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WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 16: U.S. Vice President Mike Pence speaks to reporters during a swearing-in ceremony for National Security Director Dan Coats at the U.S. Capitol on March 16, 2017 in Washington, DC. The U.S. Senate confirmed Coats 85-12 yesterday. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)Justin SullivanGetty Images

(WASHINGTON) Republican legislation letting states deny federal family planning money to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers advanced toward Senate passage Thursday, rescued by an ailing GOP senator who returned to the Capitol after back surgery and a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence.

Republican leaders kept a procedural vote open for over an hour after two GOP senators, Alaska's Lisa Murkowski and Maine's Susan Collins, joined Democrats trying to block the measure. Pence then journeyed to the Capitol to break a 50-50 tie and cast the deciding vote in Congress' latest clash that mixed abortion, women's health and states' rights.

Senate approval was planned later Thursday and would send the measure to President Donald Trump, who was expected to sign it. The House voted its consent last month.

Passage would give Republicans and anti-abortion groups a needed victory just six days after the party's highly touted health care overhaul disintegrated in the House due to GOP divisions. Besides erasing much of former President Barack Obama's 2010 health care law, the abandoned House bill would have blocked federal funds for Planned Parenthood for a year.

The Senate measure would roll back a regulation Obama issued shortly before leaving office. It bars state and local governments from denying federal family planning funds to organizations unless they are unable to provide those services. Some states have passed laws preventing abortion providers from receiving the funds.

There is already a ban on using federal funds for abortion except for rare instances.

Democrats assailed the legislation as an attack on women, two months after Trump's inauguration prompted a women's march on Washington that mushroomed into anti-Trump demonstrations around the nation.

"While Trumpcare was dealt a significant blow last week, it is clear that the terrible ideas that underpin it live on with Republicans in Congress," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., using a nickname for the failed House health care bill. Murray, among a stream of Democratic women senators who spoke, called the Senate measure "shameful" and "dangerous."

Republicans said the measure would give states more freedom to decide how to spend family planning funds. States would be free to divert money now going to groups that provide abortion to other organizations that don't, like community health centers.

"It substituted Washington's judgment for the needs of real people," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said of Obama's rule.

With Republicans holding 52-48 control of the Senate, the Collins and Murkowski defections could have derailed the bill because Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., has been absent since Feb. 20, when he had spinal surgery.

He had a second operation March 15 and has been recuperating in Georgia under doctor's orders. But he got permission to return to Washington for one day, his office said, and he did so using a walker.

"We didn't know at the time what it would be but it turned out to be the vice president's tie-breaker," Isakson told reporters after the procedural vote.

The federal family planning program was created 1970 and in 2015 served 4 million clients at nearly 4,000 clinics. Most of the money is for providing services like contraceptives, family planning counseling, breast and cervical cancer screening and sexually transmitted disease prevention. It has a $286 million federal budget this year.

Most recipients are women, and two-thirds have incomes at or below the federal poverty level, around $12,000 for an individual. Six in 10 say the program's services are their only or most frequent source of health care.

Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, mocked Pence.

"Mike Pence went from yesterday's forum on empowering women to today leading a group of male politicians in a vote to take away access to birth control and cancer screenings," she said.

The Congressional Review Act lets lawmakers undo regulations enacted in the last months of the Obama administration with a majority vote. Congress has already used the law to eliminate Obama regulations that strengthened protections for streams near coal-mining operations and prevented some people with mental disorders from purchasing guns.

Under the Constitution, the vice president casts tie breaking votes. Pence broke his first tie on the nomination of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Link:
Mike Pence Cast a Tie-Breaking Vote on Bill That Could Hurt Planned Parenthood - TIME

The nation learned this week that Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, have had some unusually strict boundaries around their marriage.

That's something The Washington Post's Ashley Parker dug up in writing a profile of Karen Pence this week. As Parker tweeted on Wednesday, "Mike Pence never dines alone [with] a woman not his wife, nor does he attends events [with] alcohol, w/o her by his side."

This practice, of avoiding alone time with another woman, is what some Christians call the "Billy Graham Rule," after the famous evangelist. And the revelation that the vice president has practiced it made for a fiery (and important) debate about the function of gender in the halls of power.

Perhaps the rule is purely a couple's private decision for protecting their marriage, some said. But then, others countered, it could easily enable discrimination. After all, it was created by men, in a male-dominated profession. (And virtually all references to the rule refer to men, not women, practicing it.) And it's easier to practice in a profession that's male-dominated like, for example, Washington politics. Were a woman to act similarly, it would probably be tougher, perhaps even impracticable, in a heavily male Congress or White House. Congress, after all, has about the same share of women right now as the clergy.

