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tv   [untitled]    July 1, 2011 11:00pm-11:30pm EDT

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hello i'm job market in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture the surprise conversations and great minds new york times best selling author michelle goldberg joins me for the first half hour to talk about her latest book which focuses on the uphill battle for women through reproductive and other rights around the world meanwhile with only just a month to pass a deal on the debt ceiling in order for the president to stop acting like children
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or republicans compromise or they have all true or motives. for tris conversations of great minds i'm joined by a bestselling award winning journalist and author whose work has appeared in numerous publications including rolling stone the nation and the los angeles times she brought us stories from all over the world places like uganda iraq india her first book kingdom coming the rise of christian nationalism explore the rise of religious fundamentalism particularly within the republican party and a more recent book the means of reproduction sex power and the future of the world documents the fight for women's reproductive rights around the planet and that book won the j. anthony lucas work in progress award currently she is the senior contributing writer at the daily beast and newsweek it was to say she brings in the light and perspective to many of the issues we're tackling both at home and abroad today so
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i'm pleased to welcome from our new york studios michelle goldberg michelle welcome to the program. thanks so much for having me thanks for joining us what motivated you or motivates you to do the work you do and take on the topics you. why don't i narrowed it down i can tell you a little i've always been fascinated by religion and idiology you know i grew up in buffalo new york my first political experience was standing arm in arm outside of our city's abortion clinics which were targeted by operation rescue when i was in high school so that was a kind of very intense introduction of politics and also a really satisfying one because at the end of the day you can basically declare victory you know people kind of physically kept the clinics open but it was also you know a very intense introduction to what religious fundamentalism really means you know
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a little bit later one of the doctors these clinics i used to stand in front of a man named maurice was assassinated in his kitchen by an anti-abortion fanatic so i was always interested in these issues as an activist it was only natural for me when i became a writer that i would start exploring them an end in some sense try to understand people who only previously encountered as kind of opponents screaming across a police line. in more space finish please. i suppose they were were specifically what made me want to write this second book the means of reproduction is the fact that you know when i say that i wrote a book about religious fundamentalism in american politics kingdom coming everybody knows what i'm talking about whether or not they agree with my perspective whereas people don't even realize that there is
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a global battle over reproductive rights and there are people don't understand that in many ways our politics here in the extent to which we have politicians in power who respect and understand women's rights and having a profound impact not just on women here in the united states but on women all over the world and what i had the opportunity to do in this book was to try to trace you know and kind of the lines between some of these seeming abstract abates either in congress or the united nations or some of these various summits that often seem to be kind of drowning in jargon and not really connected to anything in the real world. let's try to trace the connection between those things and if the real human drama is that are happening in cities and towns all over the planet we're finding right now around the united states women who will give back a little bit laws that had been passed and the pretext of the laws was that if
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a pregnant woman was assaulted by an evil man. and her and she lost her baby that that man should go to prison because the the fetus died and for example in south carolina some three hundred women have been prosecuted under this law one man has been prosecuted under this law and the women who are being prosecuted are and prosecuted for things like falling down the stairs or more often having miscarriages for which there is no actual known cause but that woman was taking drugs or that woman was engaged in some kind of risky behavior that the prosecutors are alleging led to i mean is several women looking looking at life in prison for this. and not even engaging in risky behavior i mean one of the what's going on right now is that there was a you know there's been a move throughout the last ten years or so to endow the fetus with as many legal rights as possible kind of as
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a precursor to outlawing abortion and so these fetal personhood or fetal protection laws are very hard to for pro-choice people to challenge because again they are a stance of glee all about protecting pregnant women from violent attacks and you know who could possibly object to a law that says that if a pregnant woman is attacked by some violent lunatic he's not going to be in a prosecuted both for hurting her and endangering her pregnancy rate they seem like pro women laws on the surface and i think that what pro-choice activists and feminists worried about was that these were really just a way to kind of introduce or back door restrictions on abortion and that's exactly what we're seeing so first what happened is they were used against. some of the most kind of unsympathetic of defendants i don't mean person to need to kind of the fed in the least likely to have public sympathy or at least likely to have you know
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to be kind of seen kindlier and patheticly by a jury which are you know women who used drugs while they were pregnant or while their children were small. now they've actually expanded so there is one thing i think people don't realize. i know people don't realize because what i've written about it people responded with a lot of shock is that there are women in right now in the united states in prison on suspicion of trying to end their pregnancies illegally you know so although we certainly have a kind of gone back to a pre rover says wade era of mass back alley abortions back alley abortions are unsafe abortions are happening in the united states right now women are being prosecuted for them so the first people to be prosecuted were these women who again had used drugs or they're pregnant now it's moved on so that there's cases there's a case of a woman in indiana. who is facing homicide charges because she tried to kill
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herself while she was pregnant and it ended up. in ended up leading to they think leading to the baby's death after it was born there is a woman who's facing charges who's who's facing prison time because she. i think she couldn't afford an abortion and so she went online and bought a person pose online you know that's kind of the clearest example of the return of back alley abortions there are you know horrible cases all over the country they're usually women who are maybe slightly more on the margins of society you know they're not happening to middle class women and certainly not to middle class women in blue in kind of blue states where abortion access is still somewhat guaranteed so we don't hear about them alive but it's you know kind of things that feminists have been warning about for years and years and years and i've always found it may
