Since I know you readers are deeply interested in fighting the good fight for social justice in the bedrooms and parlors of this nation, I'm sure you've seen this horrible video:
This was posted by Hillary Adams, whose father is Judge William Adams, who is a judge for Aransas County, which is in the Gulf region of Texas. Adams admits that it's him in the video, and in the style of abusers everywhere, is leaning on the "just a scratch" excuse, as well as skepticism-inducing claims that his behavior here is somehow out of character. (Compare to Cain's statements this past week for another example of how this works.) No one is buying it, of course, since we all see with our eyes how hard he whipped his daughter with the belt. Additionally, since Hillary set the camera up in her room specifically to capture this, we have to assume a) that this had happened enough before to compel that choice and b) that she was getting really good at predicting when he would go off like this. Research into domestic violence shows that it's not uncommon for victims to become well-attuned to when their abusers have a desire to whip the shit out of someone, and they do in fact get good at predicting it. This also belies the abusers' claim that it's a matter of "losing your temper", but that they are in control of their emotions.
When something like this happens, it's important to put it into context so people realize that behavior like this is not isolated or unusual, sadly. Jill has addressed how common it is for people with disabilities, who are often especially dependent on caregivers, to suffer abuse like this. Hillary has stated that Adams abused all his family members, but it seems he had a special hankering for whipping his only daughter, who happens to suffer from cerebal palsy, so we can see how it fits into this pattern. I want to add to this, and discuss abuse in the context of fundamentalist Christianity.
Now, I couldn't find any religious information about Judge Adams, but he is a Republican, raising the chances to "high" that he's an evangelical Christian. More importantly, if you watch the video---which I only recommend you do if you have the stomach for this sort of thing---one thing will really jump out at you if you follow the workings of the Christian right. Adams keeps using somewhat strange terms like "disobedient" and "submission". For secular people, even those who have witnessed abuse, it's really rare to see someone spell out their goals of inducing submission and obedience. (Or maybe not. I'm sure commenters have some thoughts.) Other language is employed, in no small part because abusers also have to enact a mindfuck on their victims, and convince them that the abuse isn't somehow apart from the values of their time, which for secular people and moderate religious people include equality and individuality. But the words "obedience" and "submission" are flung around Christian right circles without any hesitation. When speaking to outsiders, they often try to play that awful-sounding language off as something not as bad as it sounds. Their schtick is to pretend that they're just using archaic words for the funsies, but when they say something like "submission", they don't really mean submission. (Michele Bachmann tried this tactic when asked about her pride in being submissive to her husband.) But they do mean it. It's impossible to believe otherwise, when you're reading, say, James Dobson extolling the virtues of whipping your kids into submission, or Christian housewives on blogs discussing how much of a struggle it is to frame their legitimate concerns into a submissive framework where even asking questions can sometimes be seen as an affront to a man's godly right to have the final say over household manners. They do in fact believe in a strict hierarchy of power in the household, and in fact, I would argue that fighting against feminist progress on the home front is their main organizing principle.
They don't feel that spanking is the same thing as hitting. They will defend it to their dying breath. Christian culture is very concerned that the government may take away their right to spank.
Pretty much all right wing Christian child-rearing manuals are paens to beating your children. And I mean beating. If confronted about this, fundies tend to backpedal and play off their obsession with spanking as if it's the same thing as a mild pat on the ass delivered to a toddler who has tried to run out in traffic or something. But they lean on the "rod" talk in the Bible, which means they are big on using weapons to beat your children. James Dobson believes you should beat children with a paddle or a tree branch, which he has somehow managed to rationalize into "loving" behavior. And he's probably the most mainstream! Other, less popular family "advice" books get even more elaborate when it comes to describing how to select the weapons to use against someone so much smaller than you. Now, that doesn't mean that all or even most fundamentalist Christians whip the shit out of their kids like this guy did. However, once you've created a cultural expectation that abusing your children is not only acceptable but expected, you can expect people to take it to the next level. Outside of the cursing and the threats to hit her in the face, in fact, there's not much in this video that falls outside of the Christian right prescriptions for "disciplining" a child.
Regardless of Judge Adams' personal beliefs, Christian right ideas about family hierarchy and paranoia that the government is coming to take away their "spanking" rights (I hate calling it "spanking", which allows people to equate it with painless bottom pats, which I still think aren't such a great idea but can't be meaningfully compared to whippings in any way) are the water that conservatives are swimming in when it comes to the Bible Belt. That context needs to be understood when looking at this video. It's not enough to be angry with Judge Adams and call for him to leave his job. We need to look at an entire culture that teaches that beating your children is a good thing to do.
By the way, I want to quickly address the people who are all over internet defending Adams by saying, "I was whipped and I turned out okay." Using the surival skills of victims to condone abuse is not okay. That's like saying it's okay to throw yourself downstairs because two years from now, that broken leg will be completely healed. The here and now counts as much as the later. A child is more than the adult they will become. They are a human being now, and their pain and suffering now matters.
It's hard to bother responding to professional concern troll Charlotte Allen's "concern" that women are raping themselves with their slutty Halloween costumes. Allen deliberately misunderstands what Slutwalk is about, and basically claims that the only reason men rape is because they're uncontrollable animals who are easily provoked by a little skin into violent assault. I'm sure Allen would be thrilled to know the fundamentalist Muslims who make life hard for women in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia fully agree with her that women rape themselves by showing bare skin; the only thing they're quibbling aobut is when a man's ability to control himself flies out the window. Is it when he sees a strand of hair, a flash of ankle, or a bit of thigh? Misogynsts worldwide love to entertain themselves drawing these arbitrary lines of when they can safely say the lady done raped herself with her sluttiness.
Jill, Lindsay, and Hugo have thoroughly debunked this nonsense. Allen's sole "proof" that hawtness causes rape is that women under 30 are more likely to be raped, and Jill neatly puts that argument to bed by demonstrating that victims of all sorts of aggravated assault are likelier to be young. I will point out that Allen has just encouraged rapists to attack women under 30, however. Since we know that women under 30 are, by Allen's measure, "asking for it", the rapist knows he can target them for rape with assurance that at least Allen has his back when he starts pointing the finger at the victim and blaming her.
I have a couple of things to add to these debunkings. I just want to note that Allen's anti-feminist schtick is about an inch deep. She erects strawfeminists and knocks them down, and she doesn't really care if it makes sense or if she shows any signs of intellectual consistency or curiosity. Spit on feminists, cash the check: that's the game. So in this LA Times article, she writes:
But the fact that rapists tend to target young women rather than grandmotherly types suggests that in the real rape culture (in contrast to the imaginary rape culture of some feminist ideology), the faux-hos of Halloween and their SlutWalker counterparts marching in their underwear — like a man walking at night with a bulging wallet — should be careful about where they flash their treasure.
So, basically cover up you filthy sluts, or you have it coming when someone rapes you. Contrast that with Allen in 2005, when she blamed feminism for her and her husband having to endure---oh, how they suffer!---looking at middle-aged women working as flight attendants.
Frankly, even as a woman, I miss the old sexist days, when stewardesses were stewardesses: pretty young things in cute mini-suits and little heels who oozed attention onto everyone–because who knew? They might end up marrying one of the passengers … Why does feminism have to mean the triumph of the ugly and the surly?
According to Allen, feminism is wrong because it encourages young women to rape themselves by flashing their "treasure". But feminism is also wrong because it allows women who aren't sexy young things flashing their "treasure" to hold jobs and be seen in public. (At the time this was written, a blogger retaliated by putting up Allen's picture where she looks pretty middle-aged and surly, which started a flamewar. I realize the problems with that approach, but I still laugh and laugh to think about it. When you write rules, you should be expected to follow them.) So feminism is wrong for the sexy and the anti-sexy, right? I guess it depends on who's writing the checks.
