Remember that Hobby Lobby ruling, and how one of the problems listed in the dissent was how widely its precedent could allow “sincere religious belief” to be deployed as an unwarranted shield? And remember how there was a widespread no, no it just affects this one case.

(That one was already false long before this post and what this post’s about – emboldened by the HL ruling, it took only days for other companies to sue for the removal of female – always female, of course – contraception from their health plans. And even to exempt them from submitting forms to other insurers to allow female employees to see contraceptive care through other means).

But now there’s a new front. A little over a week ago, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – a sect that broke away from the Mormons when the latter went off the idea of polygamy and child-brides – found itself in court under investigation for violation of child labour laws. See here for a fuller description of the case, along with links to a lot of the deeper background.

A prominent member of the sect, Vernon Steed was called to testify, but refused on the grounds of having taken a religious vow not to discuss internal matters of the sect with outsiders. And this claim has been upheld by Utah Judge David Sam. That’s right, Judge Sam has ruled that a relgious vow exempts Steed from giving evidence pertinent to a federal investigation of child welfare – an investigation of a sect whose leader is currently in prison for the sexual assault of underaged girls he decreed to be his wives. And the HL decision was cited as the justification.

The sort of thing that many of us predicted, to a response of “oh, no, too alarmist.”

The HL decision was about four types of contraception that the company consiered abortifacients – this “sincere religious belief” was ruled to exempt them from offering these in its employee health plans. This is, this particular religious belief wasn’t like most others, because it was about something that was empirically testable. As such, their belief that these were abortifacients rather than contraceptives simply wasn’t a matter for belief – it was a matter of fact, and it was demonstrably wrong – and no amount of real or pretended sincerity can change that. And as I said, almost immediately other companies filed their own suits to push their exemptions further.

These decisions fueled two ideas dear to the Religious Right’s heart. The idea that religious belief could be used to trump empirical and demonstrable fact – that “sincere” trumps true and false. And of course the old favourite that religious belief trumps the health of female employees.

Of course, they were justified in terms of protecting unborn children. But now they’re being used to cover up the possible harm of actual, living children, not hypothetical future ones – at the very least, they’re being used to obstruct attempts to verify the children’s welfare. Moving on from empirical fact, sincere religious belief is now being allowed to trump being held accountable for how you treat children in your care – “sincere” trumping legal and illegal, or right and wrong. And of course it’s moved on from women to children, the very demographic the religious right claims to champion.

How could anyone have seriously doubted this would be the result of the Hobby Lobby decision? The slippery slope is always invoked as a danger in progressively encroaching on the powerful – but things roll down real slopes, not up. This is what a real slippery slope looks like – left unchecked, they encroach on the powerless, not the powerful.

So during the Q&A part of Orphan Black’s Comic-Con panel, a girl called Taylor stood up and demonstrated in epic fashion why it really matters whether characters of marginalised identities are represented and humanised:

Both transcript and video (Taylor’s bit starts at about 1 minute 50).

I was going to try and say something to this, but really, her words are the ones that matter here – that’s the whole point.

To reiterate the summary in my previous post: Orphan Black is the story of a group of women – all played by Tatiana Maslany in truly astonishing feat of acting – who discover they’re the subjects of an experiment in human cloning. It’s the story of their search for their origins, their developing relationships with each other, and their struggles against the forces who want variously to own, study, exploit, and exterminate them.

Which makes it, also, a story about sisterhood.

The show centres on four clones in its first season, five in the second. Sarah Manning, the mainest of the main characters, is a streetwise and initially amoral grifter. Alison Hendrix is a hyperenergetic and hyperefficient soccer-mom. Cosima Niehaus is a laid-back but rather bratty biology student. Helena is an outsider, abused and brainwashed by a cult, who enters the series as a feral murderer. Rachel Duncan is an insider, a cold and manipulative executive in the corporation that’s experimenting on the clones. (We see other clones, but they appear only fleetingly).

Each clone is also grappling with deep wounds, frailties, and vulnerabilties. Sarah longs to become someone who’s worth trusting, and to reconnect with the daughter she’s neglected. Alison lives her life in a fishbowl of a community where all friendships are laced with unspoken competition, which has left her filled with pent-up paranoia. Cosima fears needing and being needed, and is increasingly suffering from a congenital illness many of the clones share. Helena’s whole life is a wound, both salved and exacerbated by her desperation to belong and to be loved. Rachel was brought up with knowledge of the experiment but is still not free of it, and is torn up inside by the clash between her current environment and the loving family she once knew.

