05 December 21
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The logic being used against Roe could weaken the legal foundations of many rights Americans value deeply.
Many of the dangers of overruling Roe have been long discussed. If women lose the right to an abortion, pregnancy-related deaths are estimated to rise substantially and suddenly. (Currently, 26 states have so-called trigger laws on the books that would outlaw most abortions the moment the Court reverses Roe.) The impact of Roe’s fall would hit low-income women especially hard, as they’re five times as likely as affluent women to experience unplanned childbearing and twice as likely to face sexual violence.
Those are the dangers of restricting access to abortion. The thing is, the dangers of dispensing with Roe go far beyond abortion, because the legal logic that threatens this particular right could quite easily extend to others, inviting states to try out new laws that regulate choices about whom to marry, whom to be intimate with, what contraception to use, and how to rear one’s own children.
The contention that Roe is uniquely built on a foundation of sand ignores the inconvenient fact that lots of other rights are not expressly articulated in the Constitution. The question that a reversal of Roe accordingly poses is whether the “textualists” and “originalists” on this conservative-heavy Court would allow those implied rights to go by the wayside as well.
Most people tether Roe’s legal foundations to the right to privacy identified in Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision striking down state laws rendering illegal the use of contraceptives by married couples. The Court ultimately identified a constitutional “right to privacy” within protective “penumbras” that emanate from the Bill of Rights—in particular the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments—and reasoned that these penumbras operate to shield “an intimate relation of husband and wife and their physician’s role in one aspect of that relation” from government intrusion. Picking up on Griswold in 1973, the Court in Roe acknowledged that “the Constitution does not explicitly mention any right to privacy,” but seized on the earlier case’s recognition of “a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy” to strike down a Texas law criminalizing abortion.
Bemoaning the analytical shortcomings of Roe, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of gender equality under the Constitution, noted that critics were “charging the Court with reading its own values into the due process clause.” (In her view, “the Court presented an incomplete justification for its decision” and should have added “a distinct sex discrimination theme” to its balancing of fetal versus maternal interests.) Those charges have endured, culminating in the Dobbs case, which tees up a reversal of Roe, despite the fact that a majority of Americans across the political spectrum favor some measure of safe and legal abortion access.
But Griswold was not the Court’s first word on the scope of “liberty” under the Fourteenth Amendment’s due-process clause, which protects individuals from arbitrary governmental deprivations of “life, liberty or property” without articulating with any precision what the word liberty actually means. In a series of cases beginning in the early 1920s, the Court carved out a protected space for family, marriage, and children that the government is constrained from regulating. A rollback of Roe could split this sphere open if the conservative theory that implied rights are constitutionally invalid takes hold, and states begin passing draconian laws that creep into other areas of intimate personal life.
Consider the 1923 case Meyer v. Nebraska, in which the Court struck down a law criminalizing the teaching of German in private schools. “The obvious purpose of this statute,” the Court wrote, “was that the English language should be and become the mother tongue of all children reared in this state.” Although its enactment “comes reasonably within the police power of the state,” the Court found that the law ”unreasonably infringes the liberty guaranteed to the plaintiff in error by the Fourteenth Amendment”—the precise grounding of the now-precarious individual right to decide whether to carry a fetus to term. Two years later, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus & Mary, the Court struck down an Oregon criminal law forcing parents to send their children to public school. “The manifest purpose” of the law, the Court noted, “is to compel general attendance at public schools by normal children, between eight and sixteen, who have not completed the eighth grade.” Citing Meyer, the Court ruled, “We think it entirely plain that the Act of 1922 unreasonably interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children.”
The Court has construed liberty to safeguard numerous other personal safe spaces: the right to marry regardless of race (1967’s Loving v. Virginia) and sex (2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges). The right to use contraception (Griswold). The right to be free from compulsory sterilization by the state (1942’s Skinner v. Oklahoma). The right to be free of government-mandated surgery involving “a virtually total divestment of respondent’s ordinary control over surgical probing beneath his skin” (1985’s Winston v. Lee). And the right to engage in intimate sexual conduct with a partner of one’s choice without fear of criminal prosecution (2003’s Lawrence v. Texas).
In Dobbs, the state of Mississippi’s answer to this line of cases is to suggest that the life of an unborn fetus is especially sacred under the Constitution: “Nowhere else in the law does a right of privacy or right to make personal decisions provide a right to destroy a human life,” it claims. But saying so does not mean that critics of other privacy-based rights could not find their own reasons why those rights, too, must be balanced against some other competing interest.
