Just a reminder: all that sound and fury from the anti-abortion movement on behalf of Unborn Victims of Violence; all that sentimental law-making allegedly in the name of Laci Peterson and her yet-to-be-born son Connor; all that’s not really about protecting pregnant women from domestic violence. It’s not about punishing men who batter pregnant women, and it’s not about protecting children, either.

What it’s about is laying legal groundwork for punishing young women who seek abortions.

Test case: in Macomb County Michigan, prosecutors are now researching whether they can charge a 16 year old girl and her boyfriend with manslaughter for a desperate home-made abortion when she was four months pregnant:

(Link nabbed from excellent commentaries at Mouse Words 2004/11/17 and Pink Feminist Hellcat 2004/11/18.)

Investigators said a pregnant 16-year-old girl allowed her boyfriend to beat her with a miniature baseball bat to cause a miscarriage, which may lead to criminal charges against the teens and one of their parents.

The girl estimated she was four months pregnant, said Macomb County Prosecutor-elect Eric Smith. Police said the boy’s mother helped transport the fetus to her home and bury it in the backyard.

Smith said the beatings were done over a period of three weeks. It was done in an effort to terminate the pregnancy.

How dare they! Don’t they know that abortion is illegal in this country?

This is not a black and white area of the law. It is a gray area, added Smith. It is shocking the lengths these two teens went to terminate the pregnancy.

I am shocked! shocked! to find that a desperate 16 year old would go to such lengths to have an abortion outside of official state-approved channels. Why in God’s name would she do that?

Under Michigan law, people under 18 need one parent’s permission to obtain a legal abortion.

Oh.

Neither family knew about the pregnancy before it was terminated, Smith said.

Well.

A first-trimester abortion without complications costs about $300, Warren said.

Yeah.

If 16-year-olds feel that this is there only option, than we have really missed the boat on educating them about sexual health, Warren said.

Indeed.

This is a culture of life we’re building here, folks. And that means doing everything we can with pro-life laws to stop young women from getting abortions from a safe, medical provider. And throwing them in a pro-life prison when they finally make a desparate attempt to end the pregnancy at home without the aid of a doctor.

Or taking a pro-life gun and shooting them in the neck with a pro-life bullet if they do make it to the clinic:

INDIO, Calif. A California teenager has been convicted of attempted murder for shooting his pregnant girlfriend inside a Riverside County abortion clinic.

The shooting left the 16 year-old victim a quadriplegic.

She testified during the trial that 17-year-old Jeffrey Fitzhenry told her before the shooting that she was depriving him of his unborn child.

The prosecutor told jurors he also threatened, If you take something of mine, I’ll take something of yours.

As Sheelzebub puts it at Pinko Feminist Hellcat:

Apparently, he didn’t like the idea of her getting an abortion. Or rather, he was an abusive sociopath. He reportedly told her: If you take something of mine, I’ll take something of yours.

Except the fetus was in her body not his, and she’d be the one to deal with the health risks and potential complications, not him.

Now, you might think that it’s unfair of me to sit here pinning the actions of one abusive boyfriend on the anti-abortion movement as a whole–but how are Jeffrey Fitzhenry’s actions different in any salient respect from the legal action that pro-life laws are pushing pro-life prosecutors to take in Macomb County? Enforcing laws that stop young women from obtaining medical abortions means stationing armed men who are ready to shoot you in the neck to keep you from getting an abortion. Enforcing laws that punish women for getting an unauthorized abortion means using violence against young women who try to get one through other means. The fact that the abusive sociopath wears a suit and works in Congress does not make it any different. The fact that the shooting is done by men with badges does not make it any different. The fact that any complaints against the men who shoot you will be dismissed by men in black robes does not make it any different. The only difference is that Jeffrey Fitzhenry is only one sociopath, with only one woman as his target. The pro-life state would be a sociopath with armies at its disposal, with all young women as its targets. (For more on the same topic, see GT 2004-03-08: April March.)

Jeffrey Fitzhenry didn’t care about life; he shot his ex-girlfriend in the neck because he wanted control over her body, and he wanted to take revenge when she didn’t comply. He is not pro-life; he is an abusive sociopath. And nothing less is true of the legislators, presidents, or prosecutors who use deceptive bills to enforcing a culture of life at the barrel of a gun.

