by tyler | Mar 31, 2023 | CNN, opinions
It’s not enough to love our trans family and friends behind closed doors.
“Telling me you love me in private is not enough. Anything less is a detriment to my survival. Your silence is just another nail,” said J.D. Melendez, a friend who is transgender, on social media recently.
“I need my loved ones to be bold. Show the courage I show by just existing,” they said.
Take the time to speak up around Transgender Day of Visibility, which falls on March 31 each year, a time when we acknowledge and honor the rich lives and experiences of trans and nonbinary people.
The designation, created by trans advocate Rachel Crandall of Transgender Michigan in 2010, started as a clapback to the limited coverage of trans people in media, and stories that were wholly focused on the violence trans people faced. We must take the vision that Crandall started and help amplify it across our channels, normalizing trans lives and experiences through our cisgender networks.
If you say you are an ally, then you can’t merely be a bystander. You must speak up. There has never been a more critical time to be vocal in support of trans rights and against the attacks on the minds and hearts and bodies of our trans friends and family. Allies must combat disinformation when they see or hear it — on social media, around dinner tables or at water cooler conversations at work. Those who purport to care about trans people or about freedom of expression must contact legislators who are peddling these draconian anti-trans bills and tell them to stop. Allies need to validate trans lives to their parents and children and create dialogue that makes space for gender expansiveness and beats back at the policing of gender.
There is plenty of work to be done: In the first three months of 2023, state governments have introduced more than 400 bills that target the LGBTQ community, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. These include measures removing and threatening to block access to livesaving health care for trans people, cutting off their ability to use restrooms and facilities safely, play sports, have identity documents that match their gender, and even in some cases the right to say that they exist.
One particularly egregious bill under review in Florida threatens to remove children from homes where gender-affirming health care is being considered. More than 144,000 trans youth have already lost access to gender-affirming health care as a result of new laws or risk losing access because of pending legislation, according to a new Williams Institute study.
“I feel more hurt by the silence of my loved ones and the people who claim to support us than I am about them coming for us. I expect that of them. I didn’t expect this from y’all. Y’all broke my heart,” Melendez said. “It broke my heart.”
Trans people continue to face disproportionate rates of violence (four times more than cisgender people, according to a 2021 Williams Institute study), but shifts in culture have enabled broader and more affirmative representation that illuminate the beautiful multitude of trans experiences. The trend of increased exposure might be hopeful if only it hadn’t been met with state-sponsored attacks and misrepresentative coverage. As allies, we must help to dispel the disinformation by speaking up, shutting down false narratives, and combating ignorance with facts and affirmation.
Trans people are not OK. Lift up their voices and faces and humanity to demonstrate that they are people deserving to live their lives in peace just like anyone else. Members of the trans community desperately needs the loud voices of allies willing to go to the mat on their behalf, whether it’s fighting for them at local school board hearings, city hall or the state legislatures.
Part of the persistent problem is that the number of people who know someone who is trans remains low (42%, an increase of five percentage points in the past five years, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey), and lags far behind the number of Americans who know someone who is lesbian, gay or bisexual (nearly 9 out of 10, according to a 2016 Pew survey).
For those who aim to restrict trans rights, it’s easier to stand up at a school board meeting and condemn an invisible person who you don’t share a dinner table with — or a classroom or a playground. It’s easier to legislate against people you have never met. So long as trans people remain hypothetical, it will be harder to help people understand their humanity and their critical need for safety and equal access to basic civic life.
That’s in part because trans people are a very low percentage of the overall population (about as many as there are redheads) — but also because trans people are sometimes invisible, whether deliberate or not. They remain more invisible than necessary because self-proclaimed allies stay silent during the very moments when we need to speak up.
And it’s not just adults. Our trans kids need us. They are being forced to use bathrooms that don’t match their identities and getting banned from sports. They are being denied lifesaving gender-affirming health care, including mental health counseling and hormone blockers that the American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics have endorsed.
