Socialism & Feminism Archive 2009 Carey Roberts probes and lampoons political correctness. His work has been published frequently in the Washington Times, Townhall.com, LewRockwell.com, ifeminists.net, Intellectual Conservative, and elsewhere. He is a staff reporter for the New Media Network. You can contact him at E-Mail. Sun Spots on Nancy’s Brain? For sheer entertainment value, nothing beats a United Nations global warming conference, especially if you were one of millions of Americans holed up in sub-freezing temperatures this past week. We knew it would turn out this way two weeks ago when local prostitutes, disgruntled with a proposal to keep them under wraps during the high-profile eco-fest, threatened to offer their wares for free to convention-goers. (One only wonders if liberated female attendees would also avail themselves of the offer?) The carbon-neutral week kicked off according to plan as Global Warmingist-in-Chief Al Gore, citing the research of Dr. Wieslav Maslowski, warned summit attendees the Arctic could become completely ice-free in five years. But hours later Gore’s claim was refuted by the good scientist himself, who noted, “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.” On Tuesday it was revealed that Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is tied to a multi-national industrial conglomerate that stands to take in hundreds of millions of dollars by cashing in on unused carbon-offset credits: scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/pachauri_letter.pdf And later that day outnumbered Danish police began clubbing rock-throwing summit protesters like baby seals stranded on a wayward Arctic ice floe. The following morning, Connie Hedegaard, Danish minister of climate and energy and president of the UN conference, announced her resignation following revelations of a secret “Danish text” being negotiated by industrialized countries. On Thursday morning, world leaders trudged through ankle-deep snow and sub-freezing temperatures into the gleaming Bella Center to give their blessing to a multi-billion dollar global transfer deal. Thereupon they gave a standing ovation to Hugo Chavez, socialist president of Venezuela, when he blamed capitalist avarice for the global warming menace. All this was mere preclude as the eco-zombies awaited the arrival of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her two Air Force jets, accompanied by 20 other House lawmakers. Leaving Washington the night before, Pelosi explained to reporters, “We see Copenhagen as a meeting about job creation -- how do we move forward to create millions of clean energy jobs and new technologies to keep America number one?” But turns out she was only interested in job creation for women. Because shortly before her Thursday afternoon press conference, Pelosi banished from the room the six Republican congressmen who had joined her on the trip. Then she stepped to the podium to offer this ode to global warming hysteria: “Women have the most to gain and the most to lose in the climate crisis,” Pelosi declared. “The impacts are not gender-neutral; as the primary users, managers, and stewards of natural resources, women feel the consequences first.” The first female Speaker of the House continued with her eco-feminist musings: “Changing agricultural conditions will hit women hardest. In most developing countries, women produce the vast majority of the household food supply. It is the world’s grandmothers, mothers, and sisters in most countries who fetch water, gather wood and prepare meals. As resources become more scarce, so do opportunities for these women to attend school, tend crops, and lift themselves out of poverty.” Really? What consensus-driven UN report appointed women as “the primary users, managers, and stewards” of natural resources? What data-enhanced document concluded “women produce the vast majority of the household food supply”? And when the ice caps melt and the Napa Valley vineyards whooshed away in a climatological apocalypse, will men somehow manage to escape unscathed? I’m hoping Congresswoman Pelosi will answer these questions. Here’s her email: AmericanVoices@mail.house.gov . Fax: 202-225-4188. And telephone: 202-225-4965. Madame Speaker, I await your response. Climategate, Mediagate, and Abusegate Attention Global Warming Skeptics: There’s no need to work ourselves into a dither over Climategate, the risible global caper designed to make us believe the world will soon be turning into a burnt crisp. After all, Climategate is the new kid on the block, compared to all the other Leftist bamboozles. Take Mediagate, the fact that the lamestream media stonewalled the Climategate story for two full weeks, hoping to get beyond the Copenhagen summit to limit the fall-out. But this past weekend the media moguls finally realized they had to pull back the green velvet curtain – and then used every trick in the book to downplay the scandal. The Washington Post featured the story on Saturday when no one bothers to read the newspaper. CBS aired the report knowing its news program would be preempted by college football. NBC reassured its global warming true believers “the evidence is overwhelming that man is behind climate change.” And ABC mentioned the dust-up without revealing what the incriminatory emails actually said. How’s that for full disclosure? But the media is still playing footsy with another Leftist fairytale. It’s known as Abusegate. Take the Tiger Woods case. Everyone knows his wife went after him with a nine-iron, which is a form of criminal assault. But how many media accounts put Woods and “victim of domestic violence” within a par-5 golf hole of each other? (And if we’re going to say marital infidelity justifies partner assault, let’s be sure to tell all the cougars out there to bone up on their self-defense skills.) The cover-up of female partner aggression dates back to 1977. That’s when University of Delaware professor Susanne Steinmetz published an article titled “The Battered Husband Syndrome.” Her ground-breaking research revealed women are just as likely to abuse. But the feminists were not going to allow her research to upset the ideological apple cart. After all, domestic disputes are all about evil men who try to control and dominate their wives with “violence or the subliminal threat of violence.” At least that’s what rad-fem icon Gloria Steinem once said. So when they got wind of Steinmetz’s apostasy, the libbers began a whispering campaign deriding her work as "anti-feminist." Then the enlightened souls who aspired to stop the cycle of violence called in bomb threats. Steinmetz soon took the hint and called a halt to her research. Across the pond in England, abuse-shelter founder Erin Pizzey reached essentially the same conclusion as Steinmetz, going so far as to write a tell-all about rolling-pin wielding wives. “Abusive telephone calls to my home, death threats, and bomb scares, became a way of living for me and for my family. Finally, the bomb squad asked me to have all my mail delivered to their head quarters,” a shell-shocked Pizzey would later reveal. So while the global-warming hucksters confined themselves to relatively benign enhancements of temperature data, the feminist-fascists proved Philip Jones and his fellow Climate Research Unit perjurers to be rank amateurs when it came to the art of information control. But now the feminists’ Orwellian methods have been outed for all to see (www.mediaradar.org/docs/RADARreport-50-DV-Myths.pdf ): 1. Make propaganda-like claims about a fabricated “consensus.” 2. Play definitional word-games with terms like “abuse” and “violence.” 3. Rely on biased crime surveys. 4. Use a single outrageous incident to reach an absurd conclusion. (Example: If we really want to stop the violence, we need to pass a law that requires potential golf-club wielders to submit to criminal background checks.) 5. Slant your questions to support a pre-determined conclusion. 6. Purge the data on violence perpetrated by females. 7. Refuse to approve studies that study male victimization. 8. Misconstrue the results of prior research. Publish “fact sheets” that claim to debunk abuse myths, but in fact expand on them. 10. Instigate legal action against researchers who challenge the good ol’ girls network. 11.Resort to cheap-shots, name-calling, and motive-questioning. 12. Engage in strong-arm tactics. Just as a group of brave climatologists refused to be intimidated by the global warming thugs, the family violence field has its truth-tellers as well: Murray Straus at the University of New Hampshire, Richard Gelles at the University of Pennsylvania, Michelle Carney at the University of Georgia, Miriam Ehrensaft at Columbia University, Donald Dutton at the University of British Columbia, and Denise Hines at Clark University. All these years, the domestic violence lobby has been sullying the atmosphere with its gaseous assumptions, foggy logic, and over-heated rhetoric. When will the media blow the lid off of this story? Abuse Bill Betrays Victims, Subsidizes a Radical Agenda Two years ago Millie Almore was admitted to the SafeSpace shelter in Stuart, Florida. Ten days later the 26-year-old woman lay dead, stabbed in the neck by Marilyn Hooks, another resident at the facility. An investigation into the incident found the homicide reflected an "egregious failure of the entire agency to satisfactorily assure the health, safety, and welfare of both its clientele and staff." Millie Almore’s tragic death spotlights the woes that vex our nation’s 1,800 domestic violence shelters. These problems stem from non-existent accountability, poorly-trained staff, and most of all, a deeply-ingrained ideological agenda. One former resident at the Hope House shelter in West Virginia attested, “I often felt unsafe. There were several physical and verbal altercations between the shelter residents.” No wonder that so many opt to return to their batterer rather than continue to submit to harassment and threats by shelter residents. A bill was recently introduced in the Congress to re-up shelter funding for five more years. Known as the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, the bill carries a nearly $300 million price tag to pay for a program the federal Office of Management and Budget has judged to be “Not Performing – Results Not Demonstrated.” Regrettably, the bill not only fails to address the systemic flaws of abuse shelters, in some ways it will make things worse. So why are shelters floundering? The crux of the problem is shelter directors stoutly insist domestic violence is caused by patriarchal sexism -- and has nothing to do with dysfunctional partner relationships, alcohol abuse, or economic disadvantage. If the cause is unfettered patriarchy, the cure is evident: ever-increasing social activism. Researcher Sara Epstein once reported the eye-opening findings of her survey of 111 shelters. While only 25% of the programs declared their principal goal was the “treatment and support of battered women,” nearly half endorsed the radical feminist crusade to “change societal patterns of violence against women.” This is how the ideological Merry-Go-Round plays out in practice: 1. When victims of violence come to the shelter for help, they are plied with empowerment propaganda and coached to make false abuse claims. (A former volunteer at the Bethany House shelter in Virginia once complained the facility served as “a free hostel for women with emotional problems if they are willing to hate their husbands enough and are willing to take out protective orders against their husbands.”) 2. But victims need counseling, job training, and alcohol treatment, not an ideological rant. So eventually they go elsewhere for help. 3. Shelter managers begin to panic. After all, it’s pretty hard to tell heart-rending tales about the multitudes of unserved victims when your beds are sitting empty. So shelters start to advertise, “No proof of abuse necessary.” No surprise, homeless drug-abusing women begin to wander in. 4. Now that the shelter is full, the domestic violence lobby can claim the shelter had to turn away a gazillion persons who knocked on its doors for help. So of course we’re obligated to cough up more taxpayer money to curb the bogus epidemic of domestic violence. A side-benefit to this scheme is shelters can continue to turn-away men abused by their wives and girlfriends, disingenuously claiming their programs are already filled to capacity. The cure for the Sisterhood’s shenanigans can be summed up in a single word: accountability. Shelters need to require proof of abuse before admission, evaluate program effectiveness, and make results of these assessments widely available. But the Family Violence Act continues to throw millions of taxpayer money into a funding-stream black-hole. On top of that, it eliminates funding from the one area where abuse shelters are actually doing some good: provision of transitional housing. That’s right, the new bill axes $25 million for short-term housing and channels it to dating-violence prevention programs designed to get 13-year-old boys into believing they are proto-abusers (ignoring the fact that the Centers for Disease Control reports teenage girls are more likely to initiate the aggression). Our nation needs abuse shelters to help break the cycle of intimate partner violence. But by applying a $300 million Band-aid to a festering sore, the Family Violence Act turns its back on the true victims of abuse. Justice Official Gives Thanks for Bias and Bigotry Last week we were jolted with the news that the global warming crisis is a hoax, an ideologically-driven scam based on data that have been routinely doctored, selectively presented, and when necessary, furtively disposed of. But there’s another global disinformation campaign that is still going strong. It’s called the Cult of Domestic Violence. This ruse threatens the very foundation of American society: the traditional family. This past Thursday Catherine Pierce, acting director of the Department of Justice Office of Violence Against Women, issued a Thanksgiving message – now that sounds comforting, doesn’t it? Ms. Pierce called for “a national conversation about violence against women and teen dating abuse. The Department of Justice will also dedicate this day to talk about ways to end the violence against women and girls that pervades every community in America.” Those sentences contain two very generous helpings of Ms.-Information. First, domestic violence does not “pervade” every community in America. In fact, among couples in intact, married relationships, partner violence is essentially non-existent. Yes, intimate partner aggression lurks in some corners, but it is concentrated in low-income, substance-abusing couples not connected by the bonds of marriage. Second, domestic abuse is not limited to violence against women. There is also a substantial level of female-perpetrated violence against men that goes unreported to the police. All the research shows women are equally likely to aggress, whether it’s a slap-the-cad rebuke or a teach-you-a-lesson knee to the groin. For example, the Centers for Disease Control reports 8.9% of adolescent males are victims of dating violence each year, compared to an almost identical number – 8.8% -- of adolescent females. And let’s not purge our memory banks of the tragedy of former NFL star quarterback Steve McNair, shot four times in the chest this past July by his ex-girlfriend as he lay asleep. So how does Ms. Pierce’s one-sided Thanksgiving proclamation embrace mean-spirited bigotry? Because when gobble-gobble statistics are floated before an unsuspecting public, persons begin to believe the lies. Segments of the population become stereotyped and demonized. Laws are eventually passed that eliminate persons’ fundamental civil liberties – just consider all the states that have passed “mandatory arrest” laws that shred Constitutional guarantees of probable-cause. Once a man is saddled with an arrest record, it becomes a cinch to tar him with the abuser label and take away his children. Just as the global warming religion has come under scrutiny in recent years, a growing number of persons have begun to question the rigid orthodoxy that envelopes the domestic violence industry. On October 1, President Obama issued a proclamation that highlighted the plight of both male and female survivors of abuse: “Domestic violence touches the lives of Americans of all ages, leaving a devastating impact on women, men, and children of every background and circumstance.” Three weeks later Rep. Judy Biggert (R-IL) declared on the House floor, “When we think of domestic violence, we think of the women as being the victims. But it’s also men victimized as well. Male victims are less likely to report the violence, and seek services due to the stigma associated with being a male victim or not being believed.” And on Tuesday December 1, WETV will be airing its latest installment of Secret Lives of Women. The promo reads, “The fact is however, that more than a third of all DA [domestic abuse] cases feature males as victims, and even that number is considered low due to the relatively low reporting of these cases by men who are ashamed and afraid to do so.” Maybe we should all encourage OVW director Catherine Pierce to tune in: Catherine.Pierce@usdoj.gov . The last thing our families need is half-baked holiday greetings foisted upon us by self-serving government bureaucrats. Abuse Shelter Watchdogs: See No Evil, Speak No Evil Domestic violence shelters are rife with mismanagement and fraud. They push a radical gender ideology on the unsuspecting, discriminate against male victims, and employ woefully unqualified staff. And they ridicule traditional religion as “oppressive” to women – all to the tune of $100 million in federal taxpayer money each year. So how do shelters get away with this nonsense? Where’s the accountability? And why are the government-mandated watchdogs giving these shelters a free pass? According to federal rules, all organizations that receive $300,000 or more are required to undergo an annual audit. According to OMB Circular No. A-133, “the auditor shall determine whether the auditee has complied with laws, regulations, and the provisions of contracts or grant agreements that may have a direct and material effect on each of its major programs.” These include well-known requirements that grantees not discriminate on the basis of race or sex. When fiendish practices are discovered, the auditor is supposed to report them to the Federal Audit Clearinghouse, a veritable storehouse of juicy information about jillions of non-profits around the country: harvester.census.gov/sac/ As I reported last month, Judge James Stucky of Kanawaha County, West Virginia has handed down a ruling that declared shelters throughout the state were engaged in unlawful sex discrimination, in open violation of federal and state requirements: www.renewamerica.com/columns/roberts/091012 One of the rouge shelters is the Rape and Domestic Violence Information Center in Morgantown. During the course of the lawsuit, agency director Judy Smith admitted under oath, “we do not shelter men in the shelter, even if it's empty." The organization’s tax returns likewise state it wants to stop “violence against women.” That’s fine, of course, but why doesn’t it also care about violence against men? This calls for someone to blow the whistle on unconscionable bias. But when watchdog Hilarion V. Cann sashayed into town for his annual audit, he whitewashed the problem with an “unqualified” opinion – CPA-speak for saying everything is hunky-dory. Another shelter awash in feminist ideology is the Family Crisis Intervention Center in Parkersburg. Center director Judith Ball stated during her deposition that not a single male abuse victim had sought help at her facility in the past six years. Yes, and it’s also true that not many African-Americans have contacted the KKK in recent years for help with their robe-purchasing needs. So when auditor Randall Perry did his shelter audit, he rendered an unqualified blessing, as well. One wonders how much he was paid for that clean bill of health. The Family Refuge Center is no doubt doing wonderful things, as well, stating on its website that its staff works at a nearby medical clinic “to identify and intervene with battered women patients.” Battered men need not apply, I guess. Again no surprise -- CPA Thomas Himes passed that group with flying colors. The annual report of Stop Abusive Family Environments in the town of Welch states, "Our mission to serve domestic violence victims, homeless women and children…" National statistics show males are twice as likely to be homeless as females. Attention men: If you suspect you may become homeless in the near future, try to hitch a ride to the next town, and fast. Watchdog Kurt Feazell had no problems with that brazen admission of unsaintly conduct. Last but not least is the West Virginia Coalition Against Domestic Violence that is endowed with an annual budget of $1.2 million. The Coalition’s website reads like a hybrid of a Hillary Clinton stump speech and a women’s manifesto of the Communist Party USA: “violence against women is a political problem, a question of power and domination.” But CPA Derek Godwin took apparent delight in that neo-Marxist rant. He not only rendered an “Unqualified opinion,” he also piously declared the outfit was a “low-risk auditee.” Domestic violence shelters enjoy the best of both worlds. They claim to be doing the Lord’s work in curbing domestic violence, while running an unholy game of pick-and-chose in deciding which victims are worthy of help. And taxpayer-funded shelter watchdogs have apparently decided to turn the other cheek. The Exploitation of the Mentally Ill