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The Republicans of Gilead

Gilead
Gilead

In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s ever-resonant tale of misogynist dystopia, Christian fascism has a sordid, perverse underbelly. On the surface, the Republic of Gilead, Atwood’s imaginary successor to America, is a place of totalitarian religious austerity.

But as the book’s enslaved narrator discovers, the society’s leaders also maintain a brothel, Jezebel’s, full of women who couldn’t fit into the new order. It’s the inevitable flip side of a regime that dehumanizes women, reducing them to their reproductive organs. “Nature demands variety, for men,” says a character called the Commander.

Donald Trump’s administration turns the Gilead model upside down. Its public image is louche and decadent, with tabloid scandal swirling around the president and many of his associates. This can make it hard to focus on the unprecedented lengths the administration is going to curtail American women’s reproductive rights and enrich the anti-abortion movement.

On Friday, the Trump administration escalated its war on Planned Parenthood and the women who use it. It released a rule prohibiting Title X, a federal family-planning program that serves around 4 million low-income women, from funding organizations that also provide abortions. Further, the administration instituted an American version of the global gag rule, barring doctors and nurses receiving Title X funds from making abortion referrals to their patients except in certain emergency situations.

The rule is meant to cut Planned Parenthood, which serves 41 percent of Title X recipients, out of the program. But for many women who rely on Title X, there are no alternatives. Planned Parenthood’s president, Dr. Leana Wen, told me that in Wisconsin, as of 2017, Planned Parenthood served 80 percent of Title X patients and was the only Title X provider in seven counties. In Ohio, Planned Parenthood was the only Title X provider in nine counties. “We know that when patients cannot access their provider of choice, they delay care,” or they end up forgoing care altogether, she said.

The administration appears to think that religious anti-abortion groups, including those opposed to contraception, will fill some of the gaps. The new regulation jettisons a requirement that Title X clinics provide “medically approved” family planning services. That means that funds that once went to Planned Parenthood could flow instead to anti-abortion groups that promote so-called natural family planning. Unless the courts halt the new policy, struggling women who need refills on their birth control pills could get federally funded lectures on the rhythm method instead.

This move to turn a lifesaving women’s health program into pork for the religious right should be major news. Instead, it’s been overshadowed by a series of scandals, each offering telling glimpses of the sexual ethics of Trumpworld’s golf-shirted Commanders.

On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that prosecutors working under former Miami U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta, now Trump’s secretary of labor, broke the law in the process of making an inexplicably lenient plea deal with financier Jeffrey Epstein, who’d been accused of sexually abusing underage girls.(Trump once counted Epstein as a friend, saying of him: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”) Acosta would have already been forced out of any normal administration, but so far he seems secure in this one.

Then, on Friday, news broke that Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and a close friend of and donor to Trump, was being charged with soliciting prostitution, part of a wide-ranging Florida sex-trafficking investigation. One of the 100 richest men in the country, Kraft was allegedly a patron of a strip-mall massage parlor staffed by women who, according to police, were virtual prisoners, forced to service up to 1,000 men a year. It’s hard to imagine why a man with Kraft’s resources would visit such a place unless the squalor, and the women’s evident powerlessness, were part of the point. (Kraft has denied the allegations; the police reportedly have video evidence.)

On Monday there was another minor sex scandal involving Trump himself, when Alva Johnson, a former Trump campaign staffer in Florida, sued the president and his campaign,claiming, among other things, that he’d given her an unwanted kiss while she was at work.To Trump, the suit says, “Ms. Johnson was nothing more than a sexual object he felt entitled to dominate and humiliate.” The Trump camp denies Johnson’s charges, but the behavior she described is in keeping with Trump’s self-description on the “Access Hollywood” tape: “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” More than 22 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct.

Now Trump, payer of hush money to a pornographic film actress, employer of Bill Shine, a man forced out of Fox News for his role in abetting sexual harassment, is putting himself between more than a million poor women and their doctors. It’s ugly, but I’m not sure it’s hypocritical. Ultimately, the patriarchs of the fictional Gilead and the dreadfully real Mar-a-Lago share an ethos: harsh restrictions for powerless women, unbounded license for powerful men.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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