“A Shameful Political System”: When Did Violence Against Women Become A Partisan Issue?
While the world rang in a new year and the U.S. teetered on the edge of a fiscal cliff, House Republicans boldly stood in the way of legislation that would have gone toward helping thousands of victims in need.
Not only did the GOP leadership flub the $60 billion relief effort that was intended for Hurricane Sandy victims (although their blocking that bill was quite incredulous in itself), they also managed to obstruct the Violence Against Women Act–a bill first introduced in 1994 that provides funds to prevent, investigate and prosecute violent crimes against women.
VAWA is typically thought to be one of those “easy” legislative measures. Every few years, a vote comes up to reauthorize the bill and every few years it passes with little, if any, opposition.
Why wouldn’t it? The key aspects of the bill are intended to serve and protect victims of rape and domestic abuse–hardly a partisan issue, right?
In addition to its original purpose, the bill was recently revised to include protections for gay and lesbian victims of domestic abuse and crimes against American Indians and immigrant women. Three groups that are especially vulnerable and all too often overlooked.
So when the vote came up to reauthorize the bill, which included the new aforementioned measures, it came as a surprise to many that the Republican-led House refused to sign off on it. Especially after the Senate already approved the bill in a 68 to 31 vote.
Instead, the House introduced and passed their own watered-down version, eliciting a veto threat from the White House.
“The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 4970, a bill that would undermine the core principles of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA),” the White House wrote in a press release. “H.R. 4970 rolls back existing law and removes long-standing protections for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault — crimes that predominately affect women.
“If the President is presented with H.R. 4970, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.”
Thursday, the 113th Congress was sworn into office. There is hope that the fresh new faces of this Congress–many of them women and several LGBT–will work toward getting VAWA back up and running.
The fact, however, that the 112th Congress stood idly by and allowed the measure to expire in the first place, that speaks volumes for the current state of our political system.
By: Lana Schupbach, MSNBC, January 3, 2013
“Real Mothers Vs Moochers”: Is Motherhood The Most Important Job?
It can be hard to remember a mere six months ago, but that was when we were talking about the hard work mothers perform in the home and how valuable it is. A recap: Democratic surrogate Hilary Rosen said that Ann Romney, who is a stay-at-home mother, has never worked a day in her life. In the blink of an eye, both sides jumped on the moment to declare their undying fealty to mothers and their awe at the hard work women perform in the home. Romney even went so far as to say that Ann’s job was “harder” and “more important” than his own, be it running the state of Massachusetts or the Olympics. (Although he never explained why he didn’t simply trade places with her.)
Someone watching this debate couldn’t be blamed for coming away with the impression that this country has put motherhood on a gold-plated pedestal. But it turns out that pedestal is contingent on certain factors—class being chief among them. A Pennsylvania House bill proposed last week sought to limit the amount of TANF assistance—formally known as welfare support—that low-income women receive based on how many children they give birth to while covered. In other words: the more children a woman on welfare has, the fewer benefits she receives.
The good news is that three sponsors of the bill have since backed away from it, claiming to not have read it closely enough. The bad news is that Pennsylvania was simply following a trend. At my request, Joan Entmacher of the National Women’s Law Center calculated that as of July 2010, seventeen states had “family cap” policies that limit the amount of TANF assistance available to mothers who have children while receiving benefits. When Ann Romney stays at home to raise her five boys, financed by her family’s wealth and income, we revere her as the pinnacle of womanhood and a hardworking American. When a poor mother has five boys, we punish her by denying her the benefits she needs to keep them healthy and happy.
Unfortunately the horror doesn’t stop there. What about a woman who is raped and then bears her rapist’s child while on TANF? Should she have her benefits decreased? Pennsylvania, in its magnanimity, granted that this woman shouldn’t be docked. She just has to give the state a signed statement that she was a victim of rape or incest and that she reported the crime and the identity of her offender to law enforcement. (Never mind that over half of all rapes are never reported given the stigma and ordeal victims are put though.) She also has to sign a statement affirming that she understands that “false reports to law enforcement authorities are punishable by law” and that lets her know the state will report “evidence of false statements or fraud” to the correct department. As summarized by Jake Blumgart: “State Reps to Poor Women: Prove You Were Raped or Lose TANF Assistance.”
Once again, Pennsylvania is sadly not alone. Many states require parents to cooperate with child support enforcement to receive childcare assistance, often to establish paternity and provide accurate information. Last month, the Children, Youth and Families Department of New Mexico decided to pull a Todd Aiken and considered an amendment to this policy that would exempt victims of “forcible rape” from having to file child support claims against the absent parent. And even worse, a bunch of states already use this language. According to Entmacher, at least four states list forcible rape as one potential reason for an exemption: Colorado, Idaho, Maryland and Rhode Island, with varying levels of detail about how a woman should go about proving that her rape is “legitimate.”
