CommonDreams.org, December 28, 2007
Bush
in Your Bedroom: Top Ten Worst Appointees for Reproductive Rights
(So Far…)
By Heather Wokusch
“On
September 11, we saw clearly that evil exists in this world, and
that it does not value life … Now we are engaged in a fight
against evil and tyranny to preserve and protect life.” -
George W. Bush in 2002, linking abortion rights with terrorism,
as he declared the 29th anniversary of Roe v. Wade to be “National
Sanctity of Human Life Day.”
Bush has used
his Oval Office years to limit reproductive freedom and stack
critical posts with rightwingers bent on rolling back the clock.And
now it appears yet another reactionary Bush appointee is on track
to get a lifetime position as a federal judge…
Bush nominated
Wyoming lawyer and former state representative Richard Honaker
to the US District Court back in March, but the reproductive rights
group NARAL believes he may soon get a hearing before the Senate
Judiciary Committee.
Honacker authored
a 1991 bill which would have outlawed most abortions, and has
said that abortion is “wrong, and no one should have the
right to do what is wrong.”
If the nomination
goes through, Honacker will stay on the bench long after Bush
is out of office, and he’ll join a growing list of appointees
eager to regulate your sexuality.
A Top Ten
list, so far…
1. Patricia
Funderburk Ware
In 2001, Bush
named abstinence-only proponent Patricia Funderburk Ware to be
Executive Director of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS
(PACHA). Ware’s qualifications for the job of promoting “effective
prevention of HIV disease” included criticizing condom use
and lobbying against HIV/AIDS being in the Americans With Disabilities
Act.
Two years later,
Ware recommended that a controversial character named Jerry Thacker
join the PACHA panel. Thacker has called AIDS a “gay plague”
and homosexuality a “deathstyle.” Amid public protest,
Thacker soon withdrew his nomination and Ware left her PACHA post.
2. Tom Coburn
Bush nominated
then-Rep. Tom Coburn (R-OK) to be PACHA co-chair in 2003. Coburn
supports mandatory reporting to public authorities of the names
of those testing positive for HIV/AIDS.
He favors “the
death penalty for abortionists and other people who take life.”
According to
Coburn, the gay community “has infiltrated the very centers
of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme
power … That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom
that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization
for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That’s a gay agenda.”
Who else would
you want advising the Bush administration on AIDS?
3. David
Hager
Hager was one
of three religious conservatives that Bush put on the Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) Advisory Committee for Reproductive
Health Drugs in 2002 and only public outcry prevented him from
becoming its chairperson. Critics argued that in his gynecology
practice, Hager had refused to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried
women and had recommended Scripture readings to alleviate headaches
and premenstrual syndrome.
A memo which
Hager wrote helped persuade the FDA to overrule its own advisory
panel in 2004, thus preventing the emergency contraceptive “Plan
B” from being made more easily available. Critics assailed
the FDA’s decision as ignoring scientific evidence, but in
Hager’s assessment: “Once again, what Satan meant for
evil, God turned into good.”
A downright
criminal side of Hager emerged when his former wife went public
with the fact that he had been emotionally, physically and sexually
abusive during their 32-year marriage, forcibly sodomizing her
on a regular basis. As Hager’s ex-wife told The Nation magazine
in May 2005, “it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual
nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible.”
Hager left the
FDA committee soon after The Nation article was published.
4. & 5.
Lester Crawford and Norris Alderson
As Acting Commissioner
of the FDA, Lester Crawford was notorious for blocking over-the-counter
access to emergency contraception (EC).
Democratic senators
initially halted Crawford’s confirmation to head the FDA,
but gave approval in June 2005 after he promised to take action
on EC by September 1, 2005. Once sworn in, however, Crawford stalled
yet again, despite the FDA Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory
Committee’s having voted 23 to 4 in favor of making EC available
over-the-counter.
Dr. Susan Wood,
the well-respected head of the FDA Women’s Health Office,
soon resigned in protest - and that’s when things got really
bizarre. Weeks after Wood stepped down, the FDA Women’s Health
Office sent out a mass email announcing that she would be replaced
by Dr. Norris Alderson, who was duly listed on the FDA site as:
“Acting Director, Office of Women’s Health, Associate
Commissioner for Science.”
One small problem.
Alderson is a veterinarian.
The administration
appointed an animal doctor to be in charge of women’s health.
Speaks volumes, doesn’t it?
After predictable
outcry, the FDA tried to pretend that Alderson had never been
appointed in the first place. Recipients of the initial mass emailing,
of course, knew otherwise.
To make things
even weirder, Crawford himself suddenly resigned as head of the
FDA in September 2005 (just months after having been confirmed),
amid allegations of not having properly disclosed his financial
holdings to the Senate.
