Columbia University - Gender & Sexuality

by Rebecca Alpert and Katherine Franke (originally published in Tikkun Magazine)

This week we were scheduled to speak at the Constitution Center as part of the Equality Forum’s 2012 LGBT Summit. Instead we, a rabbi and a law professor, have withdrawn our appearances at the event, disturbed that the Equality Forum, a major mainstream gay rights group, chose Israel as the conference’s “featured nation” and gained sponsorship for the 2012 Summit from the Israeli Embassy and Ministry of Tourism.

Why boycott a conference that is celebrating the gay rights record of Israel when Tel Aviv was just voted “the world’s best gay city”? Lesbians and gay men have been openly serving in the Israeli military for years, same-sex couples’ marriages have been recognized by the state for some time, and Israel has much better sexual orientation discrimination laws than we do. The Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, often notes: Israel “provides shelter to Palestinian homosexuals seeking safety from Islamists in the West Bank,” claiming Israel is a “gay mecca.” Ambassador Oren was mistaken when he said that Israel gives asylum to gay and lesbian Palestinians. Israel does not grant asylum to any Palestinians, regardless of their sexual orientation, and in fact won’t even let an Israeli who marries a Palestinian share their Israeli citizenship with their spouse. Tel Aviv may have a great gay scene, but most Palestinians will never see it since, regardless of their sexual orientation, they are not allowed to pass through the checkpoints and the Wall to enter Israel from the West Bank.

The Equality Forum’s partnership with Israel comes as a key moment in the process to create a just end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and a fair resolution to the claims both sides have to land and sovereignty in this region. Just last week, the U.N. Human Rights Commissioner, Navi Pillay, added Israel to a list of countries that restrict the freedom of domestic human rights groups, and the Israeli government has stepped up the pace of settlement construction to unprecedented levels, despite an international consensus that this encroachment into Palestinian territory violates clearly established international law. It is in this context that we have decided to boycott an event that peels off and celebrates Israel’s good gay-rights record rather than locating it within the larger problems that plague Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. The one cannot be separated from the other in our view.

Tel Aviv may have a hot and hunky gay bar scene, but the tolerance or acceptance of homosexuality is not as common elsewhere in the country. Israel, like the United States, is a complex place, and is increasingly religiously conservative. A recent report documents that almost half of the out gays and lesbians serving in the Israeli military have been sexually harassed by other servicemembers, and a member of the Knesset who is also an Education Minister recently said that gays “are not people like everyone else,” and that “their lifestyle harms the Jewish people.” If you talk to gay and lesbian Palestinians, Israel’s reputation as a “gay mecca” in the region becomes more of a myth. Since 2000 Shin Bet, the Israeli security service, has had a policy of blackmailing Palestinians who are gay or who are perceived to be gay and threatening to out them unless they become informants against their own people. For this reason, gay people in Palestine have a reputation as collaborators with Israel—as a result some of the homophobia gays and lesbians in Palestine experience is the direct product of the occupation itself.

Palestinian gays and lesbians have urged the gay community in the United States to become more aware of how we have become an unwitting partner in Israel’s efforts to improve its much-criticized human rights record—especially with respect to the Palestinians. Through a policy that some have called “pinkwashing,” Israel has self-consciously sought to rebrand itself as less religious, less militaristic and less hostile, and in so doing wants to deflect attention from the International Court of Justice and UN Human Rights Council’s findings that many of Israel’s policies with respect to the Palestinians violate international law. Through events such as the Equality Forum’s celebration of Israel this week they have enjoined the U.S. gay rights community to become cheerleaders for Israel. It’s one thing to express our solidarity with gays and lesbians in another country such as Israel, it’s quite another to become pawns in that country’s foreign policy strategy.

While it may seem natural for gays to side with Israel—after all they have such good gay rights laws—this support reflects a major weakness of so many human rights movements that tend to prioritize their own struggles without considering the ways in which all forms of discrimination are linked. In Israel/Palestine, gay rights and human rights more broadly are necessarily connected to one another, and treating one domestic minority well does not excuse or diminish the immorality of the state’s other rights-abridging policies. Had South Africa enacted good gay rights laws during the Apartheid era no one would have seen that as excusing their treatment of black and colored people.

