Amazing how over and over again, issues of justice that mean that they might have to consider their own privilege get put in the "not important" file.

Are these people math impaired or what. 25% of the population are dems. 50% of the population(actually a bit more) are women. Bad enough the dems disregard half their own people, kos has more important things to talk about than what affects half the population of the country. Grrr

Not to get sidetracked, but for a group who's so enamored with the grassroots and the netroots, they really don't seem to care at all that Imperial Dems think they can just appoint Senatorial candidates from their thrones in DC. But yeah, ignoring women's issues, that too, nothing new.

"But this kind of dismissive attitude isn’t exactly new. It reeks of the New Left’s sexism that in part sparked the second wave."

"Sound familiar?"

Remember what I said, Jessica? Frat-boys ;-)

maybe we can get them some dirty white hats and "co-ed naked blogging" t-shirts...

I don't get why Kos keeps picking on NARAL. Aren't there other progressive single issue groups that don't toe the Democratic party line? I know the Sierra Club has been known to endorse Republicans so why not launch a 3 part series on why they can't be taken seriously? I'm starting to take this very personally. Anyone else feel like the Democrats would be happy if we all just disappeared?

I'll admit up front that I may not be sufficiently sensitive to these things, but I *still* don't interpret what Kos has written the way everyone else here is.

Kos' argument is basically this: the individual votes don't matter all that much, because all of the power is in the committees and procedural rules, and whoever controls the committees effectively controls the vote. There are only two groups vying for control of the committees, one of them much friendlier to your cause than the other, at least in the aggregate.

On that basis, any action that sacrifices the chance of takeover of the committees to gain a few votes is tactically naive, because even assuming the worst case scenario, that you would trade ten ostensibly "pro-choice" Republicans for ten anti-choice Democrats to gain control of the committees, you still have a massive net gain in terms of the number of woman-hostile legislation stopped and woman-friendly legislation passed.

Rolling Stone recently published an inside look at the way that congress works (or specifically, doesn't work). It's based on the House, but is mostly applicable to the Senate as well. It details pretty well why a few votes one way or the other just don't matter that much if you don't have control:

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7539869

If you're starting from that basis, anyone endorsing Republican candidates to score a few extra votes for *whatever* cause is going to look infuriatingly like they are not only cutting their own throats, but taking everyone else down with them. NARAL simply happens to have been in the spotlight recently.

Even acknowledging his dismissive wording, I don't think that Kos is actively hostile to women's rights (though there may be some merit to the claim that he just doesn't care, which is bad in its own way). You can disagree with him about his political assumptions, but he's not patting anyone on the head and telling them to go away. What he wants is for NARAL to do what he strongly believes (and I happen to agree) is the tactically correct thing by working first to control the committees, and *then* working on individual votes, because if you don't get the committees, the votes don't matter. Simple as that. No sexism required.

The thing is, Zed, that Kos is at least in a big way right. I think the problem isn't him saying "Ultimately, supporting anti-choice Dems will still give the pro-choice ones control", it's him deriding NARAL as a "single-issue" group. It's an insult to lump a movement as important as the women's movement in with other "special interest groups" like people who want weed legalized and the gun lobby.
I think the other thing that Kos doesn't seem to get is the reason there are 2 choices, one being less bad than the other, is that people like women's groups keep endorsing the Democrats. If they didn', the 2 party system would fall apart. It's stupid to take it as a given.

It doesn't matter if they're liberal or conservative--I still believe that for the majority of men, "women's rights" is a nuisance thing they have to put up with. It's all fun to talk about gains made by women and about supporting women, but when it comes down to putting their money where their mouth is, women are told to please go away and come back "some day" when people are "ready" to handle feminism. Same goes for gay rights.

What, we must ask, is a "progressive" agenda if it doesn't include women's rights or gay rights?

It seems to me that the current obsession with the procedural aspects of how power is acquired and wielded in Washington is quickly leading "progressive Democrats" down the same rathole that claimed them in the early 70s, where they get more interested in reclaiming power just to have power (or gain revenge, or parity, or whatever) over the Republicans. All this talk about "electability" is pretty sickening, and the recent jabs at NARAL for tactical errors only make sense if you're willing to believe that tactics are more important than beliefs.

My only problem with NARAL's ad campaign is that they undermine their own credibility if they go after someone like Roberts, who has remained inscrutable about choice issues, either by choice or happenstance. Roberts is frustrating because he's so obviously not our kind of guy, but at the same time he's also compiled the kind of record that makes it nearly impossible to paint any kind of damning picture of him to the vast majority of the American public. Attacking NARAL for betraying Democrats by defending their interests is totally nonsensical; NARAL is not a Democratic front, and given the Democrats' recent waffling on abortion, NARAL is right to be putting the squeeze on them by privileging ideology over partisanship.

The Democratic left has in effect been telling abortion rights activists that they need the Democratic Party more than the Democratic Party needs them, so shut up for a while and be good soldiers, which is a tactic that anyone who knows the history of the struggle for minority rights should recognize as depressingly familiar. At the same time, if the way the Democrats are going to convert red states to blue by redefining blue as red, what's the point? We already have a Republican party.

Oy, not again. Can someone just post "Kos often writes some weird anti-woman shit on his blog and, oh by the way, the sun is also scheduled to rise in the east" and have done with it already?

naral is single-issue. that's utterly undebatable. their love for all-abortion-all-the-time also hurt democrats in the last election, make no mistake.

but all issues are "women issues," as kos puts it. i hope he's not suggesting we ignore all issues in the name of party unity.

naral is single-issue. that's utterly undebatable. their love for all-abortion-all-the-time also hurt democrats in the last election, make no mistake.

but all issues are "women issues," as kos puts it. i hope he's not suggesting we ignore all issues in the name of party unity.