by Abuse Shelters In the former Soviet Union, dissidents who saw fit to challenge the prevailing socialist ideology were deemed to be certifiable nut cases. These men were packed off to the loony asylum for a regimen of forced re-education – a bizarre form of treatment that later came to be known as “Soviet psychiatry.” In the United States, feminists believe if a woman suffers from mental illness, the cause must be oppressive patriarchal culture. These women become unwittingly subjected to a rouge brand of therapy called “feminist psychology.” Over the years I’ve come across cases of women in domestic violence shelters who became unwitting Guinea pigs at the hands of feminist psychology practitioners. These are their heart-rending stories. In West Virginia, Eileen P. had been diagnosed with a mental disorder and prescribed psychotropic medications. The pills interfered with her sleep to the point that she eventually stopped taking them, lapsing into flare-ups of abuse. One day in 2007 Mrs. P. became physically abusive of her husband. The police were called in and she was taken to the YWCA Hope House domestic violence shelter in Charleston. Once ensconced at the facility, Mrs. P. began to fret she wasn't getting essential psychiatric help. "Several days later, I notified my pastor, Reverend Linda Duncan, of my whereabouts. Reverend Duncan, in turn, told my husband," Mrs. P. later attested. So her husband asked the Mental Hygiene Commissioner to order an examination, directing the sheriff to escort Mrs. Pope to a hearing the next day. But when the sheriff pulled up to the shelter, the staff claimed they didn’t know her whereabouts. As a result, Mrs. P. missed her hearing, sadly concluding, "This prevented me from getting the professional assistance I desperately needed." Throughout her 3-month shelter stay, Mrs. P. did not receive any professional counseling or medications for her mental health condition. In nearby Virginia, Mrs. J. went to Bethany House of Northern Virginia, hallucinating about make-believe domestic violence attacks by her husband. When the case went to court, the judge noted her precarious mental state and ruled she was not a victim of abuse. Thereupon the spiteful woman responded with a teach-you-a-lesson lawsuit, alleging her husband had stolen secret government documents and shipped them off to India. The claim was so preposterous that a psychologist concluded that she was suffering from paranoid delusions. Eventually on January 8, 2009, Judge Charles Maxfield ruled Mrs. J. had perjured herself by filing a "diatribe of complaints about the integrity” of her husband, thus subjecting him to "Kafkaesque litigation." A thousand miles away in rural Oklahoma, Mrs. H., mother of five, was afflicted with a severe mental condition that required anti-psychotic pills. Sometime in 2005 Mrs. H. became enamored of the notion that she and the children were being abused by her husband. County officials investigated the claim, later clearing the man of the allegation. In July of that year, the woman’s family had her admitted to a local mental health facility. But staff at the SafeNet shelter in nearby Claremore decided they knew better. Instructed to never question a woman’s vexations, the staff went judge-shopping. Over the next year the shelter obtained five restraining orders against the woman’s husband, never once presenting a scintilla of proof of abuse. Mrs. H. was eventually discharged from the mental health residence and sent to live on her own. But her condition remained unstable, so SafeNet employees traipsed to her house to make sure she swallowed the medicines. After countless months of baseless accusations, Judge Gary Dean ruled, "Mrs. [H] is a person with serious mental health problems...After approximately 2 ½ years of extensive counseling, through Safenet and other sources, the Court can see no progress on the mental health issues of the mother." The Judge also decreed the shelter director refrain from “any contact with the children at any time." Recently Mr. H, now divorced from the distraught woman, filed a $6 million lawsuit against the shelter for the incalculable harm it inflicted on him and his children. Mrs. P, Mrs. J, and Mrs. H are now freed from their shelter tormentors, no longer subject to the vagaries of feminist psychology. And they are the lucky ones. Because as you read this editorial, thousands of mentally-ill women languish in abuse shelters, battered by the tired feminist bromides about patriarchal oppression. The “help” they receive consists of consciousness-raising classes led by man-hating women whose sole qualifications are a degree in Womyn’s Studies. One can only hope that more salutary lawsuits are in the works. Only then will abuse shelters begin to hire employees whose qualifications are rooted in objective science, not gender ideology. Abuse Industry Teaches Women to Fear Men, Teaches Men to Fear Women Recently I attended a domestic violence conference hosted by a church in my community. “The Church’s Role in Addressing Domestic Violence in the Faith Community,” the glossy brochure explained. The program featured a Proclamation by President Barack Obama filled with heart-rending language about the “devastating impact” of domestic violence on women and children. The conference included a workshop a dramatic presentation of The Yellow Dress, a play based on stories of women who were victims of dating violence. I opted to screen a video called “Defending our Lives,” featuring the accounts of five women incarcerated for murdering their partners. All insisted their lethal actions were taken solely in self-defense. But from the beginning, it was clear an ideologically-fueled agenda was lurking in the background. Because research shows, over and over, that women are equally likely to aggress against their intimate partners. The video commenced with a stark warning; “There is a war against women in this country.” Oh, really? The video then claimed domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women. That myth has been debunked by persons like professor Richard Gelles of the University of Pennsylvania who derides such claims “factoids from nowhere.” (The actual causes of female death are accidental falls, motor vehicle accidents, and over-exertion.) And then the coup de grace: “Battered women who kill have longer sentences than serial rapists.” The source of that outrageous factoid? Well, nobody seemed to know -- and no one really cared. After all, we’ve got an epidemic of domestic violence on our hands, so any make-believe statistic will do. The effect of the conference was to teach women to distrust and fear the men in their lives as latent, if not actual abusers. Husbands, boyfriends, brothers, even teenage sons – all are now suspect. Also attending the conference were a State’s Attorney and an aide to a federal Congressman. Realizing that women outnumber men in elections, politicians have become sympathetic to women’s concerns these days. As a result, almost every state in the country has domestic violence laws on the books that represent a flagrant suspension of American civil liberties. All a Scream Queen needs to do is play the abuse card, conjuring up a creative allegation that she knows may never require proof. Two years ago a man in Stamford, Conn. was arrested for allegedly kicking his wife and throwing her down a flight of stairs. But it turned out to be a bogus accusation – the woman filed the charge hoping the restraining order would give her a leg-up in an impending divorce and custody hearing. Not only did she file the spurious accusation, but then Superior Court Judge James Bingham denied the man’s request for an evidentiary hearing. Obviously there are fundamental Constitutional issues at stake. Doesn’t the Fourth Amendment require probable cause before an arrest is made? Don’t Fourteenth Amendment due process protections apply? Isn’t stealing a man’s children with the blessing of the family courts a form of “cruel and unusual punishment”? So this past week, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled the man should have been granted an evidentiary hearing based on the preponderance of evidence standard. Amazingly, the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which receives $2.4 million federal funding each year, argued against the Supreme Court ruling, saying it would have a “chilling effect” on victims. In truth, the ruling will have a chilling effect -- on false accusers who should be stoutly punished for their scurrilous deeds. Each year, over two million domestic violence restraining orders are issued in the United States. Half of them are based on not even an allegation of physical aggression, according to a study by the Massachusetts Trial Court. Dads are stigmatized as abusers, families dissolved, and kids thrown into single-parent households. Eventually word gets out. Men get wind that marriage is a raw deal. Lose your kids, your home, and your assets, thanks to a baseless accusation. Men begin to distrust and fear women. That’s the bitter fruit of our nation’s $4 billion domestic violence industry. Well-Heeled Abuse Shelter Implicated in NYC Housing Scam It was another shocking case of domestic violence: Chevelle Richardson and daughter Chandera were both hapless victims at the hands of their abusers. Shanelle Reed, Barbara Goss, Neri Garces, and Deshanna Graham likewise had been swept into the vortex of our nation’s epidemic of partner abuse. If any should doubt their claim, each of the women brandished a police report, order of protection, and a letter from Safe Horizon, a New York City domestic violence agency that bills itself as the “nation’s leading victim assistance organization” and operates eight shelters around the city with a total of 582 beds. Problem is, it was all a scam designed to move the women to the front of the line in order to qualify for federally-subsidized Section 8 rent subsidies. As the New York Times deadpanned Wednesday, “it was a particularly imaginative scheme.” So when a Housing Authority manager noticed the women’s documents were suspiciously similar, an investigation revealed the papers had been forged. The police were called and the scofflaws arrested. For now, we don’t know whether Safe Horizon masterminded the scam or simply played along with the gig by refusing to ask any hard questions. (One of the favorite mantras of the domestic violence industry is “always believe the victim” – unless the victim is a man, of course.) Either way, the case smells worse than 3-day-old carp piled on the South Street Seaport. Like other abuse shelters, Safe Horizon makes a grand show of being perpetually hard-up for cash. Its website (www.safehorizon.org ) pleads with prospective helpers, “we could not do the work that we do without help from our volunteers.” But how many would-be donors know Safe Horizon resembles Citicorp or Bank of America, far more than a grass-roots organization dedicated to providing succor to persons down on their luck? How many realize Safe Horizon rakes in nearly $56 million every year? Do recession-hammered donors appreciate the agency suckles $18 million annually from the federal teat? And how many understand that the shelter’s letter for the six “abused” women was bankrolled by a federal grant funded by the Violence Against Women Act that prohibits giving any legal assistance to a person falsely accused of partner abuse? Safe Horizon’s website assures us our contributions help provide 15,000 referrals to abuse shelters, serve over 11,500 victims of crime, and assist 3,000 men and women who are being stalked. That’s very commendable. But federal tax returns for Safe Horizon reveal skyscraper salaries that would put many bail-out bank executives to shame: Scott Millstein, chief operating officer: $171,169 Beatrice Hanson, chief program officer: $157,776 Gordon Campbell, chief executive officer: $145,952 Michael Williams, general counsel: $141,093 George Johnson, vice president for human resources: $119,485 Nancy Arnow, senior vice president for programs: $116,038 To underwrite these generous salaries, Safe Horizon runs a well-greased corporate giving program. The agency shells out $217,192 to head rainmaker Maile Miske, plus an additional $155,354 to senior VP for development Katherine Wickham. Safe Horizon stages fund-raising events throughout the year, requiring $400,000 for an event planner and another $380,000 for “sponsorship proposals,” whatever that means. Which means Safe Horizons spends over a million smackeroos a year to bankroll its fund-raising operation. And that’s not all – there’s so much loose change rolling around the operation that it needs to pay chief financial officer Jay Aronowitz 175,000 greenbacks a year to keep the books in order, plus another 130 grand to an outside auditing firm. How’s that for going green? Safe Horizons gives a brand new twist to the famous old expression, “Doing well by doing good.” Email Safe Horizons: joanna.colangelo@safehorizon.org Judge KOs Shelter Kickback Scheme Every time we turn around, it seems, we hear of an abuse shelter being accused of discrimination, fraud, or other head-shaking irregularities. And now a judge has ruled the entire abuse shelter industry in the state of West Virginia is wracked by conflict of interest, gender bias, and financial kickbacks. The ménage a trois involves a government agency, a well-heeled trade organization, and 14 domestic violence shelters located around the state. Here’s how the scratch-your-back scheme works… Any time a couple gets married or divorced in West Virginia, they are required to cough up a $15 fee to the Family Protection Services Board. That tallies up to $380,000 each year, a tidy sum for sure. The Board then doles out the money to one of the 14 licensed domestic violence shelters around the state. So far, so good. And how does a domestic violence shelter become licensed? Actually, the Board doesn’t set its own standards – that responsibility was outsourced to the West Virginia Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Now the plot thickens, because the Coalition was long ago hijacked by a radical feminist ideology. I recently visited its website at www.wvcadv.org and was jolted by this neo-Marxist cant: “violence against women is a political problem, a question of power and domination.” That’s right, shove aside the research showing women are just as likely as men to be the instigators of partner abuse. Forget former NFL quarterback Steve McNair, shot in the chest four times in his chest by his ex-girlfriend as he slept. Sweep under the rug the fact that alcohol abuse is linked to most cases of abuse. In other words, the Coalition openly proclaims its belief that domestic violence is all about unfettered patriarchy. And this group is no seat-of-the-pants operation – the trade organization’s annual budget of $1.2 million comfortably supports a staff of nine. So if you’re looking for objective criteria for shelter licensure, you won’t find it at the Coalition. That’s because the group decrees that in order to become a certified domestic violence advocate, you have to swear fealty to the feminist catechism that “domestic violence is deeply rooted in historical attitudes towards women.” Whether you believe that statement is laughable, bizarre, or merely one-sided, you can’t become certified in West Virginia unless you take the loyalty oath. So the ideologically-driven Coalition establishes the certification standards. And the Board says before you can receive a penny of its money, at least one-third of shelter employees must be certified by the Coalition. So where’s the kickback arrangement? Because all 14 abuse shelters around the state are members of and pay dues to – you guessed it! – the West Virginia Coalition Against Domestic Violence. This good-ol’-girls club does not take kindly to other groups that want to partake of the state’s abuse-prevention funding. So finally a group called Men and Women Against Discrimination had to file a lawsuit. The suit charged the policies of the Family Protection Services Board discriminated against male victims of domestic violence and deprived violence-prone women of access to perpetrator intervention programs. When Judge James Stucky began to examine the case, he discovered bias pervaded the system from top to bottom. Take Judy Smith, one of the five directors of the FPSB and head of the Rape and Domestic Violence Information Center in Morgantown. Smith admitted – actually boasted – during her lawsuit deposition, “we do not shelter men in the shelter, even if it’s empty.” Judge Stucky found the discrimination to be so widespread and egregious that last week he issued a summary judgment, taking all parties in the case by surprise: www.acfc.org/site/DocServer/WV_Findings_of_Fact.pdf?docID=2621 Noting the state legislature did not intend to restrict domestic violence services to the members of any one sex, he found the Board exceeded its statutory authority by delegating the standard-setting to a trade organization. “In practice this rule excludes any persons who does not adhere to the gender biased fundamental beliefs of the Coalition,” ruled the judge. Appalled by the illegal actions of an organization driven by a cult-like ideology, Judge Stucky concluded the Board’s policies “are null and void.” Civil rights advocates across the nation were elated. “Today, men and the women who love them have reason to celebrate,” notes columnist Teri Stoddard. But she cautions the fight may not be over: “lawsuits like this will unfortunately need to continue across the country.” ACORN Falls from the Tree, Will Abuse Shelters Come Next? ACORN, the liberal activist group, was stripped of its funding by the House of Representatives Thursday following release of undercover videos showing lurid and criminal activities. One tape showed an ACORN employee named Tresa Kaelke of San Bernardino, Calif. bragging how she had murdered her husband: “I shot him. And he died. Right there.” To perfect her alibi, the ACORN worker declared how she had gone to a local domestic violence shelter where she “pleaded my case.” Following release of the video, a red-faced Kaelke claimed she was just playing along with the Candid-Camera gag, and local police reported her former husbands were alive and well. We’re relieved to hear the men are safe. Still, there’s something deeply disturbing about Kaelke’s boast. Recently Trudy Schuett of Examiner.com published an insider account of abuse shelters. She reveals, “We’ve seen cases where fictional abuse, contrived for the purposes of leverage in court, became a reality.” In other words, shelter workers coached women like Tresa Kaelke how to fabricate a White Lie for purposes of manipulating the legal system. Others have developed a similar jaded view of shelters’ claims of protecting women from their villainous tormentors. In July, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his plan to rescue the state from the brink of financial insolvency, cutting all funds for domestic violence shelters in the state. Over the years I’ve had occasion to visit abuse shelters, speak with their employees, and peruse their literature. Just like the kiss-and-tell videos reveal fraudulent actions at ACORN offices around the country, I have found evidence of widespread malfeasance. These are some of the more spectacular examples: Arizona: A female resident sexually assaulted a 12-year-old boy staying at the Brewster Center Domestic Violence Services, but shelter staff wouldn’t allow police on the premises to investigate. In Phoenix, the Shield Foundation operates an immigration scam operation that relies on well-rehearsed shake-downs of alleged abusers. Arkansas: A resident made up tear-jerker accounts of partner abuse and medical emergencies, duping staff at the Options shelter in Monticello to loan her $25,000. Georgia: The Cherokee Family Violence Center in Canton fabricated an allegation of child neglect by a shelter resident who complained too often, causing the mother to lose custody of her infant for five months. Oklahoma: The YWCA Crisis Center in Enid lures prospective residents with the promise, “We do NOT require proof of abuse.” Cindy Lou Shores, former director of the South Central Region Tribal Nations program, now resides in a federal prison for embezzling $106,000. At SafeNet in Claremore, the director was ordered to avoid any further contact with a former resident’s children. Earlier this month the children’s father filed a multi-million lawsuit against the shelter. Texas: The Bay Area Turning Point program in Houston hosts dating parties, pairing up abused shelter residents with local dandies for an evening of schmoozing and boozing. Virginia: Bethany House of Northern Virginia has a long record of problems. First, two female shelter workers were fired for sexual advances of the residents. Then an attorney appeared at a client’s house demanding sex for his pro bono services. Later the shelter waged a six-year campaign to harass the husband of a mentally-deranged resident, what the judge later described as “Kafkaesque litigation.” West Virginia: The staff of the Hope House in Charleston lied to police about a woman in their facility, preventing her from getting needed mental health treatment. And the director of the Domestic Violence Information Center in Morgantown recently admitted under oath, “we do not shelter men in the shelter even if it’s empty.” Now a group called Men and Women Against Discrimination has filed a sex discrimination lawsuit. Washington: A blind woman was ridiculed and finally ejected by staff at WomenCare in Bellingham for requesting basic safety accommodations like Braille dots on the security keypad at the shelter entrance. In Florida, shelters are in a state of disarray. At SafeSpace shelter