To uncritically celebrate Israel at a conference organized around notions of equality and liberty, and have Michael Oren serve as the keynote speaker at the “international equality dinner,” is taken as a slap in the face by our queer brothers and sisters in Palestine as well as by the queers within Israel who are actively seeking a just resolution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. By avoiding any programming that offers a balanced view of the human rights record of its “featured nation” the Equality Forum lost an important opportunity to be a leader in the international gay human rights movement, and instead allowed itself to be used as a part of Israel’s larger efforts to deflect criticisms of its human rights record.

Katherine Franke is a professor at Columbia Law School, where she also directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. In addition to her scholarly writing on sexual harassment, gender equality, sexual rights, and racial history, she writes regularly for a more popular audience in the Gender and Sexuality Law Blog. Rabbi Rebecca Alpert is an associate professor of religion and women’s studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was ordained as a rabbi at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1976 and served as dean of students there for ten years.

Katherine Franke’s Equality Forum talk, presented by video, is available here.

President’s Turnaround is Praised as Sign of Hope for Proponents of Same-Sex Marriage

Media Contact: Public Affairs, 212-854-2650 or publicaffairs@law.columbia.edu

New York, May 9, 2012—President Barack Obama’s announcement of support for same-sex marriage today was praised by gender and sexuality law experts at Columbia Law School, who lauded the president’s shift in position on the contentious issue as a sign of hope in the battle over marriage equality in the United States.

Reversing his stated opposition to marriage equality, Obama said in an interview with ABC News today that he decided to support same-sex marriage based on his conversations with gay and lesbian service members, his wife and daughters, and his staff members.

Professors Katherine Franke and Suzanne Goldberg, directors of the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School, said the president’s turnaround could help inspire others to rethink their positions on same-sex marriage and provide moral weight to legislative efforts aimed at rolling back discriminatory laws and promoting marriage equality.

“The president’s remarks on the inequity of denying marriage rights to same-sex couples signal a hopeful turn in American politics: that a political leader’s views on an important social justice issue such as this can evolve, largely as he notes, through exposure to LGBT people in our families and professional lives,” said Katherine Franke, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. “Let’s hope that the president will turn this new personal conviction about marriage equality into the political will to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.”

Goldberg, the Herbert and Doris Wechsler Clinical Professor of Law at the Law School, said the announcement marks a “new day in America’s journey toward equality for all.”

“Although the president’s announcement alone will not eliminate the rampant marriage inequality in the United States, his words will surely spark the movement toward marriage equality, giving it even more momentum and moral force,” Goldberg said.

Florida Conference Focuses on Improving Services and Support for LGBT Seniors

New York, May 7, 2012— Columbia Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic participated in the first White House LGBT Conference on Aging in Miami, Florida.  The Conference brought together federal government officials; national and state advocates; and the public to focus on the health, housing, and economic security needs of aging members of the LGBT community.

“LGBT seniors too often face discrimination, mistreatment, and social isolation.  Moreover, programs aimed at providing resources to the senior population inadequately address the needs of the LGBT community,” said Hillary Schneller ’12, a clinic student who attended the Conference.  “The Conference provides a critical opportunity to engage the White House on these issues and to discuss changes to federal and state policies, especially in states like Florida that have a significant elder population.”

Schneller and Andrea Johnson ’12 worked with Equality Florida, the state’s largest civil rights organization dedicated to advocacy on behalf of LGBT people, to prepare for the Conference by identifying changes to laws and policies that can improve the lives of LGBT seniors.  Their recommendations focus on better access to and financial support for caregiving, health care, and housing through both state legislative and agency-level initiatives.

The White House Office of Public Engagement, in partnership with the University of Miami Center on Aging, hosted the day-long symposium, featuring keynote remarks by Kathy Greenlee, Assistant Secretary for Aging at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and Raphael Bostic, Assistant Secretary for Policy & Research Development at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.  Equality Florida, as well as SAGE (Services and Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Elders), the first official LGBT delegate to the White House Conference on Aging in 2005, were also among the participants.

