Episode Details

Hey fam, welcome back to the Gilead Gazette, your weekly tour of the war on women, where every seven days I think we have finally found the floor and every seven days somebody shows up with a shovel and a permit. This week, the federal government decided that a woman raped in her own bed on a Navy ship had a workplace injury. Senator Bill Cassidy dropped a report on abortion pills twelve days before a court gets to take them away. Health and Human Services published a study concluding that respecting trans people makes you a national security risk. And an anti-abortion group is offering to pay the legal bills of anyone who breaks New Jersey’s new clinic law. Let’s get into it.

Rape is Workers Comp in the Navy

The Department of Labor has ruled that when a ship captain rapes a woman in her bed, that is a workers’ compensation claim.

Elsie Dominguez is a civilian mariner with Military Sealift Command. She is also a lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve. In December of 2021 she was the first assistant engineer on the USNS Carson City, and she says the captain of that ship, Yamil Sanchez Padilla, used a master key to let himself into her locked cabin and rape her while she slept. She reported it the next morning.

The Pentagon released its own numbers this month. More than twenty thousand service members experienced unwanted sexual contact last year, and roughly one in three said a word about it to anybody.

Here is what she got for reporting. Government lawyers argued that her cabin was her workplace, because her job required her to be on that ship and she had, in their words, nowhere else to live. So the rape happened at work. And things that happen at work go to federal workers’ comp, and workers’ comp is all you get. Those same lawyers admitted in their filings that rape is not part of a mariner’s job, and then argued it was covered anyway. A judge agreed this month and threw her case out.

She took a year of unpaid leave to recover. She lost her health insurance. He kept collecting a paycheck the entire time he was under investigation.

Rape in the military is an occupational hazard now, like a bad back. Rose Thayer reported on this for Stars and Stripes. While they’re still allowing reporting.

Abortion Pill Sermon Study

Over in the Senate, Bill Cassidy, who is a medical doctor, apparently, released his committee’s report on abortion pill manufacturers this week under the title “Mifepristone Without Guardrails.” His own summary of these companies is that they “profit off killing innocent children while putting mothers’ lives at risk.” The man has a medical license and he used it to write an altar call.

The centerpiece is Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith’s claim that “more than 1 in 10 women who take Mifepristone will experience a serious adverse event.” That number comes from a Christian think tank that counted bleeding as a complication, in a procedure where bleeding is how you know it worked. The real rate is three tenths of one percent. Mifepristone is safer than penicillin. Nobody wrote this to persuade you. They wrote it for a courtroom. In twelve days the Fifth Circuit hears Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill’s case to force mifepristone back to in-person dispensing only, which would wipe out the roughly thirty percent of abortions in this country that now happen by telehealth. Now they can cite the United States Senate instead of Liz Murrill. Same claims, better stationery.

Trans Allies = Terrorists

Health and Human Services published a twenty page report this week titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?” Its conclusion is that people who think trans people should be called by their names and pronouns are more willing to justify political violence. Respect the pronoun, join the insurgency.

They took five positions straight out of the guidance published by the American Academy of P