The War on Women

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Re: The War on Women

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 15, 2018 10:42 pm

Not one Republican supports a bill to protect domestic violence victims

August 15, 2018
The GOP is shrugging its shoulders at an urgent deadline to renew the most important U.S. law protecting abuse victims.

Not a single Republican in the U.S. House has signed on to renew a major law that helps victims of domestic violence — even though Congress only has 11 legislative days to act before it expires.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), first enacted in 1994, was a groundbreaking piece of legislation that made sure our justice system treats domestic violence like the serious crime it is — not a “private family matter,” as many used to believe.

VAWA needs to be reauthorized by Congress every now and then, which Congress has typically done without a fuss and with broad bipartisan support.

That is, it used to — until Republicans raised a stink in 2013 over expanding the law’s protections for LGBTQ people, undocumented immigrants, and Native Americans.

VAWA funds crucial services like rape crisis centers, community violence prevention programs, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline. It also offers legal protections against outrages like victims of sexual assault being forced to pay for their own rape kits, or victims of abuse or stalking being evicted from their homes because their attacker caused too many disturbances.

In short, VAWA is a big deal if you care at all about women’s health and safety or about protecting abuse victims.

Too bad those issues are an afterthought, at best, for today’s Republican Party.

Republicans haven’t been publicly complaining too much yet about the new VAWA reauthorization proposal, which was introduced in the House in July by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX).

But GOP representatives also haven’t bothered to sign on to it, or even offer their own alternative proposal. There are 104 Democratic co-sponsors for the bill so far, and zero Republicans.

Among other things, the proposal increases funding for local rape prevention efforts; expands the definition of domestic violence to cover “verbal, emotional, economic, or technological” abuse and coercion, not just physical or sexual violence; and gives law enforcement officers more options to take guns away from abusers.

Republicans are starting to grumble about all of these ideas. They argue that it costs too much, or that it might infringe on the rights of abusive gun owners to be abusive and own guns.

To put those complaints in perspective, the proposed $253 million spending increase is the cost of a couple of fighter jets.

Abuse isn’t just about rape or beatings; victims often report that psychological abuse or financial coercion are the worst parts of their abuse, and the factor making it hardest to leave their abusers.

And while abuse victims are 5 times more likely to be murdered if there is a gun in the home, the current legal options for taking away an abuser’s guns are depressingly narrow.

VAWA expires at the end of September. Congress will only have 11 legislative days to pass it after returning from the August recess. This urgent deadline doesn’t seem to bother Republicans one bit.

And why would it?

After all, the Republican president is Trump, the groper-in-chief who was once accused of violently raping his then-wife.

And the Republican attorney general — who leads the Department of Justice, the agency responsible for carrying out many of VAWA’s provisions — is Jeff Sessions. He voted against the 2013 VAWA reauthorization, and recently made it a lot harder for victims of brutal violence to seek asylum in the United States.

The Republican Party doesn’t care about women’s rights or safety, and often works overtime to make life even more dangerous and oppressive for women.

Shrugging their shoulders at the most important law to protect abuse victims is par for the GOP course.

Published with permission of The American Independent.
https://shareblue.com/vawa-violence-aga ... -deadline/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The War on Women

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sun Aug 26, 2018 2:11 pm

.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/book ... ccall.html


The ‘Social Hygiene’ Campaign That Sent Thousands of American Women to Jail

Image

THE TRIALS OF NINA McCALL
Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades- Long Government Plan to Imprison “Promiscuous” Women
By Scott W. Stern

356 pp. Beacon Press. $28.95.

One October morning in 1918, an 18-year-old named Nina McCall walked out of the post office in St. Louis, Mich., where she lived with her widowed mother. Waiting for her on the sidewalk was the town’s deputy sheriff, who ordered her to report to the local health officer for a medical exam. Why he singled out McCall we may never know, but the exam left her bleeding, traumatized and outraged. When the officer declared her to be infected with gonorrhea, McCall protested that she had never been intimate with a man. At which point, as Scott Stern writes in his impressively researched book, “The Trials of Nina McCall,” the doctor “turned on her and thundered, with all the authority of his position and his gender, ‘Young lady, do you mean to call me a liar?’”

Stern’s is the first book-length account of the “American Plan,” a government-sponsored “social hygiene” campaign under which thousands of American women between the early years of the 20th century and the 1960s were forced to undergo gynecological exams, quarantine and detention, all in the name of protecting the country’s citizens from sexually transmitted infections. Stern was a freshman in a lecture course at Yale when his professor mentioned that government efforts to combat sexually transmitted disease had included confining prostitutes to concentration camps. As Stern recounts, he stopped taking notes and turned to Google: “I typed in ‘concentration camps for prostitutes.’ Nothing. I went to Wikipedia and entered the same search. Nothing. This was strange.”

Stern, now a law student at Yale, went on to spend years examining records, including administrative notes, century-old news stories and social workers’ field reports. The book he eventually pieced together, which in earlier form earned him an undergraduate thesis award, is startling, disturbing and terrifically readable. Using McCall’s saga as a narrative spine, Stern chronicles the nationwide network of laws and policies targeting prostitutes and any other woman whose alleged sexual activity made her a potential carrier of venereal disease.

No proof that a woman was selling sex for pay was required in order to haul her in for testing. Local police and health officials targeted women who in their view acted too flirtatious, enjoyed themselves too much around soldiers or simply worked as waitresses. In one Louisiana town near an Army installation, a woman was forcibly examined because she’d been spotted dining in a restaurant alone. Women of color were rounded up in especially high numbers; Stern cites officials who “enthusiastically warned that nonwhite women were less moral, intent on infecting soldiers and that blacks in particular were a ‘syphilis soaked race.’”

On paper, the laws of the American Plan were gender-neutral, applicable to “any person reasonably suspected by the health officer of being infected with any of the said diseases.” In practice, the laws targeted women, and those judged to be infected were quarantined in jails, converted hospitals and former brothels fitted out with barbed wire-topped walls. Breakouts and rebellions were common: In Los Angeles, women hacked through a fence with a stolen butcher knife; in Seattle, they tied up the guards in sheets and busted through plate glass. “In one wing of the horribly overcrowded Louisville jail,” Stern writes, “quarantined women staged a riot about once a week.”

American authorities didn’t invent the blame-loose-women approach to stamping out venereal disease; they imported it from Europe. In 19th-century Paris, Stern reports, under what was known as the French Plan, prostitutes were made to bare their genitals before health inspectors. Those found to be infected could be jailed and compelled to undergo mercury injections, then the standard, if mostly ineffective, treatment for venereal disease. (“Throbbing pain, kidney damage, inflammation or ulceration of the mouth and terrible skin rashes” were typical side effects, Stern writes.)

It wasn’t until the 1940s that doctors understood that penicillin could knock out syphilis and gonorrhea. When Nina McCall was quarantined in 1918 — bullied into three months inside a Michigan “detention hospital” — she was injected with the toxins then still in fashion: mercury and, Stern surmises, remedies based on arsenic. Her teeth loosened. Her hair started falling out. She pleaded to go home. She insisted she’d been falsely suspected of consorting with “soldier boys”; Stern found evidence suggesting that she may never have had a sexually transmitted infection.