How would that make you feel as a parent of a trans kid whose sole job is to put your child’s well-being before all else? How might you feel that elected officials are making the rules without input from or thought given to how this impacts the people they purport to say they are protecting? Imagine being a teacher in a school that has banned all mention of gender identity and you are forced to misgender a student — or forced to hide books or curriculum that mention LGBTQ people or identity. What type of world do we want to live in?
One doesn’t need to look any further than US school history books to see the disingenuity of these efforts to squash gender diversity. In ancient Rome, men wore togas, dresses, wigs and makeup for centuries, including nobility and government leaders. Drag as a form of entertainment has been in existence as early as Shakespeare’s actors cross-dressing when they played female roles because women weren’t allowed to act.
There is nothing inherently threatening about a person choosing between a skirt or pants, a purse or a brief case, a truck or a doll. There is no pattern of harm caused by trans people or drag queen performances. Conversely, many trans and gender expansive children have been harmed by policies that deny them access to be their true selves. The threat comes from people who think they have a right to violate the enshrined constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression.
Trans is not synonymous with drag. The former is about gender identity; the latter about expression. The attacks on any deviation from strictly male or female identity are only growing in number and severity. It doesn’t matter who is getting targeted in the barrage of freedom-squashing bills, though. An attack on one person is an attack on us all. The silence of moderates is deafening. If you think those who want to restrict the rights of others won’t come for you next, then you haven’t read the history books very closely.
The haters tend not to distinguish between a trans person and a drag queen; between two dads or a nonbinary teen; between a boy who just likes to wear dresses or a teacher who wants to hang a rainbow flag to create an affirming space for students. At their most extreme, people who want to restrict trans rights want all of us LGBTQ folks gone. Detractors of trans people are in power in greater numbers and take bolder actions, and they are erasing all people in the LGBTQ community in tiny and substantive ways, with every piece of legislation, every epithet, every pulpit or sound bite or snark.
Trans people and drag queens aren’t the problem. And blustery politicians who would rather throw their most vulnerable constituents under the bus than get to work are most definitely not part of the solution. As allies, people who aren’t trans can help — and remember, our trans friends and family are listening.
by tyler | Mar 31, 2023 | CNN, opinions
You know the story: a young, undersized, aspiring artist from New York’s Lower East Side who loves his country and hates bullies uses a superhero persona to take on the Nazis and becomes a war hero. It’s the origin of Captain America. It’s also the origin of Jack Kirby, his co-creator.
Captain America debuted 82 years ago this month, in 1941’s “Captain America Comics” no. 1, the brainchild of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. The sons of Jewish immigrants, born Hymie Simon and Jacob Kurtzberg, in 1939 they became the first staffers of nascent publisher Timely Comics—later Marvel—Simon the editor and writer at age 26 and Kirby the artist and art director at age 22. Their Captain America was an instant hit, selling almost a million copies a month.
This embodiment of America had a square jaw, blond hair and blue eyes, but he didn’t hail from a Mayflower family or the Midwest heartland. He came from the ethnic slums of the Lower East Side, born to poor Irish immigrants.
Kirby grew up in the Jewish tenements of the neighborhood, and like Steve Rogers was a short and scrawny kid who got constantly picked on by bullies. Like Rogers, he always stood his ground, getting into scrapes, often at the defense of his blond younger brother, Dave. And, like Rogers, he developed a lifelong intolerance of bullies of any kind, his son Neal says.
Kirby never used his real name in his work, assuming a series of alter egos like Curt Davis, Jack Curtiss and Fred Sande before settling on Jack Kirby, which he also adopted legally. Though by all accounts fiercely proud of his Jewishness, not one of his pennames sounded remotely Semitic. They were all Anglo, mostly Irish names. His parents were none too happy, but he wanted “to be an all-American.” For Captain America’s alter ego, he chose the Irish name Rogers.
Making Captain America a product of the Lower East Side was also meaningful (the 2011 movie changed it to Brooklyn, and it’s been inconsistent in the comics since). It was known as the most multiethnic neighborhood in New York, if not America, a ghetto of impoverished, mostly recent immigrants. Simon and Kirby’s all-American icon was a powerful reminder that being an immigrant is all-American.
