The Silencing

by Kirsten Powers

  Illiberal feminists can’t seem to fathom that some people actually believe that an unborn human matters or that abortion is harmful to women. Sometimes the mask comes off and what we see is that illiberal feminism is often driven by a base hatred of Christianity. Amanda Marcotte, a feminist who writes for Slate and the Guardian, once posted this “joke” on her blog:

  Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

  A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.82

  At other times abortion opponents are dismissed as stupid and primitive. Accepting an award for her support of abortion rights at Planned Parenthood’s 2014 annual gala, Nancy Pelosi bashed abortion opponents as close-minded and “dumb.”83 When Republicans proposed a law granting doctors and nurses a conscience exemption from having to perform abortions, Pelosi called it “savage.” Although the effort received support from some Democrats, she said, “When the Republicans vote for this bill today, they will be voting to say that women can die on the floor and health-care providers do not have to intervene. . . .”84

  As we’ve seen, even being a Democrat is no protection. When Democratic Congressman Bart Stupak proposed an amendment to prevent federal funds from being used for abortion under Obamacare, Democratic Congresswoman Nita Lowey characterized the amendment as being driven by “anti-choice extremists.”85 At Salon.com, Katie McDonough “explained” what “‘pro-life’ efforts actually do: threaten, intimidate and squash women’s constitutional rights.”86

  And that’s not the end of it. A Planned Parenthood newsletter reported on a keynote speech by feminist journalist Michelle Goldberg: “Goldberg explained how fundamentalist forces everywhere use an anti-choice agenda as a key leverage point in their fight to keep women under the oppression of ‘traditional’ gender roles.”87

  Such conspiracy theories are rife among illiberal feminists. “While the rote use of the word ‘life’ as a code word to describe a series of anti-woman and anti-sex beliefs is probably going nowhere, there does seem to be a bit more willingness among anti-choicers lately to admit that what really offends them is that women are having sex without their permission,”88 explained Amanda Marcotte in one of her intolerant diatribes.

  “[A]nti-choicers will claim to mainstream media that they’re only in this for the fetuses,” she explained in an earlier screed, “but when they are speaking to each other, they’re very clear that this is about repressing sex and putting women back into the kitchen.”89 How Marcotte knows what “anti-choicers” say to each other in private is a mystery.

  In a Daily Beast piece titled, “Paul Ryan’s Extreme Abortion Views,” Michelle Goldberg asserted that people who oppose abortion rights have a “disregard for the exigencies of women’s lives. . . .”90 Goldberg included in that camp Michele Bachmann, whose views, she said, were virtually identical to Ryan’s. But it would also cover any woman who voted for Paul Ryan or is anti-abortion.

  The feminist group Emily’s List also takes it upon itself to decide what women are allowed to think. In 2015, after Republican Senator Joni Ernst delivered the GOP’s rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address, Emily’s List issued a press release,91 which asserted that “Choosing Joni Ernst to give the State of the Union response is a transparent attempt to appeal to women without having to offer any policies that appeal to women. What they don’t seem to realize is that Ernst being a woman politician does not make her a pro-woman politician.” Ernst was dismissed as “window-dressing.” What would make her “pro-woman”? Being a “pro-choice” Democrat.

  INTOLERABLE MEN AND OTHER OPPONENTS

  Intolerance is a weapon hard to control once it’s unleashed. Michelle Goldberg found this out when her own tactics were used against her. Writing in the Nation, Goldberg took issue with the “growing left-wing tendency toward censoriousness and hair-trigger offense.” For this apostasy she was rebuked in Salon.com by left-wing Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper. “The demand to be reasonable,” Cooper wrote without any sense of irony, “is a disingenuous demand.”

  Likewise, when Jonathan Chait reported on this exchange in a New York magazine piece about the authoritarian impulses of the practitioners of political correctness, he was—you guessed it—attacked not for his ideas, but for being a white male. Sometimes not even that sin is required. In 2013, feminist Hanna Rosin, a senior editor at the Atlantic and founder of Slate’s feminist Double X blog, penned an article for Slate announcing that “the patriarchy is dead.”92 Rather than popping some champagne, many illiberal feminists were enraged because of their investment in the story line that they experience unrelenting oppression at the hands of white men. New Republic editor Nora Caplan-Bricker accused Rosin of “mansplaining” because she was allegedly telling women what they must think.93 But that’s not what Rosin was doing. She was expressing her opinion on an issue on which she had done plenty of research. Unfortunately for her, it makes no difference. She reached the “wrong” conclusion which made her a tool of the patriarchy according to Caplan-Bricker and “a terrible human being” according to another aggrieved feminist who vandalized Rosin’s Wikipedia page in the wake of her heretical claim.94

  Rosin’s article stemmed from her book The End of Men, which proclaimed a bittersweet victory for women’s liberation. Women, she argued, are better adapted to modern society than men, women have exceeded men in terms of power dynamics, and areas of dissatisfaction for American women are likely the result of their own choices rather than caused by the patriarchy. Rosin expected men to be offended by her book, but instead the outrage came from feminists. The New Republic charged Rosin with assisting the patriarchy95 and Jezebel mocked her in a piece titled, “Patriarchy Is Dead if You’re a Rich White Lady.”96 A New York magazine writer took the smear a step further and thought it fair to suggest Rosin was dismissing the tragedy of women who are raped and murdered.97