We know all this now because after McCall was finally allowed to leave, she was sought out by a woman of means who hated the American Plan, had heard about her case and proposed that McCall sue the government for damages. Stern presents an intriguing cast of characters and ratchets up the tension as McCall’s lawsuit materializes: Her benefactress is a Christian Scientist opposed to government-mandated medical treatment; two of the lawyers on either side are bitterly combative rivals. The trial transcripts supply fine courtroom drama, but the story doesn’t end there. McCall lost her case, and Scott relates both her troubled adulthood and the fascinating debates over the American Plan that continued to roil for decades, both inside and outside the legal system.

“The Trials of Nina McCall” is a consistently surprising page-turner, and at times I found myself wishing Stern had lingered over particular details. He notes that some of the laws that made up the American Plan are still on the books today; it’s the interpretation of these laws that has changed, beginning in the 1960s, amid increasing litigation and evolving sexual mores. What kinds of public mandates are justifiable in combating contagious disease? Is involuntary quarantine ever acceptable? I would have welcomed Stern’s views on such questions. Even so, his book is a brilliant study of the way social anxieties have historically congealed in state control over women’s bodies and behavior — at times with the complicity of medical authorities. It should come as no surprise, but appalls nonetheless, to learn that more than one government enforcer of the American Plan also played a key role in the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study, in which infected black men were deliberately denied treatment and left to sicken and die. Unchecked power over those who have little, Stern warns, is a peril that should keep us on high alert today.

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Re: The War on Women

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Sep 08, 2018 3:33 pm

an un indicted co conspirator nominated Kavanaugh and after that when an un indicted co conspirator is no longer president he will be on the Supreme Court for life

women are going to lose their right to their own bodies



Brett Kavanaugh Refers To Birth Control As ‘Abortion-Inducing Drugs’ At Confirmation Hearing

Kavanaugh Confirmation Hearing
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=41276
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They could still get him out of office.
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Re: The War on Women

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Sep 09, 2018 9:55 am

Susan Collins Receives 3,000 Coat Hangers Ahead Of Kavanaugh Vote

Many believe Brett Kavanaugh would help roll back abortion access in the U.S.

Sara Boboltz
Brett Kavanaugh speaks to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in an Aug. 21 meeting. 
Bloomberg via Getty Images
Brett Kavanaugh speaks to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in an Aug. 21 meeting.
As a reminder of what could be at stake if President Donald Trump’s latest Supreme Court pick is confirmed, abortion rights activists have been sending Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) coat hangers for months.

Around 3,000 have been delivered so far to the office of the senator, The Associated Press reported Saturday. Collins is considered to be a key vote in the upcoming confirmation vote for Trump’s nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.

Many supporters of abortion rights fear Kavanaugh would dismantle the landmark 1973 abortion case Roe v. Wade ― in no small part because that’s precisely what Trump promised during his campaign. Given the chance, Trump said, he would nominate judges to the Supreme Court who would significantly roll back Roe v. Wade. Collins, a centrist, supports abortion rights.

The hangers are symbols of a dangerous method for terminating a pregnancy used when abortion was illegal and many women resorted to risky procedures.

While Collins has vowed to oppose any Supreme Court candidate who “demonstrated hostility” to Roe v. Wade, whether she believes Kavanaugh has done so in his career remains unclear. She has declined to indicate publicly what her decision may be. Although Collins said Kavanaugh told her that he considered the case “settled law,” his critics are concerned about past rulings and an email he sent suggesting Roe v. Wade could be overturned.

In(formation) email.

The reality of being a woman — by the numbers.

Progressive groups are also running TV spots in Maine urging Collins to reject the judge, the AP noted.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), another centrist generally supportive of abortion rights, has similarly not indicated which way she will vote. In addition to the issue posed by Kavanaugh’s abortion record, advocates for Native Alaskan groups have urged the senator to vote no, and Native Alaskans were key to Murkowski’s election.

Kavanaugh’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing wrapped Friday after four contentious days that saw more than 200 protesters arrested.

Democrats on the committee made their opposition to the nominee ― and Republicans’ procedural decisions ― known from the moment Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) gaveled in the first day on Tuesday. Several senators interrupted Grassley to protest the withholding of well over 100,000 pages of documents related to Kavanaugh’s judicial record.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/su ... 1db3e2e6f9
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: The War on Women

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 03, 2018 2:23 pm

I just got a text from trump on my phone .....is he alerting me that his war on women is going as planned?
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The War on Women

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 08, 2018 2:20 pm

The Perils and Possibilities of Anger

After centuries of censure, women reconsider the political power of female rage.

Casey Cep
The hatchet came later. Rocks were rare in the Red Hills of Kansas, where Carry Nation lived, so, when God commanded her to destroy establishments where alcohol was served, she gathered pieces of brick from her yard and wrapped them in brown paper to look like packages. On the morning of June 7, 1900, she walked into a saloon in Kiowa, told the proprietor to take cover, and began throwing her “smashers,” as she called them, at the mirror above his bar and all the bottles on it.

Later that day, Nation did the same thing at two other bars in town, though when her brick failed to break the mirror at one of them she hurled a billiard ball from a nearby pool table to finish the job. She was detained in Kiowa, but not arrested. Her first jail sentence came nearly seven months and many smithereened bars later, in Wichita. “You put me in here a cub,” she cried from behind the bars of her cell. “But I will go out a roaring lion and I will make all hell howl.” And so she did, switching from “smashers” to hatchets after her release, and getting arrested at least thirty more times for wielding them at bars from San Francisco to Coney Island.

Carry Nation’s wrath was a response to matters both private and public: she was furious at her alcoholic husband, and furious at the legal system that let men like him drink freely to the detriment of women, children, and society at large. Although her means were unusual and her desired ends unfashionable, she was representative of a recurring figure in American history: the woman whose activism is fuelled by anger. Such women are much in the news today, and much in the streets, too, although generally without the hatchet. Since the 2016 Presidential election, countless numbers of them have set out to make hell howl—by disrupting government hearings, occupying federal buildings, scaling the Statue of Liberty, boycotting businesses, going on strike, coming forward with stories of harassment and assault, flooding congressional telephone lines, raising a middle finger at the Presidential motorcade, and attending protests by the millions, sometimes carrying with them representations of the President’s castrated testicles and severed head.

In previous political eras, women like these would have been told to hold their tongues or act more ladylike. These days, however, we are being encouraged, at least in some quarters, to embrace our anger. A slew of new books are challenging the ancient notion that rage can be dangerous for both self and society, arguing instead that women’s anger is, as the respective subtitles of these books insist, their “power,” their “revolutionary power,” even their “superpower.”