It could also be that Kirby, who borrowed regularly from Bible stories, was inspired in part by King David, also a small, overlooked, artistic youth who was rejected from armed service but who, with unwavering faith, picked up a star-shaped shield and saved his nation.
For the cover of the first issue, Kirby drew his hero decking Hitler with a good right hook. The comic came out on December 20, 1940 (cover-dated March 1941, common for magazines), a full year before Pearl Harbor. This was a time when 93% of Americans opposed entering the war and American entertainment was under public and political pressure not to offend the Germans and their supporters. And here was Captain America, slapping Hitler, a world leader, on the covers and in the pages of his popular comics.
For Kirby, it was personal. According to his son, he was fearful and furious at the rise of Nazism in Europe and the US, especially after Chamberlain’s appeasement and Kristallnacht. He and Simon created their hero in direct response, and Kirby plainly stated, “Captain America was myself.” When he drew him punching Hitler, it was his “own anger coming to the surface.”
And there were repercussions. The German American Bund—which just a year prior paraded down Fifth Avenue and filled up Madison Square Garden with 22,000 members—inundated them with “death to the Jews” mail and calls and, as Neal told me, threatening to hang them from lampposts in Times Square.
When groups of them started waiting outside the office building, Simon and Kirby called the police. Soon after they got a call back from none other than Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. He was an avid comics fan and, unbeknownst to most, Jewish. He told them, “You boys over there are doing a good job. The City of New York will see that no harm will come to you.” A police guard regularly patrolled the offices thereafter.
Kirby was drafted in June 1943. Unlike most of his colleagues, like Simon who joined the Coast Guard mounted beach patrol, or assistant Stan Lee who joined the Army Signal Corps film division, Kirby, like Rogers, was jonesing to fight the Nazis. He joined the Army 11th Infantry Regiment, landing in Normandy 10 weeks after D-Day.
Thanks to his drawing skill and fame as Captain America’s co-creator, he was made an advance scout and sent behind enemy lines to draw maps and positions. At one point he encountered an old Jewish man, gaining his trust by talking in Yiddish, who led his unit to a small labor camp filled with Polish Jews, which they liberated.
Kirby later contracted a bad case of frostbite, almost needing both legs amputated. He spent a little over a year in the hospital, but eventually made a fully recovery. He was honorably discharged and awarded the Bronze Star.
After the war, superheroes fell out of favor and Kirby wrote and drew other genres of comics. When Stan Lee, by then the editor and head writer at what would soon be named Marvel, asked him to try superheroes again in 1961, the two created together the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man, Iron Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, Black Panther and countless others. This, combined with his artistic innovation, earned Kirby the moniker “King of Comics.” It also made him one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
And like with Captain America, he based them partly on himself. As he told Entertainment Tonight in 1982, “If you look at my characters, you’ll find me.” More than any other, even Steve Rogers, was Fantastic Four member Ben Grimm, the Thing—a gruff, cigar-chomping, thick-browed brawler from the Lower East Side, named after Kirby and his father, Benjamin Jacob. It’s “something my father never refuted,” Kirby’s son Neal told me. “I often describe my father as having the scrappiness of Leo Gorcey in the Dead End Kids, the language of Damon Runyon and the attitude of Jimmy Cagney. Stick a cigar in the Thing’s mouth and you have my father.”
When Kirby resurrected Captain America in 1964, his comics became noted for, among other things, their fight choreography, which was informed by his childhood brawls and his combat experience. And when he left Marvel in 1970 and returned in 1975 for a final, three-year stint, Captain America was one of only two co-creations he agreed to return to (the other was Black Panther). He never explained why, but Neal told me he believes it was the personal connection he felt with the character.
That Captain America was Jack Kirby’s avatar was known enough for following writers and artists to deepen the connection. In 1981, Roger Stern and John Byrne showed for the first time his childhood in the Lower East Side (previously only mentioned) and added elements taken directly from Kirby’s life; a natural talent for art and a love of books, especially fantasy, which he kept secret to avoid taunts and beatings by other kids.