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be a little bit chicken little ish about are starting to happen michel the the catholic church has been fairly out about being anti-abortion for several centuries i suppose. the protestant christians this seems like a more recent phenomena and politicizing it. in a partisan way is even more reason what is the thread that is tying all of these together both here in the united states and internationally particularly here in the united states where what is animating this movement is who are the people behind it what are their real goals. well you're absolutely right the protestant opposition to abortion as much as we now take for granted is a relatively new phenomenon you know when roe versus wade came down in one nine hundred seventy three there was tremendous catholic opposition and outrage but evan jellicoe did the modern intellectual movement was still in its infancy and there just wasn't that much outrage you know jerry falwell had
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a few years earlier been chastising martin luther king for getting involved in politics you know there was still a sense that it wasn't for the church to involvement to involve itself in kind of worldly matters now what really you know who is a built in evansville coal and a historian of the movement at columbia university has argued and i think correctly that we're really awoke kind of sleeping out until called giant and basically you had a huge evan helical resurgence in this country in the one nine hundred seventy s. and in some ways it was part of the same spiritual upsurge they gave us you know lots of different facets of the counterculture of the new age movement some of those searchers speak a what they called then jesus freaks or jesus people. so there was this movement that was kind of a little bit amorphous most of the work that political you know most of the newly awakened angelical got very excited about the jimmy carter campaign including
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include in that michele bachmann who worked for carter pat robertson who once said that he did everything so you know everything he could without violating f.e.c. regulations to get carter elected but then in the late seventy's there was a huge battle there was a growing backlash against the culture against the counterculture a growing desire to kind of create a conservative counter counterweight to you know kind of what was an establishment liberalism. and there was also a lot of anger among evan joel coles about how court court rulings and i.r.s. regulations that removed the tax exempt status from some of the christian segregation academies that had opened in the south after brown versus board of education to kind of continue segregation under the guise of procul schooling so you had all of these things coming together and then you had
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a sense that abortion could really symbolize broader issues of kind of cultural breakdown of of women's emancipation or kind of. the end of the nuclear family in traditional gender roles one thing that's really interesting and you know reporting on this internationally shows a lot of light sometimes on what's going on locally one thing i noticed internationally is that in countries where abortion and contraception were associated with kind of feminism or women's rights you know for example in india. access to abortion was. access to safe abortion. this was was passed under the guise of population control you know or in iran for example family planning was a way for men to control the size of their family you know similarly in saudi
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arabia where you can i buy the morning after pill over the counter in countries where these things aren't associated with feminism they're hardly ever controversial it's only when it because when they become signs of broader social change that people get really up in arms about them so this isn't this isn't as much about abortion as it is about the war on women. i'm curious about what are your other women and the war on terror nitty thing ok. you mentioned jimmy carter and and even michele bachmann's support for jimmy carter why did the evangelical movement or why did the born again movement leave behind the first born again president to go support ronald reagan who was divorced and never went to church. well first of all they i mean he was but you know they certainly thought that he was one of them he spoke the that he spoke of the right until the language and you know one of the very useful things that have until christianity from
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a political perspective is that it's theology of sin and redemption kind of allows you to buy this the slate clean if you have a lot of. you know if you have a past that you are not that's not particularly spotless but again it was all about abortion and well it was about two things it was about abortion and again it was about the i.r.s. under jimmy carter and what and its removal of tax exempt status for the christian segregation academies but the growing anti-abortion movement which really coalesced in the late seventy's was catalyzed by a guy named francis schaefer who's a really important thinker in this world someone i think deserves to be a lot better understood. outside they haven't told us of culture he was an intellectual who kind of created both the underlying idiology of the anti-abortion movement you know saw abortion as not just an evil in itself but as
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a symbol of kind of society's slide into barbarism and it's. kind of turning its back on god's plan and it's inviting all kinds of terrible social disorder he also claim neared something that i think is crucial to understanding is certainly people like michele bachmann or mike huckabee but really important to understanding a lot of the modern writing and that's the idea of a biblical world view which basically holds that all of reality is conditioned by your kind of theological starting point and so it says that you know if you believe for example in something like evolution it's only because you have the wrong worldview you're starting with the wrong premises and what this idea has done is it has kind of given this movement permission to create its and to create an entire alternative reality you know and so we're now living in a in
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a place where one of our two major political parties is gone many people who don't accept you know what we would consider fundamental precepts of reality you know kind of don't accept the enlightenment don't accept the scientific method you know have a kind of. entirely different a pistol ology. and in fact i'd like to delve into that more and and michele bachmann's involved with that right after the break we'll have more with bestselling author michelle goldberg in just a moment. let's think we've twenty four seven live streaming news tells what to do about the ongoing financial hardship unlimited free high quality videos for download. and stories you never find one mainstream news. going to. the political. person more on our team doctor saying.