Thus, to say that Roe is a one-off constitutional blunder, built on a flimsy foundation, while other rights are grounded in concrete, is a myth—and a dangerous one. Nothing in the Constitution says anything to specifically protect couples’ ability to choose to have sex, use contraception, get married, decide how to educate their children, refuse bodily inspection or medical treatments, and, yes, terminate a pregnancy. From a legal perspective, if Roe falls, it’s hard to see what else will still stand.
'Justice Amy Coney Barrett: would being a 'handmaiden' in People of Praise affect her decisions on the supreme court? Perish the thought!' (photo: Leah Millis/Reuters)
With Trump appointees setting the tone, promises to be above the partisan fray are revealed as – obviously – a pack of lies
Looks like those “hysterical” women were right after all. For the past few years anyone worried that civil rights in America would be gutted by a right-leaning supreme court has been dismissed as a fearmonger. The supreme court was above partisan politics, we were told. Upstanding “carpool dad” Brett Kavanaugh had no interest in reversing Roe v Wade, we were told. The fact that People of Praise, the Christian community where Amy Coney Barrett previously served as a “handmaid” (their term for a female leader) was virulently anti-abortion and would expel members for gay sex wouldn’t affect her decisions on the supreme court, we were told.
We were told, as was always obvious, a pack of lies. On Wednesday, the US supreme court considered the most important abortion case in a generation. Its final ruling, due in June 2022, could overturn Roe v Wade and put an end to the constitutional right to an abortion in the US. If that happens, and it seems an increasing possibility that it will, more than 65 million US women would immediately lose access to an abortion in their home state, thanks to “trigger laws” 20 states have in place. But don’t worry, Justice Barrett has said, forcing women to give birth isn’t barbaric at all: if you don’t want to be a mother you can just put the kid up for adoption! Easy peasy.
The rightwing assault on US reproductive rights isn’t taking place in a void. Countries around the world are escalating attempts to coerce women into having children. A new report, Welcome to Gilead, by a UK-based charity called Population Matters, warns that women’s rights around the world are under attack “because of a pervasive, political push for women to have more children, no matter the cost”. The percentage of countries with pro-natalist policies grew from 10% in 1976 to 28% in 2015, according to UN data cited by the report.
Pro-natalist policies, of course, can be a good thing. No one is arguing with policies that make it easier to have children, such as affordable childcare and parental leave. The problem, as the report notes, is the fact that “a growing number of politicians are embracing a new, de facto coercive strategy to boost birth rates: making it difficult for people to access sexual and reproductive healthcare.” Poland, for example, enacted a near-total abortion ban last October. Now, according to the Associated Press, women’s rights activists are worried the government is trying to track every pregnancy in a national database that could be used to help prosecute women whose pregnancies don’t end in a live birth. The Polish parliament is also hearing a proposal to create a “Family and Demographic Institute” that could restrict divorces in an attempt to increase Poland’s birthrate. The head of the institute would have access to pregnancy data and have the power to approve a divorce. Welcome to Gilead, indeed!
A number of factors are feeding into global pro-natalism policies. There’s good old-fashioned misogyny, of course. But as the Population Matters director, Robin Maynard, has noted: “Coercive pro-natalism is not simply a manifestation of patriarchy or misogyny but can be a product of political and economic forces entirely indifferent to women, for whom they exist simply as productive or non-productive wombs.”
There’s capitalism’s need for cannon fodder, for example: it can be hard to grow your economy if there isn’t a steady supply of cheap labour. And ethnonationalism is also fueling pro-natalism: Hungary’s populist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has repeatedly invoked the far right’s “great replacement” theory to push “procreation, not immigration”. Orbán has promised that women who have four or more children will never pay income tax again and stated: “We want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender.” In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has gutted abortion rights, has said that he believes “a woman is above all else a mother” and condemned attempts to promote birth control as “unpatriotic”.
Once again, what’s happening in the US isn’t happening in a vacuum: it’s part of a global assault on women’s rights. Earlier this year, former US vice-president Mike Pence told a summit on demographics in Budapest that “plummeting birth rates” represent “a crisis that strikes at the very heart of civilization”. “It is our hope and our prayer that in the coming days, a new conservative majority on the supreme court of the United States will take action to restore the sanctity of life at the center of American law,” Pence said. The right has been planning for this moment for a very long time. They are coming for your “non-productive wombs” and they’re not going to stop there.
