Michigan lawmaker to help perform “Vagina Monologues” (AP via Google)

Lost amid the understandable silliness surrounding the reaction to Michigan Republicans forbidding Democratic Michigan State Representative Lisa Brown  to speak on the Michigan House floor, due to her use of the word “vagina” in a floor speech against an anti-abortion bill, is a larger and much more serious problem that has been going on in Michigan for over a year now. Bear with me talking about that for a while, and I promise I’ll talk more about vaginas later on; I need to get Schoolhouse Rock on Michigan first in order to set the scene properly.

The way Michigan’s state governance works, most bills that the governor signs, after they’re passed by the state legislature, cannot go into effect until after the legislative term is over, i.e. after elections have been held. The idea here is that if Michigan’s elected officials pass a bill that Michiganders find head-slappingly stupid, they can go to the polls and turf out the legislators that passed the bill before it takes effect. The exception to this is if the bill passes with a two-thirds vote in both the Michigan House and the Michigan Senate, and the governor signs it into law. With me so far? Good.

Now, Michigan was a big target for Republicans in 2010, as it’s been for a while; there’s a sizable rural, culturally conservative population there for them to tap into, although in presidential elections it’s usually trumped by the blue-collar Democratic bases in the auto corridor and the large college towns like Lansing and Ann Arbor. 2010 was a banner year for Republicans in Michigan; they not only captured the governorship, but they got to that magic two-thirds majority in the Michigan Senate. They got a sizable majority in the Michigan House as well, but not quite enough to get to the two-thirds mark, meaning that if a vote fell on pure party lines then Republicans wouldn’t be able to pass bills that could take effect right away; a very large number of bills that Republicans are trying to pass through Michigan are falling on party lines in the House, so these bills shouldn’t be taking effect right away.

The thing is, they are, and the reason they are is that the Republicans in the Michigan House are routinely ignoring both the Democrats in the House and the rules they are supposed to follow. A lot of these two-thirds bills are passed on voice votes, so whichever Republican is acting as Speaker can simply say that in his or her opinion there was a two-thirds “aye” vote. When Democrats motion for a recorded vote, which they are entitled to do under the rules of the Michigan House, they are ignored; when they enter into the congressional record afterward that they voted no in a large enough number that the bill should not have been able to take effect immediately, they are ignored. (Some of these bills have to do with the ability of Michiganders to vote, so they will have a huge impact on this year’s presidential race, where Mitt “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” Romney is somehow polling ahead of President Obama in the state recently.) Democrats in the Michigan House are also ignored when they try to introduce amendments to resolutions and attempt other things that they are entitled to do as the opposition party in the House, and this has been going on systematically since the Republicans took power in the state afterthe last election.

This is the kind of blatant subversion of democracy, and the rights of our elected officials, that should be expected of a tyrannical country with sham officials “elected” to do the dictator’s bidding, not one of the United States of America. The most infuriating part of this whole debacle is that this is the age of YouTube, and videos of Michigan House Republicans ignoring Democrats, and blatantly breaking the governing rules of the House, are legion. Even if you don’t comb YouTube for videos from state legislatures (and I can hardly blame you for that), Rachel Maddow has been documenting this on her MSNBC show for several months. I wish I could say I was surprised that President Obama hasn’t acted forcefully to stop this from happening, especially when it is so blatant and so thoroughly documented, but I’ve long given up on President Obama to show any kind of courage when it comes to standing up against Republicans.

This all goes back to an all-too-common theme for Republicans in my lifetime, this idea that if they spend enough money, or act obstinately enough, they can alter reality. They do not have a two-thirds majority in the Michigan House, Democrats make it clear session after session that these bills are not getting passed with the two-thirds majority required to be enacted into law immediately, and yet these laws do get enacted right away because Republicans have assumed powers, not given to them by any authority, to just ignore Democrats. The videos from the House floor show that Republicans are doing everything short of jamming their fingers in their ears and shouting “La la la la, we can’t hear you” whenever they want to ignore Democrats, and if the elected officials and law enforcement of Michigan will not step in and stop this from happening, then President Obama had better figure out what he can do, because if this is allowed to go on then it sets an absurd precedent where any party in power, on the state level or lower (or possibly even higher), can essentially ignore all opposition and do whatever they want.