The main thing is that Allen believes that no matter what women do, they're wrong. And that goes quadruple if women are foolish enough to think that they don't deserve to be violently assaulted or otherwise mistreated by men.
As for my personal experience with Halloween costumes and rape, I will say that I did in fact wear a "slutty" Halloween costume around the guy who raped me. Our junior year of college, my roommate and I went as an angel/devil combo---basically a last minute thing cobbled together out of our closets and what we could buy at the drugstore. I was, duh, the devil, and wore a miniskirt and a corset-y looking top, along with fishnets and devil horns. (Also extremely cool gold false eyelashes that I would wear all the time if I could get away with it.) I'm not one for sexy costumes for the sake of it, but I was young and dumb and at least the costume called for some sex appeal, as opposed to some of your stranger "sexy" costumes. What happened to me that night was went to the punk bar, we drank some beer, we watched the band play, we saw our friends, and we went home safely. The guy who ended up raping me also just hung out, though if I recall correctly, he also broke up a bar fight in the bar we were at. The night he got around to violently assaulting me, I was not wearing a corset and a miniskirt. Nor was I interacting with him in any way---he literally saw five seconds of me that night, as I was sitting in jeans and a T-shirt playing video games with a male friend of mine. And then I went to bed, where he assaulted me, nearly 6 months after he saw me in my slutty Halloween costume. In terms of uncontrollable passion forcing him to assault me, I have to say that was an unbelievably slow burn. In my general experience, lust tends to work a little faster. And, if I recall correctly---which I think I do, since that Halloween was really fun---he didn't really seem to pay much attention to me at all at the beginning of the 6 month build-up of uncontrollable lust. Really, I think it's much easier to believe that instead of it being a situation where he couldn't simply stop desiring me and the drove him to madness, it's safer to say that actually he didn't really care much about me one way or another, and attacked me because he mistook me for someone who had passed out drunk (instead of someone who hadn't had excessive amounts to drink but was simply tired). More a crime of opportunity born out of a desire to hurt women, and less uncontrollable lust.
I was going to ignore this Dr. Pepper "bitches ain't shit" campaign on the grounds that it's just catering to the Tea Party-fication of America. It's clear the whole point of it is to convince sexist assholes that using this product will piss off the feminists, since they have empty, meaningless lives that can only be filled up with the hopes that they're somehow pissing off the liberals. Being angry about it just contributes to their disease, because it gives them a temporary fix and discourages them from developing lives with meaning that will keep them from wanting so desperately to piss off the liberals. But Scott highlighted this aspect of the website advertising Bitches Ain't Shit Cola, or whatever it's called:
This week, the company unleashed a new campaign on Facebook, including a “man quiz” and a shooting gallery that aims at girly things like lipstick.
Yeah, because the right way to react when your sense of masculinity is threatened is to whip out a gun.
Obviously, Dr. Pepper rolled out this campaign before there was a mass shooting that left 8 dead, in which the murderer was apparently motivated to get revenge on his ex-wife over not getting his way in a custody battle. But if they'd done a little market research, they would have been able to predict the reaction from the very same misogynists they hope will buy up their soda. David Futrelle gathered some at Man Boobz. The theme of the comments he collected was, "Children are the property of men who create them all by themselves by ejacualating into incubators we call "women", and when you're done with your incubator, she shouldn't be able to get custody over your child-property, no matter what a judge says. And anyone who disagrees only has themselves to blame if they get shot in the face." A sample:
E]nough of this type of offensive action might just start making women and their supporters* think twice, especially if they also become targets. (* Divorce attorneys, child services workers and counselors, family court judges, and other enabling cogs in the feminist legal system)......
Essentially men need to tell feminism to shut the fuck up, give it a vigorous slap across the face thus reminding it who is the biological superior, then order it back into the kitchen/bedroom.......
What options other than overt acts of physical violence are there for a man to deal with a shrew ex and corrupt family court system?....
Most men will just lay down and be resigned to the state-enforced kidnapping and extortion plot, but some are made of tougher stuff and for you to whine about this dead ex-wife or that is inconsequential and no loss to humanity.
I submit that women … are much more likely to pay attention when they’re being threatened.
So yeah, no matter how "cute" or "harmless" you may think misogyny is---or invoking violent misogyny---unfortunately, in the real world, it's not cute or harmless at all.
In a bit of news that will no doubt cause rejoicing amongst "men's rights activists", Topeka, KS has decriminalized wife-beating. In case that is hard to register, let me repeat: it is now basically legal to beat your wife in Topeka. If this fuckwittery isn't halted quickly, I expect that the Topeka airport will have to start booking a whole lot more flights to Russia and Thailand, as they experience a surge in new residents who have a strong interest in acquiring mail order brides. Just make sure not to have any more "Ladies Nights" at the bars, Topeka, because your new residents really hate to see bitches get half-priced drinks while they're in the club, trying to get with women half their age using tried! and! true! "pick-up artist" techniques.
All jokes aside, this new decision by Topeka is intensely dangerous. The rationale for it is they don't have the money to prosecute domestic violence cases any longer, and because of this, they're basically letting abusers go home to their victims, no doubt filled with rage that said bitches dared called the cops on them in the first place.
In the month since new prosecutions of domestic violence stopped in Topeka, there have been at least 35 reported cases of domestic battery or assault, and 18 people jailed have been released without facing charges.
What happened is that Topeka stopped enforcing misdemeanors, and as long as you make sure to beat your wife without a weapon, domestic violence is a misdemeanor in Topeka. Not that I'm weighing in on what kind of crime is should be classified as, of course, but when it comes to domestic violence, it's really a piss-poor idea to just ignore it when it happens in the early "no weapon" stages. As any expert on this could tell you, abusers tend to escalate the abuse over time. They see how far they can go without consequences, and if there aren't any, they up the ante, often with an end goal of basically beating any remaining will or autonomy out of their victims. The earlier in the process they face consequences, often the easier it is for a victim to escape. If there's one place where "broken windows" theory absolutely can be shown to work, it's with domestic violence.
I realize that prosecuting domestic violence is a really frustrating thing to do. Often, victims refuse to testify and plead with the police to drop charges. But that's all the more reason to do it; often inducing a separation between abuser and victim gives the victim time to, for lack of a better term, snap out of it. Certainly, it keeps the abuser away from her while he's steaming with rage that she dared to call the cops (they often also feel it was her fault for "starting" it, an explanation that comes up frequently on "men's rights" forums). Being consistent with consequences works to stop domestic violence; according to Bill Scher's reading of the federal government's crime statistics, the Violence Against Women Act---which emphasizes outreach to victims and swift consequences for abusers---has led to a 50% drop in non-fatal domestic assaults, and a 20% drop in domestic murders. (This sudden shift towards real consequences for abuse is, I believe, just as much an instigator for the expansion of the "men's rights" movement as is the internet.) Interestingly, the drop in female-on-male murders was more dramatic, mostly because enforcing domestic violence laws gives victims the option to leave, and they don't get so desperate that they shoot their abusers. You rarely see such a stellar example of how enforcing the law can cause a dramatic drop in crime, and yet, here Topeka is giving up on doing what we know works. I can't help but think indifference to women's safety is feeding this, as is the heavy influence of fundamentalist Christian teachings that domestic violence is the victim's fault for being inadequately submissive, as well as so-called libertarian influences that would have the government butt out, allowing men to treat women like property.