People are buying prosthetic testicles for their dogs
Celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Jake Gyllenhaal have had Neuticles, a brand of prosthetic animal testicles implanted into their neutered dogs. And they’re not the only ones buying the things: balls are big business, according to Mel Magazine.
Proximity to green space may help with PMS, study finds
A first-of-its-kind study looking at women in Norway and Sweden found that those who lived in neighbourhoods with more green space are less likely to experience PMS symptoms than those living in less green neighbourhoods.
Taliban release decree saying women must consent to marriage
Very gracious of them.
Gender inequality key driver of toxic culture in Australian parliament
A landmark report by Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner found one in three staffers interviewed had been sexually harassed. Eighty-four per cent of people who experienced sexual harassment did not seek support or advice. The report found power imbalances to be “one of the primary drivers of misconduct”.
The main perpetrators of violence against female MPs in Africa are male MPs
A new study by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and the African Parliamentary Union (APU) has uncovered “an insidious epidemic of sexism in parliaments in Africa.” Women interviewed reported that the majority of abuse comes from male parliamentarians, often from a rival political party. “When young women and girls read about these stories, some of them may fear getting into spaces of influence,” said the Ugandan MP Winnie Kiiza in an interview with Quartz. “Until we challenge the patriarchal system, then the men will continue stopping women from participating in politics.”
The escalating costs of being single in America
“American society is structurally antagonistic toward single and solo-living people,” Vox writes.
Elizabeth Holmes’s bizarre schedules have been entered into evidence
“I am never a minute late,” she writes in a schedule made public in her ongoing fraud trial. “I show no excitement calm, direct, pointed … ALL ABOUT BUSINESS.”
Promo alert! I’m going to be chatting about female leadership in a Guardian Live on Tuesday Promo Alert!
I’ll be chatting to the Guardian journalist Sirin Kale; Labour MP Nadia Whittome, co-founder of Black in AI; and computer scientist Timnit Gebru, who has just launched an institute to document AI’s harms on marginalized groups. Get your tickets here.
The week in pint-riarchy
While many of us drank rather more than normal during lockdown, the Aussies took things to the extreme. Australians have been named the heaviest drinkers in the world after spending more time drunk in 2020 than any other nation. The UK came in fifth place with the US just slightly ahead as the fourth drunkest country in the world.
Bob Dole. (photo: David Ake/AFP/Getty Images)
He had a reputation for being a brooding budget slasher. But to his friends in the Senate, Bob Dole was kind, wise, and bipartisan.
Instead, his life was defined by a great and noble war that took young men like him away from home and turned them into the greatest generation.
The war opened his world. It took him far from home—to Italy, where he was grievously wounded. The experience, both on the battlefield and in the lengthy recovery that followed, gave him leadership abilities, fortitude, and a depth of faith he might not have found otherwise. He wasn’t expected to heal, and the wounds he suffered marked him throughout his life: the shattered shoulder, the withered left arm, his fingers wrapped around an ever-present pen should some thoughtless stranger try to shake his hand.
When he returned to Kansas as a decorated war veteran, a political career awaited. Though he came from a Democratic family, the GOP offered more of a future in a state that was predominantly Republican. He first ran in 1950 for the Kansas House of Representatives, serving a two-year term before setting his sights on Washington. He was elected to the U.S. House in 1960 and the Senate in 1968, and re-elected four times before stepping down in 1996 to focus on his presidential campaign.
Dole died Sunday morning in his sleep at the age of 98, his wife’s foundation announced on social media.
Tributes from Washington immediately poured in. Sen. Chuck Grassley recalled that Dole “took me under his wing” when he joined the Senate. He was, Grassley tweeted, “a dedicated public servant + kind + funny + hard worker + a true patriot.” Many posted video of Dole in 2018 struggling to stand so he could salute the flag-draped coffin of President George Bush.
Dole’s public persona—as a dark and slashing political figure—took root in 1976 when he was President Gerald Ford’s running mate on the Republican ticket. In the vice-presidential debate with Walter Mondale, Dole made a comment about “the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century.” The remark left a bitter aftertaste that Dole was never able to shake, and which shaped the public’s view of him as deeply cynical and sarcastic.