  Rosin experienced the cold reality of what silencing feels like. She didn’t like it. “Her response since then has been to avoid committing a provocation, especially on Twitter,” Jonathan Chait explained in New York magazine. “If you tweet something straightforwardly feminist, you immediately get a wave of love and favorites, but if you tweet something in a cranky feminist mode then the opposite happens,” Rosin told Chait. “‘The price is too high; you feel like there might be banishment waiting for you.’ Social media, where swarms of jeering critics can materialize in an instant, paradoxically creates this feeling of isolation. ‘You do immediately get the sense that it’s one against millions, even though it’s not.’ Subjects of these massed attacks often describe an impulse to withdraw,” Chait wrote.98 That’s the whole point. The silencing campaign is enormously effective.

  In November 2010, the women’s magazine More hosted a panel to discuss feminism. Jessica Valenti, “a gutsy young third wave feminist,”99 according to the New York Times, canceled her appearance on the panel because it included Allison Kasic, a conservative from the Independent Women’s Forum.100 On her blog, Valenti explained she dropped out because she didn’t want to “validate” the idea that conservatives could be feminists.101

  “When I agree to be on a panel I’m accepting the terms of a debate,” she wrote. “And it’s not a debatable point whether people whose policies actively harm women are feminists. I don’t want to validate that this is a question open for reasonable conversation.” Reasonable conversations aren’t something illiberal feminists do.

  A scheduled 2014 Oxford University debate was canceled following illiberal feminist outrage that two men would be allowed to debate the topic of whether “abortion culture” was harmful to society. The event hosted by Oxford Students for Life was to feature Tim Stanley, a historian who writes for the Daily Telegraph and Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked and a columnist for the Australian. Stanley was to argue that abortion was harmful to society; O’Neill, who considers himself a left-leaning libertarian, would oppose that notion. O’Nei
ll has written, “The right to choose frees a woman from official prying into the decisions she makes about her body and her life; it increases her humanity, it makes her a fuller, more independent human being.”

  The delegitimizing started with a bang. A group called “Oxrev fems” set up a webpage called, “What the f-ck is ‘Abortion Culture’?”102

  Protesters were urged to attend the event with some “non-destructive but oh so disruptive instruments to help demonstrate to the anti-choicers what we think of their ‘debate.’” Around three hundred people signed up to protest an event that was expecting around sixty attendees.103 Oxford University’s Student Union Women’s Campaign put out a statement saying, we “condemn OSFL for holding this debate. . . . By only giving a platform to these men, OSFL are participating in a culture where reproductive rights are limited and policed by people who will never experience needing an abortion.”104

  Ultimately, they won. The venue, Christ Church, informed Students for Life they would have to find another venue for their event, which they were not able to do on such short notice.105 Oxford undergraduate Niamh McIntyre, gloated in an Independent piece headlined, “I helped shut down an abortion debate between two men because my uterus isn’t up for their discussion.” She argued that, “Feminists are all too used to encountering . . . [the] indignant assertion that ‘Free speech is a vital principle of a democratic society.’”106 She argued that the “pro-life” groups could find another platform to express their views, so there was no infringement on free speech. But she added, “The idea that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate has a detrimental effect on marginalised groups.”107

  O’Neill wrote in response, “Orwell must be kicking himself in his coffin for not thinking of putting such doublespeaking words in the mouths of his tyrannical characters in 1984. Just as they insisted that ‘war is peace,’ so today’s Big Sisters on campus claim ‘censorship is freedom.’”108

  Slate’s Will Saletan, a liberal and pro–abortion rights supporter, has experienced the same kind of demonizing from illiberal feminists. His heresies include writing articles exposing lax oversight at abortion clinics and suggesting that abortion might not be the most ideal outcome for a pregnant woman. For writing articles like this, Saletan has been described109 as “anti-choice”110 and “misogynist.”111

  “The mere fact you are a male instantly disqualifies you,” Saletan told me in an interview. “If a man disagrees with them, they ascribe it to the fact he is a man and doesn’t understand the woman’s perspective. They complain about sexism rightly and then apply it by instantly dismissing men.” He notes, “Some of these people weren’t even born yet when I was carrying signs for the Equal Rights Amendment on the Louisiana border. It’s laughable that they think they represent feminism and I don’t.”

  For liberals, free speech is a fundamental value. Debate is a good thing. So is tolerance of differing viewpoints. But the illiberal feminists and the illiberal left reject the ideas of free speech and tolerance. They believe that views that don’t align with their ideology should be silenced.

