Republicans for Rape (Now With Push Polls!)
Why did Republicans vote to deny rape victims their day in court? Why do they want women to be raped?
Oh, you haven’t heard? Republicans are pro-rape. At least, that’s the latest sensational charge levied by liberals, and they’re hoping it will stick when voters go to the polls in 2010.
That’s why they’ve started push polling the smear. Here’s a question asked of likely North Carolina voters during a poll commissioned by Change Congress, an organization working against the reelection of Sen. Burr (R-NC).
Jamie Leigh Jones is an American woman who was gang raped by her co-workers while working for a defense contractor in Iraq. Her employer tried to cover up the rape and prevented her from filing charges in court – instead forcing her to use a private arbitrator chosen by the employer. I’m going to ask you a few questions about this.
Congress is considering legislation that would allow victims of rape to bring their case to court instead of being forced by their employers to use private arbitrators. Some businesses oppose this legislation because arbitration costs less money than going to court. Do you favor or oppose this type of legislation?
Subsequent questions focused on how voters would feel about Sen. Burr opposing the legislation. (He and 29 other Republicans voted against the measure.) The poll also implied that the defense industry was buying congressional opposition to the bill at the expense of protections for rape victims.
Understandably, 73 percent of those polled said they would disapprove if Burr voted against the legislation and 74 percent said they favored the legislation. Considering the wording, one wonders what the other 26 percent were thinking.
Why, it’s almost as if they knew they were being hoodwinked by a deceitful push poll.
This current smear campaign began when Sen. Al Franken (D-SNL) proposed S. Amdt. 2588, a measure ostensibly inspired by the horrific gang rape reported by Jamie Leigh Jones while she worked in Baghdad for defense contractor KBR, then a subsidiary of Halliburton. Franken contended that “her KBR contract banned her from taking her case to court, instead forcing her into an ‘arbitration’ process.”
It was a lie.
No employment contract can be used to force criminal complaints into arbitration. Not in America. But that didn’t stop the disingenuous left from immediately seizing upon the talking point that Republican opponents of the amendment want to deny rape survivors their day in court. Commentators pretended to be mystified as to how any rational human being could vote against rape victims.
“We’re still waiting for the screaming-Fox-News-headline: Republican Senators Support Gang-Rape by Three to One Margin,” wrote an ill-informed Huffington Post contributor. “Arbitration for gang-rape? Surely the Republican Party has earned the right to die.”
Daily Show host Jon Stewart called it “the old ‘it’s ok if you get raped’ clause in government contracts” and wondered how anyone could possibly reject the amendment.
And of course, no smear campaign would be complete without its very own Web site: Republicans for Rape.
Hundreds of scathing attacks on Republicans have appeared in major newspapers and blogs. Dependable foot soldiers that they are, the netroots are gleefully promoting the laughable idea that Republicans voted to prevent rape victims from having their criminal cases heard in court. And just this week, video surfaced of a rape survivor accusing Sen. Vitter (R-LA) of trying to silence victims.
In actuality, Jones’ contract required employment disputes, not criminal cases, to be resolved through arbitration, an effective form of alternative dispute resolution that is cheaper, faster, and offers individuals greater access to justice than litigation. The contract she signed limits her litigation options in matters of civil law related to the workplace, but it does not impact her ability to seek redress against her assailants through the criminal courts.
It is the foot dragging of the United States Department of Justice that is keeping Jamie Leigh Jones from facing her attackers in court, not her KBR employment contract and not Republican legislators. Republicans must do a better job articulating the true motivation behind Franken’s amendment.
Franken’s primary objective was not to ensure justice for rape victims, but to strike a blow at the company that sits at the top of every rank and file liberal’s hit list: Halliburton. The legislation is an overly broad political sledgehammer designed to ban the disbursement of federal funds to Halliburton when narrow wording addressing arbitration in assault cases would have received bipartisan support. Franken makes his intentions clear by calling Halliburton out by name in the amendment’s stated purpose:
To prohibit the use of funds for any Federal contract with Halliburton Company, KBR, Inc., any of their subsidiaries or affiliates, or any other contracting party if such contractor or a subcontractor at any tier under such contract requires that employees or independent contractors sign mandatory arbitration clauses regarding certain claims.
Even the Obama administration objected to the amendment as worded, characterizing it as unenforceable.
Franken’s second objective was to assist the trial lawyer lobbyists in their relentless campaign to do away with arbitration, thus lining their pockets with the spoils of litigation. Remember, trial lawyers and their lobbying groups are among the biggest contributors to Democratic Party, and even former DNC chairman and presidential candidate Howard Dean has explicitly said that Democrats are not willing to rub trial lawyers the wrong way.