In August 2006,
the FDA finally approved making the EC “Plan B” available
over-the counter to consumers 18 years and older.
6. John G.
Roberts
Progressives
balked in September 2005 when Bush put forward far-right extremist
John G. Roberts to head the US Supreme Court. In Robert’s
illustrious career, he had fought against minority voting rights,
argued against women’s educational rights, and tried to limit
the rights of women prisoners. A legal brief Roberts contributed
to said that Roe vs. Wade was “wrongly decided and should
be overruled.”
Roberts became
Chief Justice within weeks of his nomination, and as expected,
has dragged the Supreme Court to the right. In the past two years,
for example, the Roberts’ court upheld the constitutionality
of a federal anti-abortion law (the so-called Partial Birth Abortion
Act) and decreased public school students’ rights to free
speech.
7. Samuel
Alito
In January 2006,
the stridently anti-choice Samuel Alito was sworn in to the US
Supreme Court. Alito had previously argued that the strip-search
of a mother and ten-year old girl without a warrant was constitutional
and that women should be required to tell their husbands before
getting an abortion.
Alito stated
in a 1985 application to be Deputy Assistant Attorney General:
“I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases
in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial
and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution
does not protect a right to abortion.” For good measure,
he added, “I am and always have been a conservative.”
Alito replaced
the moderate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the nation’s
high court. The obvious shift to the right caused by the addition
of Roberts and Alito led Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer
to observe: “It is not often in the law that so few have
so quickly changed so much.”
8. Paul Bonicelli
In October 2005,
Paul Bonicelli was appointed as Deputy Assistant Administrator
for the US international development agency’s Bureau for
Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA). Bonicelli’s
main prior claim to fame was being Dean of Academic Affairs at
the fundamentalist Patrick Henry College, where the Student Honor
Code mandates: “I will reserve sexual activity for the sanctity
of marriage.” Patrick Henry College also has a 10-part Statement
of Faith which says that hell is a place where “all who die
outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.”
Bonicelli’s
current office at DCHA is responsible for: “strengthening
the rule of law and respect for human rights; promoting more genuine
and competitive elections and political processes; increasing
development of a politically active civil society; and implementing
a more transparent and accountable governance.”
In other words,
a guy who thinks that non-believers “shall be confined in
conscious torment for eternity” has been put in charge of
promoting human rights across the world.
9. Eric Keroak
In 2006, Bush
tapped Eric Keroack to be Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population
Affairs at the Health and Human Services Department. Keroack opposes
contraception, has described premarital sex as “modern germ
warfare,” and espouses the bizarre, unscientific belief that
casual sex depletes “bonding” hormones. He was previously
medical director of a Christian pregnancy counseling service which
described contraception as “demeaning to women.”
And that’s
who the Bush administration chose to oversee the distribution
of $283 million in family planning funds for the nation.
Keroack resigned
in March 2007, after state Medicaid officials began taking action
against his private medical practice.
10. Susan
Orr
Keroack was
replaced by Susan Orr, who had been “Senior Director for
Marriage and Families” at the anti-gay, anti-reproductive
rights Family Research Council. In her prior career, Orr had opposed
the emergency contraception RU-486 and gushed that Bush was “pro-life
… in his heart” for withholding funds from international
family planning groups which even discussed abortion.
Orr has claimed
that contraception is “not a medical necessity.” Yet
she now is in charge of facilitating access to both contraception
and sex education for low-income families across the nation.
—–
While presidential
candidate George W. Bush insisted that he would put “competent
judges on the bench, people who will strictly interpret the Constitution
and will not use the bench to write social policy,” his judicial
and other appointments have proven otherwise. And these appointees
will not leave office when Bush does.
Take Action
1. Oppose the
nomination of Richard Honaker
NARAL Pro-Choice
America has made it easy for you to urge your Senators not to
support a lifetime judgeship for Richard Honaker. Check it out
here.
2. Learn more
about reproductive rights
How does your
state stack up when it comes to reproductive rights? NARAL Pro-Choice
America has a quick and easy way to find out via its “In
Your State” index. For example, if you choose Wyoming, you’ll
find that the legislature is considering two anti-choice bills
including one requiring women to receive a “state-mandated
lecture, which may include medically inaccurate information, prior
to obtaining abortion services and prohibits abortion unless women
wait an additional 24 hours after receiving lecture.” If
you choose Tennessee, you will also find three separate anti-choice
bills, including one “proposing a constitutional amendment
to restrict low-income women’s access to abortion.”
The site also lets you to see your Congress members’ reproductive
rights voting records. Definitely worth a visit.
“Bush
in the Bedroom” is partially excerpted from The Progressives’
Handbook: Get the Facts and Make a Difference Now, Vol.1, which
hit #1 on Amazon’s political activism charts in December
07. Heather can be contacted at www.heatherwokusch.com.
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