Like any emotion, anger is easy to recognize but difficult to define. We know it when we see it, and certainly when we feel it, yet most definitions struggle to wholly capture it. Philosophers sometimes describe anger as a response to the feeling that something one values has been wronged or harmed. Biologists might explain it as a feeling of pain or discomfort or anxiety, accompanied by the release of hormones, like adrenaline, that increase blood pressure. Psychologists often classify it as a secondary emotion—one that follows from a primary reaction, such as fear or shame, and can take many affective forms, from tears to screaming to silence.

This definitional slipperiness inevitably haunts any effort to make anger into a political tool—what, exactly, is being valorized, an ethical objection or a rush of adrenaline? But one thing is clear: responses to anger depend, to a remarkable degree, on whether the person expressing it is a man or a woman. In “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger” (Atria), the writer and activist Soraya Chemaly notes early on that women “don’t need books, studies, theories, or specialists” to prove how reviled our anger is. We are all familiar with the stereotypes whereby femininity demands the suppression of anger while masculinity rewards its expression, and whereby angry women are hysterical harpies but angry men—white men, at any rate—are heroes. Rather than dwell on how female rage is received, Chemaly presents a thoroughgoing assessment of its causes: an account, organized thematically, of the private and public abuse, bias, and discrimination faced by women.

The result is both relentless and revelatory. American women between the ages of eighteen and forty-four are nearly twice as likely as men to report feeling exhausted every day; women, if they have sex with men, have fewer orgasms than their male partners; they make less money than their male colleagues; of the thirty highest-paying job categories, twenty-six are dominated by men, while women dominate twenty-three of the thirty lowest-paying categories; female patients are treated for pain less often than male patients who present with the same symptoms; one in four women lives with domestic violence; one in five women has been sexually assaulted; and two-thirds of women have experienced street harassment, roughly half of them before they turned seventeen. Chemaly deftly balances these statistics with grim stories to illustrate them, so that the cumulative effect of reading her book is not merely to legitimize women’s anger but to render it astonishing that we are not even angrier.

All the facts that Chemaly musters were true before the most recent Presidential election, but in its wake many women are refusing to stay quiet about their experiences. Chemaly says that she is calling for a change in our cultural thinking on anger, gender, and politics, but in truth she is responding to one that has already begun. It was on display on January 21, 2017, the day of the first Women’s March, and since then has grown steadily more prominent, and strikingly more personal, with the #MeToo movement. Chemaly’s book has autobiographical passages—many of her female relatives get vivid cameos—but she chooses not to emphasize her own story. By contrast, the Rutgers University professor Brittney Cooper builds a manifesto mostly from memoir. “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower” (St. Martin’s Press) considers African-American feminists from Michelle Obama to Beyoncé, but it is chiefly a chronicle of how Cooper learned to stop disguising and dismissing her own anger.

Video From The New Yorker



Cooper writes movingly about coming of age as a black woman in the Baptist Church and on the campus of Howard University—two bastions of black power and, in her experience, black patriarchy. She describes carrying around Audre Lorde’s “Sister Outsider” like a “feminist bible,” and it is mostly from Lorde that she derives her account of how rage can be made useful. Lorde owns anger the way that Monet owns water lilies; no one writing about the emotion today can ignore her address at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in 1981. Delivering “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”—a title too often abridged at the colon—Lorde described the bigotry within the feminist movement, and then argued that anger was an appropriate response, because when “focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”

It was essential for Cooper to develop that focus, she says, in order to make use of her anger: “The clarity that comes from rage should also tell us what kind of world we want to see, not just what kind of things we want to get rid of.” Focus, of course, is really the ability to adjust our vision, measuring one thing accurately against another, and Cooper’s attention to the complex dynamics of anger is illuminating even for readers who don’t agree with the positions she ultimately takes. She weighs her desire to join the first Women’s March as an act of feminist solidarity against her anger over the long-standing failure of white feminists to make common cause with women of color. (In the end, she skips the march, but feels ambivalent about the decision.) She considers her frustration that President Obama did not send troops to rescue the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram alongside her wariness about “getting in bed at any level with the logics of patriarchy and militarism.” (Despite those qualms, she wishes Obama had done more for the girls, many of whom have still not been found.)

That sort of self-critical reflection is often missing from the journalist Rebecca Traister’s “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger” (Simon & Schuster). Traister, who covered both of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaigns, is a kind of feminist first responder who writes often and sometimes instantly about sexism in America. Her columns and profiles for New York magazine are astute accounts of the daily attacks on women’s rights, and the argument she makes in her book is partly one of accretion. Women’s rage, she claims, has long fuelled progressive social change, and the women galvanized by Trump’s election are part of a grand tradition of radicalism. Traister sees parallels between the participants in the Women’s March and the members of the National Women’s Political Caucus who protested when the press failed to cover their presence at the 1972 Democratic National Convention; between the gun-control activist Emma González and the labor activist Rose Schneiderman; between the men who demand smiles from women today and those who, in previous centuries, put women in branks (a metal muzzle, also known as a scold’s bridle, used to silence and publicly humiliate those who were forced to wear it); between the women of #MeToo and those who stormed Versailles during the French Revolution; between herself when she published an angry column and Rosa Parks who, as a girl, picked up a brick and threatened to throw it at a white boy who was bullying her.

Traister writes, “I had no idea how old and deep and urgent was women’s impulse to sometimes just let their fury out without a care to how it would be evaluated, even if that expression of rage put them at risk: in young Rosa Parks’s case, at risk of death; in my case, at risk of being mocked on the internet.” Of course, the Internet these days is very much real life, and abuse there can lead to abuse offline, but the problem with Traister’s comparison is that no semicolon can bridge the gap between those two experiences. That is, in fact, a problem with the book over all: juxtaposition is not a sufficient structure for a political argument. Traister focusses on isolated episodes of anger among progressive women of various races, classes, and eras, while failing to adequately reckon with crucial differences among the circumstances that provoked their anger and the ways in which they chose to respond to it.

But those aren’t superficial differences. They are critical distinctions that lead some angry women to be applauded while others are attacked, and that lead many rebellions to fail while only a few revolutions succeed. Traister writes that she does not wish “simply to cheer” anger, and acknowledges that the rage that fuels insurrections “has the power to burn them up.” But her case for ire is undermined by a rampaging elephant in the room: anger knows no political persuasion. For every Maxine Waters, there’s a Michele Bachmann; for every Gloria Steinem, a Phyllis Schlafly. At the same time that Chemaly, Cooper, and Traister were watching their own angry takes and rage-filled tweets go viral, Ann Coulter, Candace Owens, and Jeanine Pirro were watching theirs do the same.

This failure to parse politically inconvenient anger is, as Ogden Nash once put it, “a notable feat / of one-way thinking on a two-way street.” “Eloquent Rage,” “Good and Mad,” and “Rage Becomes Her” give little space to Sarah Palin, the women of the Tea Party, and the legions of women who—in what they, too, feel is an expression of righteous anger—lend their voices to the anti-abortion movement. All of the books do, however, acknowledge a fact that undercuts their attempts to valorize women’s anger: one of the angriest demographics in America before the 2016 Presidential election was white women, and the majority of them voted for Donald Trump.