If Franken’s primary concern was rape victims, why did he risk opposition to his legislation by weighing it down with a hefty gift to trial lawyers? Why does the amendment cover disputes totally unrelated to rape?
Finally, this legislation is Franken’s attempt to curry favor with his fellow Democrats by handing them a giftwrapped smear of Republicans just in time for the 2010 election season. Hence, the propaganda masquerading as an unbiased poll in North Carolina and the absurd allegations nationwide that voting for the falsely labeled anti-rape amendment is a vote in favor of rape.
It is the Democrats who are using an unspeakably atrocious gang rape as a political bludgeon, and Republican senatorial candidates are already feeling the impact. Of course, no one spreading these liberal distortions has addressed why Republicans would invite the nasty political fallout following a vote against an “anti-rape” amendment. Just gluttons for punishment, I guess?
Expect the following senators to be targeted during their 2010 reelection campaigns:
Tom Coburn (R-OK)
Mike Crapo (R-ID)
Jim DeMint (R-SC)
Johnny Isakson (R-GA)
Richard Shelby (R-AL)
John McCain (R-AZ)
John Thune (R-SD)
David Vitter (R-LA)
Richard Burr (R-NC)
Must we play politics with rape? Instead of using sexual assault as partisan political ammunition, let’s do something that will really help rape survivors. We need a cooperative effort to find out what’s preventing the DOJ from aggressively pursuing cases of sexual violence among military contractors. Only then will Jamie Leigh Jones’ rapists be brought to justice.
“This dance itself was a successful event.”
Brutal gang rape? Check.
Beating and robbery? Check.
Degenerate witnesses? Check.
Here’s the spin, courtesy of the school district where the vicious assault occurred:
“Dance was successful event and safe for the students that were there,” said Marin Trujillo, the West Contra Costa Unified School District spokesman. “This dance itself was a successful event.”
Successful? In the words of Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.”
New York Times: What’s Funnier Than Battered Women?
Oh, the jocularity of a good domestic violence punchline. Will jokes about women getting smashed in the face with glassware ever get old?
Not for New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman.
Searching for an angle on the domestic violence conviction of New York State Senator Hiram Monserrate, Haberman and his editors decided they couldn’t go wrong with a little light-hearted levity about the slash wounds Monserrate left on his girlfriend. The lacerations carved into her face by Monserrate’s water glass were so bad that the emergency room doctor notified police that a stabbing had occurred.
Are you laughing yet? No?
Well maybe you’ll get a chuckle out of Haberman’s report that Monserrate’s victim, Karla Giraldo, has agreed to marry him. For Haberman, the jokes practically wrote themselves.
But if a wedding is in store, it is never too early to think about the bridal registry. As a service, we checked out glassware at several prominent stores. With this couple, you want to be sure that what you buy is sturdy.
Pottery Barn has tumblers for $10 apiece, part of its “Montana” collection. Montana certainly sounds rugged. Despite the name, the glasses were made in China. “Each piece is hand-blown with thick sloped sides,” a sign said. Thick sides are a definite plus.
If $10 is too steep for you, Pottery Barn also sells glasses for $2 per. They are less elegant than the Montana but more solid. They even come with “Made in U.S.A.” tags. How many things can you say that about these days?
Still other deals can be found at Gracious Home. Hefty glasses sell there for as little as $2.49 apiece. Bed Bath & Beyond does better yet, with slash-proof tumblers going for as little as $9.99 a dozen, taxes not included. They aren’t very pretty. But they are almost guaranteed to keep a squabbling couple out of court.
What reader wouldn’t be rolling on the floor laughing at those knee-slappers? Because really, what’s funnier than a domestic violence survivor marrying her abuser? Luckily she has the New York Times to offer up advice about what sort of glassware will be least likely to leave slashes the next time she’s bludgeoned.
If this is the New York Times strategy for rebuilding readership, the editors might want to give Sandra Bernhard a call. I’m pretty sure she could use the work, and I hear she tells a mean rape joke.
Using the Poor as a Scapegoat for Gun Violence
Like a lot of kids raised in liberal New York City, I was taught that anyone who wants a gun is probably the last person who should be allowed to own one. I learned to consider the Second Amendment a quaint throwback to less civilized times and had it drilled into my head that only psychos, criminals, and men with small penises carry guns. Most gun violence could be blamed on economic inequalities created by Reaganomics, according to the elementary school teacher who made sure a Mondale/Ferraro sticker was affixed to each student’s binder.
Then I grew up, read the Bill of Rights, and married a gun nut.
Across the country in Phoenix, Meghan McCain was brought up with a more informed view on the right to bear arms. Her brothers were avid hunters and she developed a deep respect for the Second Amendment. Today she’s an NRA member with a lifetime of positive gun experiences under her belt.