All good characters in all good shows grow and change of course, but it’s dispiritingly rare for that growth to be effected and shown through female-female relationships. On Orphan Black, such relationships are not only prevalent, and deep, but celebrated.

Which isn’t to say they can’t also be difficult and heartbreaking – they certainly can be, one of the most so being that between Sarah and Helena. When they first meet, it’s as enemies: the cult that raised Helena has told her she is the original and must redeem the taint of being cloned by killing the others; Sarah is her latest target, but Helena feels a connection between them, and despite everything so too does Sarah. At the end of the first season, this proves true when they learn they’re not just clones but also twins – a fact that Helena latches onto with all her desperate longing. At first Sarah resists this – to the point of shooting Helena – because Helena has threatened and hurt too many people Sarah cares about. And yet… when Helena returns, it’s to seek her sister’s help. And while Sarah starts off just trying to use her, she’s unable to stay unmoved by Helena’s attempts to reach out to her. It’s a relationship that’s still unresolved so far – as is the question of whether Helena’s shattered psyche can ever come to some sort of wholeness – but if it can, and if it does, it’ll be because of Sarah.

Sarah – as is apparent from the previous paragraphs – starts the series as a pretty awful person. In the opening scene, she robs the body of a suicide – Beth, the first other clone we see – and then moves into Beth’s life, intending to clean out her assets. While she wants to reconnect with her daughter Kira, her plan is to snatch Kira from her (Sarah’s) foster mother Siobhan who has been raising Kira in Sarah’s absence. Of course, this is all promptly complicated by coming across the other clones, Alison and Cosima, who with Beth were investigating their origins – and by seeing the depth of love between Kira and Siobhan – and she finds she can’t go through with either plan. Her mother and her daughter who love each other, and her newfound sisters who need her, add up into connections she resolves to do right by.

Redemption is also at the heart of another relationship, specifically Cosima’s with her girlfriend Delphine. When they first meet, Delphine is a plant from the group experimenting on the clones, assigned to monitor Cosima’s life. Cosima has deduced this, and intends to use Delphine in much the same way. Just as would be expected if Delphine were a man, they fall for each other; hard. And love for Cosima shakes Delphine’s loyalty to her employers. It’s not a smooth path, because Delphine is willing to betray the other clones for the sake of Cosima in particular – and as Cosima’s illness gets worse, a desperate Delphine secretly uses Kira’s genetic material to treat her. Both actions come close to breaking them up altogether – and do culminate in an ultimatum from Cosima to Delphine that loving her alone isn’t enough, not without also caring for her sisters.

Meanwhile, sisterhood is the furthest thing from Rachel’s mind. Raised inside the Dyad corporation, aware of the experiment and the other clones, she’s been brought up to believe that she’s better than them. But even so, she is not free – she is monitored like them, tested like them, just with her knowledge, and marked in her cells with the same patent. Where Helena has been taught that killing the other clones is the way of redeeming her body, Rachel has been taught to abstract her body – to ignore the way it’s treated in favour of a sense of superior perspective. In the second season, this illusion begins to crack – from learning that Sarah has had a child, something most of the clones cannot do – from Cosima’s stubborn refusal to be dehumanised, and her connections with her sisters – and finally dies when the man who’d once been her father, one of those who created the clones to begin with, blithely tells her that she was barren by design. Which she could have responded to by siding with the other clones. But instead, she retreats into her practiced superiority, and obsesses over “defeating” Sarah and breaking Cosima. And when the two of them escape from Dyad, Rachel is (perhaps fatally) wounded in the process. Where an acceptance of sisterhood holds the hope of healing and redemption for both Sarah and Helena, and sustains Cosima and Alison through the dark turns their lives are taking, the rejection of it proves to be Rachel’s downfall.

I don’t really have a larger point here, except for how rare it is for shows to do this. Even those that centre on female characters rarely have quite such a tapestry of female relationships – as sisters, daughters, mothers, lovers, friends – or have those relationships be such a positive force in those characters’ lives. And how appropriate it is for a show that depicts the violation of female bodies to balance that by celebrating the connections between female hearts.