That the words “President” and “Trump” came together anywhere outside of a Mad Lib is itself perhaps the most straightforward argument against anger as a political virtue. According to exit polls and endless postmortems, many people were so furious about immigration, the economy, the election of a black President, the potential for a female one, Black Lives Matter, the War on Christmas, and any number of other real and phantasmagorical issues that they voted for Trump. Was there ever a better example of blind rage?

That blindness is one of the oldest objections to anger. The ancients generally regarded rage as uncontrollable and violent; it led to bad decisions and endangered the well-being of individuals and collectives. The University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum shares that view, and, unlike Chemaly, Cooper, and Traister, she is not sanguine about anger as a political tool. In “The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis” (Simon & Schuster), Nussbaum acknowledges the seductions of anger but warns against its side effects.

“Anger is a poison to democratic politics, and it is all the worse when fueled by a lurking fear and sense of helplessness,” Nussbaum writes. That is true regardless of the angry person’s gender: it clouds the judgment of men and women alike, and increases the likelihood of error. Because the sort of insults and injuries that provoke anger can occur by accident, and because their causes can be difficult to determine, it is easy to get angry at the wrong person, or to settle for a substitute for the unavailable or unknown source. Even if we accurately identify the responsible party, Nussbaum argues, we can still err in assessing the severity of the transgression or in selecting an appropriate response. Anger, according to this view, is almost always retributive; even when it does not seek personal redress, it demands the suffering of others.

History is filled with examples of how easily anger can be exploited or manipulated, but Nussbaum summons from Greek tragedy an evocative illustration of how it can be redeemed. She tells the story of how, in the Oresteia, the Furies, vengeful beings that drip ooze from their eyes and vomit blood, are transformed into the Eumenides, beautiful creatures that serve justice rather than pursue cruelty. Athena establishes a system of law, and the changed Furies are part of its foundations. To Nussbaum, Aeschylus offers a metaphor for how individual passions can be tamed by reason and how collective anger can be converted to the cause of justice.

Of course, classical mythology is one thing and contemporary reality is another. Yet resisting anger personally and rejecting it politically is a crucial, if never fully realizable, duty of democratic citizens. That may seem like a reactionary message for a political era such as ours, but it is worth remembering that this age of rage was preceded, for progressives, by an era of hope, and that earlier injustices have been fought by political movements devoted to peace and nonviolence. Nussbaum cites Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela in her account of protest without payback. (The fact that all three are men does not, needless to say, reflect a masculine attraction to nonviolence but, rather, our failure to canonize female political heroes. She could have written as convincingly about Susan B. Anthony, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Clara Luper.) Nussbaum quotes King explaining that, though anger might have brought people to his protests, an essential task of the movement was to purify the emotion so that it could serve the cause of civil rights.

That belief came partly from King’s deep theological commitment to nonviolence. But it may also reflect a tactical awareness that people who feel, even erroneously, that they are losing power can be angrier than those who are seeking it. It is the deforming nature of anger to blur the boundary between unjustified and justified; if it weren’t, only the righteous would ever be angry. Instead, rage is most often forsworn by those who seem most entitled to it, and civility is demanded by those who least deserve it. The civil-rights marchers and the Freedom Riders were the ones with the calm clarity of the Eumenides, while their white neighbors were the ones who looked and sounded like the Furies.

All these authors are right to note that a major problem with anger is that some people are allowed to express it while others are not. That disparity was vividly on view during the recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which Christine Blasey Ford calmly testified about being sexually assaulted in high school and her alleged attacker, the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, seethed and shouted at the senators, behavior that was applauded by conservative pundits and politicians as evidence of his innocence.

It was an upsetting display, and hardly one to make the case for the virtues of anger in the political arena. Indeed, the hearing suggests that, instead of encouraging rage from people who have traditionally been denied it, we might be better off defusing it in those traditionally rewarded for it—not only for the sake of our democracy but for ourselves. However efficacious anger may seem in the short term, even righteous anger is likely to be deleterious in the long term, to the individual body and to the body politic. Repressed emotions are dangerous, but, as countless medical studies have shown, sustained anger is both physically and emotionally destructive.

Women have every reason to be livid right now, and our anger should not be mocked, censored, or punished. But that does not mean it must be celebrated, or that hard-won efforts to manage anger and discourage aggression in the general population should be reversed. Tellingly, Cooper’s book concludes with a meditation on joy, a benediction of sorts that ends with a reminder: “What you build is infinitely more important than what you tear down.”

Anger is an avaricious emotion; it takes more credit than it deserves. Attempts to make it into a political virtue too often attribute to anger victories that rightfully belong to courage, patience, intelligence, persistence, or love. These days, we remember Carry Nation’s hatchets, but forget that she sold souvenir versions of them and used the proceeds not only to pay her own bail but also to support a shelter for the wives, mothers, and children of alcoholics. Nation’s anger accounts for only a sliver of her political activism; the majority of her life was spent in constructive rather than reactive efforts, and it was also spent in community with other activists, through the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Such solidarity, rather than the rage that occasioned it, feels like the secret subject of these new books. What is powerful isn’t so much women’s anger as their collective action. That is what has changed most radically since this past election, hopefully not in a burst of rebellion but in a revolution of lasting consequence.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018 ... s-of-anger
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The War on Women

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Nov 02, 2018 4:59 pm

Why Are Pelvic Exams on Unconscious, Unconsenting Women Still Part of Medical Training?
Image
We understand consent better than ever. So why haven’t we ended this practice?

Phoebe FriesenOct 30, 20189:00 AM

A medical exam table with stirrups, in black and white.
Photo illustration by Slate. 3D render by kelllll/iStock/Getty Images Plus.

If you happen to have had a gynecological surgery at a major teaching hospital in the U.S., there’s a good chance that after you were given the anesthetic, several medical students used your unresponsive body to learn how to perform a proper pelvic exam. Each student would have inserted two fingers inside your vagina and placed one hand on your abdomen, feeling for abnormalities in your uterus and ovaries. This would have been done entirely for their benefit, not yours. And after the surgery, you would have been sent on your way, with no mention of these exams and with no knowledge of your role as a teaching tool.

You, like many women, might feel that this constitutes a serious violation of both your body and your trust. This may sound like something that should have been left behind long ago in the days where medical paternalism was the norm. But this practice still appears to be commonplace in many teaching hospitals in this country. While little data has been collected in terms of frequency, medical students across the country are familiar with the practice and engage in heated debates regarding the ethics of the practice in online forums.

I first heard about the practice while teaching ethics at several medical schools in New York. When I asked my students to consider an ethical issue they’d encountered during their training, many of them brought up their experiences practicing pelvic exams on unconscious women who had not consented.