A thought: this entire case reminds me strongly of the spate of Satanic ritual abuse accusations in the 80s that put a good number of innocent people in jail, some who are still there. It's not just the baseless accusations of Satanism-inspired sexual torture and murder, either. It's that these accusations seem to be a response to widespread cultural anxiety about women's claims to be independent and free. I firmly believe suspicions were aimed at day cares (as opposed to public schools) in the 80s because day cares symbolized women entering the workforce in record numbers, and doing so in a way that made it clear things would never go back to the way they were. In Knox's case, it's super-duper-clear that the railroading of her was shot through with vicious misogyny. Yes, there were other factors, including Italian resentment of American college kids who act like overgrown children who never learned good manners, but let's not kid ourselves. The eagerness to to pin this crime on Knox had as much to do with wanting to string up a woman for a violent sex crime as anything else, even though very few women actually commit sex crimes in the real world. It's not that there's never any women who do what Knox was accused of---joining a man for a violent sex crime (her then-boyfriend has also been exonerated, thank goodness, since he's equally innocent)---but it's both exceedingly rare and when it does happen, it's not the first week that they're dating. You don't leap to that first, and you don't stick to it like you were super-glued despite the evidence against that theory, unless you have an agenda, which I believe the prosecution had.
What was interesting about the Satanic ritual abuse situation is that so many feminists got caught up in the hysteria. Historically speaking, this makes some sense. Child abuse was a feminist issue, and it basically got hijacked by more right wing impulses to attack the places that made it possible for so many mothers to work. In a similar way, feminist critiques of porn were hijacked by the right and, in a move that basically helped destroy all feminist momentum in the 80s, some feminists decided to go along with the right on the issue. Since then, we've seen a lot of other feminist impulses get hijacked and distorted by the right, though feminists have grown wiser about how this works and don't give in so much. Now when right wingers steal feminist language and claim, for instance, that sonograms for women who want abortions are necessary for "informed consent"---a feminist idea---we see the ruse for what it is. Not as much in the 80s. That was a hard-learned lesson.
I do sense a small bit of this problem of feminist-duping going on with the Amanda Knox case, however. I haven't heard anyone denounce her or claim she's guilty, thank goodness, but I have heard a lot of people suggest that perhaps we shouldn't care that much because Knox is a privileged white woman and that's why her case is getting so much attention. (I've felt this to a degree myself.) That may be true, but I also think there's more going on than that. This case has also risen to prominence because people wanted to believe in her guilt. Which I suspect taps into cross-cultural misogynist desires. It's also become a focal point for widespread problems of sexism in Italy. Above all, cases where people are actually busting out the Satanism card grab attention because this is the 21st century, and well, this is the 21st century. Knox's case is a lot like the West Memphis Three, who faced similar accusations of Satanism that were used to railroad them for a crime they didn't commit. That Satan-worshipping is bandied around in criminal justice cases like it's a real thing should be a matter of concern for all of us. It's a symptom of a larger problem, and ignoring the usefulness of this case to highlight problems of misogyny, miscarriage of justice, and the way that false beliefs are presented as truth in court is an unwise thing to do.
Today's Panda Party is dedicated to Slutwalk, which is coming to NYC tomorrow at noon at Union Square in Manhattan. I really like these pictures from Slutwalk in Argentina, where they call it Marcha de las Putas.
What I don't get about all the confusion about the Slutwalk methods and message in the U.S. is examples like this: Slutwalk's sense of humor and message is so obvious, so straightforward that it crosses borders without much struggle. If read the satellite list at the original, Toronto Slutwalk, you'll see that the march has expanded beyond culturally similar, English-speaking countries, but that's jumpinng language barriers with relative ease. This is because the message is actually simple and what women have been dying to say. This is a protest march that fits the "yes means yes" mentality. This is women saying, "I have every right to say yes to sex with who I want, to wearing what I want, to going to parties, to getting my education, to working in a male-dominated environment, to having interests that threaten anxious men's ideas of masculinity, to being butch or to be femme, to being single, to being out at late hours, to having a job that may not be so great but pays the bills, to being a sex worker, to having a less than virginal past, etc. None of these things mean you have a right to rape or sexually abuse me."
This year hasn't been a good one for that message. This year was practically designed to remind people of how rape isn't taken seriously by authorities and/or by the public if the victim is considered less than "worthy" for any of the above reasons. People still believe that the price of admission to a party, a boy's club, a sexually active life, a miniskirt is being groped, cat-called and raped.
I was just reading another example of this problem this morning, as Rebecca Watson came out about all the abuse that she's faced over Elevatorgate. Elevatorgate is a perfect example of the problem here; Rebecca made what should have been an uncontroversial point about how, because a woman enters a male-dominated space like atheist/skeptic circles doesn't mean she's an object whose personal space and privacy can be violated by anyone who wants to do it. Her critics disagree, and feel that simply being a female skeptic means that you have to forsake your right to dignity, safety, and quite possibly to declining sexual invitations that aren't going to be enjoyable for you. For her simple request that men not corner her in elevators and make her worry that she's about to be violently assaulted, she's been called the usual names. The message from these men are clear; women in the atheist/skeptic community have two choices, to either tolerate sexual harassment in silence or to leave the community. They believe the price of admission to what they believe it their club---after all, they're men!---is to be reduced to an object whose feelings about sexual interactions are irrelevant.
So I'm marching for people like Rebecca, whose sexuality is used as a weapon against her to silence her voice and keep all the plum spaces male-only. I'm marching for women like Nafissatou Diallo, who prosecutors still believe was raped but whose case was dropped because we really do hold rape cases to a much higher standard of proof than pretty much any other crime. I'm marching for the victim of the NYPD rape cops, who saw her abusers walk free in no small part because the jury just couldn't get past their disapproval that she had been drinking so much that night (I'd bet most of them have done the same a couple times in their lives). I marching for myself, and in memory for all the stupid names the rapist called me and weak excuses that he came up with for why he decided it was okay to crawl in bed with a sleeping woman who had absolutely not invited him. I'm marching for women whose access to the sidewalks is restricted by catcalls, who avoid taking the jobs they want because they know the men in those environments will react with sexualized hostility, who endure groping and catcalls at school as the "price" they pay just trying to get an education, who have to spend much of a night out monitoring each other's safety because men will corner your or slip drugs into your drinks, who try to make a living in the hard world of sex work and who know if they get raped, they have no recourse, who can't escape abusive marriages because people are so worried about wondering what's wrong with you that you married an abuser they forget to ask what's wrong with him that he hits and rapes you.
But first we party at the Panda Party. Because hey, part of the whole point is that we should have fun without being guilted, abused, or shamed for it. One half of Slutwalk is to say that we shouldn't be forced to suffer, and the other half is to say that we should be allowed to be free to do our thing.
Condolences to Troy Davis's family; I cannot imagine what it must be like to lose a family member because the state railroaded him into the death penalty to appease a bloodthirsty and unduly frightened public. I hope the outrage over this case is channeled into a more robust opposition to the death penalty. If we want it to end, we have to make it a priority.
Lindsay has an excellent response to my argument that death penalty activism should get away from the abstract question of whether or not the state has a "right" to kill someone---which I believe encourages people to think more of worst case scenarios like obviously guilty serial killers who have no claim to life after all they've done---and move more towards questions about how the death penalty cannot be enacted in a way that's clean, fair, and non-corrupting. I want to clarify what I mean by this, since Lindsay quotes some of my piece in the Guardian about Rick Perry and how the death penalty increases bloodthirstiness. I want to be clear that I incorporate this larger critique into my "focus on the procedure/the system" argument. I'm proud of that piece because I think I lay out a good case for why the death penalty actually makes it easier to railroad an innocent person. Capital cases send the message that someone must pay for this, and whether or not the someone is guilty stops being as important. Blood for blood. Lindsay correctly identifies the pro-death penalty arguments as being purely revenge-oriented. What's important to remember is that, historically speaking, "blood for blood" doesn't necessarily mean you get the blood of the person who actually drew blood. Throughout most of history, getting the blood of their child or their wife or their parent or their friend would do. I have a strong feeling that much of the "blood for blood" thinking in capital cases allows people to accept substitute executions. For many people, that Davis was likely innocent isn't the point---one family lost a family member, so another must sacrifice. This creates symmetry and people watching can walk away. Except of course the two families who are still missing their members, but they get lost in the shuffle.