in Stuart, a 16-month-old toddler was run over in the shelter parking lot, and a woman was later fatally stabbed by a shelter co-resident. The Shelter for Abused Women and Children in Naples fired its former director for harassing and assaulting shelter employees. At Another Way in Lake City, a four-year-old girl was vaginally penetrated by an older girl staying at the facility. Shelters managers drive shelter vans for personal use. Overt sex discrimination. Illicit drug use. Employees convicted of multiple violent crimes. An astronomical staff turn-over. And more. No doubt some abuse shelters are providing a tremendous service to their communities. But considering abuse shelters take in $1.4 billion from the government and other sources annuallly, there are far too many bad apples in this barrel for Congress to continue to turn a blind eye on this sordid affair. Culling Out the Population, the Enlightened Liberal Way Progressives exist in a state of constant angst, agonizing over snail darters, incandescent light bulbs, and of course global warming. But the issue that drives liberals to a state of tongue-wagging, eyeball-popping hysteria is population growth -- what doomsayer Paul Erlich once termed the “Population Bomb.” And history shows liberals are willing to take almost any measure to keep the population in check – just so long as the program can be cloaked in mesmerizing happy-talk. Want to stop the beating hearts of 46 million unborn children each year? Then just call it “promoting choice and empowering women” – doesn’t that sound wonderful! Desire to kill off 30 million African children from the ravages of malaria? Then ban DDT in the name of saving the bird shells! Yearn to see the deadly AIDS epidemic continue to rage out of control? Then push the “safe sex” campaigns that tell teenagers to indulge in carefree sex, just so long as you use a condom. And when all else fails, try forced sterilization. I’ve previously described how progressive-inspired racial purification schemes led to the sterilization of 400,000 undesirables in Nazi Germany: www.renewamerica.com/columns/roberts/090827 Sterilization is not merely a hush-hush liberal policy of a by-gone era. Sterilization continues to be topic of debate to the present day. And I’m not just talking about repressive societies like Communist China. (As First Lady, Hillary Clinton decried China’s one-child policy as a violation of human rights. But as Secretary of State, Clinton completely swept the issue under the rug during her recent trip to China. But I digress.) And now there’s a whole new chapter to the eugenics saga. In 1977 Paul and Anne Erlich wrote Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment. The book is so replete with Chicken-Little scenarios and mad-scientist nostrums that if I paraphrase, you’ll accuse me of making this up. So allow me to recite a few lines as you hum along to the tune of Three Blind Mice. Paul and Anne Erlich begin by declaring, “Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.” That’s what’s called a living, breathing Constitution. But compulsory abortion alone will not suffice: “A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men,” they urge. For reasons unknown, these benevolent people say they prefer to target women. How to bring this about? “The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control.” Ever heard of Norplant? If that fails, the Erlichs propose a back-up plan: “Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods.” To meet stringent FDA standards, the sterilant “must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets or livestock.” At least Fido and Fufu will be safe! Admitting there are “very difficult political, legal and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems,” the Erlichs still express hope their idea will one day bear fruition. Oh, I forgot to mention one important detail. Ecoscience was also co-authored by John P. Holdren, recently named as President Obama’s chief science advisor. Considered an expert on global climate change, Holdren has a wide-ranging mandate to advise the president how science and technology impact domestic and international affairs. To this day, Holdren has yet to repudiate any of the frightening proposals outlined in his book. So until the Sterilant-in-Chief departs from the Obama administration, my advice to you is this: Keep a close eye on the drinking-water. Rep. Joe Wilson Calls Out the Liberal Lies Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina infuriated millions of smug liberals Wednesday night when he yelled out during President Obama’s congressional speech, “You lie!” To which I heartily respond, “Representative Wilson, you are one red-blooded American hero.” Peddling his healthcare plan to an increasingly skeptical electorate, Obama claimed, “The reforms I am proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” The truth is, Obama’s healthcare reform bill contains no mechanism to verify whether persons are U.S. citizens before they receive government benefits. So the president’s statement was, a-hem, highly misleading. For years, conservatives have been unfailingly polite and duly respectful when confronted with the standard array of leftist slanders, half-truths, distortions, and outright prevarications. But have you noticed how it’s getting harder these days to sort out the lies from reality? We’ve reached the point that propagandistic claims are beginning to permeate our culture – the media, our schools, the workplace, not to mention in political discourse. Of particular concern are the falsehoods regularly doled out by former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Barbara Mikulski, along with all the rest of their N.O.W. sidekicks. So for the sheer pleasure and entertainment of my loyal readers, herewith I list my 10 favorite feminist follies. Ready for a couple belly-laughs? Lie #1: Women require special preferences and set-asides so they can compete fairly with men. Truth: Can you believe feminists would make such a disparaging remark about the abilities and ambitions of women? Lie #2: Women are more ethical and morally-upright than men. Truth: Knowing this was one of candidate Hillary Clinton’s applause lines, any attempted refutation on my part would be redundant. Lie #3: Women are the victims of wage discrimination (another of Hillary’s favorites) Truth: Women work fewer hours, have less work experience, and more often work in air-conditioned comfort, compared to men. When these factors are taken into account, women are paid the same as men. Lie #4: Only men care about the trappings of political power. Truth: I am “the most powerful woman in America…All right, let’s hear it for the power!” – Nancy Pelosi, January 3, 2007, upon being named Speaker of the House Lie #5: Women were routinely excluded from medical research studies (Sen. Mikulski milked this ha-ha for years). Truth: Although women were slightly under-represented in heart studies, they were substantially over-represented in cancer research. Nowadays, two out of three research participants in National Institutes of Health studies are female. Lie #6: Male lawmakers have historically given short-shrift to the needs of women. Truth: Consider Social Security, Medicare, and the full gamut of social welfare programs – services that were passed into law by male legislators, and serve mostly women. Lie #7: The glass-ceiling stops women from reaching the highest levels of business and politics. Truth: Few women wish to put in 70-hour work weeks and sacrifice time with their families to reach the pinnacle of their profession. Lie #8: Women are incapable of slapping, hitting, or otherwise harming their partners. Truth: Research shows women are equally violent as men in their intimate relationships. Just ask former NFL star Steven McNair. Lie #9: Men don’t do their fair share of childcare or housework. Truth: When you add up the total number of hours that men and women put in on the job and at home, men are very much pulling their weight, and more. Now, are you ready for the Big Kahuna? The Grand Gagger that forms the basis for all other feminist lies? Here goes… Lie #10: For millennia, women have suffered from patriarchal oppression wielded by over-bearing and wicked men. Truth: That’s plain ridiculous. Why do these women choose to ignore the countless men who have given their lives defending kith and kin? And the husbands who clock extra hours on the job so their wives can enjoy the good life? So I want to offer a challenge to my readers. When you hear a liberal fabrication, stop being so polite. Acquiescing to the bully tactics only reinforces the behavior. Here’s a more apt response: “You lie!” That’ll stop them in their tracks. Turning the State Against Law-Abiding Citizens In every fascistic society the government eventually resorts to the vilification of its own citizenry – that’s the schoolboy lesson from 20th century Italy, Soviet Russia, and of course, the Third Reich. So what are we to make of Democratic leaders who use ugly stereotypes to revile opponents of healthcare reform as “un-American,” “Ku Klux Klan folks,” and “rabid right-wing extremists”? And what of President Obama’s August 6 admonition, “I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking.”? Apparently he was referring to Republicans, conveniently ignoring the fact that the bloated Medicare and Medicaid programs were the brainchild of Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. That same week the White House launched its fishy-fact hotline to combat “disinformation about health insurance reform.” That’s right, if you are one of millions of Americans who believes Obamacare will escalate the national debt, ration medical care, and pay for abortions, obviously you’ve been duped. To avoid further embarrassment, please report for assignment to the appropriate re-education class. Actually, the Obama Administration’s purge of the political opposition started months before -- on April 9 to be exact. That’s when the Department of Homeland Security released a document bearing the none-too-subtle title, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” Warning “rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears,” the report is a concoction of loony conspiracy theories, not a document that resembles anything like a credible intelligence assessment. And exactly who are these potential extremists? Well, are you White? Then you have likely “capitalized on related racial and political prejudices in expanded propaganda campaigns.” Are you a returning veteran? Do you believe in the Second Amendment? Have you ever worried about “perceived government infringement on civil liberties”? Are you opposed to abortion? Do you question federal authority in favor of state or local authority? Wary of illegal immigration? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, Homeland Security has now classified you as an extremist. That’s right folks, we’ve eliminated the terrorist threat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now we can go after the real terrorists – all those returning G.I.s who were expecting a hero’s welcome! The bizarre DHS report set the stage for media coverage of the April 15 Tea Party protests. Despite the spirited tone of the rallies, media commentators took delight in linking the event to an obscure homosexual fetish. And President Obama pretended to not notice, with ABC inexplicably reporting, “The White House says the president is unaware of the tea parties and will hold his own event today.” A call to arms was sounded at the state level. A Maryland National Guard report warned ominously, “Commanders are encouraged to update alert rosters and review emergency evacuation plans/rally points. Ensure all facilities have emergency phone lists posted (i.e. FBI, FIRE, POLICE, HOSPITALS, EMS, ETC…). Be aware of and avoid local protests.” Yikes! Then on June 26 the White House named feminist Lynn Rosenthal as the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women. It’s no secret the domestic violence industry is marinated in make-believe statistics, anti-male ideology, and ever-expanding definitions of abuse. So with that appointment the White House placed its seal of approval on the continuing wave of unconstitutional mandatory arrests of Americans falsely accused of “domestic violence.” (A few days after Rosenthal’s appointment, former NFL quarterback Steve McNair was shot and killed by his ex-girlfriend as he slept. But according to the $4 billion abuse industry, a woman killing a Black man is not domestic violence, so no cause for worry.) And two weeks ago President Obama upped the ante, authorizing Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate whether CIA officers broke the law to interrogate al Qaeda suspects. The truth is, as a result of enhanced questioning methods, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed spilled the beans on a whole range of al Qaeda activities. This information led to “specific, actionable intelligence, as well as a general increase in the amount of information about al Qaeda and its affiliates,” according to a recently-released Department of Justice memo. But Obama brushed that aside. Presidential shunnings. A White House snitch line. Peaceful protesters smeared as terrorists. A politically-motivated witch hunt of government officials. It’s all so….post-Orwellian. Margaret Sanger: Birth Control Pioneer and Feminist-Fascist Shell-shocked liberals have taken to dubbing conservatives as “Ku Klux Klan folks” and “neo-fascists” toting swastikas to town hall meetings. But ironically, turns out it’s liberals who have engaged in a century-long pas de deux with fascistic ideology. Take Margaret Sanger – public health nurse, rabid feminist, and avowed socialist. Doing her rounds in New York City’s immigrant ghettos, she became enamored of the biological and political possibilities of birth control. A prolific writer, she churned out numerous books and articles. In Women and the New Race, Sanger ominously expounded: “no Socialist republic can operate successfully and maintain its ideals unless the practice of birth control is encouraged to a marked and efficient degree.” Margaret Sanger regarded members of both sexes with a decidedly misanthropic disdain. Of men she wrote, “In all of the animal species below the human, motherhood has a clearly discernible superiority over fatherhood….natural law makes the female the expression and the conveyor of racial efficiency.” Members of the female sex were equally worthy of contempt: “woman has, through her reproductive ability, founded and perpetuated the tyrannies of the Earth. Had she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively.” In 1921 Sanger established the American Birth Control League, which later assumed the sanitized moniker Planned Parenthood. The League’s co-founder was the anti-Semite Lothrop Stoddard, who would later aver the “Jew problem [is] already settled in principle and soon to be settled in fact by the physical elimination of the Jews themselves from the Third Reich.” Two years later Sanger launched her notorious Birth Control Review. The journal would publish propaganda pieces like “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need” by Ernst Rudin, Hitler’s director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. The American counterpart to the Nazi group was the American Eugenics Society, of which Sanger was a prominent member. In 1939 Sanger created the Negro Project with the avowed purpose of reining in the unchecked growth of the Black population. But her true intentions went beyond mere population control: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” she cautioned a friend. At that time Blacks numbered 12 million persons, representing about one-tenth of the U.S. total. The acme of Sanger’s career came in 1932 when she unveiled her Plan for Peace. The fascistic manifesto urged the U.S. Congress to “apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of populations whose progeny is tainted” and to “give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.” Sanger’s wide-ranging hit-list included “morons, mental defectives, epileptics,…illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, [and] dope-fiends.” Sanger admitted these persons constituted an “enormous part of our population,” upwards of 20 million persons. That represented about 15% of the American population. A mere year after Sanger expounded on her peace plan, Adolf Hitler signed the infamous Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. During the ensuing years, the Nazi regime sterilized an estimated 400,000 persons deemed to be racially, physically, or mentally unfit. At the Nuremberg Trials, Allied prosecutors recited the horrifying litany of Nazi crimes, including the practice of compulsory sterilization. Without mentioning Sanger by name, the German Socialists defended their harsh population control measures by explaining it was the United States from whom they had taken inspiration. Over the years, Margaret Sanger used her bully pulpit to call for the segregation or sterilization of 15% of the U.S. population, and the extermination of another tenth of the citizenry. Despite those fascistic designs, Margaret Sanger still occupies a revered position in the pantheon of American liberalism. Every year Planned Parenthood bequeaths its Margaret Sanger Award to recognize “outstanding contributions to the reproductive health and rights movement.” Past recipients include such liberal luminaries as Bella Abzug, Phil Donahue, and Jane Fonda. Any guesses who carried home the award in 2009? Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. How to Argue with a (Guilty) Liberal Like a demanding and ill-mannered child, liberals are used to getting their way. Whenever they lapse into the losing side of an argument, they reflexively resort to name-calling and mud-slinging. Epithets like “neo-Nazi,” “crypto-fascist,” and “imperialist stooge” buzz like mosquitoes hovering over a Potomac swamp. But how many conservatives who are targets of such slurs know these liberals are indulging in one of the greatest intellectual ruses in history? How many realize it’s a matter of the red-faced pot calling the kettle black? Esteemed reader, you are about to learn the truth of the long-standing love affair between American progressivism and European fascism. As Jonah Goldberg reveals in his bestseller Liberal Fascism, that romance can be traced back to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. The Democrat was both a progressive and racist who famously wrote, “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation…until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.” Shortly after America entered World War I in 1917, Wilson signed an Executive Order establishing the Committee on Public Information, a propaganda apparatus designed to whip Americans into a patriotic fervor. The following year Wilson pushed for the Sedition Act which banned the use of any “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government. That sweeping language served to squelch all forms of political dissent. The notorious Sedition Act occasioned the arrest of an estimated 175,000 Americans accused of essentially failing to be sufficiently patriotic – leading Goldberg to dub the Wilson presidency a “fascist police state.” For those who wonder whether the phrase “liberal fascist” is a little over the top, in fact it was coined by science fiction novelist H.G. Wells. In 1932 the progressivist Wells delivered a speech that called for a revitalization of the fading liberal movement: “the Fascists of Liberalism must…begin as a disciplined sect, but they must end as the sustaining organization of a reconstituted mankind.” Wells was also a friend and confidante of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Struggling to rescue America from the dregs of the Great Depression, FDR was fully aware of what was transpiring in Europe and sought to emulate its accomplishments. Roosevelt once bragged, “what we are doing in this country were some of things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany.” European fascists returned the presidential compliment. In 1934 the Nazi Party’s official newspaper sang the praises of FDR, describing him as a “warm-hearted leader of the people with a profound understanding of social needs.” And the Fuhrer himself sent Roosevelt a private letter applauding his “heroic efforts in the interests of the American people.” Mussolini was even more enthralled with the American commander. Upon reading Roosevelt’s Looking Forward, Mussolini fawned, “The appeal to the decisiveness and masculine sobriety of the nation’s youth, with which Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people.” Il Duce was of course referring to the sweeping New Deal policies that established massive job programs, centralized power in vast government bureaucracies, and imposed rigid price controls on the economy. But the ugliest chapter in the progressive-fascist alliance centered on eugenics, the pseudo-science of racial purification. Three prominent persons, all of the liberal persuasion, were prominent flag-wavers in this execrable episode of American history. Woodrow Wilson was one of the first American politicians to promote eugenic policies. As governor of New Jersey, Wilson approved a law in 1912 that created the Board of Examiners of Feebleminded, Epileptics, and Other Defectives. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was another progressive icon of the era. Holmes wrote the flawed Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell that put the legal stamp of approval on compulsory sterilization. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Holmes infamously wrote. A few years later in 1934 the American Eugenics Society published the Case for Sterilization, a book that piqued the interest of the Fuhrer himself. One leading member of the American Eugenics Society was Margaret Sanger. The birth-control crusader was the moving force behind the Negro Project, which enlisted ministers such as Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. in the crusade to restrict reproduction among “inferior” stocks of Blacks. So fellow conservatives, arise! The next time you are slandered as a proto-Nazi or angry White male (which in the liberal mind are one and the same), drag out the fascist skeletons rattling in the progressive closet. Mention Woodrow Wilson’s infatuation with racial cleansing, the FDR-Hitler mutual admiration society, Justice Holmes’ authorship of Buck v. Bell, and Margaret Sanger’s Negro Project. If that doesn’t stop the guilty-minded liberal in his tracks, mention how progressive-inspired eugenics policies were the prime moving force behind the forced sterilization of 400,000 undesirables in Nazi Germany. That inconvenient truth is certain to focus the discussion. Hope House Shelter Denies Woman the Help She ‘Desperately Needed’ Two years ago a newspaper account alleged Hope House, a domestic violence shelter located in Charleston, West Virginia, had admitted an abusive woman to its facility, misled sheriff deputies, and denied her the help she needed: www.wvrecord.com/news/202143-victims-of-false-domestic-violence-reporting-detail-experiences Now, new documents have come to light that detail how the domestic violence system apparently failed to help a woman who urgently needed medical treatment. Eileen Pope was diagnosed with a mental disorder and was prescribed psychotropic medications in late 2006. The pills interfered with her sleep to the point that she eventually stopped taking them, and she relapsed into her bouts of verbal abuse. One day in January 2007 Mr. Charles Pope came home to find his wife in a highly agitated state. He immediately telephoned the family pastor, Rev. Linda Duncan, for help. Without warning, Mrs. Pope began to threaten and chase him around the table. Just as the pastor came in the house, she violently shoved him backwards. The police arrived shortly afterwards. Because they were trained to believe the male partner is always culpable for domestic violence, they started to arrest him. But the pastor, who had just witnessed the incident, explained it was Mrs. Pope who was the aggressor. The police took Mrs. Pope to the Charleston Area Medical Center for treatment. There she falsely told the social worker that she, not her husband, was a victim of domestic violence. The hospital worker took her claim at face value and didn’t bother to check the police report. Mrs. Pope, now officially dubbed a “victim” of domestic violence, was transferred to the nearby Hope House shelter. According to its website, the mission of Hope House is to “eliminate domestic violence through leadership, education, empowerment, and community collaboration.” Hope House operates on a budget upwards of three-quarters of a million dollars, so it’s safe to say the program is no fly-by-night operation. According to Mrs. Pope’s recent statement, “I told the shelter staff that I was a victim of domestic violence and needed help…The staff asked me for no proof [of abuse] or no identification. The truth was I was not a domestic violence victim but had abused my husband.” (emphasis added) Once ensconced at the facility, Mrs. Pope faced a decidedly non-therapeutic environment. “I often felt unsafe. There were several physical and verbal altercations between the shelter residents. I had clothing stolen from me,” she relates. She began to fret she wasn’t getting psychiatric help. “Several days later, I notified my pastor, Reverend Linda Duncan, of my whereabouts. Reverend Duncan, in turn, told my husband.” So on January 16, 2007, Mr. Charles Pope filed an Application for Involuntary Custody for Mental Health Examination. The Mental Hygiene Commissioner approved Mr. Pope’s petition, ordering the sheriff to escort Mrs. Pope to a hearing in his chambers the next day. But when the sheriff arrived at the shelter, Mrs. Pope wasn’t there – at least that’s what shelter staff said. But that wasn’t true, according to Mrs. Pope: “My husband attempted to get help for me through a mental hygiene petition. However, the YWCA Hope House Staff blocked my husband’s efforts by telling the officials (law enforcement) that I was not at the domestic violence shelter.” Mrs. Pope missed her hearing with the Mental Hygiene Commissioner, haplessly concluding, “This prevented me from getting the professional assistance I desperately needed.” Three months later the distraught woman found herself languishing at the shelter. But in mid-April events took an unexpected course. “The staff and administrators appeared to be angry with me. I did not know why. Then the director told me that I must leave the shelter,” Mrs. Pope recounts. Three days later she was out the door, dispatched to a homeless shelter. And why the sudden change of heart? Because Mr. Pope had succeeded in finding a public forum to share the account of his wife, who was unable to get urgently needed psychological help. Most abuse shelters impose a 1-2 month limit. So why did the Hope House keep the woman in the shelter for so long? Mrs. Pope believes the reason was less than altruistic: “I believe there was some financial incentive for YWCA Hope House to have me remain at the domestic violence shelter because I am physically handicapped, mentally handicapped, over the age of 40 years and an African American female.” Throughout her shelter stay, she did not receive any prescribed medicines for her mental health condition or undergo professional counseling. By Mrs. Pope’s account, the Hope House staff thwarted a sheriff’s attempt to comply with a court order, did not provide a safe environment, and deterred her from receiving the medical care she required. When these facts came to light, she was summarily removed from the facility. Does Feminism Portend the Rise of a New Master Race? Were you taken back by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg’s recent admission that Roe v. Wade was decided because persons were worried about “populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”? Ginsburg’s atavistic views can be traced back to the pioneering work of Margaret Sanger, the celebrated American feminist who later founded Planned Parenthood. Beyond her feverish crusade to convince women to use birth control, Sanger was an unapologetic eugenicist. In her book The Pivot of Civilization she wrote, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control.” In 1934 she wrote her infamous Code to Stop Overproduction of Children that advocated, “no woman should have a legal right to bear a child without a permit…no permit should be valid for more than one child.” (Think China’s One-Child Policy.) Nor could there be any doubt about Sanger’s genocidal motivations. In 1926 she gave an impassioned speech at a New Jersey KKK rally and later established the euphemistically named “Negro Project.” Sanger would later confide to a friend, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” But the long-standing feminist interest in promoting “good births” is not limited to race alone. Feminists regard women, especially white women, as a sort of uber-species, a superior breed of human-beings who are endowed with greater foresight, wisdom, and understanding. One such advocate is Sally Miller Gearhart, author of The Future – If There is One – Is Female. Here’s Miller’s uniquely gendered solution to over-population: “The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race.” In commemoration of Miller’s accomplishments, a fund was later established in her name for the University of Oregon’s women’s studies program. Valerie Solanas is another female supremacist. Author of the SCUM (Society for Cutting up Men) Manifesto, Solanas referred to men as a “biological accident” and called on women to “destroy the male sex.” Upon her death in 1988, Solanas was lionized by the president of the New York State chapter of the National Organization for Women as an “outstanding champion of women’s rights.” Mary Daly, former professor at Boston College, was one of the early proponents of the “goddess movement,” which seeks to replace Christ-centered religion with a polytheistic pantheon that includes Earth Mother, Gaia, and other icons of womanist theology. In 2001 Daly wrote, “If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this process will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.” But in one of history’s supreme ironies, the feminist scheme to “decontaminate” the Earth by weeding out male undesirables backfired. It boomeranged largely due to feminists’ own doing. As a result of widespread availability of abortion services and the decision of millions of pregnant women to abort their fetuses on the basis of sex, the lives of millions of unborn girls in India, China, and elsewhere have been tragically snuffed out. As Charles Dickens once wrote in A Tale of Two Cities: “Every revolution eventually turns on itself.” But most gender supremacists are well-schooled in the methods of soft totalitarianism. They eschew the ham-fisted rhetoric of boot-jacked fascism in favor of kinder, gentler catch-phrases such as “female empowerment” and “gender consciousness-raising.” So rather than engage in a “drastic reduction” of the male population, feminists now implement laws and policies that are designed to incrementally stigmatize and ultimately marginalize men. Let’s start with NPR analyst Cokie Roberts’ recent comment, “Men are just lesser beings.” That misandrist attitude may be more widespread than persons like to admit. Once a substantial minority of the populace comes to believe that men are “lesser beings,” it becomes easy to jigger policies that make it harder for men to get a fair shake. Take Obama’s stimulus package – remember how the $787 billion was going to create “shovel-ready” jobs, rebuild the infrastructure, and restart the economy? As it turned out, the stimulus package will hire thousands of social workers, nurses, and teachers’ aides, allowing women to commandeer 42% of all the new positions, even though four out of five persons who lost their jobs in the recession were male. Consider the millions of dollars spent for “women’s health” programs, even though men die 5 years sooner than women. And ponder the irony of colleges that sponsor “women’s studies” programs, while the number of men in higher education continues to dwindle. So is it far-fetched to countenance the quest for a new Master Race based on neo-eugenic feminist ideology? Columnist Jonah Goldberg offers this terse, if sobering answer in his recent opus: “The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism.” Feminists Endowed with a Superiority Complex Taking the oath to “do equal right to the poor and to the rich,” Sonia Sotomayor was finally sworn in as the first Latina on the U.S. Supreme Court. No sooner had the kerfuffle surrounding her “wise Latina” remark subsided, when Carol Smith saw fit to pen this wise verdict in the New York Times: “In my experience, female bosses tend to be better managers, better advisers, mentors, rational thinkers.” Not to be outdone, last week NPR analyst Cokie Roberts opined in the Washington Post, “Women tend to be a lot more commonsensical than men are” and admitted to hectoring her husband that “Men are just lesser beings.” Call it whatever you want – female empowerment, turning the tables, girls letting off a little steam, whatever -- it’s time to blow the whistle on feminist-inspired misandry. For decades, male-bashing has been deemed an amusing side show in the Battle of the Sexes. Some consider it funny when an advertisement depicts a man maimed by his girlfriend. Others will say an abused man simply had it coming. (Think former NFL star Steve McNair, shot four times in his sleep by a jealous girlfriend -- but no one could bring themselves to call it “domestic violence.”) In recent years, gender supremacism has entered the mainstream of political discourse. Former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Texas once declared, “I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which a man structurally does not have.” And consider Hillary Clinton’s remark, “Research shows the presence of women raises the standards of ethical behavior and lowers corruption.” Thank goodness we have ethical paragons like Hillary to show us out of the wilderness. Sometimes pronouncements of women-as-uber-species approach the point of logical absurdity. Appearing on NPR radio, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona once gushed that women “get so much done because we make lists.” Somehow that sounds like the freakish musings of an obsessive-compulsive, not the reflections of a person trying to make the world a kinder, gentler place. A February 5 editorial in the Christian Science Monitor announced grandly that “a woman leader governs differently than a man, bringing new perspectives and helping other women.” I’m sure that came as a surprise to the men who worked long and hard to enact Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a bevy of other programs that primarily benefit women. Sometimes the gender supremacists get downright ugly, lapsing into demagoguery to cast men as abusers, deadbeats, and batterers. If you want a real eye-opener, take a look at University of Michigan Catherine McKinnon’s writings. And don’t forget Valerie Solanas’ SCUM (Society for Cutting up Men) Manifesto. Not all academics are enamored of the feminist antics. Professors Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young of McGill University have written two scholarly tomes that probe the feminist dystopia. Their first book, Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture, lamentably concludes “men are society’s official scapegoats and [should be] held responsible for all evil, including that done by the women they have deluded or intimidated.” Their second work, Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systematic Discrimination Against Men, reveals how feminists have capitalized on their disdain for men to reshape policies in such wide-ranging areas as marriage, divorce, custody, and even employment. Case in point is the recent revelation that President Obama’s stimulus plan is skewed to favor women, even though men in the manufacturing and construction industries have been hit hardest: www.renewamerica.us/columns/roberts/090723 . America has a courageous record of drawing on our traditional notions of fairness and justice to confront supremacists in our midst. We have faced down the bigots, the xenophobes, left-wing fascists, and race-baiters. Now we must come to terms with the dark side of modern feminism, a movement that fosters contempt and scorn for men. NYT Decrees, Women ‘Better Managers’ than Men In a reprise of Sonia Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” comments, the New York Times has settled the age-old debate about who makes better office managers. “No Doubts: Women are Better Managers” announces the July 26 headline. To resolve the galloping debate, the NYT editors summoned Carol Smith, senior vice president for the Elle Group. In case you haven’t made the acquaintance, the Elle Group woos new members with the breathless claim it will “enrich your life, pamper your body, nurture your spirit, accelerate your business, and celebrate your soul.” Sorry, no men allowed. Ms. Smith is possessed of an uncanny, indeed unfathomable acumen such that she is able to dispense with the usual accoutrements of objective inquiry, so no need to do an employee survey or commission a national poll. It’s what they call a woman’s intuition. Here’s Ms. Smith at her most lucid: “In my experience, female bosses tend to be better managers, better advisers, mentors, rational thinkers.” Why? Because “Men love to hear themselves talk.” (In my time hanging around the office water cooler, female workers do far more conversing than men. But who am I to doubt Ms. Smith’s firm grasp on reality?) Oh, and women are terrific list-makers. “They will do their to-do list. They will prioritize their to-do list. They will get through their to-do list,” Smith compulsively writes. That’s right guys, forget that aspiration of getting an MBA, all you need to do is pull out pencil and paper and start making lists! “Hands down women are better. There’s no contest,” Smith zestfully concludes. And lest she come across as a smug know-it-all, “I want less of that self-righteousness,” she avers. I hate to differ with the erudite pronouncements of Ms. Smith, but my experience has been of a different ilk. I well recall a female co-worker who whispered to me in the hallway, “I can’t stand working for women!” Her female supervisor micromanaged and publicly berated her for every shortcoming, imagined and real, to the point she had to go to the union with a harassment complaint. My personal you-won’t-believe-this story involved an office where women outnumbered men three to one. My supervisor, a female, had hand-picked all the women. On good-hair days, she would refer to her staff as “my dysfunctional family.” On bad days, staff would hole up in their offices, waiting for the storm to blow over. She was eventually forced into retirement by senior management. And yes, she was good at making lists. What do polls of female employees show? Three years ago the publishing company Vault did a Gender Issues in the Workplace Survey. The results shocked many: Only 9% of women said they preferred to work for a woman, while three times that number, 28%, preferred a male boss. The majority of respondents had no preference. One woman explained, “Men are generally more decisive, quicker, and focused in their decisions. Women approach work with more emotion than men.” A similar survey by Harper’s Bazaar queried 500 English professional women working in finance, media, and healthcare. A majority – 60% -- of these high-status women stated their preference for male bosses. Seven out of 10 admitted they would be delighted to see a female colleague fail, and 86% said they would flirt with a male co-worker if it would boost their job prospects. Maybe the Sisterhood isn’t all it’s been made out to be. When men of an earlier era engaged in such unabashed buffoonery, they were derided as chauvinist Neanderthals. So thank goodness we have Carol Smith’s screwball humor to relieve the workday tedium for the rest of us. Cover-Up: No Cause for Worry at Florida Abuse Shelters The nation’s abuse shelters are bedeviled by an epidemic of violence, illicit drug use, shoddy financial procedures, ill-trained staff, and more. Last year I wrote a series of columns detailing widespread child abuse, misuse of public monies, and lack of public accountability at Florida domestic violence shelters. Recently the Florida Department of Children and Families released the results of two investigations that confirmed my earlier reports. One such shelter is Harbor House, located in Orlando. Before delving into the findings of the probe, I’ll excerpt the message I received last year from a distraught Caucasian woman whom I’ll call Mrs. R: “I went to a shelter in Orlando, Fl. Orange County called Harbor House back in 1990…There were women there who were there to get welfare benefits only. One woman stole quite a bit of cash from me.” One day Mrs. R noticed the husband of a shelter resident cruising the street in front of the facility. She then recounted the following: “I told her [the man’s wife] we have to go in and alert the others for lock down. Next thing I know, all of the black residents were plotting against me…They accused me of being a snitch….None of the counselors were on premises at night. After she [the wife] was moved away, one very big woman threatened to kill me.” Not surprisingly, Mrs. R fled the shelter and returned to her abusive relationship. So how is Harbor House faring these days? Not much better, according to the recent Inspector General report. One afternoon a two-year-old boy in the shelter was left without adult supervision. During that time the child reportedly jumped off a counter, injuring his head. By law, a staff member is required to immediately report the incident to the Florida Abuse Hotline. But when the staffer told her supervisor she planned to file a report, she was summoned to the office of director Carol Wick, who instructed the worker that Ms. Wick was the CEO and “the only person allowed to call the Hotline.” Fearing for her job, the employee remained silent about the incident. The IG Investigation 2008-0106 dated July 14, 2009 somberly concludes, “Chief Executive Officer Carol Wick failed to make a mandatory child abuse report to the Florida Abuse Hotline and prohibited a staff member from making a mandatory child abuse report.” The second IG report probed a shelter known as Another Way, located in the sleepy northern Florida town of Lake City. A year ago I published an exposé documenting so many tribulations at this facility that its motto should read, “Another Way: Any Way but Our Way.” www.renewamerica.us/columns/roberts/080728 . Of grave concern, I reported a sexual assault that had taken place on shelter premises: “On June 5, 2008, a four-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by a nine-year-old female at the shelter while the two were left unattended… The incident took place around 9:30 on Saturday evening. But the assault wasn't reported to the police until noon the following day.” www.renewamerica.us/columns/roberts/080722 Thanks the courageous efforts of a (now former) shelter employee, a complaint was lodged with the Office of the