In 1985, Mark Gruenwald and Paul Neary even made Rogers briefly a Marvel comics artist, assigned to, what else, the Captain America comic. Not to be outdone, he even compares his work to Kirby’s.
Kirby died in 1994 at age 76. He didn’t get to see his creation become a global household name and his youth become the first act of a multimillion-dollar superhero movie.
But Neal notes that, as much as he felt pride and kinship with the character, he was never possessive. “As a son, I saw a lot of Captain America in my father,” he said. But “my father truly believed that in times of crisis, all Americans would come together for a common cause. That’s why he told me, ‘Captain America is all of us.’”
by tyler | Mar 30, 2023 | CNN, opinions
When my spouse saw on Instagram that former first lady Michelle Obama had addressed her struggles as a tall girl on the latest episode of her podcast, he immediately sent it my way. He knew it would resonate — after all, that very day, the planned publication of my latest middle grade novel had been announced: a story about a 12-year-old girl whose 4-inch summer growth spurt and accompanying signs of womanhood begin drawing unwanted attention from family, friends and strangers.
Tentatively titled “Slouch,” the book is based on my own past as a tall child trying, and failing, to fit in. Before Obama made her comments, I felt that my experience of isolation and shame was a solitary one. Having Obama speak so openly on “The Light Podcast” felt like a private validation of a very specific and scarring set of childhood events. But it was also a public one.
Obama didn’t just speak openly to her audience about her past. She spoke openly about her vulnerability. Whether Obama is sharing the grief she felt in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s inauguration or highlighting some of the most daunting challenges of her life, her regular dives into emotional self-reflection across multiple platforms model how our politics and culture, as well as personal identities, can be enriched by our engagement with vulnerability.
Indeed, her courage is to our benefit. We need high-profile leaders like Obama spotlighting their experiences being human and being women — especially women who are still haunted by past encounters with peers and men because of the bodies they inhabited as youth. Obama understands that speaking up is not only an exercise of her power but also empowers everyone she speaks for.
As Obama told comedian Conan O’Brien on the third episode of the podcast, adapted from the tour for her book “The Light We Carry,” she still has painful memories associated with being an unusually tall child.
“That whole thing, you grow up, nothing fits you. Clothes weren’t made for you,” recounted Obama, now 5-foot-11. She confessed, “I just desperately wanted to be like the girls I saw, the peppy cheerleaders.” Her emotional frankness and relatable imagery were refreshing for offering a poignant window into my struggles.
Like Obama, I “spent my life tugging on my pants.” My frame rendered me an outcast from the time I started kindergarten. I reached my current height of nearly 5-feet-9-inches in the seventh grade. Raised by working-class parents, I already wasn’t stylish because we could never afford the latest fashions. My frequent growth spurts made it nearly impossible to keep me in clothes that looked right. My mother was forced to shop for me in the women’s section of most clothing stores before I even hit puberty.
The difficulties didn’t stop there. No one wanted to befriend the girl who resembled Big Bird from “Sesame Street,” a likeness I wasn’t even aware of until my classmates took it upon themselves to sing the show’s theme song when they saw me in the hallways. The few friends I did have were petite and adorable. When we took pictures together, I stood out like an overgrown weed. Even now, pictures of my youth make me cringe.
When I was in high school, I learned the hard way that my height would limit my options for love interests. I was considered unfeminine and intimidating by many of my crushes. They preferred girls they “could physically throw,” as one boy put it.
But there’s a larger, darker context underpinning the life of young girls who are unusually tall for their age, and it’s one I wish Obama had taken on.
Adolescent girls in our global society are hypersexualized — as evidenced in studies of social media and its effects on sexualization and on girls’ mental health outcomes. According to the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, “ample evidence indicates that sexualization has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, sexuality, and attitudes and beliefs.”
As a tall child, I naturally looked older. A lot older. Old enough to draw the attention of grown men. Men who’d decided that I was an adult long before I actually was one.