Revenge isn't justice. The fact that a proxy murderer is so easy to kill demonstrates this.
My concern with the Troy Davis case is that the amount of attention he got will convince people that his situation is uncommon. What I want people to emphasize in the conversations they have about this going forward is that he's literally just one of many, and that his situation is actually quite common. The state of Illinois took it upon themselves to shove aside the typical approach to death penalty cases---which is to conceal evidence of innocence, railroad defendents appealing on the grounds of a mistrial, and just do everything they can to get someone to the death chambers whether they're guilty or not---and found that 6% of their defendents sitting on death row were not guilty. That's 20 people in one state alone.
Some cases:
When the fire broke out, Hobley, 26, escaped the flames without shoes and wearing only underwear. He consistently maintained his innocence, alleging that the officers tortured him and — when that failed — fabricated a confession.......
The detectives claimed the confession was voluntary, but Jones claimed he signed it because he had been beaten by Hood and Markham. Jones testified that Hood struck him in the head three or four times with a black object about six inches long before Markham said, "Don't hit him like this because he will bruise" and proceeded to punch Jones repeatedly in the stomach.....In 1997, the DNA testing established conclusively that Jones was not the source of the semen recovered from the victim. Even then, prosecutors refused to abandon the case. They stalled Jones's release until, facing a retrial, they finally dropped all charges against him on May 17, 1999.
They were arrested three weeks after the crime when a witness, Phyllis Santini, went to the police with a story implicating them. Both men professed their innocence, but police found a watch taken from one of the victims in Cobb's room. Cobb claimed he bought the watch for $10 from Johnny Brown, Santini's boyfriend..... Before enrolling in law school, Falconer took a summer job in a factory, where Santini also worked. One day she confided that she and her boyfriend — Brown — had robbed a restaurant and shot someone.
It was Caraway's testimony that ultimately sent Smith to death row, but that testimony was dubious for several reasons..... irst, Caraway had been smoking crack cocaine. Second, she claimed Willis was alone when the killer stepped out of shadows and fired the fatal shot, but two other witnesses said they were standing beside Willis when he was murdered. Third, Caraway's boyfriend, Pervis (Pepper) Bell, was an alternative suspect in the murder. Finally, Caraway, according to her account, was across the street when the crime occurred and, while she positively identified Smith, the two persons who were standing beside Willis were within only two or three feet of the killer and could not identify Smith.
The reprieve was granted not out of concern that Porter might be innocent but solely because he had tested so low on an IQ test that the court was not sure he could comprehend what was about to happen to him, or why. The court's intent was merely to provide time to explore the question of the condemned man's intelligence, but it had an unanticipated consequence: It gave a Northwestern University Professor David Protess, private investigator Paul Ciolino, and a team of journalism students time to investigate the case and establish Porter's complete innocence...... On January 29, 1999, Alstory Simon's now-estranged wife, Inez Jackson, told Protess, Ciolino, and two of the students that she had been present when Simon shot Green and Hillard. She said she did not know Anthony Porter, but that he most certainly had nothing to do with the crime. Four days later, on February 3, Alstory Simon confessed on videotape to Ciolino, asserting that he had killed Hillard in self-defense after the two argued over drug money. Simon claimed the shooting of Marilyn Green had been accidental.
On Tuesday, July 7, 2009, 43-year-old Ronald Kitchen, who confessed under extreme physical duress to taking part in five murders 21 years ago, was exonerated and freed from prison.... Kitchen’s conviction rested primarily on his confession, but also involved a jailhouse snitch, Willie Williams, who has admitted that he lied when he testified that both Kitchen and Reeves had confessed the crime to him.
Reading these cases is a revealing peek into how quickly justice is thrown out the window in order to get someone---anyone, really---on the hook for these murders. Innocent people were beaten for hours, suffocated, and threatened into confessing, which they often recanted as soon as the torture stopped, if they weren't too despondent and broken to stop caring. Jailhouse snitches facing positive attention and probably some rewards just made stuff up to convict them. Actual murderers and their friends turned the innocents in, and the cops were so happy to have a name they didn't bother to investigate the people who might have a motivation to get someone else on the hook for the crime. Needless to say, black people are ridiculously overrepresented in these cases.
That's just in Illinois. Other state governments that are invested in the death penalty haven't been so brave as to revisit these cases honestly. I strongly suspect they are as likely---probably more likely in some cases---to have as many innocent people just sitting on death row. While getting falsely convicted of any crime sucks, death row is far worse for a couple of reasons. One is that you're sitting around waiting to die, of course, and you have to spend oodles of your time just trying not to die by appealing your case. Second of all, death row is worse for most prisoners than regular prison. You're often given shittier accomodations and you don't get to interact with other people as much. You're basically being quietly tortured the whole time. Damien Echols, who was falsely convicted and sentenced to death and has been recently released with the other two of the West Memphis Three, has had his health seriously degraded by the conditions of death row.
Someone points to the river, noting the geographical irony of the party’s location. But Damien, with his wife of 13 years, Lorri Davis, glued to his side, can’t see that far. After years in an isolation cell less than 12 by 8 feet, he’s lost his distance vision......
Five hours a week, alone, in a covered, outdoor cell offered scant sunlight and no real chance to exercise. A thin pad on a concrete bed was hard on his bones.
And in a fucked up way, he's one of the lucky ones, since people championed him and he finally got out. A lot of people don't have that advantage. And even then, the state was so invested in making sure someone paid for the tragic murder of these three little boys that they basically showed utter indifference to the lack of evidence linking the West Memphis Three to the crime. Even at the end, they extracted a guilty plea, because that's how much the system is geared towards conviction over justice.
Steve Kornacki asks if the Troy Davis case---Davis is set to be executed in (where else?) Georgia tonight for a crime there's a good chance he didn't commit---will reinvigorate the arguments against the death penalty. I think if anything has a chance, it's this case, plus the New Yorker expose of the Cameron Todd Willingham case, where Rick Perry surppressed an investigation that might have proven a man innocent of murdering his children so that Perry got another dead body to add to his list of death penalty cases.
Unfortunately, I'm skeptical that any movement to eradicate the death penalty will ever be effective. On many issues, liberals are ineffective and scattershot, but nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the death penalty. A lot of people who oppose the death penalty haven't really figured out why they oppose it, and they certainly have no ability when it comes to arguing against it. People who do try to argue against it are really bad about understanding why others support it and crafting their objections with that in mind. I was shocked after I wrote a piece for the Guardian about the death penalty and Rick Perry how many liberals who responded complained that I tried to make it an argument about the workings of the justice system, instead of just baldly stating that murder was wrong and leaving it at that. When I tried to present arguments such as, "Well, no, you really have to explain your arguments," I was told this is a moral issue and anything short of bald moralizing on it would be ineffective. Since then, I've really paid attention to liberal statements about the death penalty, and while a lot of them are well-reasoned, a shocking number buy right into this "moralizing is the only way" mentality. I've seen a lot of people basically saying that murder is wrong no matter what, and trying to leave it at that, as if it should be self-evident that the state executing people is wrong.
