As the government’s brief and Mr. Verrilli’s argument made perfectly clear, once the organization notifies the government of its religious objection to covering birth control, the coverage obligation passes to the organization’s insurance company without any cost to or further involvement by the employer. “Employers are not to bear any financial burden for the contraceptive coverage,” the solicitor general told the court.
.. What these organizations — colleges, charities and nursing homes that employ and serve people of all faiths — want is the complete exemption that the government has made available to actual churches.
.. It took Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the only woman among the five Catholics on the court and the only one among them who doesn’t regularly attend Mass, to bring this case down to earth, slyly suggesting that the plaintiffs didn’t trust their female employees to refrain from using birth control. “Why don’t we assume that if the majority are part of the religion, that they are not going to buy contraceptives?” she asked Mr. Francisco. “That’s their religious tenet. And so, why are we worried about this case at all?”
.. So the threshold question in the Zubik case is whether the religious nonprofits are substantially burdened by the requirement that they inform the government of their objection to covering contraception. Their claim is that as a matter of religious doctrine, informing the government is the first link in a chain of events that makes them complicit in the sin of contraception.
.. Both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. seemed to assume, against all evidence, that a new form of contraception-only insurance could magically come into existence and could adequately meet the needs of the women who work for the objecting employers.
.. because they are after bigger game: getting the Supreme Court to interpret the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to mean anything they say it means.
Donald Trump Hates Women
His father, himself a successful real estate developer, endlessly expressed a belief in his son’s greatness. “You are a king,” his father would tell Donald, according to his biographer Michael D’Antonio. His son took that to mean he could set his own rules. In elementary school, he gave one teacher he didn’t like a black eye; others were pelted with erasers. At birthday parties, he would fling cake.
.. When he owned the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, he would screen all the contestants. His nominal reason for taking on this role was to make sure that his lackeys weren’t neglecting any beauties. His real motive was to humiliate the women. He would ask a contestant to name which of her competitors she found “hot.” If he didn’t consider a woman up to his standards, he would direct her to stand with her fellow “discards.”
.. He told the journalist Timothy L. O’Brien, “My favorite part [of the movie Pulp Fiction] is when Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up. Tell that bitch to be cool. Say: ‘Bitch be cool.’ I love those lines.” Or as he elegantly summed up his view to New York magazine in the early ’90s, “Women, you have to treat them like shit.”
.. He’s perfectly blunt about this power dynamic. In a 1994 interview with ABC News, he explained, “I have really given a lot of women great opportunity. Unfortunately, after they are a star, the fun is over for me.” He means it. He brought along one his deputies, Carolyn Kepcher, to appear on The Apprentice. But he couldn’t stand her growing fame, and fired her for becoming a “prima donna.”
.. He represents the possibility of a return to patriarchy, to a time when men were men, and didn’t have to apologize for it. While he celebrates his own sexuality, he believes that female sexuality has spun out of control and needs to be contained.
The Sexual Politics of 2016
Trump embraces a masculine identity — old in some ways, new in others — built upon unvarnished misogyny.
.. These days we’re living through another great redefinition of masculinity. Today, both men and women are called upon to live up to the traditional ideals of both genders. So the ideal man, at least in polite society, gracefully achieves a series of balances. He is steady and strong, but also verbal and vulnerable. He is emotionally open and willing to cry, but also restrained and resilient. He is physical, and also intellectual.
Today’s ideal man honors the women in his life in whatever they want to do. He treats them with respect in the workplace and romance in the bedroom. He is successful in the competitive world of the marketplace but enthusiastic in the kitchen and gentle during kids’ bath time.
.. Trump’s misogyny, on the other hand, has a commercial flavor. The central arena of life is male competition. Women are objects men use to win points in that competition. The purpose of a woman’s body is to reflect status on a man. One way to emasculate a rival man is to insult or conquer his woman.
.. In this way, Trump represents the spread of something brutal. He takes economic anxiety and turns it into sexual hostility. He effectively tells men: You may be struggling, but at least you’re better than women, Mexicans and Muslims.
What Kate Did
To make the case for this world order, Millett selected four writers to study as “cultural agents,” writers who “reflected and actually shaped attitudes.” D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer were eviscerated for their misogyny and sexual mysticism, while Jean Genet was lauded for exploring the psychology of sexual oppression. Lawrence, she argued, defined love as “dominating another person.” Miller was the voice of “contempt and disgust,” a writer whose works are marked by “neurotic hostility” and “virulent sexism.” Mailer, still a literary celebrity at the time of Millett’s writing, she saw as “a prisoner of the virility cult,” who presents “masculinity as a precarious spiritual capital in need of endless replenishment and threatened on every side.” Millett closely analyzed the scene of anal rape from Mailer’s 1965 novel An American Dream, and described it as a “rallying cry for a sexual politics in which diplomacy has failed and war is the last political resort of a ruling caste that feels its position in deadly peril.”
.. To make the case for this world order, Millett selected four writers to study as “cultural agents,” writers who “reflected and actually shaped attitudes.” D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer were eviscerated for their misogyny and sexual mysticism, while Jean Genet was lauded for exploring the psychology of sexual oppression. Lawrence, she argued, defined love as “dominating another person.” Miller was the voice of “contempt and disgust,” a writer whose works are marked by “neurotic hostility” and “virulent sexism.” Mailer, still a literary celebrity at the time of Millett’s writing, she saw as “a prisoner of the virility cult,” who presents “masculinity as a precarious spiritual capital in need of endless replenishment and threatened on every side.” Millett closely analyzed the scene of anal rape from Mailer’s 1965 novel An American Dream, and described it as a “rallying cry for a sexual politics in which diplomacy has failed and war is the last political resort of a ruling caste that feels its position in deadly peril.”
.. These women were Millett’s collaborators and friends. Like Millett, they advocated for the abolishment of monogamy, marriage, and the nuclear family. Firestone described a “sexual class system” in terms that much resembled Millett’s. She called pregnancy “barbaric,” lauded artificial reproduction, and imagined a utopia in which, children, like Eros, would move freely through the world.
.. What seems remarkable now is how seriously the cultural mainstream engaged with these revolutionary ideas—which isn’t to say approved of them. These women were reviewed widely, and often well.
.. Time ran five articles on the goals and organizing practices of the radical feminists.
.. Her application of Marxist theory to relations between the sexes particularly rankled for Howe, who saw his chance to remind Millett and her compatriots that true inequality took the form of class-based oppression. “Are the ladies of the Upper East Side of Manhattan simply ‘chattel’ in the way the wives of California grape pickers are,” he asked, “and if so, are they ‘chattels’ held by the same kinds of masters?”
.. “In some ways,” she writes, “it seems that we got the cultural change that feminism promised, without the concomitant political transformation.”
.. Still, it’s hard to imagine any work of literary scholarship—let alone a Ph.D. dissertation—landing its author on the cover of Time today.