In the motherhood hierarchy, then, women who don’t need welfare support rank highest, followed by mothers who can “prove” that their rape is rape rape. Tough luck for low-income women who were date raped, raped when drugged or simply had a wanted child. Our message to them is that they’re not really mothers. They’re just moochers.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, October 29, 2012
“Official Position Of The Republican Party”: No, Richard Mourdock Has Not Apologized
Wednesday night John McCain went on CNN and told Anderson Cooper that he was withholding support for Senatorial candidate Richard Mourdock until the Indiana Republican “apologizes and says he misspoke, and he was wrong and he asks the people to forgive him.”
Apparently, McCain hadn’t gotten the memo that Republicans are pretending that Mourdock had indeed apologized for his comments in which he said that a pregnancy as a result of rape is a “gift from God.”
Thursday morning, McCain accepted Mourdock’s “apology” and pledged his support.
But let’s be clear. There was no apology for what Mourdock said. Here are his exact words from his press conference:
I’m a much more humble person this morning because so many people mistook, twisted, came to misunderstand the points that I was trying to make. I’m confident God abhors violence and rape, if they came away with any impression other than that, I truly regret it. I apologize if they came away, and I have certainly been humbled by the fact that so many people think that that somehow was an interpretation.
You catch the keyword here? “I apologize IF…” What Mourdock did was make up an interpretation that maybe three people on Twitter were accusing him of calling rape God-ordained. And then he apologized for people having that interpretation.
What didn’t he do? Apologize for what he actually said, which was:
I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.
He’s saying a pregnancy as a result of a rape is a gift from God. And that’s why people are offended. And he refuses to apologize for that. “Anyone who goes to the video tape and views that, understands fully what I meant. I really believe that,” he said later in the press conference.
But this “apology” is good enough for Mitt Romney. The GOP nominee has only filmed one commercial for a Senate candidate this year, and it was for Mourdock. He distanced himself from the comments, but he hasn’t asked for that ad to be taken down.
Why? Maybe he’s afraid of offending evangelicals in swing states.
Or maybe he recognizes what Mourdock was saying is kind of the official position of the Republican Party.
The former Republican governor of Utah who played Gallant to Romney’s Goofus in the GOP primary said he would withdraw his endorsement and pull the ad, once again proving that he’s much too sane for this Republican Party.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, October 25, 2012
“His Position Is Our Position”: Why Is Mitt Romney Outraged At Todd Akin And Not At Paul Ryan?
Mitt Romney is outraged! He’s insulted! He’s offended!
Why? A Republican Senate candidate dared to state a position on choice that is exactly the same as that of Romney’s own running mate.
Missouri Rep. Todd Akin is attracting plenty of attention for his bizarre and idiotic justification for refusing to allow rape victims to have abortions. But the extreme policy position behind those comments — a policy that is the GOP standard — should be getting just as much attention.
Akin explained this weekend how rape victims shouldn’t be allowed reproductive choice because they already have access to some mysterious anti-pregnancy control system: “First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Romney responded today in an interview with the National Review:
“Congressman’s Akin comments on rape are insulting, inexcusable, and, frankly, wrong,” Romney said. “Like millions of other Americans, we found them to be offensive.”
“I have an entirely different view,” Romney said. “What he said is entirely without merit and he should correct it.”
What is Romney’s “entirely different view”? That Rep. Akin doesn’t have a basic understanding of the female anatomy that he’s so interested in legislating? That Akin feels the need to draw a distinction between “legitimate rape” and “illegitimate rape”? That Akin thinks rape victims shouldn’t be able to choose whether to carry their rapists’ children?
Romney should start by directing his outrage at his own running mate. Rep. Paul Ryan not only opposes abortion rights for rape victims, he was a cosponsor of a so-called “personhood” amendment that would have classified abortion as first degree murder and outlawed common types of birth control. Ryan has also bought into the “legitimate rape” nonsense, cosponsoring legislation with Akin that would have limited federal services to victims of “forcible rape” — a deliberate attempt to write out some victims of date rape and statutory rape.
Romney himself has flirted with the “personhood” idea, telling Mike Huckabee during the primary that he’d “absolutely” support such a measure. When he was later confronted about the comment at a town hall meeting, it became clear that Romney had no idea how the process he wanted to legislate actually worked.
And Romney hasn’t always been keen to stand up for the victims of rape. In a Republican debate in February, he actually got in an argument with Newt Gingrich over who was least in favor of requiring hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims they were treating.
Now the Romney campaign is trying to distance itself from Akin by saying that “a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape.” But Romney has also vowed to nominate Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, returning to states the power to outlaw or allow abortion as they choose. If Romney and anti-choice activists get their wish from the Supreme Court, a Romney-Ryan administration would have no power to stop states from imposing whichever abortion bans they decide to impose. The promise to carve out an exception for rape victims is not a promise they would be able to keep.