Yet inside the Beltway and back in Russell, Kansas, he was a much admired and even beloved figure. Those who worked with him knew him to be fair-minded, funny, and kind, an old-fashioned gentleman who didn’t swear and whose movie tastes ran to 1940s Hollywood classics. “When I went into the service, I promised my mother I wouldn’t drink and I wouldn’t swear—and I figured two out of three isn’t bad,” Dole explained.
When he railed against Hollywood’s excesses during his ’96 campaign, an aide figured he should at least see the films he was complaining about. She gave him Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers. He didn’t last more than 10 minutes.
He ran for president three times, faltering in the primaries in 1980 and 1988 but capturing his party’s nomination in 1996 only to confront what to many seemed an unfair contest at the time: the then 73-year-old Dole against Bill Clinton, standard-bearer for the baby boom generation, in a clash framed as the future versus the past.
“If I’m gonna lose this, I’m gonna lose my way,” he told campaign manager Scott Reed a week before the election. Showing his stamina, Dole campaigned nonstop for the last four days in what became known as the “96 Hours to Victory Tour,” flying 10,534 miles and touching down in 20 states.
The presidency eluded him, but his real love was the Senate, and that’s where his legacy is best understood. As Republican leader, he was master of his universe, an old school legislator who worked across party lines more than the new conservative majority ushered in by Newt Gingrich would have liked. Dole cared less about ideology than he did about putting wins on the legislative scoreboard. “The magic to get Bob Dole’s attention is to say, ‘You don’t have the votes for this, but you could get them if you do such and such,’” Paul Weyrich, founder of the Free Congress Foundation, complained at the time.
Dole teamed up with liberal Democrat George McGovern on making food stamps more available, and then more broadly after leaving the Senate on programs to combat hunger in the U.S. and internationally. He worked with liberal Senator Tom Harkin on the Americans With Disabilities Act, which was one of President George H.W. Bush’s signature achievements.
Dole chafed at the unyielding conservatism of the Gingrich-led House, and took pleasure in blocking many of its initiatives, marveling that after first gaining national attention decades earlier as a partisan slasher, “I am now the rational voice of the Republican Party.”
He cultivated his image as a hatchet man when it was useful, but his record and his many friends across the aisle speak to a gentler and wiser man who loved the institution of the Senate, and who could make it work for the common good—no small feat.
Amberly Sanchez in Albuquerque. (photo: Adria Malcolm/ProPublica)
Following a ProPublica investigation, the New Mexico Child Support Enforcement Division is calling on the state Legislature to stop funding the agency with millions in child support confiscated from single mothers who previously received welfare.
Betina McCracken, acting director of the New Mexico Child Support Enforcement Division, penned an op-ed Wednesday in the Santa Fe New Mexican that presses the state Legislature to let as much as $6.9 million a year in child support collected from fathers flow directly to their families instead of diverting it into government coffers.
The op-ed, co-authored by Kari Armijo, deputy Cabinet secretary of the state’s Human Services Department, argues that the Legislature should provide more funding to the agency so that it doesn’t have to balance its budget on the backs of poor parents — like Amberly Sanchez, whose story ProPublica highlighted in September.
Sanchez’s monthly welfare payment was cut in half because she wasn’t helping the state obtain child support from her child’s father.
Lawmakers are currently debating next year’s budget and will finalize it during a special session in January and February. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, has said that she supports this policy change and would sign it into law.
“We’re focused on the kids,” McCracken said in an interview. “We want them to grow up healthy and happy and just get to be kids. Making sure we get as much money to families as we can so that children are financially supported is half that battle.”
McCracken also noted that the proposed reform would affect families who have previously received public assistance, not ones currently in the program. She said that ending the practice for current welfare recipients would require more money from the Legislature than the agency is prepared to ask for at this time. But this change would benefit most of the families whose child support is being taken by the state.
ProPublica’s investigation found that if single mothers in New Mexico — which has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the U.S. — need help from the state, they first have to reveal who fathered their kids and the exact date that they got pregnant, among other deeply personal details. The state uses that information to pursue child support from the dads, and then it pockets much of the money as reimbursement for those welfare dollars, sharing a large portion with the federal government. This creates fissures within families and in some cases subjects women to abuse by their former partners.
The 1996 welfare reform law signed by then-President Bill Clinton encourages states to recoup money spent on public assistance by intercepting child support, and most states, including New Mexico, still do it.
More than $1.7 billion collected from fathers in 2020 was seized by federal and state governments as repayment for welfare given to mothers and children, according to the ProPublica investigation. Close to 3 million of the nation’s poorest families had child support taken from them last year, amid the pandemic, for this reason.