I recall as a 12-year-old when a friend’s father referred to me as an “Amazon woman” (I was his height). I later learned that this term had sexual connotations; there’s even a sexual position apparently named in its honor. I also remember grown men pulling up to me in their cars when I was that age and running solo errands for my mother in our neighborhood of Brooklyn. I began to grow terrified of the New York City streets that I used to call home.
The research on how to help tall children navigate their difficulties with their height typically deals with bullying by peers and self-esteem issues. While these are problems that certainly require intervention, the struggles of being a tall girl are about so much more.
I worry for the children born into my family of tall women (my aunts approach or surpass 6 feet). My niece is 4 years old and is the size of a 7-year-old. I fear for her future in a world that might decide she is a woman long before she actually is one, before she’s had the chance to decide what that means for herself.
There’s a lot to the story of being an unusually tall girl, and while Obama didn’t touch on every angle of that experience, I’m glad she started the conversation. She said she wanted to describe her own experiences as a tall child because it was one of the ways she felt like an outsider growing up. “So many of us in this country feel othered, we feel different,” she said. The audience applause suggested she’d indeed hit a nerve.
Yet Obama didn’t only diagnose the problem but prescribed an antidote. “We don’t see our ourselves reflected anywhere, and I hear from young people who talk about feeling invisible because they don’t see signs of themselves anywhere in the world,” she said. “So many of us are living in a world where we feel othered. That’s why it’s so important for us to tell our stories.”
For those of us who have felt that we should make ourselves invisible in order to fit in, Obama’s own willingness to be emotionally vulnerable means that we finally get to feel seen. That lets us stand up tall and proud.
by tyler | Mar 30, 2023 | CNN, opinions
“Parents decide what their children get to learn.” So said a school board chair at a charter school in Florida after its principal was forced to resign following complaints that sixth-grade students were shown pictures of Michelangelo’s classic statue of “David” without parents being given advance warning. Barney Bishop III told CNN that “we are going to make sure the concept of parental rights is supreme in Florida and at our charter school.”
It’s no coincidence that in his comments, Bishop also voiced support for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, a bill that restricts classroom discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity, into law last year. DeSantis is among several of the big names in the shadow Republican primary unfolding in public life who have shot to the top of American politics by claiming to defend the rights of parents.
Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia governor, won a swing state with views that included “parents matter.” In his first campaign visit to Iowa, Donald Trump similarly promised to “bring parental rights back into our school system.” Early in her campaign for president, Nikki Haley claimed that the Florida bill didn’t go “far enough,” and she has condemned critical race theory.
Republicans often present these claims as a response to “woke” excesses on issues from abortion to critical race theory, but these arguments for parental rights reflect a coherent strategy that cuts across the American culture wars.
For example, Idaho is considering legislation that would ban “abortion trafficking”, making it a crime to take a minor out of the state to access abortion care without parental involvement. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who may block access to the abortion pill nationwide, held in December (in a different case) that the federal government’s plan providing birth control to low-income and uninsured families did not give parents sufficient control over the health decision-making of their minor children.
When Tennessee banned drag performances in front of children earlier this month, the Tennessee Senate Majority Leader explained that this “gives confidence to parents that they can take their kids to a public or private show and will not be blindsided by a sexualized performance.”
Lawmakers in conservative states claiming to act in the name of parental rights are considering laws similar to Florida’s “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which restricts how race can be discussed in school. The Republican-controlled US House of Representatives even voted last Friday to pass the “Parents Bill of Rights Act,” which would require schools to post their curriculum and a list of library books and would also prevent elementary and middle schools from changing a child’s gender pronouns (or preferred name) without parental consent.
What’s behind the appeal to parental control? It may come down to the Constitution: the courts have recognized a constitutional right for parents to steer the upbringing of children. That’s certainly a legitimate concern. The Supreme Court has confirmed that parental decision making is entitled to “special weight,” and states defer to parental choices in most contexts, short of abuse and neglect.
But the GOP’s new parental rights strategy must be understood in historical context: in the past, similar tactics were used to delegitimize the choices minors were making and create an opening wedge to attack the rights of adults who make those same choices.