[Full dislosure – this has been edited a little since I first posted it – partly to clean up some turns of phrase, and also to correct my omission of the dance party]

I imagine most people reading will already know what Orphan Black is… The story of a group of women – all played by Tatiana Maslany in a truly astonishing feat of acting – who discover they’re the subjects of an experiment in human cloning. It’s the story of their search for their origins, their developing relationships with each other, and their struggles against those who seek variously to own, study, exploit, and exterminate them.

Which makes it, ultimately, a story of women fighting for control over their lives, their identities, and their very bodies. A fight that, in the real world too, women face every day.

Threats to the clones are quick in coming. From a religious sect that sees them as unclean. From a corporation that sees them as property. From a scientific movement that sees them as experiments. From a world that allows these forces to move and act freely while surrounding the clones with endless obstacles. And most inescapably of all, from the patent coded into their DNA, a mark of ownership branded into every cell of their bodies. At the end of season 1, when it gets out that one of the normally-infertile clones, Sarah, has a daughter – and another, Helena, may also be able to have children – the potential for reproduction becomes the focus of ever more intensive and invasive attempts to control them. The local leader of the Prolethean sect decides the new way for Helena to redeem her body is to give up her eggs for fertilisation. The Dyad corporation is relentless in its attempts to get a hold of Sarah and her daughter, in the hopes of using them to extend the clone line, and studying them to discover how the other clones might be made fertile too.

Orphan Black presents a world where the clones are surrounded by forces looking to lay claim to their bodies and biology. Where their value is calculated according to their usefulness in reproducing. Where those who abuse them are sometimes too powerful to be fought, and the only choice is the level of surrender each clone is willing to accept. It’s a world that treats them as cruelly as any Westeros or Special Victims New York.

So what makes this any different from Game of Thrones, or Special Victims Unit, or any of the myriad other shows that chew up women’s bodies for the sake of drama? Well, Deborah Pless said it best (though she was talking about Veronica Mars at the time): rape is always personal. While the clones aren’t raped, exactly, they are subjected to almost every other sort of bodily violation. But these violations aren’t there just to foster a general sense of brutality – though they do. They aren’t there to tell us that the perpetrators are bad – though they do that too. Instead, it’s all about the clones themselves: how they react and how they resist, why they resist or why they don’t, what it means to them and where they draw the strength to keep going.

It’s a point made over and over throughout the series – in Sarah’s assertion of identity, “There’s only one of me, just like there was only one of Beth” – in Cosima’s anger when her lover Delphine, desperate to save her from a worsening illness, keeps secrets and makes medical decisions behind her back – in the silent breakdown behind the eyes of Dyad clone Rachel Duncan when she’s told she’s “barren by design” – and culminating in the climactic episode of season 2, where in response to her daughter’s kidnapping, Sarah surrenders to the Dyad institute. In a harrowing scene, Sarah is stripped down to her underwear, and subjected to a medical examination and a barrage of questions about her sexual health and history. The Dyad techs are completely indifferent to her pain and humiliation – to them, she’s not a person, just data for them to sift through. But to the camera’s eye, they’re the faceless ones – we mostly see them as hands reaching into the frame, while Sarah’s interrogator is only visible as a close-up of his mouth – even the details of the room are obscured. The result is a scene where Sarah is the absolute and only focus. There’s nowhere to look except at her, and no way to process anything except through her.

That’s one culmination, anyway.  There’s another, at the other end of the emotional spectrum.  Sarah, Cosima, Alison, and Helena together for the first time.  They’ve been fighting for control of their bodies all season – and at some point along the way, each of them has lost – and they know they’ll have to do it again.  But for a little while they’re free.  So they put on a reggae track and dance.  They use their bodies for themselves, revel in them, and in each other.

Orphan Black does on the fictional screen what is being increasingly lost from the political discourse about bodily and reproductive rights: it recognises the women at the centre of the issue; their lives, their identities, their humanity, their reality. It’s a recognition that all too few fictional shows bother with – and that is resisted by the so-called pro-life side in the real world.  Because only when women are reduced to abstractions can it make sense for a woman’s body to be seen as anything but hers alone, for decisions about it to be seen as anything but hers to make, or for the potential life of a foetus to be held up as equal to her real and actual life.