Obama: The Feminist Choice III

Keesha puts a burr under my saddle, and my morning reading leads me to "Hillary's Nasty Pastorate" by Barbara Ehrenreich, a good practical feminist if ever I read one.

Now my friends of all religious inclinations can spend their Sunday debating whether the Fellowship Foundation (or "The Family," as Ehrenreich refers to it) is just nice folks getting together for breakfast (with Bono, for Pete's sake!) or a secret Christian mafia. What catches my attention is this comment on actual policy:

Furthermore, The Family takes credit for some of Clinton's rightward legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing "religious freedom" in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics [Barbara Ehrenreich, "Hillary's Nasty Pastorate," The Nation, 2008.03.19].

The legislation in question: the Workplace Religious Freedom Act, legislation that crops up in some form or another regularly in Congress and then disappears into committee. It sounds like a good idea -- it would protect workers' rights to wear religious headgear or refuse to work on the Sabbath. However, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States says the WRFA would unnecessarily upset protections already in current law and make possible these scenarios:

1. An ambulance driver could refuse to drive a woman from an abortion clinic to a hospital.
2. A pharmacist could refuse to fill birth control or emergency contraception prescriptions.
3. A nurse could refuse to participate in an emergency c-section for a woman in danger of bleeding to death.
4. A police officer could refuse to protect an abortion clinic.

Those possibilities motivated the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, and the National Women's Law Center to oppose the bill.

Those scenarios appeared nowhere in Senator Clinton's 2005 speech to the Seventh Day Adventists Annual Religious Liberty Dinner. Those scenarios also did not prevent her from co-sponsoring the 2005 version of the WRFA. Also signing on to Senator Rick Santorum's bill were Senators Schumer, Kerry, Lieberman, Coleman, Coburn, and Brownback.

Not joining her as a co-sponsor: Senator Obama.

My conclusion: Clinton is willing to put women's freedoms at risk when it is politically convenient. Obama has to play politics as well, but on women's issues*, he's shown a superior commitment to principle.

*"women's issues" -- that's probably a sexist term. Women's issues are everyone's issues.