Moreover, by elevating the rights of some parents, they are devaluing those who do want their children to learn about slavery at school or help their children explore their gender identities.
To be sure, claims of parental rights have also been used to challenge a system in which Black mothers and LGBTQ families face excessive state intervention, an over-policing that results in a higher rate of Black children removed from their homes through the abuse and neglect system and that fails to recognize lesbian parental rights. But these critiques have been raised in very different contexts—often by parents in court rather than by state legislators—and they have failed to capture national attention or make significant reforms in the way that recent conservative parental rights strategies already have.
When questions of racial segregation landed in the federal courts in the 1950s, conservatives developed very different arguments about parental rights. In fights to preserve segregation, white, middle class parents invoked parental rights and family autonomy from the 1950s to the 1970s, even as parents of color felt that their own rights were being given short shrift.
Later in the 1970s, Anita Bryant, a celebrity of the religious right, borrowed from segregationist parental rights rhetoric, launching a group called Save Our Children that successfully fought to roll back civil rights ordinances for gays and lesbians. The anti-abortion movement adopted a parental rights strategy too, proposing state laws requiring parental notification or consent.
In the 1980s, conservative Christians launched a home-school movement and demanded a parental rights amendment to the Constitution, and the Reagan Administration issued a rule requiring federally funded birth control clinics to notify parents whose children were receiving contraception.
In the 1990s, the Christian Coalition and allied groups angry about sex education and information about HIV/AIDS promoted bills in Congress and 28 states providing that “[t]he right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children shall not be infringed.”
These claims made sense when many conservatives were unsure about the wisdom of directly attacking the legitimacy of integration, gay rights or the other issues of the day. Focusing on parental prerogatives was easier, and seemingly appealed to Americans who had not yet made up their minds, or who did not wish to appear bigoted. But parental rights arguments have also served as an opening to target the rights of adults as well as minors.
Often, after all, some conservatives suggested that parents not only have a right to object to something but also that their objections have some basis in fact—that minors are being groomed, exploited or harmed.
It is then no surprise that parental rights strategies are back. Led by Gen Z, support for abortion rights, equality for LGTBQ Americans and racial justice is growing. A record number of Americans in a recent Gallup poll supported same-sex marriage, and a growing number of American adults identify as LGTBQ. Especially after the Dobbs decision removing the federal protection for abortion, more Americans are identifying as pro-choice than almost ever before, and the number of Americans who think abortion should be illegal is hitting all-time lows.
Focusing on parental authority may be an attractive alternative for conservatives uncomfortable with these shifts, especially if they want to avoid alienating voters, all without abandoning inequitable and unpopular positions.
What should be done?
Especially since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, many parents have felt a loss of agency when it comes to their children’s education, so it’s understandable that even some at the center of American politics find themselves attracted to the GOP’s claims that parents matter.
An important first step for reaching some of those attracted to parents’ rights arguments is, ironically, education: a better knowledge of history shows that some of today’s professed concern for parental rights reflects a much broader, and often darker, agenda that can harm minors and the people who support them.
A second step is for political progressives and moderates to make parents’ rights arguments of their own—to remind everyone of the struggles of parents who want their children to have access to gender-affirming care or legal abortion or birth control, or who want their children to understand the culturally and racially diverse world in which they live.
The idea of parents’ rights might have come to serve as a shorthand for a particular conservative agenda, but it doesn’t need to be that way. Through public education and advocacy, we should make clear that all parents have rights, not just those on the far right.
by tyler | Mar 29, 2023 | CNN, opinions
Vladimir Putin last week gave details of Russia’s stated intent to base tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. The flurry of alarmist reporting on what this meant highlights much of what is wrong with Western responses to Russian nuclear intimidation.
How Putin’s words have been spun in the West may be a surprise to Moscow — but there’s no doubt it will be a highly gratifying one. Because Russia has already “used” nuclear weapons. It’s used them highly successfully without firing them, by trading on empty threats about potential nuclear strikes to very effectively deter the West from fully supporting Ukraine against Russia’s imperialist war.
By now though, we should have learned not to confuse what Putin has said with what Russia has done or is about to do.
