Posted on March 14, 2013
Truth
To VAWA
Libs
wink at violence against women
by
Daniel Clark
Congressional Republicans’ halfhearted resistance to the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act has been portrayed as evidence of the GOP’s “War on Women” – a campaign that we know exists because Jay Leno’s wife tells him so, and that’s corroboration enough to satisfy most news editors.
The bill would have sailed through, if not for the addition of several Democrat amendments. The most controversial of these allows non-Indian men who are accused of assaulting American Indian women on reservations to be tried by the tribal courts, thereby depriving the suspects of their Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights. In addition, the Democrats expanded the bill to protect gay men and transsexuals as well as women. Yet another new provision allows illegal aliens to obtain visas by claiming to have been abused.
House Republicans proposed their own version of the bill, which omitted these provocative items. It was voted down, with all but two Democrats in opposition. So, in reality, far more Democrats than Republicans voted against renewing VAWA, but don’t expect it to be reported that way.
If liberals had any sense of irony, they might have noticed that they were posing as foes of violence against women at the same time that they cheered President Obama’s directive on women in combat. When given a chance to undermine America’s military, and satisfy their own fealty to the Cult of Diversity, they find it not only acceptable, but laudable to subject women to the most horrific violence imaginable.
A less extreme example can be seen in liberals’ support for Lauren Silberman, who comically tried out as a kicker at an NFL combine. Contrary to popular belief, kickers are not exempt from the violence of football. They are sometimes expected to block and tackle, and to fight for loose balls. There’s also a quaint tradition that referees call “roughing the kicker.” Imagine extending one leg as far in the air as it will go, and having 250 pounds of humanity come barreling into your other leg. Who, but a liberal, would encourage a woman to expose herself to such danger?
Liberals might say that by “violence against women,” what they mean is domestic abuse in particular, but even then, they aren’t credible. As much as feminists like to portray husbands as the chief abusers, a married woman is far less likely to suffer physical abuse than a single woman who shares her residence with a series of transient boyfriends. The prevalence of violence against women has undoubtedly increased as the welfare state – with help from the sexual revolution – has dissolved the nuclear family. Yet seldom does any liberal express so much as a pang of regret over it.
The central hypocrisy of feminism is that it demands that society treat men and women exactly the same, while also expecting it to maintain special considerations and protections for women. No wonder its adherents find reality so problematic. They seem to think they can put women on the battle lines alongside men, and assume that the bullets will distinguish between the two.
Conservatives are the ones who recognize that equality between the sexes does not mean that their societal roles must be identical. Women can be “the gentler sex,” who ought to be shielded from levels of violence that are acceptable toward and among men, without that making them inferior beings.
If you don’t accept that premise, as liberals tend not to, there is no rational basis for specifically combating violence against women. Maybe that’s why the Democrat revisions to VAWA lose sight of that concern. Now, it’s the Violence Against Women, Homosexuals, and Men Who “Identify As Women” Act, with a couple bones being thrown to the racial Balkanists for good measure. They might as well have simply retitled it the Violence Against Likely Democrat Voters Act.
If liberal Democrats were really concerned about violence against women, they would never have used sadistic pornographer Larry Flynt as a party operative. They wouldn’t idolize Bill Clinton, who was famously accused of rape, is a notorious pervert, and is known by his friends to exhibit “purple rages.” They would have been outraged by Al Gore’s explanation that even if Clinton is a rapist, his liberal policies more than made up for it.
In the liberal world of metaphor and euphemism, “violence against women” doesn’t mean real violence against real women. It is therefore unimportant whether or not Clinton ever brutalized women like Juanita Broaddrick. What really matters is that he never spoke disapprovingly of a feminist TV character like Murphy Brown.
The
Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press