In April, Joe “Hamlet” Biden announced his latest presidential run, shocking no one. He had been “teasing” his run for months and months. What was weird is that his announcement came after several women came forward to speak about how Biden had touched them inappropriately, or smelled their hair, or hugged them too long, or everything else we’ve always known about Biden. Biden had to “reset” his campaign before he even announced. And since then… I mean, he’s getting good polling numbers, but it’s June 2019, not June 2020. I tend to believe his numbers are mostly a reflection of name-recognition. Because once people (women) really learn what Biden is saying about their issues, his numbers will plummet.

So what has Biden been saying about the issues? Well, he apparently still supports the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment is a particularly nasty piece of Republican bulls–t from decades ago, which ensures that no federal money goes towards abortion services in the name of, you know, women’s health care or reproductive services. Anti-choice politicians have wielded the Hyde Amendment to deny access to reproductive care to women in America and abroad, since “federal money” also goes to international aid too. Biden’s campaign confirmed this week that he supports the Hyde Amendment. Not only that, but Biden was in the room for all of the Affordable Care Act negotiations and he argued that Catholic men have more of a right to their beliefs than women have a right to birth control.

As Vice President, Joe Biden repeatedly sought to undermine the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, working in alliance with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to push for a broad exemption that would have left millions of women without coverage. Biden’s battle over contraception is a window into his approach to the politics of reproductive freedom, a function of an electoral worldview that centers working-class Catholic men over the interests of women. The issue has been causing his presidential campaign some discomfort — on Wednesday, Biden’s campaign clarified that he remains a supporter of the so-called Hyde Amendment, a provision that bars federal money from being used to fund reproductive health services. Biden had recently told an activist with the ACLU that he opposed the amendment, and wanted to see it repealed.

On contraception, according to contemporaneous reporting and to sources involved with the internal debate, Biden had argued that if the regulations implementing the Affordable Care Act were going to mandate coverage, it would anger white, male Catholic voters, and threaten President Obama’s reelection in 2012. Biden’s main ally in the internal fight over contraception was Chief of Staff William Daly; both men are Catholic. Opposing Biden was a faction of mostly women advisers, joined by some men, who argued that Biden had both the policy and the politics wrong. On policy, they noted that if his broad exemption went into effect, upwards of six million women who happened to be employed by religious-affiliated organizations would lose contraception coverage. The politics were just as bad, they argued, given that women were increasingly becoming central to the party’s success. To turn on them on the issue of access to birth control — embracing a fringe position not even adopted by most Catholics who aren’t bishops — would put that support at risk.

[From The Intercept]

In many ways, the issue of abortion was always the Trojan horse for a larger campaign to deny women basic reproductive care and to limit (if not curtail) their autonomy over their bodies. Being anti-choice is the gateway drug to hating women, basically, and wanting them to be punished and/or die because they were born women. What I’m saying is that Joe Biden and men like Joe Biden should no longer have a seat at the f–king table. It’s 2019, if you don’t understand by now that birth control, access to affordable reproductive care and yes, abortion are all fundamental HUMAN RIGHTS, then I’m sorry, I don’t give a f–k about what you have to say about anything else.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.