Sex

Anders Osborne brings his musical world to SPAR

New Orleans musician Anders Osborne is a good friend of the Sex Politics And Religion Hour.

Anders joined me to talk about his most recent album, Three Free Amigos. We talk and listen to a few great tunes too! He’s quite prolific too- he’s got another album coming out later this month!

 

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NARAL dissects anti-abortion tactics in 2013

Anti-abortion activists have been successful in closing clinics through the use of regulatory maneuvers that concern landscaping, parking, hallway width and other non-medical rationales for denying American women access to abortion care.

Vice President for Policy for NARAL Pro-Choice America, Donna Crane, joins the Sex, Politics, And Religion Hour to explain why these methods have been so successful, and how the American public is turning against such tactics.

 

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Abortion rights organization Provide

More than a quarter of American women must travel a minimum of 50 miles if they wish to obtain an abortion.

Ashley Miller is the communications officer with Provide, an organization that works with existing healthcare providers in rural areas to ensure that women are able to access the full range of reproductive rights care.

From increasing the number of doctors trained in the procedure to working with social services agencies, Provide is working to ensure that all American women are able to exercise their constitutional rights despite living in jurisdictions that seek to impede this.

 

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Provenza, an indispensable satirist

Comedian and director Paul Provenza joins the Sex Politics and Religion Hour to celebrate the First Amendment, and the fact that protected speech need not be agreeable to all.

Jamila and Paul discuss the place for women on the comedy stage, why the jester is arguably the most important member of the court, and, most importantly, why modern American society needs more standup!

Provenza’s new show, which isn’t yet Stateside, “Set List,” kicks off the conversation.

See clips from http://www.youtube.com/nerdist.

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Just the three of us

Regina and Hank are a couple in their 70s. They want to spice up their marriage, so they place an online ad for someone to join them in bed.

This short film, “Just the Three of Us,” is the brainchild of filmmaker Angela Tucker. She joins me to talk about the project and the myriad issues the film brings up: senior sexuality, and (allegedly) non-traditional sexual practices. Angela then lets me quiz her on who is both sexy and seventy!

 

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Gay adoption in Michigan

Gay couples are fighting for their rights in Michigan.

Dan Ray, professor of constitutional law at Cooley Law School, joins the show to discuss how they’re being treated differently from heterosexual couples seeking to adopt.

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Filibusterer Wendy Davis in DC

The Texas State Senator who filibustered her way onto the national stage a month ago made a stop in Washington, DC at the National Press Club.

VOR’s Jamila Bey was there, and took the time to talk with two of Davis’s colleagues who assisted her during the 13 hour effort to block Governor Rick Perry’s restrictive abortion law: Texas Senator Leticia Van de Putte, famous for inquiring “At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?”, and Texas Senator Rodney Ellis, who helped Davis into her back brace during her effort.

They spoke about their hopes for the future of Texas politics.

 

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New book finds parallels between current US military sex misconduct and WWII

In her new book called “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France,” historian Mary Louise Roberts uncovered the history of sexual improprieties of U.S. troops as they liberated France, and tells the story about how the U.S. military stood silent as troops took women as spoils of war.

In addition, the black American soldiers who were present on the front often were accused of rape and many were tried and executed on foreign soil within mere days of allegations.

Host Jamila Bey spoke with Roberts to talk about her book, the tales that haven’t been discussed in nearly 70 years and the startling parallels to modern day allegations of military sexual misconduct.

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The idea and the knowledge that there was a problem with U.S. troops and sexual impropriety in WWII, particularly in France, that’s not a story that many of us have ever heard about. How did you come upon this?

I was a French historian and I was a little frustrated with the way American historians tell the story of Normandy. They completely leave the French out of the picture. And if you think about films like “Saving Private Ryan,” they could be liberating any country- there’s nothing French about that. SO I was interested in bringing the French into the picture and I thought it would be fun to look at the ways in which the Americans look at the French and vice versa. So I started looking at documents in Normandy that had just opened up to the public. Those government archives are closed for sixty years in France and I discovered the sexual misbehavior. Somewhat shocking for me. I had the same visions of Normandy as everyone else of heroic men rescuing French women.