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Columbia Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic addresses cutting-edge issues in sexuality and gender law through litigation, legislation, public policy analysis and other forms of advocacy. Under the guidance of Professor Suzanne Goldberg, clinic students have worked on a wide range of projects, from constitutional litigation to legislative advocacy to immigration cases, to serve both individual and organizational clients in cases involving issues of sexuality and gender law.

Engaging Tradition Project Director Urvashi Vaid shares her informal remarks below from the workshop on Diversity with Ira Katznelson, Fred Harris and moderator Mae Ngai, sponsored by the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University on April 2, 2012.  CCASD Keywords: Interdisciplinary Roundtable Conversations is a series inspired by the innovative interdisciplinary scholarship promoted by the Center.  The series draws participants together from a wide range of disciplinary homes in order to explore the various ways we think about fundamental critical/theoretical ideas and to generate new vocabularies and new methodologies. Crossposted from VaidBlog.

Every time I sat down to think about today’s presentation, I found myself impatient, irritated, avoiding the topic.  I realized the word diversity actually annoyed me a great deal, and even infuriated me to the point that I could not focus on this exercise. They say that if it’s hysterical, it’s historical.  So I had to ask myself why this annoyed reaction.

I came up with two reasons:  first, my experience with the deployment of diversity leaves me cynical about its function and utility.  And, second because too often the deployment of the concept serves to contain, marginalize, co-opt, or otherwise absorb the challenge being made by those outside the mainstream.

My experience with diversity comes out a range of situations — running nonprofits, building organizations, building teams of volunteers and staff in organizing projects, demonstrations, campaigns and social movements, funding initiatives on diversity, working in civil rights organizations, fundraising, engaging in the writing of public policy and legislation, media advocacy and politics.  In each of these environments I have used the “diversity” arguments to question and push for change in the dominant hierarchies of race, gender, class or sexual privilege in the environments in which I have worked.  My irritation comes out of a frustration with the concept as a mechanism of achieving structural change.

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It also comes out of living with the backlash against any politics that prioritizes race or foregrounds race.  What makes my feelings about diversity so personal is the myriad experiences —  through an accident of birth and a chosen leftist politics,  of embodying diversity and feeling used and managed by it as a concept, claim and analytic tool.    Whether it’s the experience of being the indian immigrant in a small upstate town in the mid-1960’s facing a question of whether you lived in a teepee; or the experience of being an out lesbian in the ACLU of the early 1980’s, which had a hard time seeing sexual preference (as it was then called) as anything bigger than a matter of a first amendment freedom issue.  Or whether it is the experience of being one of the only person of color leaders in the mainstream LGBT political movement for more than two decades, or being the only woman at scores of decision making meetings in the gay movement, or being the staff person to extremely wealthy and privileged individuals with whom I forged close partnerships – the fact of not being a part of the mainstream is a constant and unrelenting lesson in otherness.  And otherness gets weary especially if you think of yourself as universal and what passes as universal a clever magic trick that has deluded millions for millennia.

Three ways I have used the term in my work:

1)    Diversity as a good thing/a moral values appeal.  Used this way persuade those in the dominant group in a particular institution that race, gender, economic justice, sexuality, disability, or whatever should be part of the agenda.

1.  Framed it as an appeal to do the right thing:  The institution/government/corporation should do the right thing in terms of “inclusion” of the difference – because the “ism” or exclusion or prejudice is wrong.
2. Framed it as a Todd Gitlinesque-common humanity appeal – diversity is not about having one of each but knowing that we can carry the interests of each in one
3. Framed it as moving beyond identity….It’s about a politics of justice not an identity of x, y or z.  A justice politics creates avenues for participation and recognition for wider ranges of people.
4. Lately, I’ve been making the data-nerd/social scientist appeal…. Because there is racial, gender and class diversity in gay communities, we need to have a political agenda that speaks to the needs of these communities

2)    Second way I have worked with it is to focus on the development of tools, trainings, mechanisms to increase representation and inclusion by race, gender and class on decision making bodies and staffs of institutions; to enumerate categories of people previously excluded in public policy frameworks as a mechanism to secure their resourcing and inclusion in service delivery.

