During the July protests against governor Rick Perry's
threat to close all but 5 Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas and criminalize
abortion after 20 weeks, 14 year-old Tuesday Cain faced harassment for holding
a sign saying “Jesus isn't a Dick, so keep him out of my vagina”. Passer-byers
responded with hateful comments, including the commentary of an older man who
told Cain and her friend “You should become lesbians! No man will ever want
you! You're ugly!” and another man who called her a "whore". A photo
of the sign was later posted online, provoking further outrage.
What is particularly stunning about why Cain's sign is so
provocative is that her assertion is nothing unheard of. The message is
straight forward, non-discriminating and has been repeated by pro-choicers many
times: she is simply stating that when it comes to making laws about
reproductive rights, the bible has no place in the matter. Tuesday’s father Billy
Joe Cain reiterated his daughter’s views on twitter, tweeting, “Women should
have access to all needed health care based on scientific facts, not political
ideology”. The protests were likely to have been abounded with many signs
arguing for lawmakers to keep religious biases out of the decision-making
processes when making choices that would impact the health of people of
numerous, or zero, denominations. So what made Cain evoke such a strong and
hateful response?
The same factors that make Cain's sign so clever is also
perhaps the most threatening to those who attempts to intimidate and silence
her, in that the words she chose have been construed by harassers as an implication
that Cain is sexually active.
The irony of this is that supporters of Planned Parenthood
are protesting the Senate Bill 5 in part for the purpose of sustaining the
accessibility of health care and contraceptives so that women, including girls
Cain's age, are not left with the burden of unwanted pregnancies. One criticism
among anti-choice citizens is that by providing contraceptives, Planned
Parenthood is giving young girls more incentive to be sexually active.
Therefore, in the eyes of Senate Bill 5 supporters, the solution is to limit
availability of contraceptives; in this way the anti-choice movement is not
only taking away the right to safe abortions from women, but pushing abstinence
as the only option for minors, leaving only unsafe sex and the risk of unwanted
pregnancies as the alternative. What Tuesday Cain's sign evokes is
anti-choicers' widespread response to the fears that fuel the Planned
Parenthood boycott: a girl who does not view sex as something strictly
prohibited to minors such as herself. The personal pronoun in Cain’s sign
allows the sign to be construed as some statement that Cain has sex, possibly
casually, possibly because she does not see the almighty consequence that so
many anti-choicers see attached to the act of minors having sex, regardless of
it being consensual and protected. It goes without saying that the sexually
frank attitude of Cain’s sign poses a threat to anyone who thinks abstinence
should be the only option for minors; that is, it is a threat to anyone who has
looked into the services of Planned Parenthood and still supports Senate Bill
5. In the same way that criticizers pellet Planned Parenthood as an operation
turning young girls into “whores”, the criticizers of Cain pin her as the
representative of every girl who has been brainwashed by said machine to
believe that minors should be equipped to have protected sex.
It speaks volumes of the general public's discomfort with
the idea of a young girl having sex when hundreds of adults feel entitled to
criticize a fourteen year old based on the whereabouts of her virginity.
Parallel the response to Cain’s sign with the large-scale movement to all but
criminalize abortion with the enactment of Senate Bill 5, and it is essentially
the same ordeal; adults’ discomfort with the possibility of minors having sex
blinds them to the benefits and logic of providing passage to Planned
Parenthoods, which do provide accessibility to contraceptives, but also provide
services that apply to all women, including those who are not sexually active.