This is pretty anathema: the idea that U.S. troops behaved poorly in any way. That U.S. troops were sexual aggressors in some cases. What exactly went on when these men many of whom had fathers who fought in WWI and talked about the nature of French women and who encouraged their sons to go and enjoy France.

The problem that the U.S. military had in the European Theater was how to motivate the men. Unlike Japan who had attacked the Unites States, in the Pacific Theater, the men were motivated to fight the Japanese and to liberate the Philippines and places like that. But in the European Theater it was a different story because there was no racialized discourse of the Germans. They were a white European people and there was no real reason to rescue France in the same way that there was to fight the Japanese. So the U.S. military played on those old stereotypes of WWI servicemen coming back and talking about French brothels and what a sexy place it was. And I discovered this by looking at “Stars and Stripes,” the military newspaper. The way they were in great part motivating the G.I.s was to present France as a place where French women were waiting for rescue and would reward them. So what happened was that when the French did that, they produced a “tsunami” of American G.I. lust, and as a result the U.S. military realized that maybe the sex thing was getting a little out of control. There was a wave of rape in the summer 1944 in Normandy and there was also a lot of misbehavior in port towns; a lot of prostitution a lot of sex outside, sex in parks and cemeteries and abandoned building. So the initial drive to interest G.I.s in rescuing France in sexual terms kind of turned into a situation the U.S. military couldn’t handle.

You begin the book with the exchange between French and U.S. authorities discussing the problem. But the U.S. didn’t want to be seen as sanctioning prostitution or other licentious behavior.

If you were living in a place like La Havre, that’s a port town where a lot of G.I.s came in and out of that French port and you could not take a walk in a park, you could not visit your mother’s grave. You could not even walk down the street and I’m including children without seeing a sexual deed- without seeing a G.I. having sex with a woman. That is how overrun the town was with prostitution.

So I found this amazing correspondence in the municipal archives of La Havre between the mayor and the American commander. The mayor asked, “Couldn’t you create a regulated brothel?” He just wanted to get the guys out of town! And he wanted to make sure that it was medically supervised so that the women who were prostitutes would not get venereal diseases. And he was summarily turned down by the American commander. Because, if the U.S. military institutionalized sexual labor, then at home they would find out. And ironically, so that American sweethearts and wives could be kept from the knowledge of prostitutes the French people had to deal with it visually every day.

The U.S. troops were told that they should be mindful of encounters with French women and prostitutes in rather strong terms. What did the rates of sexual disease look like?

The U.S. army did not care if the G.I.s had sex with people. They cared that the G.I.s not contract venereal disease. This is 1944, only months before penicillin is starting to be widely used. No sooner do the U.S. servicemen arrive in France than venereal diseases start to soar. Again, they didn’t care about the women, but they just cared about the soldiers getting diseases because it would be time away from the line. There were some officials who believed it was the top military medical problem. So a lot of the effort to control prostitution was an effort to control the health of the American soldier.

The idea that women were fully human and not spoils of war to be enjoyed was a notion that would take decades longer to gain wider support.

Yes, but I also think it was a colonial mindset. In fact this is why I became interested in the whole issue of sexual misbehavior. I was interested in that blind spot that they treated the French so badly in this one respect. The relations between Americans and French were good in many ways but that aspect of sexual exploitation of women was really about power and dominance. I shaped the relationship between the nations and showed the U.S. as a rising global superpower asserting a new dominance over the European continent.

Black soldiers were overwhelmingly blamed for the rapes and misconduct that went on.