1. Successful examples of tools:  firm requirements/quota queen approaches worked on actions — 1993 MOW requirement of 50% POC diversity and how it was trashed; and boards (in the 1980’s all gay boards used to have co-chairs m/f and required gender parity)- today less than 40% women and far less POC.
2. Diversity trainings for boards – tons of investment by philanthropy in this to what end…. Urban Institute in 2009 noted that CA has 58% POC population and nonprofits in state have 28% POC on boards; nationally its 14%.[1],[2]
3. Inclusion is a funny thing and entirely impossible to achieve in a perfect way.  My partner Kate Clinton and I often joke that our clearest auditory and visual image of our years in lesbian feminist organizations in the 1970’s was the sound of folding chairs being pushed backward to widen the circle.  When perfect inclusion became the impossible goal, the enterprise fragmented.  Another example — LGBTQIAA

3)    Ecosystem approach – diverse organizations like biodiversity make life better, makes our work more successful.  This is the corporate and nonprofit mantra.

1. Four key arguments for diversity on boards (according to Jan Masoaka at Blue Avocado)[3]:  mission (part of an organization’s value system); business case (it’s good business for the company or group); it’s part of the social responsibility of organization to increase access; definition of organization is as one that serves “the diverse” population.
2. But data disprove the attention that this receives- corporate boards are still extremely not diverse.

These three experiences leave me feeling that diversity generates several unintended consequences:

• A focus on inclusion can  bleach out a real power analysis
• A focus on adding treats difference as if it were a condiment
• As an approach that has the effect of re-empowering that which it says it claims to question
• Resentment

Diversity as Bleach

Saying things like we must build more diversity on our board actually can leave the conversation of power unaddressed.  One can “diversify” by race, gender, class and still keep the mechanisms by which power is held, gained, distributed and organized in any institution intact.

• It is a wonderful cosmetic for any institution. Covers structural imbalances under the guise of commitment.
• bleaches out structural power analysis in many situations by enabling them to be seem identity based rather than structured by material things like money, what neighborhood you live in, what school you went to, who your mentors were and whether they are popular, social capital and social networks that structure so much of why some people get ahead and others don’t, white supremacy or unquestioned privileging of certain values – like the normalcy of heterosexuality.
• At the same time, a focus on diversity and seeing it as inclusion can bleach out the different histories that different forms of exclusion bring – so we have a black president, but the racism with which he and his family are regarded, reported, treated reflect the persistence of ideas and logics of white supremacy in America.
• Diversity and inclusion programs in corporate America are great examples of this bleaching effect. Corporate diversity programs proclaim a commitment to workplace equity diversity within institutions that reproduce gender and racial hierarchies and dominance.
  • There’s lots of literature and investment by corporations  on how to engage in “inclusion”, what the benefits can be for employees and company, impact of diversity policies (happier employees, more competitive recruitment).  E.g. From Catalyst Research on Building LGBT Inclusive Workplaces – “Respondents cited three factors that affected their career advancement and the formation of critical relationships in the workplace: a lack of awareness regarding LGBT issues, discriminatory behaviours, and exclusion from important connections with others. LGBT women reported less positive relationships with their managers than LGBT men and non-LGBT women and men did. LGBT employees at organizations with diversity and inclusion programs, policies, and practices, as well as those with broader talent management programs, were more satisfied and committed, described their workplace as more fair, and had more positive relationships with their managers and colleagues.”[4]
  • So structurally, corporate boards are about 16% women[5] but every fortune 500 company has a diversity initiative.  Even in Canada, women held 14.5% of board seats at FP500 companies, and women held 3.6% of chair positions in public companies in 2011. Racial diversity on corporate boards is even smaller.