I’ve mentioned a few times here already how brilliant and important I find Andrea Dworkin‘s work (in That Feminist Boy Thing (GT 2004/09/06) and Andrea Dworkin, Feminist Icon (GT 2001/07/03)); so I was glad to catch (through Feminist Blogs, no less!) feministe’s post today on Andrea and her critics. She quotes at length from an interview of Dworkin by Michael Moorcock, where Dworkin, inter alia, sets the record straight on the all intercourse is rape slander (she doesn’t believe that and has never argued for it). There’s more too; read the whole thing and follow the links.

Ms. Lauren is, unfortunately, right when she describes Dworkin as one of the most vilified and misquoted women in recent history. It’s worth taking the time to look at what she has actually had to say. So here’s your Dworkin for the day; it comes from an essay that’s been perhaps as important to me as anything else ever written: I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape. It’s Dworkin at her best–a damning indictment and a call to arms, reflections on men and feminist activism that have literally changed my life, and the best argument for radical, unapologetic feminism that there is: a confrontation with the simple, heartbreaking, terrifyingly ordinary facts.

And if there would be a plea or a question or a human address in that scream, it would be this: why are you so slow? Why are you so slow to understand the simplest things; not the complicated ideological things. You understand those. The simple things. The cliches. Simply that women are human to precisely the degree and quality that you are.

And also: that we do not have time. We women. We don’t have forever. Some of us don’t have another week or another day to take time for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something. We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way. That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.

And it is happening for a simple reason. There is nothing complex and difficult about the reason. Men are doing it, because of the kind of power that men have over women. That power is real, concrete, exercised from one body to another body, exercised by someone who feels he has a right to exercise it, exercised in public and exercised in private. It is the sum and substance of women’s oppression.

It is not done 5000 miles away or 3000 miles away. It is done here and it is done now and it is done by the people in this room as well as by other contemporaries: our friends, our neighbors, people that we know. Women don’t have to go to school to learn about power. We just have to be women, walking down the street or trying to get the housework done after having given one’s body in marriage and then having no rights over it.

The power exercised by men day to day in life is power that is institutionalized. It is protected by law. It is protected by religion and religious practice. It is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy. It is protected by a police force. It is protected by those whom Shelley called the unacknowledged legislators of the world: the poets, the artists. Against that power, we have silence.

On male supremacy and militarism:

I have heard in the last several years a great deal about the suffering of men over sexism. Of course, I have heard a great deal about the suffering of men all my life. Needless to say, I have read Hamlet. I have read King Lear. I am an educated woman. I know that men suffer. This is a new wrinkle. Implicit in the idea that this is a different kind of suffering is the claim, I think, that in part you are actually suffering because of something that you know happens to someone else. That would indeed be new.

But mostly your guilt, your suffering, reduces to: gee, we really feel so bad. Everything makes men feel so bad: what you do, what you don’t do, what you want to do, what you don’t want to want to do but are going to do anyway. I think most of your distress is: gee, we really feel so bad. And I’m sorry that you feel so bad–so uselessly and stupidly bad–because there is a way in which this really is your tragedy. And I don’t mean because you can’t cry. And I don’t mean because there is no real intimacy in your lives. And I don’t mean because the armor that you have to live with as men is stultifying: and I don’t doubt that it is. But I don’t mean any of that.

I mean that there is a relationship between the way that women are raped and your socialization to rape and the war machine that grinds you up and spits you out: the war machine that you go through just like that woman went through Larry Flynt’s meat grinder on the cover of Hustler. You damn well better believe that you’re involved in this tragedy and that it’s your tragedy too. Because you’re turned into little soldier boys from the day that you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the world in which you live. It is also part of the economy that you frequently claim to protest.

And the problem is that you think it’s out there: and it’s not out there. It’s in you. The pimps and the warmongers speak for you. Rape and war are not so different. And what the pimps and the warmongers do is that they make you so proud of being men who can get it up and give it hard. And they take that acculturated sexuality and they put you in little uniforms and they send you out to kill and to die.

And, finally, on equality and bullshit excuses:

I want to talk to you about equality, what equality is and what it means. It isn’t just an idea. It’s not some insipid word that ends up being bullshit. It doesn’t have anything at all to do with all those statements like: Oh, that happens to men too. I name an abuse and I hear: Oh, it happens to men too. That is not the equality we are struggling for. We could change our strategy and say: well, okay, we want equality; we’ll stick something up the ass of a man every three minutes.

