More Than A Magazine, A Movement
U.S. voters have legal protections when they cast their ballots, including rights to assistance in certain circumstances. Whether you encounter a long wait, a question about your registration or someone trying to intimidate you, you don’t have to figure out the next step alone.
Here are some common obstacles voters may face this election season, plus recommended next steps from voting rights experts.
On Oct. 17, in honor of No Kings 4.0, I found myself standing at a suburban intersection littered with big-box stores in my once farm-filled Vermont town. There, local organizers with Indivisible gave weekend activists like myself sturdy signs that said “VOTE” on one side, with an American flag on the reverse.
I’m not much given to following rules, or holding signs that other people give me with messages worked out by committee. And I can’t remember a time when I had an uncritical or non-ironic relationship to the flag. But it worked: Despite everything, despite history, even, I was happy to wave my little representation of Old Glory.
What that little flag meant at my demonstration in Williston, Vt.—and others’ in Salt Lake City, Utah; San Diego; Brooklyn; Atlanta; Dallas, Texas, and many other places—was the promise of democracy at a time of genuine peril. It’s hard to have an ironic relationship to that.
No surprise, the Food and Drug Administration now plans to hold off on releasing its so-called safety review of mifepristone—the drug most often used in medication abortions—until March 2027, when the midterms will be safely in the rearview mirror.
When news broke about the Cornell 7 case, author Jennifer Percy looked first at the text messages between Jane Doe and one of the men she accused of raping her.
“I just wanted to apologize for how things went down the other night,” he wrote.
“At the end of the day non [sic] of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly I really liked being with u,” Doe replied.
Some commentators have pointed to these messages as evidence that the encounter was consensual. Percy’s research offers another explanation: Survivors do not always immediately recognize what happened to them as assault, and their responses can confound public expectations of how a victim should behave.
Percy’s latest book Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation describes a number of ways survivors can respond, both during an assault and afterward. These include phenomena like “tonic immobility,” when—similar to animals playing dead to ward off their predator—survivors freeze or even become paralyzed upon being assaulted.
Survivors also frequently “friend” (as opposed to fight or flight) their attackers in an effort to placate them. “I made him chicken soup [after],” one woman recounted to Percy.
Why is it that we can understand why a hostage victim may try to befriend their kidnapper in an effort to survive, or someone being robbed would give up all of their belongings, yet, when it comes to rape, we question what the victim could have done to stop it?
Federal policies shape women’s lives across the country—in our workplaces, schools, healthcare systems and homes, in red and blue states alike. For example, federal workforce reductions undermine economic security and career opportunities for Black women, who have historically constituted a substantial share of the federal workforce. And restrictions on federal funding for reproductive healthcare can also weaken access to contraception and cancer screenings.
Gloria Steinem reminded women, “Voting isn’t the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one.” Let’s also remember that women have been a majority of the electorate for the past two decades. When it comes down to tough choices, voters must demand America gets it priorities straight. After all, as Steinem asked bluntly: “Who needs a ballroom?”
Beth Osborne, a Las Vegas writer and activist, had an abortion as a teenager. Now, she is working to convince Nevadans to approve Question 6 on their November ballots, which would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and preserve safe, legal abortion in the state.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell released a 203-page report on Sept. 30 showing more than 270 Catholic priests abused at least 1,000 children over several decades in the dioceses of Fall River, Springfield and Worcester.
The report focuses on how church leadership, including bishops, perpetuated this abuse by failing to report crimes to the police, obstructing investigations into these crimes and repeatedly reassigning perpetrators to new parishes, where they abused even more children. The report also details the ways current Catholic leadership continues to circumvent policies and procedures designed to protect children.
“For decades, survivors of clergy sexual abuse, including those who are no longer alive, have carried the devastating consequences of abuse, while the institutions entrusted with their care too often failed to protect them,” said AG Campbell. “This report provides for the first time a public accounting of the unimaginable harms afflicted on children in the Fall River, Springfield and Worcester dioceses.”
This report is the latest of many revealing widespread clergy sexual abuse and institutional coverups in the Catholic Church and other male-dominated patriarchal religions.
The Massachusetts attorney general’s report catalogs testimony from several survivors of abuse, including Frank Fitzpatrick, who was repeatedly gang-raped by James Porter and other priests beginning when he was a 9-year-old altar boy.
“I am that boy. I carry him with me, always,” wrote Fitzpatrick. “He took your violence, you shameful enablers who do nothing but cover up and perpetuate the cycle of systemic abuse. You call yourselves representatives of God. God has no place in anything you stand for. God is safety; God is nurturing; God is protection; God is Love.”
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too, in this biweekly roundup.
This week:
—”That is my greatest fear: that people don’t understand our system of government. They don’t understand what the First Amendment means. Some of my colleagues don’t either, by the way. And I’m not joking about that,” said Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
—A congressional candidate hopes rape survivors “have the baby.”
—Almost 70 percent of American women have experienced sexual violence, and 61 percent reported intimate partner violence (IPV).
—California passes new law finally banning child marriage.
—Mothers of young children remain dramatically underrepresented in government: Only 7.2 percent of Congress members are moms with minor children, compared to 18 percent of the adult population.
—Harvey Weinstein is resentenced to 15 years in prison in New York.
—Amazon accused of discriminating against pregnant employees using reasonable accommodations or medical leave.
—Public pressure led a district attorney to reopen cases against the “Cornell 7” fraternity members accused of gang raping a fellow student.
—Trump flip-flops opinion on mail voting ahead of the November election.
—Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear calls for Democrats to be a “party of compassion and empathy” towards trans students.
… and more.
I grew up around women who were wed while they were still children. My grandmother was married at just 10 years old and my aunt at 16. At school, friends of mine married. I watched their schooling stop, pregnancies that came too soon, choices made for them rather than by them. Relatives would ask, gently but pointedly, when I intended to do the same, as though delaying it only put off something inevitable.
What haunted me then still haunts me now is how ordinary everyone around us made it seem.
That ordinariness is how child marriage has survived for so long in the United States. California has now banned it.
On Sept. 30, Governor Gavin Newsom signed bill AB 1267, setting 18 as the minimum age for marriage with no exceptions.
California has just shown that what was once treated as ordinary does not have to remain inevitable. Eighteen states have now drawn a clear line.The rest of the country should follow. No child’s right to safety, freedom and a future of their own choosing should depend on the state in which they happens to live.
Imagine a 4-year-old boy scraping his knee and starting to cry. What if his caregiver scolded, “Big boys don’t cry.” It still happens.
We must intervene before boys get the message to toughen up and harden their hearts.
Cornell fraternity men were once 4 years old. What were they taught about expressing their feelings, about bullies, about respecting girls—and themselves?
We spend billions responding to men’s violence and almost nothing studying where it starts.