That, at long last, brings us back to vaginas. Lost in the hubbub and the more sensational stories being written about what happened this past week is exactly why Michigan Republicans came down so hard on Representative Brown for her use of “the V word.” As Brown herself pointed out when interviewed, vagina is the “correct medical term” to use, and it had been used by others in debating the bill she was arguing against. However, when Brown used it at the end of her speech, she was using it in the context of describing her vagina. To quote her, as she addressed the Republicans in the chamber, “I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but no means no.” The grievous sin, the unpardonable offence that Brown committed was not that she said the word vagina, but that she talked about her vagina.

It goes back to the birth control debates of recent months, to Bush 43 and eight years of abstinence-only sex education in our public schools, to the long, sad line of puritanical thought that still runs through this country like razor wire, as the religious right tries to enforce its world vision on all of us, that fantasy world where everyone is heterosexual and cis-gendered, and those who identify otherwise are insane and living in sin and what have you. Sex is supposed to be for reproductive purposes only, and the womb is a sacred tomb where life begins at conception (and, given how they want to cut government programmes, pretty much ends at birth) and the idea of insurance having to provide for birth control is anathema, even as it’s expected to pay for all the “male enhancement” pills a guy wants.

You want to think that we are making progress in this country when it comes to redefining and reenvisioning gender, and certainly there are the odd stories once in a while that hint at progress at some areas, but when you look at this story, and Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” for arguing that health insurance should cover birth control, and all the measures Republicans across the country are pushing through state legislatures to make abortion more difficult because they’re hoping the Roberts Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, you realize that you can try to create a parody of Republican views on women’s rights and it would still mostly be true. They see women as little more than baby incubators who have a sacred duty to bear as many children as they can, and that any attempt to take control of their sexual organs for anything other than a reproductive centre is not only immoral, but should be made illegal. Of course women should look attractive and sexy — men need that “eye candy” after a hard day’s work as the family breadwinner — but to actually be sexy is an abomination. You want to think that this is a comic oversimplification, something to laugh at when we need a joke in the midst of the turmoil caused by so many other issues, but time and time again the lampoon of Republican views towards women and gender roles is proving to be the reality.

It’s reminiscent of a couple of months ago when the Catholic League went after Jon Stewart for his “vagina mangers” joke on The Daily Show, which would have been funnier if, like so much of Stewart’s material these days, it’s a little too true to be funny. I wish I could have written about that when it was still hot in the press, and I’m surprised it didn’t linger longer than it did; I would have thought someone (Suicide Girls?) would put on a “vagina manger” photo contest to capitalize on the news. Stewart introducing the manger concept into his joke makes what he did different from what Representative Brown has been put through, but not substantially so. The dreaded “V word,” and its use to describe something other than a place for purely reproductive pursuits, is key in both.

Representative Lisa Brown dared to challenge religious right orthodoxy, and the same House Republicans that regularly ignore Democrats, and the rules of their own chamber, saw fit to punish Brown by forbidding her from speaking on the floor of the Michigan House of Representatives for a day, on a day when the House took up several pieces of legislation that she wanted to speak on. They might as well have ordered her to serve an “in-chamber detention” and made her write “I must not say that word” five hundred times. There is a good deal of humour in this whole episode, and I’ve had my share of chuckles from it, but at its heart is something that is no laughing matter at all: Republicans assuming power they do not have, breaking rules and procedures that they are constitutionally and legally bound to follow, simply ignoring voices that rise in opposition to theirs, and putting into place a plethora of laws that should not be getting enacted immediately. Getting so worked up over “the V word” is kind of funny in its way. Systematically and methodically silencing the entire opposition is not.

If I were Lisa Brown, and Michigan Republicans continue to act this way and the federal government stays on the sidelines, I would contact the United Nations and ask for observers to sit in on sessions of the Michigan House of Representatives to ensure that procedures are followed and that every representative’s voice is heard and vote counted. What is going on in Michigan is the kind of legislative abuse that we should not tolerate in any government, let alone one in the country that is supposed to be the pinnacle of democracy.