While discussing the importance of respecting an individual’s rights and bodily autonomy, many students agreed that obtaining women’s consent before this occurred would be preferable to sneaking in a lesson once they’ve been knocked out. Most of them admitted, however, that they would never feel comfortable raising their concerns with their instructors, given the rigid hierarchy that structures medical education as well as the intimate connection between those instructors and their chances at being placed for their residencies the next year. No one wanted to be seen as a troublemaker.

When I asked my students to consider an ethical issue they’d encountered during their training, many of them brought up their experiences practicing pelvic exams on unconscious women who had not consented.
Interestingly, research shows that while first-year medical students largely find the idea of practicing pelvic exams on women under anesthetic to be morally problematic, the longer they spend in medical school, the less they see it as an issue. Some have labeled this process, which shows up in many aspects of medical education, “ethical erosion.”

Unsurprisingly, 100 percent of women say they would prefer to be asked before their pelvis is used as a teaching tool. Some say they would feel assaulted if they weren’t consulted beforehand. Most also don’t have the ability to learn that this has even happened to them. They have no chance to say no, thank you—or #MeToo. But in our current era of rethinking consent and the institutions that have perpetrated unfair treatment of women, now is the perfect time to finally end this practice.

I’ve spoken to many people who argue that we can’t get consent from every woman before medical students learn how to give a pelvic exam on them, because so few of them would agree to take part that medical students would never learn the technique. Just as the many patients at teaching hospitals share the burden of allowing students to learn the ropes of medicine while caring for them, women having gynecological surgeries at teaching hospitals just need to (unwittingly) do their part for the greater good.

It’s not clear that consent is such a barrier to student learning, however. When polled, the majority of women say they would consent to having medical students perform pelvic examinations on them while they are under anesthetic. Moreover, when consent for pelvic exams under anesthetic has been made routine, most women agree to take part.

There are also other ways to learn how to perform a pelvic examination. Following public outcry, performing pelvic exams on women without their consent has been banned in California, Virginia, Hawaii, Illinois, and Oregon, and several professional bodies in medicine have condemned it. Teaching hospitals in these places often hire professional patients to guide students through the process of giving a pelvic exam, or they use electronic teaching mannequins. Others have just incorporated specific consent for pelvic exams into medical education. It’s time for the rest of the country to catch up.

A pelvic examination has a different moral significance than suturing a wound.
Others argue that these exams are no big deal. At teaching hospitals, medical students participate in patient care in all sorts of ways—from chest drainage to suturing—and this is just one more aspect of teaching that takes place. It’s far too burdensome to mention any possible involvement that medical students might have during a surgery within the consent form.

But there’s a difference between these practices and unauthorized pelvic exams on unconscious women, and it’s that, unlike other forms of treatment, these pelvic exams are done with no medical benefit to the patient. The purpose is purely for students to learn how to perform the exam.

A pelvic examination also has a different moral significance than suturing a wound. Women are frequently nervous before pelvic exams, reporting feeling vulnerable, embarrassed, and subordinate. Those who have experienced sexual assault often find the experience particularly distressing. This discomfort is a sign that pelvic exams are sensitive experiences and should be treated as such.

It’s time to make informed consent for educational pelvic exams on anesthetized women routine. Several legislative documents are available for inspiration, and New Zealand has developed a clear policy requiring written consent before such exams. Rather than just teaching our future doctors how to perform a pelvic exam, let’s also teach them how to respect women’s bodies.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/pe ... nsent.html?
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Re: The War on Women

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 19, 2018 8:56 am

Julia Claire


In 2014 an Ohio judge punched his then-wife 20 times and slammed her head against the dashboard of his car five times, breaking her orbital bone in front of their children. He served only 9 months and was subsequently hired by the Mayor of Cleveland. Yesterday he killed her.


.....

He was granted judicial release nine months later. Part of his petition for early release included a letter to Fraser Mason in which he apologized to her, asked for her forgiveness and said he deeply regretted what happened.

......

Mason drove home after the attack. A family member reported to Cleveland police that he might attempt suicide, but Mason surrendered. Officers searching his home at the time found smoke grenades, semi-automatic rifles, a sword, a bulletproof vest and more than 2,500 rounds of ammunition from the home.
https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2018/11 ... ncart_push


they always apologize
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Re: The War on Women

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 27, 2018 11:52 am

The women killed on one day around the world

Image

An average of 137 women across the world are killed by a partner or family member every day, according to new data released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

They say it makes "the home the most likely place for a woman to be killed".

More than half of the 87,000 women killed in 2017 were reported as dying at the hands of those closest to them.

Of that figure, approximately 30,000 women were killed by an intimate partner and another 20,000 by a relative.

Short presentational grey line
BBC 100 Women wanted to find out more about the women behind the numbers. We spent October monitoring reports of gender-related killings of women on the first day of that month. We will share some of their stories below and find out more about how these killings were reported.

More than half of women killed were victims of relatives or partners
Male homicide rates still higher

The data collected by UNODC highlights that "men are around four times more likely than women to lose their lives as a result of intentional homicide".

The UN indicates that men accounted for eight out of 10 homicide victims worldwide.

However, the same report suggests that more than eight out of 10 victims of homicides committed by intimate partners are female.

"Intimate partner violence continues to take a disproportionately heavy toll on women," the report states.

Women are much more likely to be killed by someone close to them
Forty-seven women, 21 countries, one day

The UN statistics summarise the findings for 2017 based on homicide statistics provided by government sources. The figures for "gender-related killings of women and girls", or "femicide", are collated using the criteria of intimate partner/family-related homicide.

BBC 100 Women and BBC Monitoring set out to find out more about the women behind the numbers.

We monitored press coverage of women killed by another person on 1 October 2018 around the world. Our regional specialists counted 47 women reported killed, apparently for gender-related reasons, in 21 different countries. Most of these killings are still being investigated.

Here are five of these cases, reported initially by local media and then verified by local authorities the BBC contacted.

Judith ChesangFamily handout
Judith Chesang, 22, Kenya

On Monday 1 October, Judith Chesang and her sister Nancy were out in the fields harvesting their sorghum crop.

Judith, a mother of three, had recently separated from her husband, Laban Kamuren, and had decided to return to her parents' village in the north of the country.

Soon after the sisters began their duties, he arrived at the family farm where he attacked and killed Judith.

Local police say he has since been killed by villagers.

Women in Africa most at risk
Africa was where women ran the greatest risk of being killed by their intimate partner or family member, the UN report says. It occurred at a rate of 3.1 deaths per 100,000 people.

Asia had the greatest number of women killed by intimate partners or family members in 2017, with a total of 20,000.

Neha ChaudharyManohar Shewale
Neha Sharad Chaudury, 18, India

Neha Sharad Chaudury died in a suspected "honour" killing on her 18th birthday. She had been out celebrating with her boyfriend. Police confirmed to the BBC that her parents did not approve of the relationship.

Her parents and another male relative are accused of killing her in their home that evening.

The investigation continues and the three remain in judicial custody awaiting trial.

The BBC has learned from the lawyer representing Neha's parents and her male relative that they intend to deny the charges.

Hundreds of people are killed each year for falling in love or marrying against their families' wishes. Official data on so-called honour killings is hard to come by as such crimes are often unrecorded or unreported.