Fortunately, the Internet is hard at work debating all that, so we can get to something different here: the other rules that Graham set for his ministry.

Graham knew something about leadership; during his career, he was one of the most (if not the most) influential evangelists in America. Indeed, he has been close with presidents of both parties, and met with all the presidents from Truman to Obama (President Trump has met him, but before Trump was president). Trump won four-in-five evangelicals in November, but his actions have, to a remarkable degree, run counter to the strictures Graham set out, in part to keep his ministry running smoothly.

At a 1948 meeting, Graham and his ministry team came up with what was called the Modesto Manifesto, a set of four guidelines (including the no-alone-time-with-women rule many evangelical men follow).

Here's an abridged rundown of the rules, as Graham described them in his autobiography (emphasis ours):

"The first point on our combined list was money. ... [T]here was little or no accountability for finances. In Modesto we determined to do all we could to avoid financial abuses and to downplay the offering and depend as much as possible on money raised by the local committee in advance.

"The second item on the list was the danger of sexual immorality. We all knew of evangelists who had fallen into immorality while separated from their families by travel. We pledged among ourselves to avoid any situation that would have even the appearance of compromise or suspicion. From that day on, I did not travel, meet or eat alone with a woman other than my wife. ...

"Our third concern was the tendency of many evangelists to carry on their work apart from the local church, even to criticize local pastors and churches openly and scathingly. We were convinced, however, that this was not only counterproductive but also wrong from the Bible's standpoint. ...

"The fourth and final issue was publicity. The tendency among some evangelists was to exaggerate their successes or to claim higher attendance numbers than they really had. ... In Modesto we committed ourselves to integrity in our publicity and our reporting."

Ironically, the current president's actions have at times quite brazenly run counter to these rules that Graham set out for himself, and that the vice president at least partially seems to follow closely.

That first guideline, about money, Graham described as being about "accountability."

Money and accountability is one area where the Trump White House has run into heavy criticism; all presidents since Nixon have either released their tax returns or summaries of those returns. Trump, however, has not. In addition, big questions still loom about the degree to which he has separated himself from his businesses, as well as how much those businesses benefit from his presidency.

On the sexuality rule, as many pointed out this week, Pence follows a rule designed to help men serve their God by avoiding temptation, while the president he serves has in the past spoken quite explicitly about embracing that temptation ("I'm automatically attracted to beautiful I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. ... Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything."). Trump later apologized for the remarks.

As far as Graham's third item, Trump has no "local churches" to speak of. Still, there are echoes here of the Republican "11th commandment," which is heavily associated with Ronald Reagan, whom the GOP has all but canonized. This week, Trump vowed to "fight" Freedom Caucus members.

And then there is the rule about inflating attendance numbers. The White House ran into trouble on this from Day One, literally.

Of course, the White House is not a religious organization and does not have to (and, plenty would argue, should not) follow the exact rules of an evangelical preacher.

However, much about Graham's rules isn't strictly biblical. Yes, the ideas are tied to the Christian idea that people are fundamentally sinful and therefore easily tempted. But many people who aren't Christians can still get behind ideas like financial accountability and honesty, for example.

After all, a lot of what Graham was aiming for here was not only keeping himself spiritually pure, but also keeping his organization from being derailed by scandal.

The degree to which Graham's sexuality rule could reinforce gender discrimination is troubling and important to examine. But that one bigger aim of Graham's rules helping keep an office beyond reproach could be applied to White Houses, too.

(Of course, even some presidents who relied on Graham for advice didn't always live up to his standards.)

For Graham, those close to him say that strategy paid off.

"In hindsight, Billy Graham and people close to him would say, 'Whatever inconvenience these practices might have involved, it was worth it to protect his reputation and the reputation of the ministry, and that for 60-some years, there was no hint of scandal surrounding him,'" said Mark DeMoss, Graham's spokesman. "So I think it paid good dividends.'"

Here is the original post:
Beyond The Mike Pence Misogyny Debate, The 3 'Billy Graham Rules' You Haven't Read - WCAI

UPDATED with video: For the past week everybody everywhere has been wondering about Devin Nunes secret intelligence source at the White House, Stephen Colbert said at the top of Thursday nights Late Show. Nunes has refused to reveal who it was, out of concern that if his source was exposed, hell haves to come up with a new reason to cancel all the Russia hearings.

Earlier in the day, The New York Times revealed that two people met with Nunes, the California Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee: Ezra Cohen-Watnick, senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who had worked on national security issues at the White House.