  So rabid is this intolerance that they find the very existence of opposing groups an offense. On college and university campuses, the illiberal left work to ban group groups they dislike or vandalize displays. In 2013 at DePaul University,112 thirteen students admitted to vandalizing a “pro-life” display erected by the DePaul chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. The offending display consisted of roughly five hundred pink and blue flags planted in the ground of the campus quad. This so angered some pro–abortion rights students that they tore the flags from the ground and threw them in trash cans. At Dartmouth College, a student ran his car over a display of American flags representing aborted pregnancies. At Northern Kentucky University, a professor encouraged the destruction of a “pro-life” display, saying “any violence perpetrated against that silly display was minor compared to how I felt when I saw it.”113

  Johns Hopkins University freshman Andrew Guernsey was exposed to this hostility when he sought to establish a “pro-life” campus group in 2013. Voice for Life would provide “sidewalk counseling” at abortion clinics and hand out “pro-life” literature on campus. The Student Government Association (SGA) promptly denied the request and compared Voice for Life to white supremacists.114 The SGA claimed that sidewalk counseling would violate undergraduate anti-harassment policies, even if it were off university property. An SGA member told a reporter that anti-abortion rights demonstrations made her feel “personally violated, targeted and attacked at a place where we previously felt safe and free to live our lives.” Another SGA leader told a reporter that, “We have the right to protect our students from things that are uncomfortable. . . . Why should people have to defend their beliefs on their way to class?”115

  There was no evidence that anyone would ever be asked to “defend their beliefs” any more than an anti-abortion rights student might have to “defend their beliefs” by passing a pro–abortion rights demonstration. Students shouldn’t be “protected”—to use the SGA leaders’ term—from beliefs that upset them. A true liberal would say that it is by debating our beliefs that we come together to reason and seek the truth. Isn’t that what universities are supposed to be about?

  A Baltimore Sun article quoted a female student complaining that with Voice for Life, “group members would be approaching students and talking to them about how abortion is immoral. That’s an impingement on someone’s personal beliefs.”116 Here, at one of the nation’s most elite universities, a student truly believes that another person expressing a viewpoint with which another person disagrees is impinging on someone’s personal beliefs. Actually, it’s called “dialogue” or “free speech” or “debate.”

  It’s worth noting that while university administrators and student government groups appear to embrace the pro–abortion rights agenda, the same shouldn’t be assumed for all college students. A 2011 Thomson Reuters poll for NPR found that among Americans under thirty-five, 65.5 percent believed “having an abortion is wrong,” the highest percent of any age group (it was 57 percent for those between thirty-five and sixty-four, and 60.9 percent for those older than sixty-four).117 The left-leaning Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) reported in 2011 that “Millennials are conflicted about the morality of abortion,” with 50 percent saying they don’t think having an abortion is morally acceptable.118 Ultimately, how Millennials feel about abortion should not dictate whether a “pro-life” group should gain university status. At a minimum though, it shows that groups like Voice for Life do not represent a fringe view, except to the illiberal left.

  If the illiberal feminists were truly confident in their views, they would welcome disagreement and dissent. It’s interesting to note that anti-abortion student groups on college campuses aren’t afraid of debate. They are willing to face hostility to express their point of view. It is the illiberal left and the illiberal feminists who fear debate, who seek “protection” from opposing points of view, and who want to simply ban ideas they don’t like.

  Freedom of speech is supposed to be protected by the Johns Hopkins student government constitution. But another one of the reasons the Student Government Association denied Voice for Life’s request for university status was because Voice for Life’s website linked to the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform’s website, which was judged “offensive” for showing pictures of bloody fetuses.119 The complaint was not that the group linked to pictures that were falsified or untrue. Just that they offended the sensibilities of the liberals on campus who claim to love scientific facts, except in situations where it might make them feel bad. Voice for Life’s Andrew Guernsey said the obvious: the student government is “ultimately intolerant of pro-life views being expressed on campus. They want to censor the message. . . .”120

  Guernsey was under no illusions that his plans for a “pro-life” group on campus would
be popular, but he was surprised that the members of the student government did not “separate their personal views from being able to tolerate differences of opinion on campus.”121

  Eventually, the group was able to appeal to the Student Government Association Judiciary, which overturned122 the SGA’s decision to deny recognition. Finally, Voice for Life was allowed on campus after having to fight tooth and nail for the basic rights and recognition that liberal students take for granted.123

  ILLIBERAL FEMINISTS AGAINST HUMOR

  It should not be a surprise at this point to learn that illiberal feminists also suffer from a humor deficit. In late 2014, when the European Space Agency landed the Philae spacecraft on a comet, scientists and engineers involved in the mission participated in a live-stream of the event. One of the scientists, Dr. Matt Taylor, wore a wild shirt with cartoonish pinups on it. The feminist blogosphere, which apparently had nothing better to do, exploded with outrage. The Guardian’s124 Alice Bell complained that the European Space Agency “can’t see misogyny under their noses” and called the shirt “sexist.” The Atlantic’s Rose Eveleth tweeted, “No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt.”125 A headline at the Verge blared, “I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing.”126 One of the writers alleged, “This is the sort of casual misogyny that stops women from entering certain scientific fields” and noted the ESA hadn’t apologized.127