The potential reform in New Mexico is also the result of an advocacy effort led by the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty, as well as Democratic state legislator Angelica Rubio.
“I believe we can find the support we need in the Legislature,” Rubio said. “We’ll keep pushing.”
Chris Cuomo. (photo: CNN)
People attend a press conference to announce Saudi Arabian Grand Prix as part of the 2021 F1 calendar, in the Red Sea coastal city of Jiddah on Nov. 5, 2020. (photo: Amer Hilabi/AFP/Getty Images)
China is hosting the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Qatar is putting on next year's soccer World Cup and Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in staging high-profile, international sporting events.
But human rights organizations and others have been voicing concerns that behind this seemingly innocuous trend is a concerted effort by these and other nations to use sports as a way to cover up their poor human rights records.
"They are using and increasingly seeing sport as an opportunity to launder their image," Felix Jakens, Amnesty International UK's head of campaigns, told NPR.
The human rights group even uses a recent term to describe this practice: "sportswashing."
"It's the process whereby a country or regime with a particularly poor human rights record uses sport as a way of creating positive headlines, positive spin about their countries," Jakens explained.
Saudi Arabia dabbles in English soccer and Formula One racing
Last month, the rights group criticized Saudi Arabia's takeover of English Premier League club Newcastle United. According to news reports, the Saudi government-owned Public Investment Fund purchased an 80% stake in the English soccer club for 300 million pounds ($400 million).
"Ever since this deal was first talked about we said it represented a clear attempt by the Saudi authorities to sportswash their appalling human rights record with the glamour of top-flight football," Amnesty International UK's CEO Sacha Deshmukh said in a statement.
The Newcastle United buyout is just the latest sports-related investment by Saudi authorities. In recent years, the kingdom has spent more than $1.5 billion to stage elite sporting events, according to a report by Grant Liberty. This includes staging the annual Spanish Super Cup soccer match, international men's and women's golf tournaments and professional wrestling, among many others.
Next month, global racing series Formula One will host its race in Saudi Arabia for the first time. The Grand Prix event will take place on Dec. 5 at a brand-new racetrack in the port city of Jiddah. F1 — which is owned by U.S.-based Liberty Media Corp. — signed a 10-year deal with the kingdom worth a reported $650 million.
The Saudi F1 event will also feature a number of musical performances. Pop star Justin Bieber, who is headlining the off-track entertainment program, is facing growing calls to cancel his show.
In an open letter published by The Washington Post, Hatice Cengiz — the fiancée of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi — urged the Canadian singer to "send a powerful message to the world that your name and talent will not be used to restore the reputation of a regime that kills its critics."
The kingdom says it's reforming
The Saudi government rejects all accusations of sportswashing. Fahad Nazer, the spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., says that those investments are part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's plans to diversify the country's economy, which depends heavily on oil and gas.
"The notion that the transformative reforms currently underway in the kingdom are simply an attempt to improve the kingdom's image are widely off the mark," Nazer told NPR.
He said that the country aims to establish a sports industry under its Vision 2030 plan, which not only calls for a more diverse economy but also a vibrant society.
But the 2018 killing of the journalist Khashoggi, the imprisonment of rights activists and the ongoing bombing campaign in Yemen cast doubt over how transformational those reforms really are.
Despite ushering in some limited newfound freedoms for Saudi citizens, the crown prince has made the country more autocratic than before, says Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
"There are more freedoms for women, just to pick a very important example. But there is less tolerance even of limited political dissension," he says.
A spokesperson for Formula One, which has been accused of enabling sportswashing in the past, did not directly respond to the question of whether the series considers a country's human rights record in its decision to host a race there.
"We take our responsibilities on rights very seriously and set high ethical standards for counterparties and those in our supply chain, which are enshrined in contracts, and we pay close attention to their adherence," the spokesperson said.
This past weekend, F1 made its debut in Qatar — another country with a less-than-stellar track record. Seven-time world champion and race winner Lewis Hamilton raised the issue of human rights and equality in a news conference ahead of Sunday's Grand Prix.
"As sports go to these places, they are duty-bound to raise awareness for these issues. These places need scrutiny. Equal rights is a serious issue," said the British driver, who wore a rainbow-colored race helmet in a show of solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community.