Diversity as Flavor

• When it is deployed in many corporate or nonprofit settings the concept of diversity is used as a sort of condiment – a flavor enhancer.
• It is additive not revolutionary – a spice to add flavor to the colonizing power’s palate, not a restructuring of who makes decisions really.    Out and Equal, the national organization for LGBT employees in corporate America, hosts one of the largest gatherings in the movement bringing together members of hundreds of corporate LGBT Employee Resource Groups – they are called.  Workplace diversity is a huge focus of these companies, and their resource groups compete to get 100% perfect ratings from HRC for their workplace diversity policies.  But I very few of these companies have openly LGBT people on their boards, much less women or people of color.  Diversity is really only about placating employees and adding a little color or flavor, not about sharing power.
• I do believe that adding people and voices and perspectives to the table can change and transform things; but not necessarily or inevitably and only if there is a competing imperative or pressure to change.

Diversity reinforces the non-diverse as a category

To identify diversity merely restates that there is a norm against which the thing that is being identified as different is in fact different.   In this sense, using the term reinforces the otherness of other people.

• It perpetually defines every non dominant category as marginal to the main event, as the diversity (extra) that is added and not the subject of the show.  Despite the truth diversity is the norm in all situations, it is what is presented as special, and the norm as that which simply is – even if it is not. (e.g the term racial minorities).
• Its naming often reinforces the power of the normal/the dominant, it feels inauthentic to me in the same way that talking about privilege can – like hey we have privilege (which we are trying to undo….). Even though we know that what passes as normal is either a byproduct of structural systems that reproduce certain hierarchies (patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, family, heterosexuality) or a byproduct of tradition (inherited notions, behaviors, values, beliefs) which is also structurally reproduced.

Ultimately I suppose what vexes me about the word is that  through its deployment as a goal, a tool and an analytic category we have not been able to transform racial, gender and class hierarchies even within social movements most identify.

Diversity and Resentment

Our consideration of the concept would not be complete without notice of the significant backlash produced by all efforts to secure change in existing racial, gender, sexual and class hierarchies.  The word diversity is burdened with the efforts of potent movements that push back any and all efforts to secure racial equity, economic redistribution, gender equity and sexual freedom. Jean Hardisty named the mechanism by which right wing populism works as “mobilizing resentment.”  An accurate term that begs consideration of the deeper political challenge of how social movements should handle a politics of resentment – that visceral combine of longing, envy, anger and woundedness that comes out of feelings of loss of power and control, feelings of humiliation, experiences of losing ground, fear or greed.  In short – how can a politics of redistribution engage with the reality of resentment?  Some might answer by saying tough, you are losing ground and power and you should.  I think movements for justice and redistribution need to have a better answer than that.  Affirmative action fights illustrate this problem. (Today’s NY Times had an article about the ongoing affirmative action fight and the fact that the Supreme Court has accepted a case in which it will again review the question of how race is considered in college admissions decisions.   One law professor quoted noted that since the 2003 affirmative action decision involving U of MI, race had increasingly been creeping in as a factor, while another lawyer for the American Council on Education was quoted as saying that colleges and universities will “be seeking diversity by any legal means possible.” )

Seen in this larger context of resistance to change, and recognizing the significant investment that each of us has in keeping the privileges and power we enjoy, the idea of diversity seems rather naïve.  The only way I know how to answer the question of how to manage resentment is through a focus on power and a concern with processes that allow participation, engagement and accountability from the institutions that have power over our lives.

I betray my lesbian feminist roots. June Jordan wrote: “there is difference and there is power. Who has the power determines the meaning of the difference.”   I’m interested in building the power/Hardware and Operating Systems through institutions and participatory decision making processes which are conscious of race, class, gender and sexuality dynamics and through a set of political outcomes being pursued.

How do we create mechanisms that allow those outside power structures to challenge and change hierarchies and exclusions by race, sexuality, gender and other forms of outsiderness?   Can any movement for fundamental change ever persuade those with power to give it up, and how?  What mechanisms allow for power to be held by people with very different goals and ideas?