I confess I have a soft spot for Meghan McCain. I don’t agree with all of what she writes and I wish she’d add something new to the national political conversation instead of recycling a mishmash of talking points. But I admire her practical decision to milk her campaign fame for all it’s worth, and I think she’s wise to go the contrarian Republican route. Controversy sells, as evidenced by her six figure book deal.
McCain and I agree on the Second Amendment issue. But while her devotion to gun rights confirms her bitter clinger bona fides, she appears to have absorbed a different kind of liberal humbuggery on the issue of gun violence.
The real solution to preventing gun violence is not taking away the tools, but tackling its causes: poverty, inadequate health care, mental illness, joblessness, inadequate housing, and poor education. Desperate people will make anything a weapon. We need to eliminate desperation, not guns.
Translation: guns don’t kill people, people with less money and education than Meghan McCain kill people. (And sometimes the mentally ill do it too.)
Way to scapegoat the impoverished!
I was under the impression that identifying poverty as the root cause of violent crime was no longer in vogue – after all, that would let guns off the hook – but apparently President Obama feels otherwise. Eight days after the 9/11 attacks, Barack Obama attributed the tragedy to the terrorists’ lack of empathy stemming from a “climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.” And in a 2007 speech, Obama called poverty “a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence.” Obama’s first pick for Commerce Secretary, Bill Richardson, shared similar thoughts during the 2007 NAACP Presidential Primary Forum when he said, “the key in eliminating gun violence is eliminating poverty, eliminating hate.”
Perhaps Meghan McCain is simply repeating liberal talking points, but it seems to me that even among the political left, violent crime is usually approached as a complex phenomenon caused by a multitude of sociological and psychological factors. Many recognize that it reeks of classism to suggest that poverty creates desperation-fueled violence. It’s also unsupported by evidence. While a correlation exists between certain crimes and poverty, research has not proven a cause and effect relationship. There are simply too many variables.
Even Marxist criminologists don’t attribute crime to poverty, but rather to relative deprivation like income inequality. But both are silly assumptions: if all of the poverty-stricken or people who find life unfair engaged in violent criminal activities, the world would be in chaos. But clearly most of the world’s have-nots eke out their years without erupting into violence.
Instead, couldn’t it be that violent crime perpetuates poverty? We see this on an individual level among both victims and convicted criminals. It is also evident on the community level. Neighborhoods decimated by gun violence fail to attract entrepreneurs who might help the areas prosper. Crime also keeps property values low and drives up insurance premiums.
It may well be that poverty has little to do with being deprived, and everything to do with being depraved. And it isn’t economic poverty, but moral poverty that is to blame for gun violence.
Conservatives, Meet Google
The Liberty Counsel released the following statement last week regarding federal hate crimes legislation under consideration by Congress:
H.R. 1913 (Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009) is not about stopping crime but is designed to give “actual or perceived” sexual preference or “gender identity” (which is still classified as a mental disorder) the same legal status as race. The DSM IVR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by psychologists and psychiatrists to diagnose mental disorders) lists more than 30 “sexual orientations” and “Gender Identity Disorders,” including pedophilia. The hate crimes bill does not limit “sexual orientation” or “gender identity” and, thus, includes all these disorders and fetishes.
The American Family Association and the Traditional Values Coalition also expressed concern that people with sexual orientations such as pedophilia, necrophilia, and bestiality will receive special legal protections if the hate crimes bill becomes law.
Scary stuff, right?
Or it would be if any of their contentions were true.
But pedophilia is NOT a sexual orientation.
The information disseminated by the Liberty Counsel, the American Family Association, and the Traditional Values Coalition is verifiably false. There are not 30 sexual orientations listed in the DSM-IV-TR. In fact, the DSM-IV-TR explicitly states that sexual orientation refers to “erotic attraction to males, females, or both.”
The supposed “orientations” enumerated by these organizations are listed in the DSM-IV-TR as paraphilias. The paraphilias, which include pedophilia, voyeurism, and sexual sadism, are described in the DSM-IV-TR as sexual disorders, but they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, orientations. These are facts, easily verified by following the inline links to the Google Books copy of the DSM-IV-TR.