China faces an Olympics boycott
China has also been accused of using sports to polish its public image. With the 2022 Winter Olympics only a couple of months away, the Biden administration is considering a diplomatic boycott of the Games over the Chinese government's treatment of Uyghur Muslims living in the country's Xinjiang region.
The issue of sportswashing has even reached the halls of Congress. Last year, Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida introduced a resolution calling on the International Olympic Committee to strip China of its Olympic hosting rights.
"I don't believe a country that is committing genocide against its own citizens, that's building a military to dominate the world, that steals jobs and technology from all over the world, denies basic rights to its own citizens should be hosting an Olympics," Scott told NPR in a recent interview.
China has repeatedly denied accusations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
He further criticized U.S. Olympic broadcast partner NBC and Olympic sponsors for not being more vocal about China's alleged human rights violations.
His Democratic colleague, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, argues that sports leagues need to take more responsibility when it comes to rights issues. He says they are "selling out their integrity for profits," effectively helping to rehabilitate the reputations of human rights abusers.
China is currently facing global condemnation over its treatment of tennis player Peng Shuai. The 35-year-old ex-world No. 1 doubles player mysteriously vanished from public view last month after accusing former Chinese Communist party leader Zhan Gaoli of sexual assault.
Her disappearance led to concerns about her well-being. After she was missing for more than two weeks, a flurry of photos and videos of Peng emerged on Twitter. But that raised even more questions, as the images were posted by individuals working for Chinese government-controlled media and the state sports system, according to CNN.
Not satisfied with the official posts and statements confirming the player's safety, the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) on Wednesday announced that it is suspending all tournaments in China.
"While we now know where Peng is, I have serious doubts that she is free, safe and not subject to censorship, coercion and intimidation," WTA Chairman and CEO Steve Simon wrote in a statement. "The WTA has been clear on what is needed here, and we repeat our call for a full and transparent investigation – without censorship – into Peng Shuai's sexual assault accusation."
In response to the boycott, Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson for China's foreign ministry, said during a daily briefing that his government was "always firmly opposed to acts that politicize sports."
No other sports organization has taken a similarly strong actions over China's alleged censorship and human rights violations. The WTA stands to lose out on millions of dollars as a result of the boycott, which could extend beyond 2022.
Most other sports are confrontational, trying to balance profits and human rights, or as the IOC calls it, "quiet diplomacy."
Using sports for spin goes way back
The practice of countries using sports as a smoke screen is not new. Many nations, including Great Britain, saw sports as a way to distract from oppression during colonial times. Nazi Germany used the 1936 Berlin Olympics as an opportunity to show off its alleged racial superiority and, during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union used sports as a soft power.
But the word sportswashing came into use later. By one account, according to British sports journalist Sam Cunningham, the term emerged in 2015 when Azerbaijan hosted the European Games, and Amnesty International brought it back into the spotlight in criticism against United Arab Emirates' investments in English soccer a few years later.
Whatever the origins, whether sportswashing can have a lasting effect remains unclear. But according to Simon Chadwick, a sports industry expert at Emlyon Business School in France, it can provide temporary relief.
"If we look at the 2018 World Cup, there was widespread criticism of Russia," he says. "But what we saw upon people's return from the Russian World Cup is that now their view of Russia was much changed, they saw the country in a much more positive fashion."
With Western democracies increasingly scrutinizing the value of hosting large-scale sporting events, he believes countries with questionable human rights records will continue to use sports to boost their public image.
"What we will see is the likes of Saudi Arabia, China and others continuing to bid for these events, being awarded the rights to stage them and then leaving those in the West to deal with the kind of moral and ideological fallout that we have as a result of their hosting," Chadwick says.
Most sports organizations defend their decision to stage events in these countries by claiming to be a catalyst for change. But that change has yet to materialize.
The gray wolf OR-93, near Yosemite, California, shared by the state's Department of Fish and Wildlife. (photo: AP)
OR-93 traveled further south than any wolf had in a hundred years. Even after death, he continues to inspire
The travels of the young male through the state were a rare occurrence: he was the first wolf from Oregon’s White River pack to come to California and possibly the first gray wolf in nearly a century to be spotted so far south.
The wolf, known as OR-93, was born in Oregon in 2019 in the White River pack. The pack is managed by the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs. A tribal biologist had collared OR-93 in June 2020 when he was just 14 months old – not fully mature but nearly ready to look for a mate – and took a photo of him, looking regal and languid after effects of the tranquilizer wore out.