Yes. I found the documents that show this transition from worrying about the unruly American G.I. in the summer and fall of 1944 and needing to make it a so-called “Negro problem” and not an American problem. Because the American mission was to rescue France from Nazi oppression, and France at that time was mostly women, an even greater myth was the damsel in distress. So they didn’t want the sexual misbehavior to ruin that myth, and obviously an army that rapes will undermine that myth. So increasingly the U.S. army decides to disproportionately charge African-American men with accusations of rape, and to use those false accusations to create the notion that sexual misbehavior and sexual violence was a black problem not an American problem.

The trials were quick and these men were hung. But the French had a problem with executions by hanging.

The Jim Crow South was brought to France. Not only were many black men falsely accused, but they were also executed in disproportionate amounts. In the land of the guillotine, it was hard to find a person who would execute via hanging, so they literally brought in someone from Texas to do the job. And a lot of that was symbolic. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who knows the history of lynching that the idea was to equate rape with lynching in France and to scare African American soldiers.

But there was collusion between the French and the Americans in terms of these accusations of rape.

I’m not the first to research this topic, but most people have ascribed these rape accusations simply to the U.S. military and its racism. That is true. But the French women were the people who brought the accusations. And I had to disabuse the idea that France was an oasis of racial tolerance particularly in this period. The age of Josephine Baker. I found a bit of racism in Normandy, a provincial area, unlike Paris which is cosmopolitan. They were hysterically afraid of African American soldiers. They projected a great deal of the prejudices they had of people of African descent which were based on France as colonizer of African countries. Then they were humiliated and hysterical with fear about having a war in their backyard. They projected all that onto African American men. And I believe that many of the accusations were false. But it was more complicated than the racism of the U.S. military.

What’s at stake for DOMA, Prop 8 Supreme Court decisions?

The U.S. Supreme Court is days away from announcing some of its last and its biggest decisions of the term, Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8, California’s same-sex marriage ban.

Host Jamila Bey spoke with Ed Brayton, a journalist and head of the Freethought Blog network, to discuss the cases.

 

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From Virginia to Penn. to Arizona, secular stories traveling across US

It’s been an eventful week in secularism, and the Sex Politics And Religion Hour talks with experts about what are some of the goings on in Virginia, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

In Virginia, Republican Party members nominated E.W. Jackson to run for lieutenant governor in the upcoming gubernatorial race. Jackson is a reverend and an attorney, and he’s known for opposing gay rights, marriage equality and for being quite wrong on the purpose of the 3/5th’s compromise.

Host Jamila Bey spoke with GOP strategist and political commentator Raynard Jackson (no relation) to discuss the nomination of Jackson.

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Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia-area couple who lost a second child to a curable infection when they chose faith healing over medicine for the 2-year-old boy has been convicted.

Bey spoke with activist Ernest Perce to discuss the conviction and a number of religiously motivated laws which are being proposed and even implemented in the commonwealth.

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Finally, in Arizona, a federal court overturned a 20-week ban on abortion procedures and a state lawmaker outed himself as an atheist by quoting Carl Sagan in lieu of offering a prayer before the legislature.

Bey spoke with Serah Blain, executive director of the Secular Coalition for Arizona, to discuss the stories.

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From Australia to US, musician brings atheism on the road

Australian singer, songwriter Shelley Segal joins the SPAR with Jamila to talk and sing about many of the topics that have compelled her art, including religiously-imposed sex segregation, the horror of a life lived longing for an afterlife, and the unbelievable adorableness of wallabies.

Host Jamila Bey spoke with Segal to discuss all of this and more.

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From Pentecostal to Muslim to atheist, rapper breaks down religious barriers

From Zack Kopplin’s quest to improve the state of science education in the United States to the abuses of unchecked power as granted to the clergy, atheist rapper and musician Landon Tombstone Taylor has a lot to talk about—and more specifically rap about.

Host Jamila Bey spoke with Landon Tombstone Taylor to talk about his art, his thoughts, and frankly, the state of the world as he sees it.

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