You’ve never heard that from the feminist movement, because for us equality has real dignity and importance–it’s not some dumb word that can be twisted and made to look stupid as if it had no real meaning.

You really ought to read the whole thing.

(Link thanks to Pandagon 2004/11/14. I appreciate the commentary, Jesse, but I could have done without the joke about sexual assault.)

John Ashcroft has never been one to shy away from pushing the envelope; for the latest example, consider his parting words for the judicial branch.

Ashcroft:

Without referring to specific adverse rulings on the treatment of detainees or enemy combatants, Ashcroft blasted activist judges for encroaching on the powers that he insists belong solely to the president in wartime.

The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war, Ashcroft said.

… he spent most of his 30-minute speech defending the administration policies against federal judges critical of the government’s terrorism policies.

Ideologically driven courts have disregarded and dismissed the president’s evaluations of foreign policy concerns, in favor of theories generated by academic elites, foreign bodies and judicial imagination, Ashcroft said.

Slimy judicial activist elites:

Article I

Section 9. … The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.

…

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; … nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; …

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Charges of judicial activism have a long history on the Right. It used to be that judges were denounced as judicial activists for upholding limits to government power that go beyond what is, strictly speaking, spelled out in the Constitution. Ashcroft has an even better idea: now you can denounce judges as judicial activists for refusing to go beyond what is, strictly speaking, spelled out in the Constitution in order to find exceptions to limits on the power of the Executive.

(You may note that there are accomodations for wartime exigencies in Article I §9 and Amendment V; true, but none of those exceptions apply to the current set of cases, and none limit the protection of Amendments IV, VI, or most of the clauses of Amendment V, either. Nowhere are the phrases the president’s evaluation of foreign policy concerns or except when the security of our nation in a time at war is at risk to be found.)

Here’s how the strict constructionists in the audience greeted this exciting new discovery:

As Ashcroft arrived Friday, he received a long and roaring standing ovation from a hotel ballroom filled largely with leading conservative lawyers. In his speech to the Federalist Society’s national convention, Ashcroft made no direct mention of his decision to step down as the nation’s top law enforcement official.

Ashcroft’s stepped down, but no doubt the Right will continue in its campaign against the creeping menace of judicial activism, marching forward as they always have: that is, by denouncing defenders of individual rights and proudly championing the absolute power of the Monarch as ordained by Almighty God.

O it’s time to let mighty the Eagle soar…

Further reading:

• GT 2004/06/24: Pro-Choice on Everything, Part I
• GT 2004/05/30: Why We Marched
• GT 2003/12/20: Belated birthday presents for the Bill of Rights
• GT 2002/08/10: Judge Doumar has made his ruling; now let him enforce it
• GT 2002/06/11: An Important Update from the War Information Council

www.feministblogs.org

A while back I mentioned that Geekery Today is now syndicated at Anarchoblogs, a group blog automatically generated by syndicating the weblogs of a passle of anarchists. It’s a great project, both for bloggers and for readers, and it got me thinking about the value of using free software tools to aggregate independent DIY media into communities of interest. And, especially, about the potential benefits of a similar project for another group committed to DIY media and all too often marginalized, trivialized, or simply ignored in the mainstream media–whether traditional or alternative, or, yes, in the blog world (or in the blog world, or in the blog world, or…): that is, Feminist Bloggers.

So, after spending about a week grubbing around with software and in conversation with some of my favorite bloggers, I’m pleased to announce the public launch of a new collaborative project that we’ve developed: FeministBlogs.org, a syndication-based group blog for self-identified feminists, womanists, women’s liberationists, and pro-feminist men. The site uses contributors’ newsfeeds (RSS or Atom) and the Planet aggregator to generate a community weblog out of our posts. That helps bloggers by raising awareness, firing up debates, encouraging cross-linking and discussions, increasing Google juice, etc. More importantly, it helps readers by making it easier to follow discussions, keep track of several feeds in one place (if you’re in to that sort of thing), and to discover new feminist bloggers. It also helps, inter alia, to raise the visibility of alternatives to a bunch of boys shouting at each other, and to drive another nail into the coffin of Where are all the good female political bloggers?. And that, my friends, is good for everyone. Syndication is powerful.