Putin didn’t announce any plans that had not already been declared in the middle of 2022. Last week’s stated intention wasn’t new — it just had dates attached to it that we had not heard before.
Similarly, it’s been widely reported that Putin took this step in direct response to the UK’s announcement that it would be providing Ukraine with tank shells containing depleted uranium. While Putin previously said Russia would “respond accordingly” to such a move, that wasn’t the stated trigger in Saturday’s rehashed plans.
In the full version of his interview released by Russian TV, Putin explicitly said that this was a long-standing plan “outside the context of” the UK’s announcement.
There’s no doubt that Russia will be keen to extract maximum intimidatory potential from any plans to move long-range missile systems forward, so they can threaten larger areas of Europe.
There’s a precedent in Russia’s long-running program for deploying Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad (a Russian province along the Baltic coast) — which caused fresh alarm among Western politicians throughout the previous decade every time it was announced.
Russia learned long ago that mentions of military deployments do not need to be new to be effective, and they will consistently trigger a highly gratifying wave of commentary from a collective West that has too short a memory to place them in context.
With the “announcement” of nuclear weapons to Belarus too, as often happens, 24 hours later reality checks on the reporting start to emerge in those same media outlets. But by that time the damage is done.
In a report released by the Chatham House international affairs think-tank this week, I lay out how Russia’s nuclear scare tactics have been enormously successful in preventing Ukraine from receiving the help it needs to win the war — and even in preventing some Western leaders from backing Ukraine to win it at all.
That’s not just because of what Putin has said since the full-scale invasion started in February 2022. It’s the result of a long-running campaign that has mobilized all of Russia’s propagandists, influencers, mouthpieces and embedded agents of influence across the West, all driving home the single message that Russia should not be opposed because that will trigger nuclear war.
That campaign’s success can be measured by the way the whole basis of the conversation in Western policy has changed. The idea of escalation management, and how to deter Russia, has been replaced with prioritizing avoiding escalation altogether based on the assumption that it is only Russia that can practice deterrence.
The result is a free hand for Putin.
Russia has used its nuclear weapons as a get out of jail free card to escape the consequences of its actions in Ukraine. It’s been aided in doing so by the information ecosystem that amplifies and plays on nuclear threats — including not only Russia’s own network of propagandists, mouthpieces and influencers, but also genuine Western media outlets.
For now, the more immediate implications are for neighboring Belarus. For years President Alexander Lukashenko succeeded in maintaining a degree of independence, and in particular to avoid outsourcing Belarus’s defense to its notional ally Russia — for instance, by fending off persistent Russian demands for an airbase there.
That all changed after Belarus’s fraudulent elections in August 2020. Lukashenko leaning harder on Russian support for staying in power meant the Kremlin’s grip tightened on his country.
That was an essential precondition for Belarus allowing its land facilities and airspace to be used by Russia for attacks on Ukraine in February 2022.
Belarus’s armed forces, despite their close cooperation with those of Russia, have shown no evident inclination to go to war for Moscow as this would expose their own country to reprisals.
And widespread reporting earlier this year that Russia might be preparing a new attack on Ukraine from Belarusian territory is now widely discounted as Russia has not put the forces in place to do so.
But Ukrainian drone strikes on high-value assets within Belarus show how Lukashenko providing a rear support area for Russian military operations has made his country a target all the same. Hosting Russian nuclear missiles — if and when it happens — means Lukashenko is exposing his country to even greater risk.
Although Russia’s threats so far have been proven empty, there is still a non-zero chance that Putin might eventually order a nuclear strike if he perceives — mistakenly — that the benefits of doing so outweigh the consequences.
That non-zero chance should be reduced still further by a substantial change in how other countries aim to dissuade Russia from considering actual nuclear use. As I detail in the Chatham House report, Russia could well believe that if it did use nuclear weapons, the consequences would be manageable.