The rest of the story hasnt changed, Colbert said. It was legal wiretaps of foreign officials who were apparently talking to Trump people. We still dont know what they were talking about, or if Trumps campaign colluded with Vladimir Putin.

CNBC tried to get answers straight from the horses mouth, asking the Russian ruler if he tried to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. Putin made a reference to Ronald Reagan having told the American people, when asked about raising taxes, Read my lips: No.

Actually, it was George H.W. Bush who said the Read my lips: no new taxes gag and then raised taxes but, whatever. Anyway, Colbert noted the error, adding, Its the reason Vlad lost Jeopardys War Criminals Week.

Speaking of Donald Trumps loved ones, Colbert segued, yesterday it was announced Ivanka Trump will become a federal employee in the White House, serving as the presidents eyes and ears. No word yet on who will be operating his brain.

Colbert noted that Ivanka Trump will be Trumps assistant, son-in-law Jared Kushner is his senior adviser, and hes put Eric and Donald Jr. in charge of the National Hair Gel Reserve.

Taking a break from Trump, Colbert turned his attention to Mike Pence. The Washington Post profiled the VP, noting remarks he made 15 year ago about never eating a meal with a woman other than his wife. That can only mean that Pence is so out of control he has to be monitored by his wife at all times, Colbert concluded: One Amstel Light and hes humping the bread baskets.

Pence also said he wont attend events featuring alcohol without his wife by his side.

He is so naughty, if you left him alone with a bottle of whiskey he might try to have sex with it, Colbert warned.

View post:
Stephen Colbert: Veep Mike Pence Is Very Naughty - Deadline

Vox.com producer and correspondent Liz Plank said on Sunday that Vice President Mike Pences marriage rules about not dining alone with women other than his wife are different from Donald Trumps hostile sexism, but its still demeaning and treats women as unequal to men.

MSNBCs Richard Lui asked Plank if its sexist that Pence wont dine alone with anyone other than his wife Karen and will not attend events where alcohol is being served without her at his side.

Yes, its sexist, Plank said matter-of-factly. But I think its a different kind of sexism than were used to seeing.

We have two men in the White House, she said, one who brags openly about sexually assaulting women and another one who doesnt want to eat alone with a woman.

This isnt the kind of hostile sexism we see from someone like Trump, Plank said, its benevolent sexism, which is still a form of discrimination, but its sexism with a smile.

This kind of sexism is rooted in the belief that women and men are fundamentally different and that women can be excluded from very important parts of society because they are women.

Its emblematic, she said, of the antiquated view that a lot of members of the GOP have of women.

If you look at the way Mike Pence and Donald Trump have conducted themselves in the White House, signing executive orders restricting womens reproductive rights without a woman in the room, Plank said, you can see where their priorities really lie.

Watch the video, embedded below:

More here:
Vox's Liz Plank blasts Mike Pence's 'benevolent sexism' and the 'antiquated view' GOP has of women - Raw Story

The Internet is on fire after an in-depth Washington Post profile of Vice President Mike Pences wife, Karen Pence. The article revealed that Pence explained, in 2002, that unless he is with his wife, he wont eat alone with a woman or attend an event where alcohol is served, a spin on what evangelicals call the Billy Graham Rule. Twitter threads and think pieces have abounded. Mike Pences Billy Graham Rule has Internet yelling sexism, blared a USAToday headline that could have read, but didnt, Mike Pences Billy Graham Rule is sexist.

What a luxury it is for a man to decide he cant, and doesnt have to, be unchaperoned in the presence of a woman who might be an evil temptress out to destroy him. And what a serious problem for women.

This quiet informal rule isnt only a matter of Pences private life, but of his professional life and public policy. It is, if still true, ridiculous and a good illustration of the absurdity women have to put up with regularly. As Mother Jones Clara Jeffrey tweeted, Would Pence dine with Theresa May? Angela Merkel? What, if he were to become POTUS, with female VP candidates? Someone then asked her, What sort of bosses have you had that required you to dine with them alone? to which she replied, I am the boss.

In May 2015, Sarah Mimms wrote a lengthy Atlantic piece titled, Why Some Male Members of Congress Wont Be Alone with Female Staffers. The starting point for her article was an anonymous survey of female staffers conducted by National Journal. Women aides described the many ways in which men who adhere to the Graham Rule left them out of meetings and professionally relevant recreational activities. The never alone with a woman rule makes it difficult for these women to do their jobs, become part of their workplace cultures and compete effectively for promotions.