We’re starting small, with a basic design and a small core of bloggers. But the public launch is only the first step on the road to world domination; further steps include welcoming new members, gathering some more information, making the process of joining more user friendly, and anything else we can do to help the community grow and thrive. So far, our contributors are:

• BlackFeminism.org
• CultureCat: Rhetoric and Feminism
• feministe
• Pinko Feminist Hellcat
• Rad Geek People’s Daily
• Rox Populi
• Sappho’s Breathing
• Trish Wilson

Do you have a blog that regularly discusses gender and politics from a feminist perspective? Then we’d love for you to join us. Do you want independent alternatives to the malestream media? Then check out:

www.feministblogs.org

Michael Pate has pointed out a blurb from L.A. Observed clarifying that the tanks (Marine Armored Personnel Carriers, actually, for what that’s worth) deployed at a peaceful anti-war demonstration in Los Angeles had just gotten lost on their way from Camp Pendleton to the nearby National Guard Armory in preparation for the Veteran’s Day parade the following day.

Fair enough; I don’t see any reason not to accept that this was a silly mistake on the part of the Marines coupled with a firestorm of hasty reaction from Internet cranks such as myself. But it is indicative of something–and that something is not (or, at least, not just) Leftist paranoia in these times. The fact is that using tanks would, at this point, be not at all out of character for L.A. riot cops. Nor would it be beyond the means of most large urban police departments. The combined effects of the War on Drugs, the increasingly militant police reaction to mass demonstrations, and now the mass recruitment of all civil police into paramilitary units for Homeland Security have meant that any vestiges of a notion of proportionality have been completely and systematically obliterated. I see no reason whatever to doubt that cops would have any principled objection to sending out tanks to help with crowd control at an anti-war demonstration. They exist in an institutional culture in which there is apparently no inhibition at all against using any kind of force whatever in order to maintain control and enforce obedience.

Don’t believe me? Here’s how a peace officer in Miami decided to handle a tipsy 12 year old girl trying to play hooky:

(Link nabbed from Austro-Athenian Empire 2004/11/13.)

MIAMI (AP) – Police have acknowledged using a stun gun to immobilize a 12-year-old girl just weeks after an officer jolted a six-year-old with 50,000 volts.

. . .

According to the incident report, officer William Nelson responded to a complaint that children were swimming in a pool, drinking alcohol and smoking cigars on the morning of Nov. 5.

Nelson said he noticed the girl was intoxicated and was walking her to his car to take her back to school when she ran away through a parking lot.

Nelson, 38, said he chased her and yelled several times for her to stop before firing the Taser when she began to run into traffic. The electric probes hit the girl in the neck and lower back, immobilizing her.

— CBC News 2004/11/13: Police reviewing use of stun guns after second child shocked with taser

Ah, but you see, it was necessary to electrocute the girl in order to save her:

Nelson said he fired for my safety along with (the girl’s) safety. Paramedics treated the girl, who went home with her mother.

Because, you know, she might have gotten away, and then not gone to school or something.

Police director Bobby Parker defended the decision to use a Taser stun gun on the six-year-old boy last month because he was threatening to injure himself with a shard of glass. But Parker said Friday he could not defend the decision to shock the fleeing girl, who was skipping school and apparently drunk.

So if the decision is indefensible, why isn’t Officer Nelson in jail on charges of assault and battery? Why isn’t there any official reaction at all other than some hand-wringing about whether officers should have tasers or not–as if the equipment were the problem here? The problem is not how police are equipped, but rather the lack of accountability for disproportionate force and the belligerent posture that permeates cops’ training and daily working lives. You know, the sort of attitude that would make someone think it’s okay to respond to the incredibly dangerous immediate threat of a tipsy 12 year old disobeying orders by using an extremely painful electric shock that necessitates immediate medical attention. Or the kind of attitude that would make someone think of the incident as a P.R. problem instead of a criminal assault. Most major American cities effectively no longer have civil policing; they are occupied by federally-trained and supported paramilitary forces. The free-wheeling use of electrocution on anyone and everyone in Miami is a case in point (and this ain’t exactly the first time they’ve have problems there, either).

Is this as bad as, say, martial law in Iraq? No, of course it’s not. But it is brutal, and it’s becoming more clear every day that the difference in posture and attitude is only one of degree, not of kind. That goes to show how important differences of degree can be–but also how alarming and unreliable.

Further reading

• GT 2002-02-13: More police brutality in Montgomery
• GT 2002-01-30: Corporate elites meet & greet; New York Times makes shit up