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it's. all about the conversations and great minds i'm speaking with bestselling author michelle goldberg author of the award winning book the means of reproduction sex power in the future of the world the show i was in in minneapolis two weekends ago i guess it was for a net roots nation and spent a fair amount of time talking with
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a number of people who know michele bachmann and the bottom line that i took away from that with it which frankly surprised me at first was do not underestimate this woman she works very hard she's very personable but people who know her her like. even the people who disagree with her she is she has access to enormous amounts of money and perhaps most importantly she lives within this what you were just describing within this world or this bubble as it were here in the united states of ideology and the ology that can perhaps provide her a much more powerful. platform or or. elevator to to high office than even mitt romney's access to to the mormon network can use can you speak about that well i think there's two parts to it i mean on the one hand certainly you have just her access to a huge army of foot soldiers and fundraisers i mean we've seen that in her kind of
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fantastical fundraising prowess but maybe on a on a more subtle level and one of the things i think it's important to understand about her and her role within this movement and she comes out of this movement. more than any other candidate certainly more than any other candidate in the race and probably isn't as much as any candidate that we've ever seen i mean she is completely out of this movement from the very beginning and. one reason again why i think it's useful to understand this idea of the christian worldview and to understand the kind of vast alternative reality that this movement has constructed is because it explains what may otherwise look like bath aling gaffes. on michele bachmann's part and it shows why the thing that i think is important to understand about michele bachmann that i heard again and again it during my reporting in minnesota was that she's not stupid you know she and i think we saw that during the
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first to be people really surprised that she's not sarah palin she doesn't fumble her words she's articulate she's eloquent when she makes. you know she does make pretty dramatic mistakes but they're they're not really random mistakes what they are is that basically they're kind of expressions of an eighty of an eighty all a gee that's so foreign to us that we sometimes have no idea what she's talking about so for example you know whatever most celebrated gaffes recently well it was both the fact that she talked that she had talked earlier this year about how the founding fathers were adamantly opposed to slavery and worked tirelessly to end it and then just recently she went on i think was good morning america and and refuse to admit that she made a mistake she kind of stood by that and everybody laughed at her and i guess my point was that this wasn't just a random error. there's a whole kanin of revisionist history books you know history written from what
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people call the course called christian worldview designed to show that the united states was founded as a christian nation that it should be one again and this idiology house to contend with the fact that if the united states was really founded as a christian nation then how do you and if you know if it was founded if it had this kind of immaculate conception so to speak and that everything since then has been one long decline and that we need to kind of return to this. syrian world of the founders well then how do you explain away a slavery i mean slavery is a pretty big sign that the founders were not in fact you know we're pretty far from infallible and that there actually is such a thing as progress right that we don't want to kind of go back to the days immediately following the revolution and so one of the ways that they have explained that away is to both kind of exaggerate the founders opposition
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to slavery and then to argue in the case of a guy named. john ives always important for understanding michele bachmann that the founders may have opposed slavery but they knew that to free their slaves into into a world with no jobs for a man into the economy of the time would have been cruel and so they needed to keep slaves to protect them which is a fairly astonishing argument but john. who makes this argument is somebody that michele bachmann often cites as an important figure in her intellectual development and when she was a oral roberts university which is you know a pad a costal bible based school in oklahoma where she specifically has said you know that she went to get a biblical worldview on the law when she was there he was her professor she was his research assistant she was his research assistant on a book called christianity in the constitution which argues that the united states
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was intended to be a theocracy and should be again and make some of these arguments but the founding fathers and so. i guess my point is that these are random mistakes and when she makes these kind of mistakes and we all laugh and guffaw to a lot of her most devoted followers it sounds like we're going ones who don't know what we're talking about because they believe that she has access to this secret history that liberals have conspired to ignore or cover up so she is in fact speaking to generation joshua for example you want to tell our viewers what generation joshua is and how this all fits together and how in a how was years to get around was about you know separating politics from from story at least with. well that's not that's a somewhat big question and i think that one of the ways one of the and again i