That's why we won't win. If you make this about just bald moralizing about murder, you leave yourself open to the most damning argument the other side has against you, which is that they do take murder seriously, which is why death is the ultimate price you pay for it. Bleating at death penalty supporters that they don't understand the evil that is taking life will never, ever work. They believe their support for the death penalty is about upholding the value that one cannot take another's life. After all, the people that are getting executed are believed to be cold-blooded murderers.
The more you harp on executions as an inherent evil, the more focus you put on the people actually being executed and whether or not they "deserve" it. I think a lot of liberals really do think that all you need to do is baldly state that no one deserves the death penalty, and lay back on the laurels of your moral superiority. That's not going to work. Doing that puts the focus on the people sitting on death row and what most of them actually did. Which basically kills your argument that no one deservese to be put to death. Good people can look at someone who viciously ax murders a family and think, "They don't deserve to live. You know who deserved to live? The family that did nothing and then got viciously ax murdered."
I do blame, as with many things, religion for this lack of inspiration for backing up your moral arguments. The notion that killing is always wrong is rooted in "turn the other cheek" Christianity. And while I suppose I'm glad that many liberal Christians actually pay attention to their god's teachings, I think it shows how foolish it is to state a moral idea and then leave it to a made-up god to rationalize it. After all, religion is an empty set. I would argue that right wing Christians are just as justified in calling their support for the death penalty "Christian" and liberal Christians are with their opposition. They simply define forgiveness differently and leave it at that. Since religion is taken on faith, no one can really be wrong in these discussions. Everyone's just making it up as they go along.
This is why I prefer to address the death penalty as a procedural issue. It's simply too easy to convict an innocent person. Emotions are higher in capital cases, which makes the pressure to get a conviction that much stronger. Once you have the death penalty in place, politicians and prosecutors start getting competitive, seeing the number of successful executions achieved as a number they can use to prove that they're "tough on crime". This lowers the standard of evidence to get someone executed even more. There's a ton of evidence to back this up, but you can also summarize the argument into a soundbite by saying, "The death penalty is too final to be left to fallible humans who make mistakes all the time." We should constantly be pointing out this case or that where an innocent person was convicted or a mistrial should have been called, to drive home the fact that the death penalty corrupts the system, encouraging the railroading of people charged with crimes. Get the discussion away from whether or not ax murderers deserve to be executed by the state, and move towards whether or not we want to have a judicial system that's measured and fair. I think that constantly hammering at it could work to shift public opinion, but right now I'm not really seeing the enthusiasm for that. I'll leave it to you to guess why, but I suspect that it's because there are so many other looming issues like the war and the economy, and people don't have energy for it.
Camila Batmanghelidjh has a powerful piece in The Independent about the social underpinnings of the riots in London and elsewhere in England, and how the collapse of the social contract made this violence inevitable. Quoted at length for brilliance:
Working at street level in London, over a number of years, many of us have been concerned about large groups of young adults creating their own parallel antisocial communities with different rules. The individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best. The drug economy facilitates a parallel subculture with the drug dealer producing more fiscally efficient solutions than the social care agencies who are too under-resourced to compete.
The insidious flourishing of anti-establishment attitudes is paradoxically helped by the establishment. It grows when a child is dragged by their mother to social services screaming for help and security guards remove both; or in the shiny academies which, quietly, rid themselves of the most disturbed kids. Walk into the mental hospitals and there is nothing for the patients to do except peel the wallpaper. Go to the youth centre and you will find the staff have locked themselves up in the office because disturbed young men are dominating the space with their violent dogs. Walk on the estate stairwells with your baby in a buggy manoeuvring past the condoms, the needles, into the lift where the best outcome is that you will survive the urine stench and the worst is that you will be raped. The border police arrive at the neighbour's door to grab an "over-stayer" and his kids are screaming. British children with no legal papers have mothers surviving through prostitution and still there's not enough food on the table.
It's not one occasional attack on dignity, it's a repeated humiliation, being continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession. Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped. Savagery is a possibility within us all. Some of us have been lucky enough not to have to call upon it for survival; others, exhausted from failure, can justify resorting to it.
Emphasis mine. Whenever something like this happens, there's a widespread tendency to shy away from trying to understand why, for fear that doing so will somehow come across as excusing those who commit violence, especially against their own communities. But refusing to understand the situation leaves us in an even uglier space. After all, the violence in concentrated in some communities and not others; the link between who riots and poverty is undeniable. (Not that some people don't try, as one woman on Twitter complained to me that she's totally seen expensive sneakers on the feet of a rioter, which apparently renders the entire problem of poverty in Britain moot. This, despite the fact that a pair of sneakers is not a job, it is not an education, and what it costs probably couldn't even pay for a week's worth of meals.) If we pull faces and say that the only moral position is to write off the rioters as thugs and monsters, we're left with the question of why some communities break out into fire and some do not, why some people's children are rioting in the streets and some are not. If we eliminate, out of the principle of not wanting to make excuses, these are the options left for why rioting tends to be so strongly associated with poverty: The poor are inherently, perhaps genetically inferior people with violence born into them. I personally reject this thesis, as it's never been proven with scientific evidence, and not for lack of trying from those who stand to gain from the discovery that inherent inferiority creates poverty, and not social injustice.
It's also a more hopeless theory. If we refuse to look at the whys of these situations, we basically are refusing to look at solutions. Wriitng off the rioters as thugs and monsters and not asking why some people turn thuggish and some don't means never even making the first step towards preventing future riots. By looking at social causes, we can at least start down a path that prevents future riots.
I'm not excusing the rioters. At the end of the day, each individual has moral responsibility not to stab, throw things, or set fire to the possessions of innocent people. But the rioters aren't the only people who have flouted their moral obligations here. The decision-makers of society have the choice not to treat people living in poverty like shit. Choosing against that is also immoral. While responding to abuse with abuse isn't morally correct, it's also inevitable if the abuse is large-scale, as it sounds from this essay like it is. If we're going to cast moral judgments, we need to make sure that everyone who has erred is held accountable, and not just the ones who erred the most recently while being the most vulnerable to the criminal justice system.
While Matt Drudge cranks out a constant flow of propaganda to convince his easily-bewildered audience that there's some kind of black-on-white race war going on, CNN is reporting an actual hate crime in Mississippi. Warning: while the video isn't gory or anything, they do run surveillance footage of the murder.
The reporter in the video twice says that this crime is something out of Mississippi's past, but the grim truth is that while crimes like this are far less common than they used to be, this is still a reflection of Mississippi's present. Deryl Dedmon is the 18-year-old charged with running over James Craig Anderson and ending his life, and the reason this looks like it's going to be an open-and-shut case is Dedmon felt so much social support for his racist views that he spent the hours before and after the murder bragging about it. This doesn't surprise me. Growing up in Texas, my experience was white people saying horribly racist shit usually went unchallenged, and Mississippi is even worse on this front than Texas. Take, for instance, this story about how a Charleston, Mississippi high school had racially segregated proms until 2008. And simply integrating proms doesn't exactly stop the problems, as evidenced by a girl in Kentucky who sued because she wasn't allowed to deck herself in the Confederate flag for her prom. (A Google search for this story shows widespread support for this young woman's cause from conservative bloggers, and makes me wonder where they stand on the issue of designing prom dresses around swastikas.) By the way, her story shows how empty the "Southern heritage" excuse for the Confederate flag nonsense is; she said that's her reason for wanting to go to prom dressed in a Confederate flag, but really, since when is your prom dress chosen to reflect your "heritage"? Most girls choose theirs with an eye towards displaying other assets.