That needs to change, because for all the horror and tragedy that Russia has inflicted on Ukraine, a similar failure to deter Putin if he chose to embark on nuclear adventurism would come at a vastly higher cost.
by tyler | Mar 28, 2023 | CNN, opinions
Days after the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to an abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I received a call from a former officer in the US Air Force. Like most Americans, she worried about how the ruling could harm the health, privacy and freedom of American women. But she raised another issue that is equally deserving of our attention – the harm to our national security.
The number of women enlisting in the military has grown significantly over time. They now represent roughly a fifth of the total force and over a third of our civilian workforce. But when women volunteer for active duty, they, like any other service member, don’t choose where to serve. The Pentagon decides that.
Before Dobbs, our troops had some assurance that, wherever the Pentagon sent them, they would at least have minimal access to reproductive care as a protected constitutional right. Not anymore. The Supreme Court stripped away that right, without grappling in its written opinion with the harm it would inflict on service women in states with little or no access to reproductive care.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, 18 states have rushed to ban or limit abortion access. Ten have no exceptions, even for rape or incest. Meanwhile, radical state legislators have introduced bills restricting the freedom of women to travel from one state to another for reproductive care. And several states – from Iowa to Nebraska – have only begun to chip away at a woman’s right to choose.
Texas, home to Fort Hood – one of the largest military bases in the US, has posted $10,000 bounties for residents who successfully sue anyone who has helped in accessing or performing an abortion after it is no longer legal.
Alabama, home to six military bases, has threatened doctors and nurses with up to 99 years in jail for performing an abortion. The state’s attorney general even suggested using a chemical endangerment law – which is designed to protect kids from meth – to prosecute women for ending their pregnancies with a medication abortion pill.
In Florida, which is home to 21 military bases, Gov. Ron DeSantis just endorsed a six-week abortion ban. He may be unaware – or may not even care – that a third of women don’t even know they’re pregnant until around six weeks.
These cruel policies are part of an escalating war on access to reproductive care, and we cannot allow our military readiness to become collateral damage.
After Dobbs, it’s not hard to see why a woman might think twice before enlisting if the Pentagon could station her in a state that bans abortion – even if she is a victim of rape or incest. The former Air Force officer who called me understood immediately how it harms military readiness to force service women to travel far from their base to access care, to say nothing of the cost to their privacy when every single person in their units finds out about it.
A recent study from RAND Corporation found that Dobbs could increase attrition, decrease readiness and harm military recruiting. And that’s after the Pentagon just had its worst recruiting year since the Vietnam War ended.
To help address these challenges, the Pentagon recently announced three policies. The first two authorize travel allowances and absences without leave for service women to access reproductive care if it’s unavailable in their duty station. This matters because service members may not be able to afford to travel, which is why the Pentagon covers travel for other procedures that aren’t locally available.
The third policy gives service members more time before they must tell their commanding officer they’re pregnant, providing women in uniform more space and privacy to decide if they want to carry a pregnancy to term – a decision that’s become a lot more complicated after Dobbs.
I applaud the Biden administration for these steps to protect access to care for the service women who protect us, but the administration should go further. In the wake of Dobbs, the Pentagon still has no policy to account for the harm of moving a base from a state that protects access to reproductive care to a state that does not.
For example, the Pentagon is now considering whether to move the US Space Command from Colorado, which protects abortion access, to Alabama, which criminalizes it. When the Pentagon makes basing decisions, like this, some of the factors it considers include number of available parking spaces, housing affordability and area construction costs.
What’s not on the list? Whether the state prohibits abortion, imprisons doctors who perform them or turns its residents into bounty hunters against women.
Why should basing decisions turn on how much it costs to house a family, but not whether that family has the freedom to plan its future? It is absurd.
Securing access to reproductive care is among the greatest civil rights struggles of our times, and President Joe Biden has an opportunity to lead – as former President Harry Truman did when he ordered the desegregation of our armed forces. Today, at a minimum, that means creating a policy to account for access to reproductive care in the Pentagon’s basing and personnel decisions.
Nine months after Dobbs it can be easy to feel powerless as one state after another takes aim at the right to choose. But here is one specific way that Biden can hold the line, strengthen our readiness and defend the freedom of service women who spend every day defending ours.
