with ever more finely sliced and diced rules and regs makes some people a little crazy and inclined to scrupulosity. That's not exactly conducive to the confidence needed to love and serve the Lord.
DeleteRaber went to some sort of training program where diocesan leaders emphasized ad nauseam never to say, "We don't believe that anymore."
I think they were using the term "heresy" rather loosely. Point being that if you don't over-define something in the first place, then you don't have to un-define it later.
Delete