The youth of the perpetrators is a reminder of how racism and hatred perpetuate themselves, and why conservatives make such a big stink over "parental rights" to impose complete control over their children, to make sure they instill their "values". Thus the enthusiasm for home schooling and rewriting textbooks to reflect conservative propaganda instead of historical fact. The result of all that hard work of insulating kids from other points of view and making sure they grow up in a thick of conservative "values" is that these kinds of racist views get planted and grow without any outside interference to challenge them. In that kind of environment, hate crimes are basicaly inevitable, since hate crimes tend to be perpetuated by people who believe they have the support of the community for their racist views.
I've been a little surprised at how little analysis there's been in the mainstream media regarding Andres Breivik, the Norway terrorist, and his views on women. Man Boobz has been covering the story heavily, and David wrote about it for Shakesville. Hugo covered it for the Good Man Project. Sarah Posner tackled it for Religion Dispatches. But in the mainstream media, the focus has been solely on how Breivik was a rabid Islamphobe, which is of course really important, but this is also a good time to explore the intersections of anti-feminism, anti-immigration sentiment, the Christian right, and racism.
So I was stoked to see Michelle Goldberg take this one on at The Daily Beast, because there's just too little attention paid to how much misogyny fuels Christian right and other white nationalist terrorism. Michelle, as is her custom, nails it, pointing out how Breivik was consuming a steady diet of mainly America, British and Canadian media---the language of the far Christian right is English. Breivik's obsessions were so American, in fact, that not only did he obsess over "Sex and the City" in his manifesto, but he name-dropped Ellen Willis right next to Simone de Beauvoir. Now, I'm someone who would put those two together, but Willis is, as as Michelle notes, a relatively obscure American feminist, known to feminists for sure, but not an icon like Betty Friedan, who Breivik also denounced. (Her daughter Nona was understandably unnerved by this reference to her mother.) It's obvious to me what Breivik's beef with Willis was---she's the woman who invented the term "sex-positive feminism", and Breivik was especially against sex positivity.
This whole thing is a reminder that while secular types think of feminism's relationship with sexual liberation as complicated, as far as the Christian right is concerned, feminism is a movement that exists solely to make it hard for conservative men to marry and make babies with submissive virgins. Everything goes back to feminists' supposed desire to encourage lacivious behavior amongst women, which is why they all seem to think the most important feminist text of the late 20th century is "Sex and the City". Now, obviously that's my entire purpose in life, but I can safely say other feminists are interested in things like equal pay and whatnot.
All jokes aside, what was remarkable about Breivik's views on feminism and Islam is that they're indistinguishable from the everyday rantings of anti-feminists and Islamaphobes in the media, many of whom get paid handsomely to spout the same shit that Breivik did about "demographic winter" and other paranoid fantasies. What's also interesting to me is how widespread on the right the notion is that women's sexual liberation must mean that men lose something. They perceive, rightly I think, that women's growing freedom has meant that men have higher expectations put on them not to harass and abuse, but I personally don't see that as a loss for men. Being able to deal with women sexually as equals has a lot more potential for men, in terms of pleasure, but that's clearly not a message that's embraced by the masculinist right that Breivik was following so closely. Breivik, sounding very much like an MRA, complained specifically about how women have more "erotic capital" than men, whatever this means. Unsurprisingly, when someone posted his rants on a "men's rights" forum and passed them off as something written by a regular contributor, the writings were praised and upvoted until the ruse was revealed.
It's hard to know what really to do with the understanding that Breivik---whose attorney is probably going to call "insane"---was actually more of a lucid conduit of right wing ideas than, say, half of the people sending me garbage on Twitter. Obviously, most people who spout this garbage aren't going to go shoot up summer camps full of teenagers whose main crime is being generally supportive of liberal social and economic policies.
But there's definitely a strong link between misogyny and violence that can't be denied. Misogynists are far likelier to be violent people than non-misogynists, which is why rape and wife-beating are such common crimes. (Domestic violence is the number one cause of injury for women 15-44.) All bigotry provokes violence at its ends, of course. This isn't the Oppression Olympics. But misogyny and violence go hand in hand so often because misogynists really buy deeply into the idea that women are weak and men are "strong", by which they mean aggressive. A steady drumbeat of misogynist thought couldn't be better designed to reach the unhinged and cause them to lash out violently, all while imagining themselves to be big, tough men who claim they were forced---with "why did you make me do this?" being the battle cry of wife beaters---into violence.
Which is why it was so foul that Ross Douthat basically argued E. In reality, these kind of masculinist postures just breed more violence, both in the widespread sort, but also every day behind closed doors, between individual misogynists and the women they encounter in their social circles, families, and even bedrooms.
So, as I predicted, my stint at jury duty lasted exactly one day, though I didn't get bounced for interesting reasons (my number was too high to actually get interviewed, but it was clear listening to the line of questioning that there was no fucking way the lawyers involved would okay me for the jury, for reasons that aren't even that interesting but have nothing to do with politics). It just so happened that the book I've been reading---and had lots of time to read today!---a marvelous book about crime by Bill James called Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence. It's James's eccentric history of mostly American popular crime stories of the Black Dahlia/Sam Shephard variety, those one-off crimes or serial killers that capture the public's attention. I also got a handful of tweets from crazed anti-feminists who have decided, with what evidence I don't know, that I'm some big time supporter of Casey Anthony, the woman acquitted for killing her toddler. I found this accusation interesting, since I have not a) said anything about Anthony b) haven't really been following the case at all c) wasn't entirely sure until the acquittal what she was accused of and d) had to look up the gender of her child to even know if it was a boy or a girl. (A daughter named Caylee, apparently.)
Having been so accused, however, I did look at the case a little and discovered that it's one of those where I can totally see why everyone thinks she's guilty, and perhaps this is a good time to remind all the people out there who claim that many to most rape cases are just victims lying that there's a difference between an acquittal and an exoneration. I agree that Anthony seems guilty, but it's just one of those things where the lack of evidence comes into play. Maybe the term "Casey Anthony" should be mentioned every time some MRA suggests automatic charges for false reporting for the victim if an accused rapist isn't acquitted. MRAs do seem very interested in this case, so I don't imagine they'll forget soon.
But reading the James book did get me to thinking about why this case blew up and so many others, including many other murdered children who are equally adorable to Caylee Anthony, go unheralded by the press. James has a preliminary and predictive code as to what kind of cases will attract media attention, to which he assigns letters and number values, and he'd probably classify this one as an IMT 8 or 9, which stands for Innocent Victim Elements/Missing Persons Stories/Tabloid Elements, and the number is the amout of media attention this one sucks down on a 1 to 10 scale. I do wish he'd been more specific, however, because I think that Tabloid Elements is too broad, and this case really propelled to the top of the heap because of the Slut Factor. Many of the cases he documents that rocket to the top of the heap have female persons whose sexual choices were in conflict with the social norms of the time. In this particular case, it appears that Casey is intriguing to the public not just because she's a likely murderer, but because she violates all sorts of standards about the proper sexual choices and behavior of someone who is a mother. Like Scott Lemieux notes, the fact that she got a tattoo is, by reasonable standards, some irrelevant bullshit, but it looms large in a story that is, to most of the public, about how being a mother and being what society sees as a slut are mutually exclusive. In fact, apparently so much so that a tattoo becomes evidence of murderous intent.
Quite literally, the first thing I learned about Casey Anthony through osmosis is that the father of her murdered daughter is an unknown person. I learned this before I learned about the duct tape around the baby's mouth or the lies that focused attention on her. I knew more about her sexual habits than anything else. Most of the coverage I'm seeing now still focuses heavily on her sexuality. You know, I just struggle to see how being slutty is evidence for being murderous.
Which isn't a defense of her, by the way. The lies and the evasion and the refusal to report the girl missing strike me as the real evidence in play. She seems like the likely candidate. The acquittal is probably based on the fact that the prosecution failed to make the case, not on any real evidence of her innocence. But I find it fascinating how much influence the "she's a slut" narrative has on the "she's guilty" narrative.
