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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (April 2, 2004)
30 j u s t o u t ' aprii 2. 2004 "Making women have babies they don't want to have, or not giving people basic employment or relationship rights, about limiting access to power" Continued from Page 29 National leaders are also advancing the idea of multi-issue progressive organizing. “We can learn something from the other side,” says Tim McFeely, executive director of the Center for Policy Alternatives, a nonpartisan public policy organization that helps state legislators enact progressive change. A longtime queer rights activist, McFeely served as director of the Human Rights Campaign Fund from 1989 to 1995. Conservatives “don’t organize in silos,” he says. By teaming up, the queer and choice movements can leverage support for one another’s issues. Sen. Brown describes the cross-pollination this way: “1 don’t want the government in my womb, and 1 don’t want the government in my bedroom.” Brown says protecting abortion rights was one of the main reasons she went into politics. “For me, it’s about my very essence of being a female. 1 see women’s reproductive freedom as a human rights issue and as a way for women to achieve a self-determination, not just locally hut also internationally.” Schwisow agrees: “Our reproductive free dom is a fundamental human right, just like our decision about who to sleep with and to be involved with.” Like Brown, Schwisow is bisexual, and because o f this she has a particularly personal stake in reproductive freedom and queer liber ation. However, she is quick to clarify that not only self-identified bisexual and hetero sexual women are concerned with pregnancy and reproductive health. “I think it’s important to remember there are lesbian-identified women out there who — State Sen. Kate Brown still sleep with men,” she states. “Those folks still need the services a Planned Parenthood can provide, such as pregnancy options, coun seling, pregnancy tests, screening for sexually transmitted diseases.” As options increase for lesbians to pursue parenthood, taking care of sexual health is doubly important. Comprehensive education about reproductive health and sexuality is something Roey Thorpe sees as another area of overlap for the pro-choice and pro-gay movements. “Queers should know that the reproductive rights movement has been at the forefront of making information about sexuality available in schools,” she says. LONG BEACH LESBIAN S GAY PRIDE, INC. Thorpe is not the only leader of a queer organization to acknowledge allies in the feminist movement. The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgen der Community Center in New York City took a public pro-choice stance in the late 1980s and publicly “recognized the debt the LG B T lib eration movement owed to the feminist movement of the 1970s.” The center recently published the pamphlet Causes in Common: Reproductive Rights and Les bian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Liberation, which was produced as a position paper as part of a grant from the Ford Foundation. The com munity center will distribute the pamphlet at the upcoming March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C. It states: “Reproduction and sexuality are profoundly and intimately related aspects of human experience. Reproduction is a choice that evolves out of sexuality, not an unavoid able consequence of sexuality. Individual human autonomy in the conduct of our sexual lives is integral to our liberty.” PRESENTS the 2ist annual PRIDE festival loneliness SUNDAY Cecilia Noel 8 The W ild Clams Sheena Tiffany FESTIVAI MAY 22 nd fi 23rd www.longbeachpride.com. 5 62.987.9191 outside CA: 800.354.PRIDE SAT & SUN 11am til 10pm Along M in e Drive? Marinaden PARADE SUNDAY § 11:30am Begns on Ocean § Temple Participa Liberty and individual human autonomy are concepts that seem lost on the Bush administration. While President Bush is attempting to foreclose certain rights for queers from ever existing, he is simultaneously dismantling reproductive rights that already exist for women. The so-called Partial-Birth Abortion Act he signed into law last year is the first piece of federal legislation to put limits on Roe vs. Wade. The law, which bans late-term abor tions, not only affects heterosexual women, it impinges upon the reproductive choices of any woman who has sex with men or any woman who is raped. Additionally, the precedent set by the gov ernment’s efforts to determine when “life” begins could precede government decisions about what constitutes gender and, more gen erally, what individuals are and are not allowed to do with their bodies. Alice Cohen, director of the March for Women’s Lives, says that in terms of attacks on reproductive and queer rights, “a threat to one is a direct threat to the other.” Sometimes that threat is made manifest in a single human being. In February anti-abortion extremist Stephen Jordi of Florida plead guilty to one count of attempted firebombing. Jordi was charged with plotting to bomb abortion clinics and gay and lesbian bars. Gender discrimination by any other name T he anti-choice organization Oregon Right to Life has filed four initiatives for 2004 that limit women’s access to abor-