But if you believed the propaganda generated by Liberty Counsel and their fellowship of the intellectually dishonest, you’ve got plenty of company. Both Human Events and World Net Daily covered the pedophilia angle on the hate crimes bill story, and major conservative blogs like Gateway Pundit and American Thinker repeated the falsehood that pedophilia is one of many sexual orientations protected by the Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
During debate on the House floor, the notion that sexual orientation includes pedophilia was parroted by Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Michele Bachmann (R-MN). Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who sponsored an amendment to explicitly exclude pedophilia from the definition of “sexual orientation,” recited a list of “sexual orientation proclivities” clearly cribbed from unverified press releases. His litany included asphyxophlia, autogynephilia, bisexuality, exhibitionism, incest partialism, masochism. sadism, scatalogia, toucherism, voyeurism, and bestiality. And yes, his speech included definitions. The House Republican Conference Web site links to yet another list of sexual disorders in a misguided attempt to define sexual orientation.
Rep. King’s argument for the amendment was that “sexual orientation” is not specifically defined in H.R. 1913 and is therefore open to wild interpretation. But the term sexual orientation is already defined by federal law, in The Hate Crime Statistics Act, as “consensual homosexuality or heterosexuality.” Since there is nothing consensual about pedophilic behavior, the amendment, however well intentioned, was superfluous. Pedophiles don’t need to be explicitly excluded because they were never included to begin with.
By accepting outrageous propaganda as truth and not performing the bare minimum of due diligence with some quick Google-powered fact checking, these conservatives are undermining their credibility and helping to bolster the false and dangerous belief that pedophilia is an orientation. All pedophiles have a sexual orientation; it just isn’t pedophilia.
Pedophiles can be gay, straight, or anywhere in between: that is their orientation because orientation relates to gender, not age and certainly not criminal propensity. They are not toddlersexuals or infantsexuals. They are sadistic criminals who prey upon the most vulnerable among us.
For the record, I agree with House Republicans that hate crime legislation is a bad idea whether it includes race, gender, sexual orientation, or any other class of citizens. Hate crime statutes arose as a form of political pandering: they allow liberal politicians to posture against prejudice and bigotry while twiddling their thumbs over institutionalized discrimination like DADT. These laws perpetuate our unhealthy focus on identity politics while conveying that some victims deserve a greater measure of justice than others. Murder should be prosecuted as murder, no matter the identity of the victim, no matter the motive of the killer. And criminals should be tried on the basis of their hateful actions, not their hateful thoughts.
The Hate Crimes Act of 2009 is also in gross violation of the principle of federalism and the spirit of the Tenth Amendment, which states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The Hate Crimes Act federalizes crimes that should be under state jurisdiction.
But despite my strong disagreement with this legislation, it is clearly faulty logic and poor political strategy for House Republicans to bundle pedophilia and homosexuality together in an effort to appeal to the emotions of their colleagues and constituents on the issue of hate crimes. Let’s hope Senate Republicans don’t get suckered into the same strategy as they debate the companion bill, S. 909. Perhaps their aides will prove to be better Googlers than their House counterparts.
The only people who benefit from defining pedophilia as an orientation are the members of pedophile activist groups who seek to legitimize their degenerate behavior. Let’s not be party to that mission.
Things That Fail to Surprise Me
How often do you hear someone start a sentence with the words, “I can’t believe ….” I can’t believe it’s raining. I can’t believe Obama got elected. I can’t believe another Chicago politician is corrupt.
But really, all these things are well within the realm of believability. I prefer to think of them as remarkable – not shocking, not even really surprising, but definitely worth a remark or two. In that spirit, here are some remarkable items I wish I could find surprising:
Arizona ranks among the worst states in the nation when it comes to emergency preparedness. Since Arizona governor Janet Napolitano has done such a stand up job addressing her state’s disaster response capabilities, it’s only natural that she will oversee Homeland Security for the Obama administration. (via The Weekly Standard)
The increasing number of Orthodox Jews in the Riverdale section of the Bronx doesn’t sit well with at least one resident. Michael O’Brien is calling for a boycott of local shops that have adapted their business practices to respond to shifting neighborhood demographics. He is offended by the lack of Christmas decorations at the Jewish deli and outraged that the Dunkin Donuts across the street from an orthodox yeshiva doesn’t serve sausage and egg sandwiches.
Some liberal feminists consider the Twilight YA series to be dangerously misogynistic Mormon apologia. I prefer not to link to them, but here’s a Google search to point you in the right direction if you’re so inclined.
Mounting evidence suggests that teenage girls seeking spiritual mentoring and camaraderie on pagan social networking sites are being lured into inappropriate relationships with adult men.
South Carolina GOP chairman Katon Dawson played the black friend card this week in a revoltingly calculated (and easily anticipated) attempt to assure the public that his 12 year membership in a segregated country club is irrelevant to his candidacy for national RNC chairman.
And finally, the Detroit bailout bill passed in the House of Representatives with a vote of 237-170 on Wednesday. 32 “Republicans” were among those who voted in favor of the “rescue package.”
Like I said, no surprises.