The real scandal of Rep. Akin’s comments isn’t the faulty sex-ed he’s teaching. Instead, his comments expose the anti-choice movement’s skewed and condescending view of women. Akin can’t accept that a woman who fits his definition of virtue — the victim of a “legitimate rape” — would also need to seek an abortion, and he has made up false science to support that assumption. But with or without the weird right-wing science, that same false distinction underlies all anti-choice policies — including those embraced by Romney and Ryan.
Romney can feign all the outrage he wants at Rep. Akin’s misogynistic pseudo-science. But until he can draw a clear distinction between Akin’s policies and his own, his protests will ring hollow.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post Blog, October 20, 2012
“Extreme Positions On Everything”: Republicans Scaring The Voters In The Middle
The claims of Representative Todd Akin that women don’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape” now live in infamy. But a few things you may not know:
If an American woman in uniform is raped and becomes pregnant, Congress bars Tricare military insurance from paying for an abortion.
If an American woman in the Peace Corps becomes pregnant, Congress bars coverage of an abortion — and there is no explicit exception even if she is raped or her life is in danger.
When teenagers in places like Darfur, Congo or Somalia survive gang rapes, aid organizations cannot use American funds to provide an abortion.
A record number of states have curbed abortions in the last two years. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which follows reproductive health, 55 percent of American women of reproductive age now live in one of the 26 states deemed “hostile to abortion rights.”
The Republican campaign platform denounces contraceptive education in schools. Instead, it advises kids to abstain from sex until marriage.
All this boggles the mind. Republican leaders in 2012 have a natural winning issue — the limping economy — but they seem determined to scare away centrist voters with extremist positions on everything from abortion to sex education.
Most Americans do not fit perfectly into “pro-choice” or “pro-life” camps. Polls show that about one-fifth want abortion to be legal in all situations, and another one-fifth want abortion to be illegal always. The majority fall somewhere between, and these voters are the ones who decide elections.
Bill Clinton won their support with his pragmatic formula that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” Then social conservatives won ground with a shrewd strategic decision to focus the abortion debate where they had the edge.
They fought battles over extremely rare procedures they called “partial-birth abortion.” They called for parental consent when a girl seeks an abortion, and for 24-hour waiting periods before an abortion. In polls, around two out of three Americans favor those kinds of restrictions.
But change the situation, and people are more in favor of abortion rights. Four out of five Americans believe that a woman should be able to get an abortion if her health is endangered, or if the pregnancy is the result of rape.
So it’s astonishing that Republicans would adopt an absolutist platform condemning abortion without offering an exception even for rape.
Mitt Romney insists that his position on abortion is crystal clear. In fact, his policy is so muddled that he doesn’t seem to know it himself. So, Mr. Romney, let me help you out.
On your campaign Web site, you say that life begins at conception and that you favor overturning Roe v. Wade. As with the Republican Party platform, you give no indication there that you favor an exception for rape or to save a woman’s life.
Likewise, you seemed to endorse a “personhood” initiative like the one in Mississippi last year that would have treated a fertilized egg as a legal person. It failed because of concerns that an abortion, even to save a woman’s life, could be legally considered murder. It might also have banned in vitro fertilization and some forms of birth control.
These days, Mr. Romney, as you seek general-election voters, you insist that you do, in fact, accept abortion in cases of rape, incest or a pregnancy that endangers a woman’s life. In an interview with CBS the other day, you added another exception, for the health of the mother.
Mr. Romney, if you don’t know your own position on abortion, how are we supposed to understand it?
More broadly, you’ve allied yourself with social conservatives who are on a crusade that scares centrists and mystifies even many devout evangelicals.
“Representative Akin’s views don’t represent me,” Richard Cizik of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good told me. “They also don’t reflect the theological and ethical, not to mention scientific, view of evangelical leaders, who understand the rationale for exceptions: God’s grace and mercy. Akin and company are the political and theological minority, but they have captured the G.O.P.’s platform process.”
Americans are deeply conflicted on abortion, but I think most are repulsed by the Republican drive to impose ultrasounds — in some cases invasive ones — on women before an abortion. Five states now require a woman, before an abortion, to endure an ultrasound that may use a probe inserted into her vagina. Four of those states make no exception for a rape.
And if the Republican Party succeeds in defunding Planned Parenthood, the result will be more women dying of cervical cancer and fewer women getting contraception. The consequence will probably be more unintended pregnancies — and more abortions.
Or there’s sex education. Today in America, more than one-third of teens say that when they began having sex, they had not had any formal instruction about contraception. Is this really the time for a Republican Party platform denouncing comprehensive sex education?
Some Americans don’t even seem to have had any sex education by the time they’re elected to Congress. Like Todd Akin.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 1, 2012
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