 

[1]Measuring Racial Diversity in California’s Nonprofit Sector, at http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411977_CA_Diversity.pdf “California’s nonprofit boards, on average, are more diverse than the national average, despite the underrepresentation of people of color. People of color hold 28 percent of board positions in California compared with 14 percent nationwide. Women hold a slight majority of seats on California’s nonprofit boards, while nationwide, they have slightly less than the majority of seats.” (November 2009)

[2] http://www.catalyst.org/publication/525/2011-catalyst-census-financial-post-500-women-board-directors

[3]Jan Masaoka, “A Fresh Look at Diversity and Boards,” http://www.blueavocado.org/content/fresh-look-diversity-and-boards  (November 2009)

[4] Christine Silva an Annika Warren, Building LGBT Inclusive Workplaces:  Engaging Organizations and Individuals In change (June 2009) – http://www.catalyst.org/publication/328/building-lgbt-inclusive workplaces-engaging-organizations-and-individuals-in-change

[5] Catalyst, Women on Boards, http://www.catalyst.org/publication/433/women-on-boards

Professor Katherine Franke, Director, Columbia Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, Joins Academic Boycott of Israeli-Government Sponsored Conference

New York, May 4, 2012—Responding to the call from a wide coalition of Palestinian civil society organizations and joining more than 700 U.S. academics who support a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, Katherine Franke will boycott the annual Global LGBT Summit, organized by the Equality Forum in Philadelphia, at which she is scheduled to speak today. Instead, she has recorded a video explaining her decision to boycott the summit, and asked that it be shown in lieu of her attendance. View her video statement below (as well as here). A transcript of her remarks are here.

“To uncritically celebrate Israel at a conference organized around notions of equality and liberty, and have Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, serve as the keynote speaker at the ‘international equality dinner,’ is taken as a slap in the face by our queer brothers and sisters in Palestine as well as by the queers within Israel who are actively seeking a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Franke. “By avoiding any programming that offered a balanced view of the human rights record of its ‘featured nation,’ the Equality Forum lost an important opportunity to be a leader in the international gay human rights movement, and instead allowed itself to be used as a part of Israel’s larger efforts to deflect criticisms of its human rights record.”

Franke, along with Columbia Professor Kendall Thomas, was a member of a first delegation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer academics—together with artists and community leaders—who traveled to Israel-Palestine this past January to learn firsthand how the struggles for sexual rights are being worked out as part of the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  “Our trip convinced us that we have a responsibility to share with our U.S.-based LGBTQ communities what we saw and heard so that we can do more together to end the occupation,” said Franke.

Rabbi Rebecca Alpert who was scheduled to speak on a panel about religion, and Pauline Park, who was also a member of the January delegation and was slated to speak on transgender rights, have also decided to boycott the Equality Forum’s global summit this year due to its selection of Israel as its “featured nation.”

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Reposted from Columbia Law School’s press release: Carol Sanger Delivers Marks Lecture at University of Arizona’s Law School – Annual lecture Was Endowed by the Late Jack Marks ’35 and his Wife Selma Marks:

Carol Sanger, the Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law, spoke about abortion as a medical issue, a political issue, and a legal issue in a talk titled “About Abortion: Meaning and Methodology,” for the 32nd Isaac Marks Memorial Lecture at the University of Arizona’s James F. Rogers College of Law.

“Abortion is not an easy subject to talk about,” she said. “But there must be discussion in a society that takes lawmaking and the well-being of its citizens seriously.”

The annual lecture, established in 1979, was endowed by the late Jack Marks ’35, a Superior Court Judge in Arizona, and his wife Selma Marks, in memory of his father. Speakers at recent Marks Lectures have included U.S. Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59.

Sanger, a nationally known expert on family law and women’s reproductive rights, is also a senior research fellow at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. She has written numerous articles on motherhood and reproduction and is currently working on a book titled About Abortion (Harvard University Press) that focuses on the social and legal regulation of abortion in the United States.