OR-93 first entered California on the last day of January 2020, dipping his paws into Modoc county. Historically, gray wolves were found throughout California, but they were probably extirpated from the state in the 1920s. In 2014, officials listed gray wolves as endangered under the California Endangered Species Act, making them illegal to hunt, trap, harass or harm.
After his sojourn in California, OR-93 zagged back to Oregon, returning once more to California at the end of February.
He moved remarkably fast, Weiss says, padding around 16 counties between the first week in February and the end of March. He traveled more than 935 air miles (straight miles on a map), over three months in search of a mate and territory.
After reaching Yosemite national park, the wolf made a remarkable decision: he made a hard turn west and crossed the Central Valley of California – which means he somehow crossed three of the state’s busiest roads – Highway 99, Interstate 5 and Highway 101. “How he did that is anyone’s guess,” says Amaroq Weiss, a wolf advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity. He may have found routes to cross under the highways through creek and river crossings, or he may have actually made his way across the road – which he would have had to do in the dead of night because the roads are so busy.
By 5 April, he had made it to San Luis Obispo county, on the central coast of California. At this point, his radio collar stopped working (researchers still do not know why). Some wolf fans worried that he had died, but then tiny signal flares went up again and again: proof of life for OR-93. A farmer’s trail camera near a water trough captured a grainy picture of a wolf with a collar in May. In late September, three separate people spotted a wolf with a purple collar in Ventura county – one even captured video of him on a cellphone.
“This wolf, he will go the distance,” said Weiss.
When a driver called in a dead wolf on the side of Interstate 5 in November, it sent a shock wave through the wolf community.
Authorities quickly identified OR-93 through his bright purple radio collar, and an investigation and necropsy results determined he died from trauma consistent with vehicular strike.
Looking at the place where OR-93 was killed, Weiss wonders if the wolf was headed back to Oregon to find a mate, after having struck out in California. November and December is the time when wolves are looking most aggressively for a mate – they prefer to be coupled up before mating season comes in February. Maybe the lone wolf realized he couldn’t find what he needed in California and decided to head back home.
OR-93’s days were probably driven by his nose, says Weiss. Scents may have sent him along a creek where he could have pushed aside rocks with his nose and played with fish or frogs – or his nose could have taken him to scents left behind by other wildlife, maybe finding bear scat and rolling in it to mask his smell so deer wouldn’t know he was approaching. Smells may have even evoked memories of his home in Oregon. “I think a day in the life of a wolf is pretty much an adventure,” says Weiss. “A search that’s broken up by exploring new things you come across.”
Since OR-93 was successful in finding prey and living a wolf existence deep into California, it shows that others could do the same, says Jordan Traverso, deputy director of communications, education and outreach for the California department of fish and wildlife. “He’s like the first pioneer – but if one wolf can do it, it can be done. All of California is a historical wolf habitat and we like the things that belong here to be here.”
Traverso adds that given wolves’ stealth, it is possible other individuals are eking out an existence in parts of California where people would never expect to see them.
The territory OR-93 crossed is impressive, but it also highlights the habitat wolf conservationists hope will sustain the creatures. “It’s almost as if he had the map that we’ve drawn, the lands that remain suitable with habitat in California,” says Bethany Cotton, conservation director with Cascadia Wildlands. “Instinctively he knew where he could survive in the state and that is really impressive and hopeful.”
His death also highlights the need for wildlife overpasses and underpasses – safe ways to get around impenetrable ribbons of asphalt ripping through the state.
Whether wolves will thrive also depends on the policies of the state they roam in, Cotton says. The Trump administration removed federal protections for wolves in 2020, returning their management to individual states. “We’ve unfortunately had a really negative turn in Oregon and in Montana and Idaho and other states that are aggressively managing the species,” says Cotton. “And Idaho and Montana are allowing for hunting seasons and trapping seasons that could kill up to 90% of the population. So when you reduce those populations, they’re much less likely to go ahead and disperse and go into unoccupied habitats further away.”
The situation is a strong argument for why wildlife shouldn’t be managed state by state because those borders are invisible to the wildlife, she says. “Wildlife travel according to ecosystems, not arbitrary political boundaries that humans have drawn on maps.”
The epic journeys of individual animals like OR-93 help humans understand wolves better, Cotton says. “We can recognize on a human scale how far he traveled looking for a partner and looking for a place to call home. It really does help us recognize that they just aren’t too different from us: these are animals looking for a good place to live and food to eat and families and we just need to let them be.”
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