Zeinab SekaanvandPrivate via Amnesty International
Zeinab Sekaanvan, 24, Iran

Zeinab Sekaanvan was executed by the Iranian authorities for murdering her husband.

Zeinab was born in the north-west of Iran into a poor conservative family of Kurdish origin. She ran away as a teenager to marry in the hope of finding a better life.

Amnesty International says her husband was abusive and had refused to grant her a divorce, and that her complaints were ignored by police.

She was arrested for the killing of her husband at the age of 17.

Her supporters, including Amnesty, say she was tortured to confess to the killing of her husband, beaten by police and did not receive a fair trial.

The UNODC report suggests women who kill intimate partners have often experienced "extended periods of suffering physical violence".

Meanwhile, the motivations typically expressed by male perpetrators include "possessiveness, jealousy and fear of abandonment", the report says. This appears to be the case with another long-term couple who were found dead in Brazil on the same day that Zeinab was executed.

Sandra Lucia Hammer MouraReproduction / Facebook
Sandra Lucia Hammer Moura, 39, Brazil

Sandra Lucia Hammer Moura married Augusto Aguiar Ribeiro at the age of 16.

The couple had been separated for five months when she was killed by him.

Police in Jardim Taquari confirmed to BBC Brasil that she was stabbed in the neck.

They found a video of her husband confessing to the crime on his mobile phone. In it, he said that Sandra was already dating another man and he felt betrayed.

He also said in the video that he would not be arrested as the couple would go to the "glory of the Lord" together. He then hanged himself in what had been their bedroom.

Sandra's case highlights a form of killing known as a "murder-suicide" - when an individual kills one or more people before killing themselves.

BBC Monitoring found 14 cases of women killed on 1 October this year in Latin America. Two were in El Salvador.

Authorities in El Salvador have told the BBC that at least 300 women have been killed so far in 2018. Karla Turcio is one of them. Watch her story here.


Is El Salvador the worst country to be a woman?
Marie-Amélie VaillatPHOTOPQR/LE PROGRES/Photo Jean-Pierre BALFIN
Marie-Amélie Vaillat, 36, France

Marie-Amélie was stabbed to death by her husband, Sébastien Vaillat.

The couple had separated after four years of marriage.

He attacked her with a knife before confessing to the police. A few days later, he killed himself in prison.

Outside the door of Marie-Amélie Vaillat's lingerie shop on Rue Bichat, residents left a sea of flowers and organised a march in her memory.

The killing of Marie-Amélie came on the same day that the French government announced new plans to tackle domestic abuse.

A march in memory of Marie-Amélie VaillatPHOTOPQR/LE PROGRES/Photo Jean-Pierre BALFIN
A march in memory of Marie-Amélie Vaillat
Short presentational grey line
What does it take for a woman's killing to be reported?

To collect these stories, BBC Monitoring's international network of journalists and researchers analysed TV, radio, print, online and social media around the world, looking for reports of women killed, apparently for gender-related reasons, on 1 October 2018.

They found a total of 47 reports of women killed on that one day around the world. We have shared just some of those cases. There are many more where the motives were unclear, or the perpetrators unidentified.

The new UNODC report suggests that a large share of violence against women is "widely underreported to authorities and that a large share of such violence is hidden".

Rebecca Skippage, who led the project for BBC Monitoring, found that behind the numbers, "the way in which the media reported their lives and deaths revealed a huge amount about how women are viewed by different societies around the world".

She explains: "We were looking for deaths within one day, but we searched for that day's stories for a month. We found that the time-lag in reporting, the tone of the coverage or the scarcity of information often told a wider tale about the status of women in that region."

Maryam Azwer works for BBC Monitoring and drew much of the final data together.

"This is as much about the deaths that aren't reported, as those that are," she says.

"Those whose stories never reached the media, that went unreported, were unverified, or were not or could not be investigated. It makes you wonder: what does it take to make a woman's killing important enough to be reported?"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-46292919
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Re: The War on Women

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 28, 2018 3:38 pm

Ohio lawmakers are considering making abortion punishable by death
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Re: The War on Black Women

Postby Cordelia » Wed Nov 28, 2018 7:13 pm

What kind of (racist) message is The Washington Post trying to send via today's online, front page, headlining of this photo (the jpg below I won't embed out of respect for anyone female, black, obese... (My immediate thought was that it's to promote a new movie starring Eddie Murphy in dual roles but maybe that's my own unconscious conflict over some other message from from some other industry that I've internalized.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/ ... 5WEJSM.jpg
Two ad campaigns raise concerns for critic Robin Givhan. LEFT: Jason Wu and Eloquii highlighted a size-14 model, smaller than the average woman. RIGHT: In striving for in-your-face realism with a size-24 model, Universal Standard is hardly showcasing her in her best light. (Chloe LeDrezen/Eloquii; Ronan McKenzie/Universal Standard)

What kind of message is fashion trying to send plus-size women?

By Robin Givhan

November 27 at 5:25 PM

What kind of message is fashion trying to send larger women? Consider two recent photos.

In one, designer Jason Wu launched his holiday collaboration with plus-size brand Eloquii with a retro black-and-white image of a coquettish model in a demure, full-skirted party dress. Her skin is poreless and gleaming. Her hair is immaculately slicked back. She looks like a fantasy. And at a size 14, smaller than the average American woman, she arguably is.

In the other, Universal Standard promoted its new loungewear with a full-color image that is almost the direct opposite — a size 24 woman in her white skivvies, generous rolls of flesh exposed to harsh lighting and the camera’s glare. Her skin tone is unretouched and uneven. Her hair is a bit frizzed. She gazes defiantly out beyond the viewer. She looks palpably real.

Together, the pictures exemplify a fashion industry debating how to speak to plus-size customers in a way that feels both inclusive and authentic. The Wu portrait is familiar fashion glitz — a beautiful lie. The Universal Standard picture aims for a kind of raw honesty, and it upends everything the culture has taught us about beauty and desirability.

Fashion, by its nature, reaches for extremes. As a result, it has always made size inclusivity so much more of an event than it ever needed to be. It has politicized, weaponized and fetishized fat.
Now, as waiflike models are replaced with Rubenesque ones, can plus-size fashion be freed from the burdens of identity politics and cultural prejudices — to simply exist as clothes and not statements? When will a plus-size model get to stop representing diversity and simply be part of the pack? Does every plus-size model really slay?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyl ... eb30cd8ca7


I don't disagree, and/but The Washington Post reaches for extremes. As a result, it makes (fill in your choice of subjects) inclusivity so much more of an event than it ever needed to be. It has politicized, weaponized and fetishized (many people, views, subjects, etc...).
The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

We may not choose the parameters of our destiny. But we give it its content. ~ Dag Hammarskjold 'Waymarks'
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Re: The War on Women

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 10, 2018 6:40 pm

Supreme Court Justices Won’t Hear States’ Appeal Over Planned Parenthood

New Justice Brett Kavanaugh was among the justices who opted not to hear the case.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday avoided a high-profile case by rejecting appeals from Kansas and Louisiana in their effort to strip Medicaid money from Planned Parenthood, over the dissenting votes of three justices.