Back from Netroots Nation, and while I'm still a little tired, I'm energized as usual after the conference. As many of you no doubt know, the pathetic shadow conference Right Online was closer than ever this year. And by "pathetic shadow conference", I mean it. Every year, Right Online finds out where Netroots Nation is and schedules near there, because there's something about being conservative that requires being childish and petulant. This year, it was especially ugly, because the Right Online was closer than ever to Netroots Nation, and they were in fact in the Hilton that many of us---including myself---were staying at. Which means that the childish, petulant behavior kept spilling over. And also that I ran into Andrew Breitbart downtown and took a picture of him standing with a friend (with his permission, of course!). Breitbart showed up at Netroots Nation, which is irritating because while the vast majority of attendees react to such behavior the way you should---with scorn bordering on indifference---a handful of people got provoked and taped themselves yelling stupid shit at him. Which is what he no doubt hoped would happen, and leave media with the assumption that "both sides" are bad, even though only one side schedules an entire conference for the sole purpose of irritating their opponents.
False equivalence is particularly a problem when you consider that the one incident that everyone heard about was a Right Online attendee harassing some Netroots attendees. The main victim of the harassment told her story in a panel about fighting Islamaphobia (which was, by the way, a great panel that I learned a lot from). She was wearing a hijab while standing outside a bar that was having a Netroots event, talking to some friends, and at least one of her friends was also wearing a hijab, and some dude from a shitty right wing blog rolled up and started to harass her and her friend. When they told him to kindly fuck off, he started taking their pictures. (For what purpose, I'm not sure---he seemed to be under the impression that someone could use the photos as some sort of expose of Netroots Nation, or maybe he thought the police would somehow stop free Americans from wearing what they like as they stand around on the streets of Minneapolis.) At this point, a number of people at the party came to the women's defense, and he was arrested. Marc and I walked up to the club right as the man was being shoved into a cop car, and I said something about it, since something about the situation seemed like it was more than a drunk-asshole-getting-arrested situation. Indeed, it was. And of course, someone got video of much of the confrontation between the man who was harassing the women and the Netroots folks who pushed back. You can see the confrontation (with my Texas buddy Matt Glazer!) starting at 4:30.
I want to highlight that the guy in question is threatening to call Andrew Breitbart, which again I don't completely understand. Does he think Breitbart has some legal authority to stop people from standing in the streets wearing clothing items he disapproves of? I suppose I can see how you'd get confused, since all this happened the day Anthony Weiner resigned. But it's unsettling to see how at least one of Breitbart's fans imbues the man with nearly god-like powers. I'm inclined to think the guy is bluffing, by the way, and was just hoping the threat of calling the Breitbart cops who would make the women pay for wearing hijabs would make them, I don't know, stop or something.
Anyway, the incident was understandably upsetting, and some people reacted by organizing a flash mob at the Hilton. I stood on the second floor and watched it; it was mainly a bunch of people milling around, many in hijabs. But it worked as intended, getting coverage for the incident and giving the protestors a chance to explain their point of view:
Jesse and I got in the elevator with some protestors after the incident and spoke briefly to them; they were excited and a little scared about everything that happened, but felt like they had made their point.
Of course, you can predict the right wing reaction, considering that what happened was a woman claiming a man harassed her: immediately hide behind claims that women are liars and not to be believed. John Hawkins of Right Wing News went straight to that strategy. Believe it or not, I was one of the liberal bloggers he was talking to, as was Jesse. I don't recall if I explained to him that I had seen the guy getting arrested, but you know, if he was so skeptical, he could have asked if we knew anything. By the way, the characterization of Netroots as "90-95% white" is really laughable from someone who was there with Right Online, since when we were talking to him the entire conference was moving from one location to another. But I wouldn't characterize them as 90-95% white, since that figure is way too low.
Hopefully, the right wingers won't be as close next year. While it did provide from some really amusing encounters (liberals are apparently very frightening to ride elevators with!), it's also scary, since there is the unhinged element of conservative activists, and a willingness to make casual death threats, as Melissa Clouthier did on Twitter, when she said, "Bunch of #nn11 folks in the elevator called me the enemy. I reminded that folks on the right pack heat. #ro11."
One of the benefits to being a wingnut is that there's a low-cost, high-payoff emotional reward system. A handful of smart people---Karl Rove, Frank Luntz---come up with the dog whistles and empty talking points, and all you have to do is repeat them and collect your high fives from your fellow dittoheads, who will crow about how you showed those lie-brals with their stupid facts they got from the lamestream media. (Indeed, the quickest way to tell that a wingnut has lost an argument is he and his buddies start declaring victory.) The one danger in this, of course, is that by mindlessly parroting conservative cliches, you occasionally will say something so incredibly wrong-headed and inappropriate that even you the shameless wingnut will be embarrassed, once you see what you did there.
One of these cliches that you hear over and over is to claim that American feminists are wrong for caring about (fill in a cultural concern in American society) when some brown-skinned people in a non-Christian nation are tolerating some horrible abuse of women's rights. This delightful cliche hangs in because it allows the wingnut both to paint American feminists as nothing but bubble-headed bimbos while making the racist assertion that only people not like them are sexist while also allowing themselves to pretend they actually give a shit. It's a wingnut trifecta. It is, of course, utterly meaningless, as it presumes, incorrectly, that women who care about body image issues here can't care about FGM there, and also it presumes, incorrectly, that the mere act of caring about women in foreign nations somehow magically changes their circumstances. But setting that aside, this particular cliche also creates a giant trap and Melissa Clouthier (of course) stepped right into it:
Meanwhile gendericide in India. RT @billscher: Don't miss @JessicaValenti on Morning Joe defending "Slutwalks" http://on.msnbc.com/l8F9Rw
Jesse sent this tweet to me, because he actually has the stomach to follow some of these right wing bloggers, and I don't. But I was immediately amused, because Melissa hadn't realized what she had just said there, and how it would sound to people not high-fiving her. Let's recap:
1) SlutWalks are an anti-rape action that has proven to be really popular.
2) Regardless of how effective you think a SlutWalk is, one must agree that someone defending it is opposed to rape and takes fighting it very seriously.
3) Melissa plugged this into the usual formulation, and basically ended up arguing that Jessica is wrong to fight rape in America when there's "gendercide" in India.
To be clear, I think Melissa actually meant this. It's common enough for conservatives to argue that feminists are making too much out of rape, and that having some frat daddy corner a college girl at a party and rape her doesn't really count as much more than just good times, and it was probably her fault anyway. Heather McDonald was trotting out an unvarnished example of this argument when I went up against her on World Have Your Say, and she even suggested that because many rape victims are able to function well enough, in the months and years after a rape, to attend classes and otherwise not fall completely apart means that it isn't real rape. This argument, of course, why SlutWalk exists. So I responded to Melissa with this assumption in mind:
@MelissaTweets Wow, you're really going to put your money on arguing that rape isn't a real issue. Well-played.
I figured she'd ignore me, but having this mirror held up to her face created a giant reaction, which is understandable. I find her attitude repulsive, and can only imagine what it must feel like to see with someone else's eyes what an asshole you are. But her initial response was to double down:
.@AmandaMarcotte I'm saying Feminists undermine themselves by such stupidly misplaced priorities.
At this point, I reminded her that she was saying, in public, that considering rape a problem is a "misplaced priority". Which I think is when the penny dropped and she realized that perhaps saying that American feminists shouldn't take rape seriously may not be the brightest idea in the world. Now that it's been discovered that arty film directors, leftist warriors, and the French can be rapists, the official conservative party line is that rape is a serious crime and they're totallly not disputing that, even if it's still the victim's fault in most cases. (Melissa veered off on this for a bit, blathering about how I don't understand how men think, which is presumably that they have to rape anyone whose skirt shows X amount of thigh. It's true; I don't think men are uncontrollable animals.) Caught looking like an unreconstructed rape apologist, Melissa then tried to change the subject:
.@AmandaMarcotte Amanda, you're really going to argue that Slutwalks prevent rape?