One woman worked for a man for twelve years during which time he never took a closed door meeting with me. His refusal to meet with her made sensitive and strategic discussions extremely difficult. Male coworkers witnessed knowledgeable senior women being barred from key meetings. Id say, she has more experience, this isnt my area, reported one staffer. Theyd still say, we need you to staff him tonight. Women who came forward in the survey would not share their names or the names of their employers for fear of retribution.

The Graham rule is based on two ideas, both of which reflect deeply impoverished views of human nature, debase men and impose real restrictions on girls and women.

One is that men are little better than animals who cannot control themselves and, so, cant, ultimately, be held accountable. I have often heard men like Pence openly describe not hiring capable women because they might find them attractive, distracting and, from a marital perspective, disruptive. This equation was central to a 2013 Iowa Supreme Court case in which the all-male court reaffirmed the firing of a woman because she was too pretty and her employer viewed her as an irresistible attraction. In 2010, a woman sued Citibank for firing her for being distracting to the men in her office. The same ideas are the stuff that dress code enforcements that penalize girls and women for having the audacity to live in their bodies are made of. Men can and do control themselves. Predicating life on the idea that men cant control themselves is a pillar of sexist discrimination.

Which brings us to the second idea, that in this world view women are understood in terms of their functionality to men, not ends in themselves but as means to children or sex. Either women are fulfilling a reproductive mandate or they are sex objects and temptresses. These assumptions might be among the most unifying shared by Pence and Donald Trump whose attitudes about womens instrumentality appear to be the same. Pence is a man who calls his wife mother and Trump is one who sees all women through the filter of his sexual pleasure and violability, including, shamelessly, his own daughter. If you ever wondered what a walking/talking Madonna/Whore complex looks like youd be hard pressed to find a better example than the dynamic duo currently in the White House

The fact that so many are eager to practice, tolerate or defend the acceptability of Pences private decision is a reminder of much deeper and less obvious issues that are rarely addressed as sexist. Gender essentialists are not just uncomfortable with women in the workplace, but actually hostile to them, particularly women in leadership roles. They can talk a good game and trot out sparkly loophole women, but they are measurably disinclined to create or enforce policies that help women achieve equality in the workplace. (For a good corky read: Marriage Structure and Resistance to the Gender Revolution in the Workplace).

While conservatives like nothing more but to explain that women in the United States have achieved equality and should that we should consider ourselves lucky, the reality is that the United States, particularly under this administration, is a powerful reminder of how far women have yet to go.

There is no separating the fact that we are the most religious country in the industrialized world from the fact that we also have the worst record of institutionalized support for women working outside of the home. We are the only country among peer countries to have no mandated family friendly workplace policies, and the only one in which the percentage of women entering the workplace has been steadily declining for years. The entire economy is grounded in maintaining powerful fraternal orders reliant on womens unpaid and low wage care and domestic work.

Today, women are still primarily responsible for children, do an average of two hours more unpaid work a week and make up three quarters of minimum wage workers. Thirty-nine percent of working mothers are sole providers for their families, compared to 43 percent of men, who are twice as likely to be making more than $50K and more than six times as likely to be making six-figure incomes. The top jobs in America for women today remain the same as half a century ago. They are jobs in which women support other people administrative assistant, teacher, nurse - overwhelmingly men making more money and enjoying higher status. And the higher up you go in any organization in the country, the fewer women you will find because they remain, in culture and norms, fraternities. Fraternity is one of the most powerful obstacles to freedom and equality that women, including in the US, face today.

The idea that a man cannot be alone with a woman he is not married to is the essence of maintaining fraternity in the professional and political worlds. Despite womens monumental gains in the workplace, and the notions that patriarchy is dead, women are the richer sex, and the end of men is nigh, women are stuck at 17 percent of leadership and management positions in politics, entertainment, media, religion or corporations. This is true even though we know that companies and countries with more equitable gender balanced leadership are demonstrably more productive and economically secure. Some people find it hard to come to terms with sexism, even as its grinding them into a fine powder.

Pence and his wife will do what they need to in order to safeguard their marriage, but let s not pretend that what they do is a strictly private matter. Pences marital arrangement is central to his proudly being part of the most white, most heterosexual, and most male administration of the past 40 years. Its dishonest and destructive to suggest that the quality and pervasiveness of a politicians practice of faith should be off limits or restricted to a tidy culture war box. The evanescent effects on the workplace of self-described religious beliefs like these make any statements about womens equality moot in tangible, practical terms. Attitudes like his will keep women out of important roles in the White House and beyond.

We should be openly and publicly discussing the social, economic and political impacts and costs of Pences private religious beliefs on womens political and social equality. God or not, call it what it is: sexism, plain and simple.

Read this article:
Mike Pence Is Why We Have To Stop Excusing Religious Sexism - Huffington Post