The court’s order reflected a split among its conservative justices and an accusation from Justice Clarence Thomas that his colleagues seemed to be ducking the case for political reasons. New Justice Brett Kavanaugh was among the justices who opted not to hear the case.

The two states were appealing lower court rulings that had blocked them from withholding money that is used for health services for low-income women. The money is not used for abortions. Abortion opponents have said Planned Parenthood should not receive any government money because of heavily edited videos that claimed to show the nation’s largest abortion provider profiting from sales of fetal tissue for medical research.

Investigations sparked by the videos in several states didn’t result in criminal charges.

The dispute at the high court has nothing to do with abortion, as Thomas pointed out in a dissent that was joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. Kavanaugh’s decision not to join the three justices was his first discernible vote on the court. Had he or Chief Justice John Roberts voted to hear the case, there would have been the four votes necessary to set the case for arguments.

The issue is who has the right to challenge a state’s Medicaid funding decisions, private individuals or only the federal government. The states say that the Medicaid program, a joint venture of federal and state governments to provide health care to poorer Americans, makes clear that only the Secretary of Health and Human Services can intervene, by withholding money from a state.

Most lower federal courts have found that private parties can challenge Medicaid funding decisions in court, although the federal appeals court in St. Louis rejected a similar court challenge and allowed Arkansas to end its contract with Planned Parenthood. A split among federal appeals courts is often a reason for the Supreme Court to step in.

“So what explains the court’s refusal to do its job here? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named ‘Planned Parenthood.’ That makes the Court’s decision particularly troubling, as the question presented has nothing to do with abortion,” Thomas wrote.

The dispute over funding for Planned Parenthood stemmed from the July 2015 release by the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress of a series of edited videos purportedly depicting Planned Parenthood of America executives talking about the sale of fetal tissue. Planned Parenthood has said it did not seek any payments beyond legally permitted reimbursement of costs.

Catherine Glenn Foster, president and CEO of the anti-abortion Americans United for Life, said the court should have heard the case. “But the good news is that there are other similar cases pending in lower courts, which may give the Supreme Court another opportunity to decide this important issue. In the meantime, AUL will continue to fight to protect states from being forced to use their limited public funds to subsidize abortion businesses,” Foster said.

Planned Parenthood president Dr. Leana Wen praised the decision to leave the lower court rulings in place. “As a doctor, I have seen what’s at stake when people cannot access the care they need, and when politics gets in the way of people making their own health care choices. We won’t stop fighting for every patient who relies on Planned Parenthood for life-saving, life-changing care,” Wen said.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/su ... cb27eb4688
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Re: The War on Women

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Dec 23, 2018 5:13 pm

Thanks to Trump's steel slat tantrum, the Violence Against Women Act expired with the shutdown

Jessica Sutherland
Daily Kos Staff
Saturday December 22, 2018 · 11:10 AM CST
Recommend 90 Share 2237 Tweet 24 Comments 24 new
Supporters of Planned Parenthood dressed as characters from "The Handmaid's Tale," hold a rally as they protest the US Senate Republicans' healthcare bill outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, June 27, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

Go ahead and add victims of sexual assault, stalking, and domestic violence to the list of casualties from the third government shutdown of 2018, as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has expired. VAWA, the landmark legislation enacted in 1994, has found short-term reprieves twice this year, with extensions granted on September 30 and December 7, but not so with the shutdown that kicked in at midnight on Saturday. VAWA programs are funded through the Justice Department, or, at least, they were.

It’s just the latest disappointment served up by an administration led by a pussy-grabbing womanizer who added a second accused sexual predator to the Supreme Court.

Even as Congress congratulates itself for passing legislation that makes it somewhat easier for victims of sexual harassment in the workplace to advocate for themselves, and no longer places the bill for payoffs to victims on the backs of taxpayers, extending VAWA beyond the short-term was a bridge too far, both earlier this month and in September … and earlier this summer.

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Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee introduced the VAWA Reauthorization Act of 2018 in July, but the GOP-held House refused to bring it to the Floor for a vote. Soon-to-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi attempted to nudge House Republicans to enact more than a few-week fix, to no avail.

As Members of Congress, it is our responsibility to ensure that every woman, in every part of our society, can live free from violence. Yet, the continued refusal over many years of House Republicans to extend VAWA’s critical protections to include vulnerable communities, particularly Native American, immigrant and LGBTQ communities, represents a blatant dereliction of that duty.

[...]

This common sense reauthorization bill has 163 cosponsors and has the support of the nonpartisan groups representing communities around the country, and deserves strong bipartisan support in the Congress. It is shocking and shameful that under your leadership, the GOP has refused to bring this reauthorization bill to the Floor for a vote.

Republicans’ decision to include only a short-term VAWA reauthorization in the must-pass minibus spending bill is nothing short of an abdication of our responsibilities to women in our country.
Despite the no-brainer, bipartisan support the Act enjoyed this summer (with an ultimately disappointing lack of a long-term solution), not a single Republican co-sponsored the December extension.

Not. A. Single. One.

So what does this mean for those seeking the benefits that VAWA provides? The Boston Globe offered this explanation, just before the early December deadline:

While a failure to meet that looming deadline does not mean the funding would disappear instantly, the money would dry up eventually, hindering efforts to strengthen existing programs and create new policies designed to help survivors and eradicate domestic violence.
Ah, no big deal, right? WRONG.

VAWA “has brought a tremendous amount of attention to the issues of domestic violence and sexual assault,” said Maureen Gallagher, policy director at Jane Doe Inc., a statewide anti-sexual and domestic violence organization. “The funding that does come to states helps support the work of community-based rape crisis centers and domestic violence programs. If that were to go away, it would be really devastating.”
And here it is, gone away. It’s worth noting that yet another short-term extension for VAWA, ending in early February, was included in both the House’s continuing resolution and the Senate’s spending bill, which passed their respective bodies this week.

But as Donald Trump tells the nation to prepare for a “very long” shutdown, the prospect of that money drying up eventually becomes that much more likely.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/1 ... e-shutdown
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Re: The War on Women

Postby Jerky » Mon Dec 24, 2018 2:19 pm

Well now... could it be that Kavanaugh (loathsome as his performance before the Senate undeniably was) is going to end up being a center-right spoiler who goes against social conservatives in favor of strictly fiscal conservative decisions? Pissing off Thomas seems like a strange way to build up his far right bona fides right off the bat, no?

Jerky

seemslikeadream » 10 Dec 2018 22:40 wrote:
Supreme Court Justices Won’t Hear States’ Appeal Over Planned Parenthood

New Justice Brett Kavanaugh was among the justices who opted not to hear the case.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday avoided a high-profile case by rejecting appeals from Kansas and Louisiana in their effort to strip Medicaid money from Planned Parenthood, over the dissenting votes of three justices.

