I’m a little wary of this story about how Sarah Palin turned a blind eye when rape victims in Wasilla were forced to pay for their own investigations. Even if she is responsible—-and she’s so firmly anti-feminist it isn’t hard to see that she could be—-it’s all too easy for the campaign to argue that it was an internal police matter that simply wasn’t brought to her attention. The most damning evidence against her is that the Democrat who took her office after she left repealed the policy.
Regardless of what happens and how much culpability Palin has in this situation, it’s an opportunity to highlight one issue where the Republican party has so far not completely caved to the far right—-violence against women. There’s real tension there. The mainstream Republican party has supported feminist initiatives to support women escaping from domestic violence and rape victims, if quietly and begrudgingly at times. The reauthorization of the VAWA met with huge bipartisan support. The only area where the far right has gained ground in their war against women who’ve been victims of violence is by using reproductive politics as a stalking horse—-anti-choice arguments have been used to deny rape victims basic health care after the rape, cementing far right goals of ensuring that even rape victims are punished for being women with unintended pregnancy. And of course, people like Sarah Palin have pushed for forcing rape victims to bear children by rapists with their support of bans on abortion at all times for all reasons. But on domestic violence and just the topic of whether or not rape is wrong and the rapist is the criminal, not the victim, I don’t see Republicans falling hard to the right on this.