scATX: Speaker's Corner in the ATX

Busy day.  Here are the links, no quotes, no commentary.  Enjoy.

McDonald’s Maple Settlement (by Clare Leschin-Hoar at Slashfood)

Can Wal-Mart Change America’s Eating Habits? (Marion Nestle on NPR)

Letter From The Editor: Walmart (Dan Flynn from Food Safety News)

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First, from Historiann (I seriously want to make a lifelong commitment to this post, I love it that much):

I’ve always thought that there was a very straightforward reason for why university faculty and other highly educated people tend not to support Republican ideas:  the more you know about the world, the dumber they seem. There’s no conspiracy at universities against conservative ideas–indeed, even Marxist Feminists like me teach about very conservative ideas all the time: patriarchy, hierarchy, Thomas Hobbes, the Divine Right of Kings, nineteenth century proslavery ideology, anti-women’s suffrage, anti-unionism, anti-communism, Father Coughlin, the John Birch Society, Impeach Earl Warren bumper stickers, “free market” ideology, and the like.  And you know what happens?  When students read the primary sources laying out these ideas, they usually see them for what they are:  brutally, coarsely self-interested,  unfair, and un-American.

And from Jezebel, “Town Doesn’t Give a Shit About Roethlisberger Rape Controversy Anymore” (which, you know, isn’t surprising seeing how the NFL and reporters of the NFL forgave him the day he returned from his suspension):

But the worst response comes from the D.A. who declined the case, Fred Bright, because of its importance. Bright lets us know that he’s moved on, too. “[Roethlisberger]‘s success on the football field, what does that have to do with what happened here in Milledgeville? It’s over. The case is over.” Dude, the case never even began.

Also, watch this video (via The Improvised Life):

For more about the Fun Theory project.

[UPDATED on Jan. 2, 2012: Since I wrote this post, the way I talk about reproductive rights has evolved. More than people who identify as "women" can and do get pregnant, they also want and need access to pre-natal, abortion, labor and delivery, and post-partum care.]

This weekend I wrote a post about RedState’s messed up take on abortion.  It calls for violence, it calls women “locations”, and it equates the institution of slavery with the right to choose.  I wrote about the final thing in the original post but I feel like it deserves its own longer post.

[NB: I am a PhD candidate currently writing my dissertation about slavery in the early modern world.  I write about enslaved females as they come up in my primary sources but I am no authority on the subject.  Clearly, I tried to do my research and provide evidence as best I could.  But if you know more about this topic, please let me know.  I'm always happy to learn about the history of slavery, the history of women, and the history of enslaved women.  Cheers!]

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RedState took up the argument that the enslaved in antebellum America are equivalent to fetuses in the womb:

Twice in our nation’s history, arrogant and power-mad Supreme Court Justices have declared that certain humans are exempt from the promise of the Declaration and the guarantees of the Constitution.

In the first instance, in Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court drew a line and declared that those on the “slave” side of the line were entitled to no protection from the law, and could be treated with impunity by their masters.  That slaves were human was beyond dispute; instead, the Court found solace in an artificial and tortured distinction which treated those humans belonging to the category of “slave” as a special kind of human that was not to be treated like the rest of humanity.

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court repeated the same exercise, this time engaging in spectacular mental gymnastics with the word “person”….  And thus the Supreme Court drew a line and declared that those humans on the “person” side were entitled to the right to life, and those on the “non-person” side (as defined by the Court) were not. The combined effect of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton was that a line was drawn at physical location within a woman’s womb.

Earlier this week, Rick Santorum said that Obama should be anti-choice because he is a black man and so had family in the slave trade or something (though, of course, Obama’s father was Kenyan, not African-American so…).  Glenn Beck, of course, said this about slavery and abortion back in Sept and you can find these ideas on blog posts around the interwebs.  Andrew Sullivan responds,

I’d add, however, that there is an obvious difference in as much as slave-owners did not own those “slaves” within their own bodies. Women do. And the defense of the freedom of that woman to do with her body as she sees fit is far more complicated than ending plantations.

Agreed.  It is much more complicated.  But what happened on those plantations is complicated, too.

This reading of history removes the enslaved female all together (which is, incidentally, how much of the history of the enslaved is written – “the enslaved” is assumed to be male unless otherwise noted.  As corkingiron pointed out in the comments on a related post, the numbers don’t make sense for this as the number of women versus men who were enslaved in the Americas was nearly equal.  The gender bias of the people who wrote about slavery at the time is a big reason we know less about enslaved women than men, though we can’t discount the gendered biases of historians nowadays, too).  Santorum, Beck, and the editors at RedState are talking about an institution of slavery that would not have had a place for abortion, that wasn’t full of sexual assault, that didn’t explicitly and coercively exploit women’s bodies for both production and re-production.  What about those female slaves who used abortion to make sure that no child of theirs was born into an enslaved state, to destroy the property of their masters, to get rid of the result of a rape (an act that was completely and totally legal), to stop their already strained bodies from one more, very possibly deadly labor?

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