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hate to be so they've got to compound it a useful idea to understand regarding things like generation is the idea of dominionism which is also something that was associated in some respects with francis schieffer and the people around him it's basically the idea that christians have on it's lower public in this big space occleve the idea that christians have a right and an obligation to rule in every aspect of society and so a lot of the early didn't in its writers talked about how the goal of you know kind of political of engaged christians should be to make their way through the institute through all the institutions of american life and kind of christianize them you know so generation joshua was just one part of that pout was an initiative created by a guy named michael farris who's a very influential evangelical and one of the leaders in the homeschooling movement and the founder of patrick henry college which is
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a college for homes mostly for homeschooled until students big deal generation joshua it was basically that you know. the first generation of evansville calls you know say first generation of angelical as michael farris this generation of until close was the most of this generation they led their people out of the. you know kind of tyranny of a suspect or they've been led there are people out of society that was under the tyranny of section of secular humanism and it's the duty of generations joshua to reclaim the promised land for christ and so you know there's been this kind of long march through the institutions you know which is in certain ways legitimate right i mean every kind of movement sees the way that the way to change the way to change things in this country the way to take power is to you know get into congress make their way into the white house you know they've actually just been much better at
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organizing in a lot of ways than in progressive you know they made a real multi-year multi decade out for to take over the republican party at the grassroots you know starting at the school board starting at the town council and you know going all the way up to the present to the president and the people in the anti-gay issue has been used very aggressively by them. for example or region of the black community. talked about and in fact now that george w. bush. yes you know i don't know what that arc means. oh it certainly is part of michele bachmann. you know michele bachmann has built her career on anti-gay activism you know that was her signature issue when she was in the minnesota state house she has a record of actually fairly shocking statements on gay people i mean anyone who's
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interested should go look up a speech that she gave in two thousand and four to a group called the watch stands for education watch in which she talks about you know kind of a homosexual conspiracy to infiltrate our culture or to teach homosexuality to small children in schools to recruit. at one point she mentions in a she goes on this litany of all these kind of gay people in in entertainment and what and why this is such a problem and she mentions melissa etheridge and then she mentions that melissa etheridge has breast cancer and that maybe this will be an opportunity for her to finally be open to spirituality it gets the implication being that this is like her great chance to give up on the sexuality be a this was central to her rise just as it's been central to have a delicate politics. for the last decade although i think that the dynamics are really changing as it's no longer
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a wedge issue so much for the republicans increasingly you know as the majority of americans come to support marriage equality it could potentially be a wedge issue for the democrat wrote a great up about them in the daily beast going to expand on the minute here look. yes and you know i think that for a while it was entirely understandable i think for a community like obama or all the democratic candidates it would have been crazy for any of them to come out for marriage equality in two thousand and eight although i think that most of us can assume that they probably secretly do not believe that gay people should not be able to form families. but because this this issue has been so toxic and has been so central to kind of republican efforts to consolidate power it was worth kind of staying away from things have really shifted in the last few years so that right now for the first time holes are showing that majority a very small and a small majority but
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a majority of americans support marriage equality large majorities of democrats supported and pretty strong majorities of independents supported the only people who buy a very very large margins oppose it are rank and file republicans although increasingly elite republicans and certainly republican donors who are motivated by social conservatism support it so it could potentially be you know particularly if democrat. like obama showed more leadership it could potentially be a way to drive a wedge between some of the thunder's on the right and the foot soldiers and even point out you know dick cheney's and favorite show goldberg thanks so much for being with us tonight out thanks so much for having me. after the break conservatives had to share more and brian darling and my fellow progressive tell her committee join me for our weekly wrong.

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