The court’s order reflected a split among its conservative justices and an accusation from Justice Clarence Thomas that his colleagues seemed to be ducking the case for political reasons. New Justice Brett Kavanaugh was among the justices who opted not to hear the case.

The two states were appealing lower court rulings that had blocked them from withholding money that is used for health services for low-income women. The money is not used for abortions. Abortion opponents have said Planned Parenthood should not receive any government money because of heavily edited videos that claimed to show the nation’s largest abortion provider profiting from sales of fetal tissue for medical research.

Investigations sparked by the videos in several states didn’t result in criminal charges.

The dispute at the high court has nothing to do with abortion, as Thomas pointed out in a dissent that was joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. Kavanaugh’s decision not to join the three justices was his first discernible vote on the court. Had he or Chief Justice John Roberts voted to hear the case, there would have been the four votes necessary to set the case for arguments.

The issue is who has the right to challenge a state’s Medicaid funding decisions, private individuals or only the federal government. The states say that the Medicaid program, a joint venture of federal and state governments to provide health care to poorer Americans, makes clear that only the Secretary of Health and Human Services can intervene, by withholding money from a state.

Most lower federal courts have found that private parties can challenge Medicaid funding decisions in court, although the federal appeals court in St. Louis rejected a similar court challenge and allowed Arkansas to end its contract with Planned Parenthood. A split among federal appeals courts is often a reason for the Supreme Court to step in.

“So what explains the court’s refusal to do its job here? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named ‘Planned Parenthood.’ That makes the Court’s decision particularly troubling, as the question presented has nothing to do with abortion,” Thomas wrote.

The dispute over funding for Planned Parenthood stemmed from the July 2015 release by the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress of a series of edited videos purportedly depicting Planned Parenthood of America executives talking about the sale of fetal tissue. Planned Parenthood has said it did not seek any payments beyond legally permitted reimbursement of costs.

Catherine Glenn Foster, president and CEO of the anti-abortion Americans United for Life, said the court should have heard the case. “But the good news is that there are other similar cases pending in lower courts, which may give the Supreme Court another opportunity to decide this important issue. In the meantime, AUL will continue to fight to protect states from being forced to use their limited public funds to subsidize abortion businesses,” Foster said.

Planned Parenthood president Dr. Leana Wen praised the decision to leave the lower court rulings in place. “As a doctor, I have seen what’s at stake when people cannot access the care they need, and when politics gets in the way of people making their own health care choices. We won’t stop fighting for every patient who relies on Planned Parenthood for life-saving, life-changing care,” Wen said.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/su ... cb27eb4688
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Re: The War on Women

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 22, 2019 10:04 am

Wendy Siegelman


Trump Admin Quietly Changed the Definition of Domestic Violence last April - narrowing it by casting domestic violence as a criminal concern & removing mention of non-physical violence including emotional, economic or psychological abuse, by @NatalieNanasi



Below is definition of domestic violence updated by Trump admin last April https://www.justice.gov/ovw/domestic-violence

Image

Here’s the prior definition of domestic violence https://web.archive.org/web/20180409111 ... c-violence
Image

Image



The Trump Administration Quietly Changed the Definition of Domestic Violence and We Have No Idea What For

Natalie NanasiJan 21, 20191:00 PM
Donald Trump stands outside, wearing a red tie and grimacing.
Donald Trump answers questions from the press as he leaves the White House on Jan. 14.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Without fanfare or even notice, the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women made significant changes to its definition of domestic violence in April. The Obama-era definition was expansive, vetted by experts including the National Center for Victims of Crime and the National Domestic Violence Hotline. The Trump administration’s definition is substantially more limited and less informed, effectively denying the experiences of victims of abuse by attempting to cast domestic violence as an exclusively criminal concern.

The previous definition included critical components of the phenomenon that experts recognize as domestic abuse—a pattern of deliberate behavior, the dynamics of power and control, and behaviors that encompass physical or sexual violence as well as forms of emotional, economic, or psychological abuse. But in the Trump Justice Department, only harms that constitute a felony or misdemeanor crime may be called domestic violence. So, for example, a woman whose partner isolates her from her family and friends, monitors her every move, belittles and berates her, or denies her access to money to support herself and her children is not a victim of domestic violence in the eyes of Trump’s Department of Justice. This makes no sense for an office charged with funding and implementing solutions to the problem of domestic violence rather than merely prosecuting individual abusers.

For varied reasons, many survivors make an informed choice to not initiate a criminal case.
Restoring nonphysical violence to the definition of domestic violence is critical. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports, over one-third of U.S. women (43.5 million) have experienced “psychological aggression” at the hands of an intimate partner. Experts have long recognized that the manipulative behaviors identified in the Obama-era definition as restricting a victim’s liberty or freedom can cause greater and more lasting damage than physical harm. I know this from my experiences over a decade working with survivors of domestic violence. In nearly every case, the bruises and broken bones eventually heal, but the psychological scars can last a lifetime.

Trump has attempted to brand his administration as one of “law and order,” so shoehorning domestic violence into a criminal justice framework may seem to him like a sensible way to recast the issue. But it isn’t. The assumption that domestic violence must involve a criminal justice response demonstrates a myopic understanding of abuse. Many survivors—particularly those from minority or marginalized communities—are reluctant to report domestic violence to law enforcement. Race, class, sexual orientation, and immigration status can significantly affect whether a survivor decides to seek outside intervention when suffering violence in the home. A call to the police may make a survivor less safe if, for example, doing so intensifies the abuser’s anger or the arrest of a primary breadwinner renders her homeless. Some survivors do not report because they do not want their abusers to face criminal punishment or because they generally distrust law enforcement. For varied reasons, many survivors therefore make an informed choice to not initiate a criminal case.

A domestic violence relationship rarely begins with physical violence, much less violence that rises to the level of a crime. If you were punched on a first date, odds are there wouldn’t be a second. Intimate partner abuse is insidious: Emotional and psychological abuse escalates to physical violence as an abuser’s need and/or ability to exert power and control increases. In the United States today, more than half of female homicide victims are killed by an intimate partner. If we do not acknowledge the “small” things—yelling or screaming, name-calling, and controlling or monitoring communication and social media—victims may not realize they are in danger until it is too late.

It is too early to assess the full impact of the Trump administration’s definitional change. The Office on Violence Against Women engages in a broad array of activities in its implementation of the Violence Against Women Act. Perhaps grants that support community efforts to combat domestic and sexual abuse will be restricted to agencies serving victims of crime, leaving survivors without critical resources. If OVW’s training, education, and technical assistance curriculum is revised to adhere to the new definition, those experiencing “mere” emotional, economic, or psychological harms may no longer be considered victims. (It is further noteworthy that OVW simultaneously altered the definition of sexual assault, with the new definition containing a similar criminal justice focus.) What is clear is that these seemingly semantic changes, even if not yet embodied in official law or policy, are part of a broader trend toward the devaluation of women by this administration and this president.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... hange.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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