Of course, that was not actually my argument. I might make that in another context, but my argument here was against Melissa's assertion that as long as India is struggling with a cultural bias against having daughters, American women should not protest the rapes of themselves. This was the assertion, and I carefully reminded her of this over and over while she dodged and weaved and complained about SlutWalk because she didn't think it was effective or appropriate. I tried to explain that there's a difference between priorities and tactics, and that her first two tweets were priority-based---she denounced Jessica for supporting anti-rape protests while there were presumably worse horrors in the world than rape. I'm completely disinterested in the opinion of wingnuts on the topic of whether or not SlutWalks work; in terms of what SlutWalks are trying to accomplish, getting the good opinion of professional misogynists isn't on the list. That a resentment-based pea brain like Melissa Clouthier disapproves of women having fun while speaking out is about as shocking or interesting as the fact that I don't care for the music of Justin Bieber. What I was interested in was her contention that Jessica's interest in fighting rape was wrong when there are sexism-based problems in India.
She wouldn't get off tactics, of course, and ended up flouncing, which caused a sea of wingnuts tweeting that she had "won" the argument. (See the first paragraph.) I wish I could say this represents some sort of end to the use of the wingnut cliche that American feminists shouldn't care about X because brown-skinned people in non-Christian nations are doing Y, but alas, there is no such thing as a right wing shibboleth that is so stupid that it can be put to bed. I, personally, am looking forward to the day that Nicholas Kristof is accused of not caring about Real Issues with women who are Really Oppressed. Actually, I'm sure that's happened.
My point, besides the joy of sharing this encounter with the Pandagon audience, is twofold: 1) A reminder that a lot of wingnut truisms really are just empty blather, and this is doubly true when it comes to their stereotypes of feminists and 2) that feminist activism has actually done a lot already to change the dialogue around rape. Even a couple of years ago, I imagine that Melissa would have just clung to the "rape isn't a real issue, unlike gender disparities in India" line until the bitter end, but now it's becoming toxic for even female anti-feminists, who often are empowered to be even more belligerently misogyny by virtue of their gender, to wave off rape like it's not big deal. Good work, feminists! We still have a long way to go, but that I was able to shame Melissa Clouthier about her knee-jerk minimizing of rape is a pretty big win. Bit by bit, we're winning the argument against rape apologists.
Of course, I asked her repeatedly to admit that Jessica Valenti is in the right to declare rape a serious social problem, and I did get crickets on that. But hey, I was just driving the knife in, so I get why she might feel humiliated by actually going on the record agreeing that feminists are right with our "rape is really bad" beliefs.
As noted earlier, there's a rally in Manhattan today to protest the acquittal of the two NYPD police officers who were accused of rape. While I'm sure the rape apologists are out in full force---again, I have never seen a rape case so cut and dry that tons of folks won't defend in all the years I've been writing about this issue, and that's not because they weren't cut and dry---the ugly reality is that there was a ton of solid evidence to corrobrate the victim's testimony (and yes, women's eyewitness testimony is still considered evidence, even in rape cases, which many people seem to forget). There's the video footage that indicates the cops kept going back to her place, and only an idiot would think that they would have any other purpose but rape. There's the rape kit that showed that she'd been penetrated in the position she recalls being raped in. There's the taped admission from the cop that he used a condom (which explains the lack of DNA evidence). And there's the fact that the jurors feel so guilty about letting rapists off, but, by their own admission, they just can't really see the victim as a victim because she was drunk. A telling quote:
“She was drunk. I don’t believe she would have gotten into this situation if she wasn’t . . . She was blasted. She was a mess.”
So the question now is, what are we protesting? What needs to change so that raping women is considered legal if the victim behaves in an unladylike fashion?
This is where things get really depressing, because there's no quick fix. There's no authority to appeal to on this anymore. In many ways, feminists have done a really great job of getting authorities to take rape seriously. Not that there's not more to do, but we should take a moment to be grateful that the police pursued this case, the city prosecuted it, and even that the jurors tried to make excuses for their loathsome willingness to let a couple of cops off for raping someone because they thought the victim brought it on herself. These are, historically speaking, huge steps forward. The NYPD immediately fired the cops as soon as the trial was over. I'm sure there were areas where the authorities could have done more. Prosecutors especially are often too timid about addressing head on the prejudice against victims of rape. But at the end of the day, the ultimate responsibility for this injustice lies with the jury who just couldn't bring themselves to believe that even if a woman does something stupid like drinks too much, she should not be punished with rape.
Seriously, a hangover is enough, assholes.
This case demonstrates that, above all other things, what needs to happen to stop rape is a change in our culture's attitudes about sex and women. Getting it through people's thick skulls that no one deserves to be raped is a start. But the toxic attitudes that allow people to excuse rapists go much deeper than that.
At its core, the rape culture is built around the belief that women do not deserve to have a subjective sexuality. Sex is constructed as something women have and men have to extract from them. And women who "give it up" are seen as weak idiots and sluts. It's been said before but it's worth saying again, this time from David at Man Boobz:
We grow up, after all, in a society that treats sexuality as a commodity that women possess, and that men try to “get” from women – by charming them into “giving it up,” by buying it directly or indirectly (by going to a prostitute or paying for dinner), or simply taking by force.
This has to end. This attitude makes it all about the victim and how she didn't adequately protect "the goods", instead of about the rapist, who uses sex as a weapon to violently assault people. If someone gets too drunk and they pass out, and a gang of dudes decides that they're going to use that person as a pinata to see who can land the biggest punch, would we say to the drunk person, "Well, you should have known that's what dudes do." I would hope not. I would hope you'd be so horrified that anyone would think that beating the shit out of someone for shits and giggles was a fucked up thing to do.
Well, that's what rape is. It's a violent assault that uses sex as a weapon instead of fisticuffs. But the general gist is the same. But we get all confused, because we as a culture don't think of sex as something that men and women do together for fun, but as something men extract from women. If we were clearer on this, why rape isn't sex wouldn't be so damn hard to understand. And we wouldn't tolerate rapists wandering amongst us, free to rape.
This is cultural change. It works one argument at a time, one clear-headed presentation, one Slutwalk, one rock song, one blog post, on explanation of why you or your friend or loved one did not deserve to get raped. This is a long-haul battle. But it's one we must fight.
It's hard to bother responding to 
Condolences to Troy Davis's family; I cannot imagine what it must be like to lose a family member because the state railroaded him into the death penalty to appease a bloodthirsty and unduly frightened public. I hope the outrage over this case is channeled into a more robust opposition to the death penalty. If we want it to end, we have to make it a priority. 
I've been a little surprised at how little analysis there's been in the mainstream media regarding Andres Breivik, the Norway terrorist, and his views on women. 
One of the benefits to being a wingnut is that there's a low-cost, high-payoff emotional reward system. A handful of smart people---Karl Rove, Frank Luntz---come up with the dog whistles and empty talking points, and all you have to do is repeat them and collect your high fives from your fellow dittoheads, who will crow about how you showed those lie-brals with their stupid facts they got from the lamestream media. (Indeed, the quickest way to tell that a wingnut has lost an argument is he and his buddies start declaring victory.) The one danger in this, of course, is that by mindlessly parroting conservative cliches, you occasionally will say something so incredibly wrong-headed and inappropriate that even you the shameless wingnut will be embarrassed, once you see what you did there.