Inspector General. Bearing an eerie resemblance to the Harbor House incident, the Another Way case also involved ill-supervised children, failure to promptly report child abuse, and attempts to dissuade others from doing so. In this case, when the girl’s mother learned of the assault, she demanded that the incident be reported to the abuse hotline and to local police. But the shelter advocate discouraged her from this course of action, warning the mother that state investigators would come in and ruin her life, and instructed her to instead “go to bed.” The name of the shelter employee is Gloria Taylor. Ms. Taylor had been previously convicted for a series of violent crimes, including improper exhibition of a dangerous weapon and two counts of written threats to kill or injure. These charges landed Taylor in prison for 32 months: www.renewamerica.us/columns/roberts/081009 . The IG report also looked into allegations of financial misconduct, concluding Another Way managers had repeatedly squandered shelter assets. Executive director Donna Fagan had used the shelter vans for personal use and allowed long-distance phone calls from her son for non-work-related purposes. The complete report can be seen in the IG Investigation 2008-0074 dated July 17, 2009. In both investigations, the problem was traced to the highest management levels. In a sane world, both Carol Wick and Donna Fagan would now be out on the street looking for a job, shamed by the memory that they failed to meet their fiduciary duties to shelter residents, staff, and taxpayers. But to this day both Wick and Fagan remain on the payroll, drawing handsome salaries of $75,000 and $95,000 respectively. In Florida, being a shelter director means never having to say you’re sorry. Obama’s Betrayal of the Working-Class Male It’s no secret that men have been hit hard by the recession. From November 2007 to November 2008, the U.S. economy lost over 2 million jobs -- 82% of those losses were male jobs and only 18% female jobs. The reason is because men are concentrated in the sectors devastated by the downturn: manufacturing and construction. This employment gap prompted University of Michigan economist Mark Perry to dub the downturn a “man-cession in the lipstick economy.” So in his Inauguration speech, Barack Obama glowingly promised, “We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.” Within days, the newly-installed president unveiled his stimulus proposal, vowing it would create millions of “shovel-ready” jobs. And on February 17, Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. That would get men back on the job and ready to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, persons assumed. And if you visit the government’s ARRA website -- www.recovery.gov – you’ll see upbeat pictures of hard-hatted carpenters, energy-efficient courthouses, and gleaming hospitals. But following passage of ARRA, unemployment continued to rise and the gender gap worsened. By May of this year, 10.5% of men, compared to eight percent of women, filled the ranks of the unemployed. That’s the worst gender gap reported since 1948. So where did the $787 billion economic stimulus package go wrong? Part of the problem is the crass influence of pay-back politics. According to a July 8 USA Today report, counties that supported Obama in the November election received $69 per person, compared to $34 per capita in counties that voted Republican. Another reason is the hefty outlay of stimulus money to state governments at the expense of local groups. “You don’t fertilize a tree from the top down,” quipped Democratic senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. “Too much of this is going to the top.” But far worse is the fact that the Obama Administration sold out to the feminists. Christina Hoff Sommers’ recent exposé, “No Country for Burly Men,” offers a stunning account of the legislative transmogrification: www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/659dkrod.asp As soon as Obama released his stimulus proposal, the National Organization for Women and other feminist groups swung into action. They knew the head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, Lawrence Summers, would be a push-over following the putsch at Harvard University. So following a flurry of closed-door meetings, emails, petitions, and op-ed columns that derided Obama’s “Macho Stimulus Plan,” the White House staff set out to revamp the proposal. They released a report assuring that 42% of all jobs would go for females, openly admitting the new approach “skews job creation somewhat towards women.” When the final bill was signed into law, the feminists were ecstatic. NOW president Kim Gandy exulted how the law contained many of the “very specific proposals that we had made” with price tags carrying “numbers that started with a ‘B’ (as in billion).” And $325 million was allocated for family-busting domestic violence programs. Less than four months later the Associated Press would report, “Most of the roughly $300 billion coming directly to the states is being funneled through existing government programs for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps and other social services.” In Georgia, two-thirds of the state government’s stimulus money would pay social programs. In Mississippi, only 13% of the stimulus money is projected to go for road construction, according to the AP. “We talked about ‘shovel-ready’ since September and assumed it was a whole lot of paving and building when, in fact, that’s not the case,” complained Chris Whatley of the Council of State Governments. The irony is the male vote was a decisive factor in Obama’s improbable quest to reach the White House. During the primary campaign, the white male vote propelled Obama to victory in 10 out of 17 states: www.renewamerica.us/columns/roberts/080624 . And last Nov. 4, males again played a crucial role, with 49% of men casting their vote for Obama, compared to 48% siding with McCain. Conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly believes the goal of the reverse discrimination that lards Obama’s stimulus plan is to “make men, husbands, and fathers irrelevant as family providers.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 7.5 million American males are now listed on the unemployment rolls. That’s a lot of irrelevant men. The McNair Affair: Don’t Call it ‘Domestic Violence’ Am I the only one who is disturbed by the double-standard that permeates the media coverage of Steve McNair’s shooting death? On July 4 the former NFL star was killed by girlfriend Sahel Kazemi. McNair was shot as he lay asleep on his couch, first in the left temple, twice in the chest, and finally in his right temple. So why are the news media stubbornly refusing to put the words “Steve McNair” and “domestic violence” in the same sentence? And where are all the hand-wringers who reflexively shriek we need to break the shroud of silence that surrounds partner abuse? On July 2 a distraught Kazemi met an acquaintance in the parking lot of the restaurant where she worked. For $100, the 20-year-old woman found herself the new owner of a fully-loaded 9mm semiautomatic pistol. The following day Kazemi told a co-worker, “my life is a ball of ****, and I should just end it.” Leaving the restaurant, the Iranian-American went home, then drove over to McNair’s downtown apartment in the Cadillac Escalade the former NFL quarterback had given her. McNair was not home, so she awaited his arrival. McNair returned to his apartment between 1:30 and 2am. We do not know what words the two exchanged, or what time he eventually fell asleep. When the police arrived at the scene of the crime, there was no evidence that McNair had raised his hands to ward off the shots, confirming the theory that he was asleep at the time. So what did the media do with the story? A July 6 article in the New York Times conjectured the incident may have been a “double homicide or part of a murder-suicide.” But no mention of domestic violence. A July 8 story from ESPN relied on artful phrasing to sidestep the dreaded “DV” words. Police “waited for further tests and the revelations about Kazemi’s personal problems before concluding that she pulled the trigger,” ESPN explained. Excuse me, but what do revelations about someone’s personal life have to do with figuring out whether she pulled the trigger? By the following day, the rehabilitation of Ms. Kazemi had shifted into high gear. An article in the Washington Post was crafted to evoke the reader’s sympathy, informing us she was “increasingly tormented by a rush of personal problems” and “her life was falling apart.” So while the Washington Post article took pains to highlight Kazemi’s emotional turmoil, it glossed over how well Steve McNair was coping with the injuries that sidelined him during most of his previous season with the Baltimore Ravens, and how he was coming to terms with his recent retirement following 13 years in the harsh glare of the National Football League. Domestic violence workers will insist until they’re blue in the face that domestic violence is the consequence of patriarchal oppression. As such, women are constitutionally indisposed to resort to such nefarious actions, they claim. So when women deep-six their boyfriends and husbands, their apologists turn to the thread-bare excuse that she was only acting in self-defense. But in this case the self-defense ploy doesn’t fit. Kazemi had bought the gun two days before, she pursued her prey to his apartment, and he was aslumber when she squeezed the trigger. If the self-defense argument doesn’t fly, then go to Plan B -- the “he had it coming” excuse. While I certainly don’t condone infidelity, there are lots of women I know who have strayed from the straight and narrow. Somehow I don’t remember anyone insulting their memory with a “she had it coming” comment. McNair threw for 174 touchdowns and more than 31,000 yards. His extraordinary skill and exuberant passion for the sport inspired a generation. So let’s take a collective deep breath and utter these mournful words: “Former NFL star Steve McNair was a victim of domestic violence, killed at the hand of a spiteful girlfriend.”   Feminism the Greatest Evil: The Repudiation of Life In the minds of many, evil is epitomized by Nazi Germany. An embittered Austrian corporal, a racist ideology, and an amoral eugenics movement all came together at the same point in human history, eventually spelling the deaths of six million Jews and others. Others view Communism as the far greater evil, a godless philosophy that eventually doomed many more millions of souls in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere. Yet these staggering numbers pale in comparison to the toll of unborn children whose lives are claimed each year by abortion. Each year 42 million of these procedures are performed around the world. As the Alan Guttmacher Institute boasts on its website, “About one in five pregnancies worldwide end in abortion.” So while Communism consumed 100 million persons over the course of a century, abortion has snuffed out the lives of 420 million innocents in the last 10 years alone. And as you read this essay, the United Nations is pushing to make abortion even more accessible. Under the cover of its Initiative on Maternal Mortality and Human Rights, abortion advocates are now claiming that if you want to reduce maternal mortality, you must offer every pregnant woman the right to abort. That’s like saying if you want to stop car accidents, we’ll first need to get rid of cars. Abortion represents more than a moral holocaust. Just last month a woman from Eskilstuna, Sweden who already had two girls learned that her infant in utero was female. She demanded – and received -- a state-financed abortion on the grounds that this time she wanted to have a boy. When similar decisions are made by millions of women, a nation’s sex balance begins to careen out of control. In China, only 832 girls are born for every 1,000 boys, according to UNICEF. A similar problem in China. This has the makings of a demographic disaster. All this is driven by the relentless march of radical feminism, which views abortion as a central sacrament to its destructive ideology. A woman cannot consider herself a member of the National Organization for Women or any other feminist organization without proclaiming a belief in what is euphemistically called “a woman’s right to choose.” A general right to abortion does not suffice; a feminist must believe in an absolute, state-enforced right to abortion, regardless of the child’s gestational age, age of the mother, or the wishes of the father. Just as slavery induced moral turpitude in the hearts of slave owners, abortion oppresses the soul of its advocates. If you believe in abortion, the full fabric of human life begins to lose its inherent worth. Children are eventually seen as disposable. A disturbing example of this moral perversity is the growth of so-called “Safe Haven” laws. These laws were put into place after mothers began to leave their newborns in hospitals or stash them in dumpsters. But rather than punishing the nefarious deed, legislators began to pass laws that say it’s prefectly fine to abandon your infant, just as long as you do so at an approved location. And to relieve you of any lingering guilt, we’ll let you do it anonymously! By legitimizing the heinous act, Safe Haven laws have only made the problem worse. Following passage of the 2001 Safe Haven law in Illinois, 54 mothers have illegally abandoned their babies in non-approved locations. Twenty-seven of those babies died. In Nebraska, the original law didn’t impose any age limit. This past October a woman drove 12 hours from Detroit to dump off her 13-year-old son at an Omaha hospital. And a 14-year-old Iowa girl was abandoned by her grandparents reportedly to “teach her a lesson.” And just last month a bill was introduced in the Texas legislature that would lessen the criminal penalty if a mother killed her newborn due to postpartum hormonal shifts. If passed, the measure would re-classify such deeds from a capital murder to a jail felony. Rep. Jessica Farr, sponsor of the proposal, boasted, “I think that we got this far is pretty significant.” Abortion on demand. Then Safe Haven laws. And now a proposal that trivializes infanticide. It adds up to the victimization of children and a reckless disregard for the sanctity of human life. What comes next? Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal? Sonia Sotomayor: Supreme Misandrist? Does this remark make you want to head for the hills? “I would hope that a wise Caucasian man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life.” A male faculty member who made such a claim would be laughed off of any college campus. But a slightly-revised version of that remark actually was made at the University of California at Berkeley. This is what Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor had to say at a Law and Cultural Diversity lecture she gave in 2001: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Punctuating that loopy logic, she then opined, “Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences,…our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.” Physiological or cultural differences? Gender and national origins? Let’s come right out and proclaim it to the rooftops: Having female genitalia and being able to roll your R’s makes you a better judge! Here’s another Sotomayor smoker: “I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.” That’s right, she’s admitting that unconscious biases may taint the impartiality of her legal opinions. And again: “I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that -- it’s an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others.” Am I losing it or what? Isn’t she saying because she’s a woman, impartiality is merely an “aspiration”? Apparently that notion was ricocheting through her brain last year when she ruled in a reverse discrimination case involving 19 white firemen in New Haven. It seems that none of the Black firefighters were qualified to be promoted. Sotomayor’s decision? Not allow any of the male firemen to be promoted, either. That’s right, if Kwame and Keisha can’t qualify for an ‘A’ in chemistry class, then Jacob and Jennifer will have to settle for a ‘C’ as well. Now you can begin to understand why out of the five majority opinions written by Judge Sotomayor and later appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, three of them have already been reversed. And if the Supreme Court sides with the New Haven firemen, as many believes it will, her reversal scorecard will register a dismal four out of six. So until the Supremes render their decision next month, let’s just cross our fingers and hope no three-alarm blazes break out in New Haven. $4 Billion Abuse Industry Rooted in Deceptions and Lies Erin Pizzey is a genial woman with snow-white hair, cherubic cheeks, and an easy smile. It wasn’t always that way. The daughter of an English diplomat, she founded the world’s first shelter for battered women in 1971. To her surprise, she discovered that most of the women in her shelter were as violent as the men they had left. When Pizzey wrote a book revealing this sordid truth, she encountered a firestorm of protest. “Abusive telephone calls to my home, death threats, and bomb scares, became a way of living for me and for my family. Finally, the bomb squad asked me to have all my mail delivered to their head quarters,” she would later reveal. According a recent report, the domestic violence industry continues to engage in information control tactics, spewing a dizzying series of half-truths, white lies, and outright prevarications. The report, “Fifty Domestic Violence Myths,” is published by RADAR, Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting: www.mediaradar.org/docs/RADARreport-50-DV-Myths.pdf How often have you heard the mantra-like claim, “domestic violence is all about power and control”? That’s code for the feminist dogma that domestic violence is rooted in men’s insatiable need to dominate and oppress the women in their lives. And the obvious solution to partner abuse? Eliminate the patriarchy! I know it all sounds far-fetched, but that’s what the gender ideologues who get their funding from the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) believe. And no surprise these programs have been an abject failure. As Dr. Angela Parmley of the Department of Justice once admitted, “We have no evidence to date that VAWA has led to a decrease in the overall levels of violence against women.” Once you blame the whole problem of partner abuse on patriarchal dominance, the women who proudly call themselves the “VAWA Mafia” find themselves compelled to dress up the fable with a series of corollary myths. Here are some examples: When a woman attacks her boyfriend, claim she was only acting in self-defense. Shrug off her assault with the “He had it coming” line. Aver her short stature prevents her from ever hurting her man. Or assert she grew up in an abusive household, as if that somehow lets her off the hook. Above all, the ideologues will never admit that partner violence is more common among lesbians than heterosexual couples. Just consider the case of Jessica Kalish, the 56-year-old Florida woman who was stabbed 222 times last October with a Phillips screwdriver wielded by ex-girlfriend Carol Anne Burger. But no one dared call it “domestic violence.” Once you begin to play tricks with the truth, you need to invent ever grander prevarications. So sit back and get ready for a good chuckle, because there’s not a shred of truth to any of these claims regularly put forth by the domestic abuse industry: 1. A marriage license is a hitting license. (Truth is, an intact marriage is the safest place for men and women alike.) 2. Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women. (The leading causes of female injury are unintentional falls, motor vehicle accidents, and over-exertion. Domestic violence is not even on the list.) 3. The March of Dimes reports that battering is the leading cause of birth defects. (The March of Dimes has never done such a study.) 4. Women never make false allegations of domestic violence. (That’s the biggest whopper of all.) 5. Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest day of the year for violence against women. (Will the abuse industry never tire of its demagoguery?) These are just five of the 50 domestic violence myths documented in the RADAR report. As former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once deadpanned, “You’re entitled to your own opinions; you’re not entitled to your own facts.” Hopefully the $4 billion partner abuse industry will begin to pay attention. The Supreme Court Nominee Who Can’t Write Supreme Court opinions are words for the generations that can affect the lives and welfare of millions. No one doubts that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has a compelling life story. But more to the point, we need to inquire about her aptitude to draft thoughtfully-reasoned, well-crafted legal opinions. On this count, there is reason for worry. Sotomayor herself has admitted, “Writing remains a challenge for me even today…I am not a natural writer.” Reporter Stephanie Mencimer has characterized Sotomayor’s legal opinions as “good punishment for law students who show up late for class.” A cursory pass of Sotomayor’s writings reveals them to be clumsy to the point of being impenetrable. This comes from her “wise Latina” speech: “I also hope that by raising the question today of what difference having more Latinos and Latinas on the bench will make will start your own evaluation.” So exactly what does “start your own evaluation” mean? And this ringing – but ungrammatical -- declamation: “Other simply do not care.” Maybe it’s acceptable to drop the final ‘s’ in Spanish, but not in English. Then there's the time Sotomayor referred to a chirping insect as “Jimmy the Cricket” – with no apologies to “Jiminy Cricket.” That malapropism triggered a summer reading assignment for the future Supreme Court nominee to immerse herself in a round of children’s classics. When it comes to Spanish grammar, Sotomayor doesn’t have a clue. In a 1996 speech she uttered this blooper, “in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition.” There is in fact a good Spanish adjective for such an off-key statement: “absurdo.” (For the compulsive linguists in the room, Sotomayor’s name comes from a combination of the words soto (“thicket”) and mayor (“greater”). Mayor is the adjective that modifies the noun soto. So Sotomayor means “greater thicket.”) Most telling is a person’s ability to think analytically and reason logically, as revealed in a jurist’s ability to write well. Here again, Sotomayor’s nomination raises eyebrows. Ms. Sotomayor has asserted her Latino heritage makes her a better, “wiser” judge. So see if you can follow this obtuse legal argument: “For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir -- rice, beans and pork….My Latina identity also includes, because of my particularly adventurous taste buds, morcilla, -- pig intestines -- patitas de cerdo con garbanzo – pigs’ feet with beans, and la lengua y orejas de cuchifrito, pigs’ tongue and ears.” So let’s get the word out to our nation’s jurists, Consuming swine guts makes you a more discerning and compassionate judge! And when Sotomayor was asked to defend her membership in the all-female Belizean Grove, she rendered this risible verdict: “to the best of my knowledge, a man has never been asked to be considered for membership.” In a 1986 interview on Good Morning America, Sotomayor railed against the sex discrimination she allegedly had encountered. Want proof? “And if you’re a male that grew up professionally in a male-dominated profession, then your image of what a good lawyer is a male image.” That’s right, discrimination has nothing to do with the actions you may commit, it’s clinging to a politically-incorrect “male image.” The real problem, of course, has nothing to do with one’s image of being a good lawyer. The concern is the extent to which the affirmative action mindset has permeated our society, watering down standards and discriminating against more qualified applicants. “I am a product of affirmative action,” Sonia Sotomayor boasted in a 1994 interview. “I am the perfect affirmative action baby.” During her now-famous address at the University of California School of Law, Judge Sotomayor concluded in her rambling, nearly incoherent prose: “There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering. We, I mean all of us in this room, must continue individually and in voices united in organizations that have supported this conference, to think about these questions and to figure out how we go about creating the opportunity for there to be more women and people of color on the bench so we can finally have statistically significant numbers to measure the differences we will and are making.” If the Senate confirms Sonia Sotomayor next month, it will be only a matter of time until such sentiments begin to make their way into the legal opinions handed down from the High Court. Please, No Neckties for Father’s Day! Can you imagine a Mother’s Day ad urging the purchase of a vacuum cleaner for Workaholic Moms? Or a greeting card that depicts mom grinning contentedly over a hot stove? These slightly irreverent images came to mind as I surveyed the advertisements for Father’s Day this year. Go to Amazon.com, for example, where you’ll see a creative listing of gifts for Workaholic Dads. The featured item? An iRobot 560 Roomba vacuuming robot. Act now – it’s available in black and silver! What if housecleaning is not on this weekend’s honey-do list? Then get him the Birmingham Executive 60-inch executive desk and a Boss B8601 Executive Leather chair. What better reminder for him to go into the office Sunday and catch up on that pile of tedious paperwork! For Chef Dad, a cheery assortment of grills, cookware, and barbeque aprons greets us. For the hard-to-please father, how about the Chris & Chris Chef Kitchen work station? He’d love that, I’m sure. Here’s my personal favorite: the Eastman Outdoors Reveo MariVac food tumbler. The speed and timing controls will please the most demanding of fathers. And it’s only $199 bucks. (Kids, I hope you’re paying attention!) Then there’s the usual array of carpentry gifts and gadgets. About.com exhorts us to “Give a woodworking gift to your dad this Father’s Day.” Bar clamps, jigsaws, router kits, miter saws -- or best of all, a band saw. Proudly plying his battery-interchangeable tools, just think of all the odd jobs that dad can knock out this weekend! And then the greeting cards that send the none-too-subtle message: “Dad we love you, as long as you work, work, work!” One Hallmark card depicts a dad stomping the daylights out of a gargantuan spider. The card recounts, “Fatherhood can be an icky job, But somebody’s got to do it!” (Consider the counterpart card for Mother’s Day: A picture of a frazzled woman sweeping a floor with the caption, “Motherhood can be yucky work, But somebody’s got to do it!”) And for those dads who think Father’s Day is about copping a little R and R, consider this greeting card message: “Take it easy, let the lawn go, and don’t repair a thing! Just lie back on the couch and watch TV till you fall asleep!...You know, just treat it like any other Sunday afternoon!” How’s that for laying a guilt-trip on dad for his Special Day? While we’re on the topic of Father’s Day, I do have a serious request: Please, no more neckties. My closet is brimming with a cacophony of appreciative neckware. Subdued, outrageous, plaid, checkered, wide, or narrow -- you name it, I’ve got it. And really, how many dudes come home from a long day at work, eagerly looking forward to slipping into a comfy necktie? Alice-in-Wonderland Justice at the DoJ “Sentence first, verdict afterwards!” Remember that memorable line from Lewis Carroll’s classic, Through the Looking Glass? And if we take a recent Department of Justice report to heart, we will soon be marching to the tune of “Accusation first, incarceration next!” Adding to the absurdity, the DoJ report was written not by a recognized university researcher, but by a former probation officer who was once indicted on charges of stealing probation fees to set up a personal slush fund. The Department of Justice report, “Practical Implications of Current Domestic Violence Research,” purports to pull together the research on partner abuse, a sort of handy-dandy guide for police officers, prosecutors, and judges. But the document ends up making a mockery of objective science and an impartial judiciary. To understand where this 96-page report went wrong, you have to realize that the domestic violence industry has created a separate universe, a parallel legal system that puts on a fine show of respecting due process. But in this world the judicial outcome is virtually predetermined -- especially if the accused is a male. As you ponder the many bloopers in this report, keep in mind the fact that all the research shows women are just as abusive as men: www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm . And men are unlikely to report the incident to law enforcement, so police reports are of questionable value. So let’s peer through the looking-glass to find out what the Practical Implications report wants us to believe. In the document, there is no such thing as a false allegation of abuse. So save yourself the trouble. Once an accusation of abuse is made, it’s simply a matter of meting out the proper punishment – the modern-day equivalent of “Off with her head!” Don’t look too hard for the word “alleged,” because that implies the accused person might actually be innocent. And don’t expect the report to accurately summarize the studies, either. In some cases, the DoJ paper states the exact opposite of what the research really says. A couple examples… The DoJ report informs us on page 11, “arrest deters repeat reabuse, whether suspects are employed or not.” But go back to the published research study and here’s what said it really says: “This research found no association between arresting the offender and an increased risk of subsequent aggression.” In regard to restraining orders, we’re told that such orders “do not appear to significantly increase the risk of abuse” (page 59). But the study cited by the DoJ stated the opposite: “women with temporary protection orders in effect were [four times] more likely than women without protection orders to be psychologically abused.” Other times the Justice report is flatly misleading. On page 45 the DoJ report discusses mandatory prosecution, claiming the research “suggests most prosecutors should be able to significantly increase successful prosecutions.” But the paper highlighted in the DoJ report actually found in two out of four cites, no-drop prosecution had no impact on conviction rates. Zilch, zero, nada. At one point the DoJ paper turns positively Orwellian, lecturing us on page 15 that we need to avoid any “overrepresentation of female versus male arrests.” But remember, the whole domestic violence system is geared to accusing and incarcerating men, innocent or not, so the real problem is widescale unnecessary arrests of men. I could highlight many other examples of bias, but I think you get the point. And what about the former probation officer? The Practical Implications document was written by a fellow named Andrew R. Klein. According to a Boston Globe report, Mr. Klein had to resign as the probation chief in Quincy, Mass. following a state investigation into alleged misuse of funds. He was later indicted on seven counts of diverting $100,000 in probation fees to a private bank account. But hey! That happened 10 years ago, and I’m sure it’s no reflection on Mr. Klein’s honesty and integrity. The DoJ report is not the first time that the abuse industry has come down with a bad case of Ms.-Information. In fact the field has become so riddled with wild exaggerations and outright falsehoods that legitimate researchers such as professor Richard Gelles of the University of Pennsylvania dismiss such claims as “factoids from nowhere.” So if you want to commend the Department of Justice for this masterpiece of obfuscation and subterfuge, why not drop them a note? Send it to Kristina Rose, acting director of the DoJ National Institute of Justice, at Kristina.Rose@usdoj.gov . Feminism the Greatest Evil: The Repudiation of Life In the minds of many, evil is epitomized by Nazi Germany. An embittered Austrian corporal, a racist ideology, and an amoral eugenics movement all came together at the same point in human history, eventually spelling the deaths of six million Jews and others. Others view Communism as the far greater evil, a godless philosophy that eventually doomed many more millions of souls in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere. Yet these staggering numbers pale in comparison to the toll of unborn children whose lives are claimed each year by abortion. Each year 42 million of these procedures are performed around the world. As the Alan Guttmacher Institute boasts on its website, “About one in five pregnancies worldwide end in abortion.” So while Communism consumed 100 million persons over the course of a century, abortion has snuffed out the lives of 420 million innocents in the last 10 years alone. And as you read this essay, the United Nations is pushing to make abortion even more accessible. Under the cover of its Initiative on Maternal Mortality and Human Rights, abortion advocates are now claiming that if you want to reduce maternal mortality, you must offer every pregnant woman the right to abort. That’s like saying if you want to stop car accidents, we’ll first need to get rid of cars. Abortion represents more than a moral holocaust. Just last month a woman from Eskilstuna, Sweden who already had two girls learned that her infant in utero was female. She demanded – and received -- a state-financed abortion on the grounds that this time she wanted to have a boy. When similar decisions are made by millions of women, a nation’s sex balance begins to careen out of control. In China, only 832 girls are born for every 1,000 boys, according to UNICEF. A similar problem in China. This has the makings of a demographic disaster. All this is driven by the relentless march of radical feminism, which views abortion as a central sacrament to its destructive ideology. A woman cannot consider herself a member of the National Organization for Women or any other feminist organization without proclaiming a belief in what is euphemistically called “a woman’s right to choose.” A general right to abortion does not suffice; a feminist must believe in an absolute, state-enforced right to abortion, regardless of the child’s gestational age, age of the mother, or the wishes of the father. Just as slavery induced moral turpitude in the hearts of slave owners, abortion oppresses the soul of its advocates. If you believe in abortion, the full fabric of human life begins to lose its inherent worth. Children are eventually seen as disposable. A disturbing example of this moral perversity is the growth of so-called “Safe Haven” laws. These laws were put into place after mothers began to leave their newborns in hospitals or stash them in dumpsters. But rather than punishing the nefarious deed, legislators began to pass laws that say it’s prefectly fine to abandon your infant, just as long as you do so at an approved location. And to relieve you of any lingering guilt, we’ll let you do it anonymously! By legitimizing the heinous act, Safe Haven laws have only made the problem worse. Following passage of the 2001 Safe Haven law in Illinois, 54 mothers have illegally abandoned their babies in non-approved locations. Twenty-seven of those babies died. In Nebraska, the original law didn’t impose any age limit. This past October a woman drove 12 hours from Detroit to dump off her 13-year-old son at an Omaha hospital. And a 14-year-old Iowa girl was abandoned by her grandparents reportedly to “teach her a lesson.” And just last month a bill was introduced in the Texas legislature that would lessen the criminal penalty if a mother killed her newborn due to postpartum hormonal shifts. If passed, the measure would re-classify such deeds from a capital murder to a jail felony. Rep. Jessica Farr, sponsor of the proposal, boasted, “I think that we got this far is pretty significant.” Abortion on demand. Then Safe Haven laws. And now a proposal that trivializes infanticide. It adds up to the victimization of children and a reckless disregard for the sanctity of human life. What comes next? Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal? Sonia Sotomayor: Supreme Misandrist? Does this remark make you want to head for the hills? “I would hope that a wise Caucasian man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life.” A male faculty member who made such a claim would be laughed off of any college campus. But a slightly-revised version of that remark actually was made at the University of California at Berkeley. This is what Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor had to say at a Law and Cultural Diversity lecture she gave in 2001: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Punctuating that loopy logic, she then opined, “Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences,…our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.” Physiological or cultural differences? Gender and national origins? Let’s come right out and proclaim it to the rooftops: Having female genitalia and being able to roll your R’s makes you a better judge! Here’s another Sotomayor smoker: “I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.” That’s right, she’s admitting that unconscious biases may taint the impartiality of her legal opinions. And again: “I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that -- it’s an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others.” Am I losing it or what? Isn’t she saying because she’s a woman, impartiality is merely an “aspiration”? Apparently that notion was ricocheting through her brain last year when she ruled in a reverse discrimination case involving 19 white firemen in New Haven. It seems that none of the Black firefighters were qualified to be promoted. Sotomayor’s decision? Not allow any of the male firemen to be promoted, either. That’s right, if Kwame and Keisha can’t qualify for an ‘A’ in chemistry class, then Jacob and Jennifer will have to settle for a ‘C’ as well. Now you can begin to understand why out of the five majority opinions written by Judge Sotomayor and later appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, three of them have already been reversed. And if the Supreme Court sides with the New Haven firemen, as many believes it will, her reversal scorecard will register a dismal four out of six. So until the Supremes render their decision next month, let’s just cross our fingers and hope no three-alarm blazes break out in New Haven. SAFE Act: Abuse Industry Batters the Truth There is a group of activists among us who have found the perfect way to advance their statist, anti-family agenda. They ply their issue by relying on a devious mixture of exaggerations, half-truths, and bald-faced lies. I’m referring, of course, to the domestic violence industry. DV operatives make bogus claims designed to garner ever-expanding federal funding, which in turn is used to disseminate more biased factoids that keep women in a continuous state of fear. It’s a multi-billion dollar, taxpayer-financed scam, and I’m here to blow the whistle. Last week Dear Abby devoted her column to helping a man who had been pummeled and maimed by his wife: www.uexpress.com/dearabby/?uc_full_date=20090506 . And according to a 2006 Harris poll, 55% of Americans know of a man who has been physically abused by his wife or girlfriend. But the domestic violence industry works day and night to make you think the Roper poll got it wrong -- that abused men are a statistical rarity, and such men probably had it coming anyway. Here’s the latest example of the abuse industry’s ms.-information: the Security and Financial Empowerment (SAFE) Act. The bill was recently introduced in Congress by representatives Lucille Roybal-Allard of California and Ted Poe of Texas. (The fact that Poe is a Republican shows how far the GOP has wandered from its core principles of late.) The bill contains 33 findings – supposedly a series of verifiable facts that everyone can agree are true. But this time around, someone got very creative with the truth. Last month RADAR, a Maryland-based watchdog group, released its analysis of the SAFE Act findings. I’ll give you fair warning, this one’s a doozy: www.mediaradar.org/docs/RADARanalysis-HR739Findings.pdf The SAFE Act starts off with this chestnut: “Violence against women has been reported to be the leading cause of injury to women.” That’s a prime example of crackpot science. Because according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the leading causes of injury to women are unintentional falls, automobile accidents, and over-exertion. The SAFE Act goes on to assert, “According to recent Government estimates, approximately 987,400 rapes occur annually in the United States.” Want to know the real number? Only 90,427, according to the FBI. The SAFE Act wants us to believe that “each year there are 5,300,000 non-fatal violent victimizations committed by intimate partners against women.” That claim reminds us of the old Yiddish proverb about a half-truth being a whole lie. Because the same survey that reached the 5.3 million number reported a similar number of male victims of physical abuse. For several of its claims, the SAFE Act cites research by Joan Zorza. Problem is, Zorza is not a researcher. She’s a lawyer and well-known advocate for an assortment of radical feminist causes. All in all, only 4 of the SAFE Act findings are accurate, up-to-date, and verifiable. All the rest are vague, misleading, exaggerated, or even intentionally deceptive. There’s a lot more that’s wrong with the SAFE Act, including the fact that it will open the floodgates to even more false allegations of abuse (www.renewamerica.us/columns/roberts/090204) and impose a gigantic unfunded liability on American businesses (www.renewamerica.us/columns/roberts/090209 ). So why did representatives Roybal-Allard and Poe risk bringing dishonor upon themselves by sponsoring this piece of legislative clap trap? Shattering Rampant Abuse Myths Imagine a world where ideology takes the place of truth and laws are rooted in dubious factoids from nowhere. That pretty much sums up the fact-challenged, hysteria-mongering domestic violence industry that is propped up by $1 billion of federal money each year. Industry ideologues are loathe to admit the fact, but they truly believe the cause of partner abuse is patriarchal oppression. Not convinced? Just take it on the authority of feminist Gloria Steinem who once made this randy claim, “The patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself.” In her now-famous PBS interview, Steinem expounded on her conspiracy-laced worldview: “It starts with the slippery slope of the supposition [of] gender that sexual relations between men and women are dominant-passive… And then it goes all the way up the scale to beatings, torture, [and] murder.” www.pbs.org/kued/nosafeplace/interv/steinem.html That’s right, share a