Abortion is first a medical procedure, which governs how it is treated under the law, Sanger told the audience of students, faculty, and members of the public. She added that it is the most regulated medical procedure in the United States. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, she noted, state legislatures have passed thousands of statutes regulating abortion, and it also has been subject to popular referenda on such issues as fetal personhood. “All this voting, by legislatures and by citizens, makes abortion an essentially political and therefore an essentially unsettled subject,” she said.

Although the basic legality of abortion appears to be firmly established, Sanger said, the ongoing debate continues in part because abortion is about so many things: states’ rights, parental authority, religion and perceptions of morality. The subject permeates matters of all sorts, she said, ranging from what health-care services available to pregnant members of the military serving overseas to whether Doonesbury should run on the funnies pages.

Sanger observed that in addition to abortion being a medical, a legal, and a political issue, “it is also a deeply personal decision that over a million women in the United States make each year.” In this way, abortion is also about all the things women consider when they assess the place of a child and the meaning of motherhood in their lives at a particular point in time. She noted that almost a third of all women will have an abortion at some point in their reproductive lives.

“There is always going to be abortion, the question is whether it is going to be legal and regulated or not,” Sanger said, urging each side in the debate to consider the concerns of the other.

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Devi Rao, CLS ’10, is a Skadden Fellow for Educational and Employment Opportunities at the National Women’s Law Center, where she focuses on using Title IX to promote safe school environments, including preventing gender-based bullying. Devi is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia Law School, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review. She discusses pregnancy discrimination below, cross posted from the National Law Women’s Center blog:

On Friday, President Obama officially endorsed two crucial pieces of legislation currently pending in Congress — the Student Non-Discrimination Act (SNDA) and the Safe Schools Improvement Act (SSIA). The bills are aimed at improving the climate in our nation’s schools, especially for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students.

SNDA would outlaw discrimination in K-12 public schools on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression. And the bipartisan SSIA would require schools to undertake affirmative efforts to prevent bullying and harassment in schools, including conduct based on a victim’s sexual orientation and gender identity. These bills are essential — a 2009 study by GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network) found that nearly 9 out of 10 LGBT students experienced harassment in schools.

Here at the National Women’s Law Center, we have been working actively with our coalition partners to advance SNDA and SSIA. Just last month, NWLC was among a group of seventy LGBT, civil rights, education, labor, and faith groups that sent a letter to President Obama urging him to publicly support and endorse SNDA. And he did!

The Administration’s announcement of its support of SDNA and SSIA was timed to coincide with a screening of the new documentary film “Bully” at the White House. I was lucky enough to attend the screening, where Lee Hirsch, the director, and many of the students and families featured in the film spoke poignantly about bullying and harassment in schools, and urged audience members to work to eradicate it.

Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to President Obama, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan also addressed the crowd. Jarrett described her experience watching the film with her mother, and provided an overview of the ways in which the Obama Administration has been working to end bullying and harassment in our nation’s schools — for instance, the Departments of Justice and Education reaching a landmark settlement with the Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota under Title IX regarding pervasive bullying and harassment of students who failed to conform to gender stereotypes. (A version of Jarrett’s remarks can be found on the White House blog.) And Secretary Duncan — who has been vocal in his opposition to bullying — referenced the Department of Education’s 2010 guidance on bullying and harassment in schools, which helps clarify schools’ legal obligations to respond to and prevent bullying and harassment.

SDNA and SSIA are necessary to ensure that all students are able to learn in an environment free from harassment, bullying, and fear. I applaud the Obama Administration for using its — pardon the expression — bully pulpit to bring attention to the issue and its support to these bills.

Miss out on the The Ethics of Pinkwashing: LGBT Rights in Israel/Palestine” Panel? Click below to watch the video featuring Professors Katherine Franke, Kendall Thomas, and Vani Natarajan, Humanities and Area Studies Librarian, Barnard College. They visited Israel and Palestine in January, 2012 as part of the first LGBTQ delegation to the West Bank, and offered a “queer take” on Israel/Palestine on Wednesday, April 4, 2012. Moderated by Neta Patrick, Human Rights Institute, Columbia Law School. Cosponsored with the Center for Palestine Studies and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

 

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