few tender moments with your romantic heart-throb and next thing you’ll end up a statistic in the newspaper obituaries. Journalist Philip Cook has recently come out with a book titled Abused Men: The Hidden Side of Domestic Violence. Cook probes the patriarchy-equals-violence theory and concludes it has more holes than a rotted-out rain barrel. Take lesbian battering, which experts say is more common than heterosexual abuse. Remember Lindsey Lohan coming to blows with her girlfriend in a London nightclub last November? Recall Jessica Kalish of Florida who was stabbed with a screwdriver 200 times by her former female lover? And Raina L. Johnson who last year was sentenced to 28 years behind bars for the shooting of her ex-girlfriend in Washington, DC? It’s pretty loopy to explain away female-on-female brutality by casting aspersions on the loathsome patriarchy, so it’s easier to pretend such incidents never happen, I guess. In that same PBS interview, Steinem also made the claim that domestic violence is “the major cause of physical and psychological injury to women.” Everyone knows Steinem is an authority in such matters, so everyone assumed she was telling the truth. Except for Phil Cook, who decided to trace the origin of the canard. Back in 1985, advocates Evan Stark and Anne Flitcraft poured through a stack of hospital emergency room records. Without rhyme or reason, they tallied every case of injury as caused by domestic violence, unless the chart specifically said a stranger had caused the harm. When later pressed to explain his unconventional methodology, the best Stark could say was, “maybe domestic violence is the leading cause of injury and maybe it isn’t.” That’s right, and maybe the moon is made of cheese so the Man in the Moon can have something to eat. Or maybe it isn’t. But that logic didn’t stop former senator Joseph Biden from becoming a True Believer. “The single greatest danger to a woman’s health is violence from men. Something is sick in our society,” he once admonished. That line of thinking is reflected in the federal Violence Against Women Act that Biden succeeded in passing in 1994. The DV-as-the-leading-cause-of-injury legend soon became a dependable applause line as President Bill Clinton and senators Olympia Snowe and Ron Wyden joined in the sing-along. And sure enough, look at the Security and Financial Security Act that Rep. Roybal-Allard of California introduced just a few months ago. Peruse the bill’s findings, and once again you see the lie standing straight and tall: “Violence against women has been reported to be the leading cause of physical injury to women.” Once such myths are embedded in the national psyche, they become ferociously difficult to remove. Take a Department of Health and Human Services website that once featured the “Domestic Violence is the leading cause of injury to women” claim. “It took two years, letters from a congressman, and an inquiry from a Senator’s office, plus numerous letters, which mostly went unanswered, for an undersecretary at HHS to finally respond that maybe ‘the’ leading cause was erroneous, but it was ‘a’ leading cause. The truth, of course, is that is was neither,” recounts an exasperated Philip Cook. “Eventually the HHS removed the statement from its Website site but refused to issue a retraction, even after eight years of perpetrating an outrageously false ‘health’ statement.” Curious to know what are the leading causes of injury to women? Here they are: unintentional falls, car accidents, and overexertion. Domestic violence did not even make the list: http://mchb.hrsa.gov/whusa08/hstat/hi/pages/226i.html So relax ladies, everything you’ve heard about the “epidemic” of domestic violence is mostly hype calculated to stampede you into divorcing your husband and voting for yet another taxpayer-funded, ideologically-charged abuse reduction program.   White House Council on Men and Boys: The Right Thing to Do One of the greatest failings of the Great Society programs of the 1960s was the devastating blow they dealt to low-income African-American families. And it’s no secret how all this happened. Thanks to President Johnson’s signature legislation, newly-minted social welfare programs provided an array of services and benefits that were designed to help single moms. But these programs proved to afford powerful incentives for women to become pregnant, and then make sure the dad didn’t hang around too long. The effects were devastating as they were dramatic. Within three decades the number of Black families with fathers and mothers at home plummeted from four-fifths to only 38%. Of course boys raised by mothers are more likely to suffer from a raft of behavioral problems, drop out of school, and get in trouble with the law. Rather than becoming in-laws, they turn into outlaws. And the well-intended Great Society effort ended up worsening the cycle of poverty that it was intended to relieve. Ironically, passage of the Welfare Reform Act in 1996 wreaked even more havoc with Black families. That’s because the law ratcheted up child support enforcement. As a result, millions of low-income men with no prospect of meeting their child support obligations suddenly found themselves behind bars, now stigmatized as “dead-beats” and alienated further from their families. Last week a letter was sent to President Obama, urging him to establish a White House Council on Men and Boys. The plea came from Alpha Phi Alpha, a fraternity boasting a membership of 200,000 African-American men: apa1906.net/PressNewsDetails.php?newsID=90&newsCat=Press%20Release The APA letter highlights a report by the Schott Foundation for Public Education that found only 26% of black male students in New York City graduate from high school. Nationally, only 22% of Black men who enter college end up getting their degree. Life expectancy figures paint a similarly dismal picture: White females live to the ripe age of 81 years on average, while Black men die 11 years sooner. One would expect President Obama will rush to support the proposal. After all, fully 95% of Black men voted for him in last November’s presidential election. And surely he empathized with the plight of all the listless boys and unemployed men he encountered as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side. First Lady Michelle should enthusiastically endorse the move, as well. As a child she adored her father, Fraser Robinson. Even after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Mr. Robinson continued to work – a fact that may have contributed to his premature death at 56 years of age. During one interview, Mrs. Obama movingly recounted how “he never missed a day of work, never talked about being sick.” Surely both Barack and Michelle desire that their daughters will one day be courted by marriage-able men. If we’re going to have a White House on Women and Girls, it’s only fair that we extend the same courtesy to men and boys. And liberal feminists, often portrayed as a self-serving interest group, should support the measure as well to prove they really do care about equal opportunities for both men and women. “With liberty and justice for all” for African-American men and boys – that’s the message of hope that conservatives and liberals alike should send to the White House: www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/opl It only seems fair. Sexism Rife Within the Democratic Party “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life. Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences,…our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.” That sexist remark, made by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor in a 2001 speech, should have triggered a round of red-faced apologies and promises to do endless hours of community service. But instead of denouncing the comment, this past weekend Democratic pols rushed to the nominee’s defense. Sen. Arlen Specter invoked the diversity mantra, remarking somewhat ungrammatically, “The diversity and the point of view of Latina women is significant.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California claimed to enjoy preternatural mind-reading abilities, saying “I understand what she meant by it.” And all the media commentators oozed about the jurist’s “compelling personal story.” (Funny, I don’t remember Dan Rather raving about nominee Clarence Thomas’ compelling life story.) Even President Obama came to Sotomayor’s rescue, saying “I’m sure she would have restated it.” But that clarification only opened another can of worms, because Obama didn’t choose to explain why she would have wanted to say it differently. Was it because her intemperate remark would become the flashpoint for public outcry following decades of judicial activism? Or was it because the case would underscore the fact that all four finalists for the Supreme Court nomination were women, exposing a plan to conform to an artificial sex quota? The reason, of course, for all the semantic two-steps is that sexism has become endemic in the Democratic Party. Under the guise of promoting female empowerment, Democratic meetings routinely feature programs with chauvinistic titles like “Women Taking Charge,” “Women in Power,” or “Putting Dead White Males out to Pasture.” Sadly, Democrats have become sold on the use of anti-male clichés as their short-sighted strategy to ballot-box success. Here’s Hillary Clinton in 2005: “Research shows the presence of women raises the standards of ethical behavior and lowers corruption.” Remember the quip she made about “evil and bad men” made at an Iowa campaign stop? And in New Hampshire, she commented, “I don’t know about you, but I like seeing women in charge.” (Just imagine the ruckus if candidate John McCain had proclaimed, “I don’t know about you, but I like seeing white men in charge. Consider Democratic pols like Nancy Pelosi who express misandrist put-downs that range from the haughty (“I didn’t come to Congress to change the attitudes of men.”) to the imperious (“By electing a woman Speaker, my colleagues turned the old system upside down.”) Let’s call to mind former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers who tried to resuscitate a stalled career with her book, Why Women Should Rule the World. In the book Myers recalls an incident involving Alexis Herman, former Secretary of Labor, who once grabbed a labor negotiator by the lapels and threated him, “Don’t f_ck with me.” Myers highlights that episode to prove how peace-minded women surpass men in forging sensible compromise. There’s the famous quip by former Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Texas, who claimed, “I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which a man structurally does not have…He’s just incapable of it.” And then the gazillions of liberal women’s organizations that pound the feminist tom-tom, making logic-defying claims like this one from Women’s Action for New Directions: “change will come when women take the lead.” The reason for all this, of course, is the Democratic Party has morphed into the political arm of the National Organization for Women. Democratic candidates casually make sham claims that paint men as ogres and tyrants: “women in the workplace are victims of wage discrimination,” “wives suffer from an epidemic of domestic violence,” “females were routinely excluded from medical research,” and so forth. Across the pond in England, Labor Party’s deputy leader Harriet Harman recently ridiculed her nation’s financial institutions as “testosterone-fueled.” Then she vowed to mandate that banks appoint more women on their boards, admitting “Sometimes we have to take scary methods in order to achieve worthwhile results.” For years, such gender-baiting claims suited the grievance agenda of the feminists to a ‘T’. But now, the liberal orgy of new-school sexism disguised as female empowerment has come back to haunt the Democrats as they work to reshape the High Court. Liberals Indifferent to the AIDS Time-bomb I’m writing this column because I’m appalled how liberals remain impervious to the fact that our current strategy to controlling AIDS has proven to be a disastrous failure. Last month the District of Columbia health department announced that 3% of the city’s population is infected with HIV, putting the nation’s capital on a par with parts of AIDS-ravaged Africa. Worse, the majority of these persons are Typhoid Marys who aren’t aware their bodies harbor the deadly germ. So the disease is likely to continue its ghoulish advance. I’ve traced the unfolding of the AIDS epidemic since the first cases were reported in 1981. I’ve recoiled at the disbelieving horror of young men as they were informed they were HIV-positive. I’ve listened to infected 20-somethings grimly discuss how they plan to spend the remaining years of their lives. I’ve seen patients in advanced stages of the disease, their bodies ravaged by infection. From the beginning we knew the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was spread mostly by having sex with persons outside of a long-term committed relationship. And no surprise, when countries implemented the so-called ABC approach (Abstinence, Be faithful, and Condoms as a last resort), infection rates plummeted. In Uganda the “no-grazing” message succeeded in dramatically reducing extra-marital sexual activity and the occurrence of HIV in pregnant women. But liberals want nothing to do with ABC because abstinence and marital faithfulness resound of old-fashioned morality. So instead of relying on proven approaches, the AIDS establishment continues to tout anti-retroviral treatments, so-called “safe sex,” vaginal microbicides, and vaccines. But the truth is, AIDS treatments are little more than sugar-pill nostrums that lend false hope to victims. They also divert billions of dollars away from the programs that could actually be doing some good. The safe-sex message is a cruel joke because it tells people to go ahead and be sexually promiscuous, just so long as they use Russian roulette methods like condoms. As the Pope commented during last month’s trip to Africa, “the distribution of condoms...aggravates the problems” of AIDS. Vaginal microbicides are designed for high-risk women who can apply the virus-killing cream before having sex. Sounds good in theory. But two years ago a high-profile study had to be stopped when it was learned the women using the gel turned out to be more prone to contract the HIV virus: www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0040235 . Why? The women were having more sex because the vaginal lubricant enhanced their sexual pleasure, increasing their exposure to the virus. So all that remains in the Leftie’s bag of tricks is vaccines. The problem is, the AIDS virus is a cunning microbe that mutates almost at will, leaving yesterday’s vaccine unsuited for tomorrow’s virus. Case in the point is the recent Step Study. Everyone hoped the massive research effort would be the long-awaited breakthrough. But in September 2007 the trial was brought to a halt because persons who received the vaccine were more likely to get the HIV virus than persons who didn’t. The flop led Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to admit bleakly, “we’re swimming in the dark.” Note that the Step vaccine wasn’t just shown to be ineffective – it actually placed persons at greater risk. And this wasn’t the first time. One study followed 1,000 men in Malawi. Initially all the men were free of the deadly HIV virus. But six months later a shocking 15% had become HIV-positive. Why? Most likely because researchers had inadvertently used HIV-infected needles to draw the men’s blood. In 2003 my column lamented that “feminist ideology has taken hold in the global struggle against AIDS,” turning HIV reduction efforts into an ideological parody of female empowerment. Two years later I revealed that “AIDS programs at the World Health Organization are being held hostage by Leftist ideologues who care more about promoting no-fault sexual experimentation than actually stopping this deadly epidemic.” And in 2007 I noted the global AIDS effort was being directed by “the gay rights lobby demanding that public health programs not stigmatize homosexuals; the radical feminists with their gender liberation crusade; [and] the Zero Population Growth zealots.” Since my 2003 op-ed, over 11 million persons around the world have died of AIDS. Given that the ABC approach was known to be effective a decade ago, the great majority of those deaths were needless. But liberals will never admit to that inconvenient truth. Abuse Excuse: How Liberalism Keeps Women in their Place Liberals have become the unapologetic predators of women, gleefully playing on their fears and psychological vulnerabilities, all in the name of curbing domestic violence. Of course women’s only hope lies in heavy-handed state intervention. Before proceeding, I will warn you this column is filled with high-octane statements made by the willfully dishonest, the social schemers, and the patently unhinged. As you wade through the claims, keep in mind two facts. First, all forms of violent crime have fallen dramatically in the past 30 years. The incidences of rape, intimate partner homicide, and non-fatal partner violence are now half what they were in 1980. We’ve made tremendous progress in the last three decades and everyone should be feeling a lot safer. Second, research shows women are more likely than men to instigate partner violence -- pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/42/15/31-a . But that’s one of those inconvenient truths the liberals will never concede. Let’s start with the willfully dishonest. A few months ago Human Rights Watch issued a press release with the screaming headline, “Soaring Rates of Rape and Violence against Women.” The release claims a recent Department of Justice report shows “huge increases” in domestic violence and rape. “The numbers in this survey show an alarmingly high rate of sexual violence in this country,” throbs the HRW drumbeat. Want to know what the Justice report really says? In 2007, “The rates for every major violent and property crime…were at or near the lowest levels recorded since 1973.” So how does Human Rights Watch get away with such a misleading claim? Because three years ago the Justice Department fine-tuned its survey methods, causing an anomaly in its crime numbers. The DoJ report emphasizes the apparent uptick in rapes does “not appear to be due to changes in the rate of criminal activity during this period.” But apparently the Human Rights Watch people decided to skip over that particular sentence. You can see the Ms.-Information here: www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/12/18/us-soaring-rates-rape-and-violence-against-women And here’s the Justice report: www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/cv07.pdf Next up, the social schemers. To drive home the message of men as inveterate abusers, the domestic violence industry has organized a series of high-profile “awareness months.” January is Stalking Awareness Month. February is when we focus on Teen Dating, when couples can celebrate Valentine’s Day by watching a performance of the Vagina Monologues. March is Women’s History Month, so anything goes then. April has been designated Sexual Assault Awareness Month. And June? Soon that will be Domestic Violence Awareness Month. So ladies, after all those Take Back the Night rallies, you’ll be so scared that you will have divorced your husband, hired a security guard, and taken up residence in a lock-down facility. All these consciousness-raising events are taxpayer-funded, thanks to the federal Violence Against Women Act. Now ready for the unhinged? I’ll warn you, this gets wild. A few weeks ago the National Organization for Women of New York State issued a press release on a pending hate crime bill. Mind you, hate crimes are already illegal in New York, so you’d think things have been taken care of. But no, the NOW isn’t about to let go of such a juicy issue. The NOW leads off with some old fashioned demagoguery: “Men who assault their wives are living up to cherished Western cultural prescriptions.” Not only that, “we cannot deny that women are in a class by themselves, discriminated against, hated, used, disrespected, and abused.” Yes, life is grim when the federal government doles out a measly $1 billion for abuse-reduction programs. Now hold on, it’s about to get hallucinogenic… “In the hospital, from the time parents scream ‘it’s a girl!’ they begin to ask themselves how they willl keep their little girl and woman-to-be from the violence that many women face,” the NOW explains. That’s right, why waste time celebrating your precious new arrival when you should be worrying about domestic violence? Let’s hold a shelter fundraiser right here in the nursery! To top it off, the NOW-NYS demands, “When a police officer is called to the scene of a violent assault against a woman by her husband/partner or stranger, the officer should arrest the perpetrator of the ‘hate crime.’ And this mandated arrest needs to be judicially enforced.” www.nownys.org/pr_2009/pr_022609.html Of course we needn’t worry about probable cause or due process. Once we declare war on the national epidemic of partner abuse, normal constitutional guarantees are no longer in effect. And don’t you dare mention that the perpetrator turned out to be the victim’s jealous lesbian heartthrob. Just imagine, these are the same women who boast when the Sisterhood takes over, tolerance, fairness, and understanding will finally preail. Voices from the Grave, Betrayed by a Restraining Order Debi Olson had three restraining orders taken out against her. But that didn’t stop the woman from ambushing ex-husband Mauricio Droguett in an Iowa shopping mall last July, fatally stabbing him in front of shocked mall-goers. Toni Brown of Washington, DC was shot by former girlfriend Raina Johnson on August 12, 2008, leaving the woman paralyzed from her neck down. Johnson is currently serving a 28-year sentence for a crime the judge termed “extraordinarily brutal.” A restraining order had been previously issued against the assailant. Karen Allende of New York City was walking to work on a September day in 2006 when she was attacked suddenly by her husband. She died that morning on the sidewalk, a restraining order folded neatly in her purse. Each year 2-3 million domestic restraining orders are issued for the purpose of curbing domestic violence. Simply put, these orders of “protection” are a hoax foisted on unsuspecting victims, all at taxpayer expense. Restraining orders are a travesty for the simple reason that they don’t work. Debi Olson had stalked her ex-husband across the country and worked herself into a lather of spiteful rage. Does anyone in their right mind really believe a piece of page will deter a person who is that intent on killing her former partner? And a 1994 study published in the American Journal of Public Health followed 150 women in Houston, Texas who had applied for a restraining order. Eighteen months later the researchers found no difference in abuse levels between women who received the order compared to those who did not. Ruing the lack of benefit, a 2005 report from the Independent Women’s Forum noted restraining orders can “lull women into a false sense of security.” Some persons would simply shrug their shoulders, saying there’s an example of yet another well-intentioned but useless government program. But other research shows restraining orders can actually make a touchy situation worse. One Department of Justice report, “Civil Protection Orders: Victims’ Views on Effectiveness,” found that six months after issuance of the order, the percentage of persons experiencing repeated physical abuse or stalking had doubled, and the number facing psychological abuse had tripled. So how do restraining orders add fuel to the fire? The reason is restraining orders are often issued on the say-so of the complainant – all she has to do is tell the judge she is “frightened” or “afraid” of her partner – no proof needed. According to a study published in Cost Management last year, 71% of restraining orders are trivial or false. But according to the Connecticut Office of Legislative Research, “nothing is being done to stop frivolous requests for restraining orders.” So how would you feel if you were booted from your house and told you couldn’t see your kids because your partner happened to be feeling blue that day? Other times a restraining order is part of a calculated effort to gain a tactical edge during a divorce action. A 2005 article in the Illinois Bar Journal revealed restraining orders are “part of the gamesmanship of divorce.” Elaine Epstein, former president of the Massachusetts Bar Association, once confided, “Everyone knows that restraining orders and orders to vacate are granted to virtually all who apply.” Tales abound of schemers who violate the terms of the restraining order, heaping even more penalties on the hapless man. Last summer Marshall Crandall of Vassalboro, Maine got into an altercation with his wife. By the woman’s own admission the exchange was mutual: “I picked him up three or four times and slammed him on the ground.” But when the police arrived, they arrested only the man and a restraining order was taken out against him. Once in jail, she visited him on three occasions. Even though she had initiated the contacts, they were seen as a violation of the restraining order. That unwanted attention earned Mr. Crandall nine months behind bars. By placing the burden of proof on the accused to show his innocence, many worry restraining orders violate fundamental notions of fairness and due process. At one New Jersey seminar, startled judges were told, “Your job is not to become concerned about all the constitutional rights of the man that you’re violating as you grant a restraining order. Throw him out on the street, give him the clothes on his back, and tell him, ‘See ya’ around.’” Judge Milton Raphaelson of Massachusetts once opined, “Few lives, if any, have been saved, but much harm, and possibly loss of lives, has come from the issuance of restraining orders and the arrests and conflicts ensuring therefrom.” Each year, the Violence Against Women Act spends up to $75 million to promote restraining orders. That’s the kind of wasteful federal program that leaves a bad taste in taxpayers’ mouths. Liberals, Want to Hoodwink a Conservative? Here’s How… Good morning fellow progressives, social revolutionaries, and Weathermen wannabees. In today’s class I’ll explain how to bewilder the conservatives, stymie their agenda, and abscond with billions in taxpayer money. Some conservatives will become so befuddled that they will even come to embrace your cause. It’s so simple, you might not believe me. All you need to do is utter a two-word incantation. Ready? “Domestic violence.” With these magical words, you can undermine the traditional family, expand the social welfare state, promote socialist principles, weaken American sovereignty, and more! Let’s say you want to revamp the traditional family structure. Just declare you need to institute get-tough domestic violence laws to halt the cycle of violence. Once the guy is kicked out of the home on a bogus charge, the woman will find the welfare state will do as a substitute husband. (You may recall that as a college student, Hillary Clinton called for a restructuring of the family. As First Lady, she worked relentlessly to secure passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994.) Or maybe you want to dramatically expand social programs. Once the “abuser” is pushed out of the picture, junior will probably end up living in a single-parent household. That places him at far greater risk of dropping out of school, running into trouble with the law, and getting hooked on drugs. Of course we’ll need oodles of welfare programs to clean up the mess. Need to block the new covenant marriage law the evangelicals want to pass? It’s a cinch -- just trot out a victim and have her explain how she was “trapped” by her abuser in marital hell. A hankie and sniffles are worth extra credit. Want to impose a socialist economy on the workplace? Advance the claim that we need to pay women the same as men, even if they are less qualified or spend fewer hours on the job. That way women will achieve economic justice and be able to live without having to depend on some poor bloke’s wages. Maybe your agenda is to strip America of its national sovereignty. So claim that ratifying the UN Women’s Treaty will eliminate the scourge of domestic violence both at home and abroad. Seriously, that’s what some progressive senators in Washington are saying these days. In many countries, the Lefties are saying that if you don’t pay a woman to get her abortion, that’s an obvious case of domestic violence. Again, argument over. Is your agenda to stereotype men as abusers and batterers? Just get everyone talking about how Chris Brown beat up on Rihanna -- but be extra careful to not mention that Rihanna started the whole incident by pummeling Brown with her stiletto heels, while he was driving. (It’s no secret there’s a double standard here, which says a woman can slap, punch, or kick her significant other, but he must not so much as raise his voice in protest. But conservatives are not perturbed by this.) Let’s be even more ambitious in our thinking – why not undermine constitutional guarantees of due process? Think about it -- handing out restraining orders like candy and placing the burden of proof on the accused. No one will figure out our true agenda as long as we keep repeating our mantra. So what is domestic violence? Domestic violence is now defined so broadly that if the guy sneezes the wrong way, it’s time to call in the cops. Which means domestic violence is anything a man does that a woman doesn’t like. But we don’t want to admit that, so better to not go there. Just utter some neo-Marxist mumbo-jumbo about using power and control tactics. No one will argue, since they don’t have a clue what you’re talking about! True, research shows women are more likely to throw the first punch: pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/42/15/31-a . And half of all partner violence is mutual. But persons are thinking, “Yeah, he must have done something to deserve it.” Again, case closed. There’s a fly in the ointment, though. Every time you turn around, you hear about another woman knocking off her husband, boyfriend, or lesbian lover. Just in the last couple weeks, Tammara McCoy of Albany was sentenced to 25 years in prison for conspiring to kill her husband. Andrea Carr, who had admitted to shooting her boyfriend in the head with a .357-caliber revolver while he slept, entered her plea in Canton, Ohio. And Chris Mason of Chardon, Ohio was sentenced to four years behind bars for killing her spouse. But as long as the story gets buried in the obituaries, no one is likely to worry. Endlessly reciting the “domestic violence” mantra, baffling conservatives by appealing to their chivalrous instincts, and advancing the radical left agenda -- it’s really that simple. Wailing Women of NOW Descend on the Emerald City of O The scene is reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz scene when hordes of winged monkeys are poised on the castle parapet, ready to snatch up Dorothy and her three affable sidekicks. But this time it’s not a harmless fairytale, it’s a cabal of feminists determined to turn our society into a socialist paradise. These women dismiss any criticism with a “to the victors go the spoils” shrug. But the fact is, men played a major role in handing Barack Obama his White House victory. During the Democratic primaries, Barack beat Hillary in large part due to support from the male electorate: www.renewamerica.us/columns/roberts/080624 . And on November 4 the guys delivered again, with more men pulling the lever in favor of Mr. Obama than for John McCain. And even with a weak economy ballooning his sails and a Republican opponent staging a lackluster campaign, the charismatic Democrat managed to garner only 53% of the popular vote. Soon after the election the National Organization for Women issued its Action Agenda for 2009 and Beyond: www.now.org/issues/agenda2009.html . This mind-boggling 10-page manifesto calls on Obama to mandate 50% female cabinet appointees, install NOW lackeys throughout the federal bureaucracy, enforce Title IX, impose “comparative worth” on the workplace, and more. In the abortion arena, the NOW-nags call on Obama to repeal all federal limits to abortion on demand, force doctors to perform abortions against their will, allow teenage girls to get contraception without a doctor’s prescription, and of course install activist judges to advance their culture-of-death jihad. A socialist society requires a revamp of the traditional family, as well. So the NOW wants to stop marriage programs, oppose any constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and appropriate $10 billion a year for daycare programs. And don’t forget to fully fund the Violence Against Women Act – VAWA might come in handy if you ever need to send dad packing on bogus abuse charges. Last but not least, the feminists are demanding that we enact the International Violence Against Women Act, ratify the UN Treaty on Women (CEDAW), and spend $1 billion to subsidize global “family planning.” How’s that for an in-your-face agenda? Forgiveness does not come easily to the Maidens of Mendacity. Columnist Katha Pollitt recently combed through the laundry list of long-remembered slights. Once Obama informed his daughters he wasn’t going to buy them a “girly-dog” – yikes! There was the Barbara Walters interview when Barack had the audacity to interrupt Michelle. And here’s the crusher: “No one has forgotten that Barack called a reporter ‘sweetie’ months ago,” Pollitt wailed. Yes, they were delighted when Hillary (“Research shows the presence of women raises the standards of ethical behavior”) was selected as Secretary of State. But when news got out that only one-quarter of Obama’s cabinet picks were female (including the eminently qualified Hilda Solis at Labor), the fems lapsed into a purple-faced funk. Amy Siskind, founder of the New Agenda was disconsolate, admitting, “We had high hopes for president-elect Obama going into this, and it’s been very discouraging.” And NOW president Kim Gandy put on her best pouty-face: “we still are such a small minority in the top boardrooms of the country starting with the Cabinet.” But the pain of so few female cabinet members was mollified by the hope of establishing a Cabinet-level advisor on women’s issues, maybe even a presidential commission. But when word leaked out that Obama’s Council on Women and Girls had no full-time staff, the girls pulled out the long knives. Calling the group a Clinton-era “retread,” Martha Burk charged, “I think it falls fall short of what’s needed.” (Burk, you recall, was the woman who cried wolf because the Augusta National Golf Club did not admit females.) And what will be the number one priority of the fledgling Council? According to California First Lady Maria Shriver, the group needs to launch a major inquiry into the stresses facing American women. News flash! American women are feeling stressed these days, and we need a White House panel to look into that! Fanciful childhood memories might tempt us to compare the Lefty Ladies to the Wicked Witch of the West. But that allegory is too facile. No, a better comparison is the Wizard himself, the aging blowhard behind the green velvet curtain, bellowing his assorted demands to the unwary and confused. So next time you talk to a feminist, do a Toto imitation. Tug back the drapes and see who’s running the show. You’ll discover a con-artist who adeptly twists the facts and strong-arms her opponents into submission. So hold on tight to those ruby slippers. It’s time to break out the brain for Scarecrow, the heart for Tin Man, and most of, a big dollop of courage for Cowardly Lion. Obama Women’s Council Tells its First Lie The Maidens of Mendacity are at it again, only this time they’re speaking from the bully pulpit that President Obama himself established. A couple weeks ago President Obama established the White House Council on Women and Girls. During the March 11 ceremony, Obama explained, “It’s not enough to only have individual women’s offices at different agencies, or only have one office in the White House.” The very next morning the Office’s director, Valerie Jarrett, went on NPR Morning Edition. This is what Jarrett had to say: “Domestic violence is still a major issue, not just for women but also for girls.” Within those 15 well-crafted words lurk two shameless lies. First, domestic violence is a “major issue” only in the minds of feminists who are hell-bent on breaking up families on bogus accusations of abuse, as well as the self-anointed abuse “experts” who plead poverty to donors as they settle in to $100,000 compensation packages. Each year an estimated 600 Americans are struck by lightning – that’s according to the National Weather Service. And each year fewer than 1,500 Americans – men and women – are murdered by their intimate partners. Being struck by lightning or wacked off by your partner isn’t the most pleasant thought, of course. But the domestic violence industry has created a hysteria that rivals the events that took place following a false claim of rape by three Duke lacrosse players. Ready for the second lie? I know this riles chivalrous conservatives as much as dyed-in-the-wool liberals. But the fact remains, Women are more likely than men to instigate partner violence. This is the main finding of a Centers for Disease Control study, which found in cases of one-way violence, women were the aggressors 71% of the time: pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/42/15/31-a Ironically, female violence is far more likely to be discounted or ignored. When Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson got into a knock-down, drag-out fight at a London nightspot last November, amused bystanders discounted the incident as two girls “fighting like cats and dogs.” When Kelly Killoren Bensimon, star of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” was arrested three weeks ago for cutting her boyfriend’s eye with a roundhouse punch, the New York Times wiffed on the story. In fact the arrest wasn’t reported until a week later when the Daily News picked up on the incident -- and even then ran the story on its Gossip page. Compounding the irony of the whole affair, President Obama had issued a high level Memorandum on March 9. Headlined Scientific Integrity, Obama explained, “Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration.” Obama then instructed the federal workforce, “Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions.” Over 200 scientific studies prove women are equally to blame for partner violence: www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm . But three days after her boss’s directive was issued, Valerie Jarrett chose to shred the well-established scientific finding. Domestic violence is an issue that concerns men and women, boys and girls. For President Obama’s Office on Women and Girls, that appears to be an inconvenient truth. Obama’s First Cover-Up: The Gender Wage Gap Myth Liberals never tire of convincing persons to believe they are victims in dire need of a government hand-out. But this time it’s a case of outright mendacity aided by the concealment of a high-level government official. During the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton repeatedly made the claim that women suffer from pay discrimination. Barack Obama’s website likewise asserted, “Despite decades of progress, women still make only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. Throughout his career, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have championed the right of women to receive equal pay for equal work.” It was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who engineered the recent passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Act. And just a few weeks ago Rep. George Miller of California made the red-meat assertion that women earn “78 cents for every dollar that is earned by a man doing the same job with the same responsibilities.” Democrats call it as the “gender wage gap,” but I prefer to think of it as the “scare-the-female-electorate-into-submission” ploy. Claims about sex-based wage discrimination have been repeated so often that many Americans simply accept them as fact. But a recently published -- and quickly suppressed -- study reveals a different picture. Titled “An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women,” the report tallies the results of over 50 studies. No one questions the fact that on average, men are paid more than women. But turns out this is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The paper concludes the 20-cent odd wage difference is not caused by discrimination. Rather it’s women exercising their right to make lifestyle choices. What choices are we talking about? 1. A greater percentage of women chose to work part-time. 2. Women may opt to leave the work force for childbirth, child care, or elder care. 3. Women are often willing to accept a lower paying job in return for family-friendly policies that allow them to have fewer hours, flexible schedules, and a shorter commute. In addition, women work fewer hours than men. According to an article posted on the Department of Labor website, “Among full-time workers, 24% of the men, compared to 10% of the women, usually worked more than 40 hours per week:” www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1984/06/art4full.pdf And then the fact that men tend to work in occupations that are far more likely to injure, maim, or kill. None of these are earth-shattering statements. But once again, liberal myth-mongering forced the government to commission a costly study to prove the obvious. In its foreword, the Department of Labor concluded, “this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors.” The DoL added this parting comment: “the raw wage gap continues to be used in misleading ways to advance public policy agendas:” www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf In other words, the so-called gender wage gap is yet another example of Ms. Information brazenly portrayed as fact by the mainstream media. End of story, right? Actually, the best was yet to come. The report was finalized on January 12, 2009 and then posted on the Department of Labor website. But within a few days the document disappeared without a trace. Michael Eastman, director of labor policy at the Chamber of Commerce, explained the report “was apparently removed as the transition in power was occurring between former President Bush and President Obama.” Meanwhile, a swearing-in ceremony for senior officials was underway at the Old Executive Office Building. It was the first full day of Obama’s fledgling presidency and the assemblage was brimming with confidence and hope. On cue, the newly-inaugurated Commander-in-Chief rose to issue this declaration: “Transparency and rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency,” Mr. Obama stated. “Starting today, every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known.” How’s that for slick? © 2009 Carey Roberts See Books, Issues Contact Us | Disclaimer | Privacy Statement Menstuff® Directory Menstuff® is a registered trademark of Gordon Clay ©1996-2023, Gordon Clay