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We’re really heading into weird territory now. In what is supposed to be a defense of Pope Benedict from accusations of covering up pedophile priest cases, the Vatican spokesbots are handling this with complete ineptitude.

The Vatican spokesman, speaking to Vatican Radio and Associated Press Television News, defended Benedict.

“It’s rather clear that in the last days, there have been those who have tried, with a certain aggressive persistence, in Regensburg and Munich, to look for elements to personally involve the Holy Father in the matter of abuses,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi told Vatican Radio.

“For any objective observer, it’s clear that these efforts have failed,” Lombardi said, reiterating his statement a day earlier noting the Munich diocese has insisted that Benedict wasn’t involved in the decision while archbishop there to transfer the suspected child abuser.

Lombardi told The AP that ”there hasn’t been in the least bit any policy of silence.”

“The pope is a person whose stand on clarity, on transparency and whose decision to face these problems is above discussion,” Lombardi said, citing the comments by Scicluna, who works in the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, which was long headed by Benedict before his election as pontiff.

“To accuse the current pope of hiding (cases) is false and defamatory,” Scicluna said. As Vatican cardinal in charge of the policy on sex abuse, the future pope “showed wisdom and firmness in handling these cases,” Scicluna said.

Wow. Do they think we’ve all forgotten how Cardinal Law was shipped out of Boston as he was about to face charges for abuse cover up, all the secret settlements? Amazing.

It is already clear that Catholic Church was covering up abuse cases as a matter of policy, thus the secrecy and the payouts. If the defense is going to be that poor Cardinal Ratzinger was forced to facilitate the coverup of child rape by priests because “everyone is doing it” or worse, that he never knew about it, will simply not fly. (NYT):

When a sex abuse scandal broke in Boston church in 2002, Pope Benedict — then Cardinal Ratzinger — was among the Vatican officials who made statements that minimized the problem and accused the news media of blowing it out of proportion.

As far as the Munich abuse cases and the decision to send a pedophile priest back out to work with children, something that the archdiocese claims Ratzinger knew nothing about, out comes the fall guy defense. That’s not flying either.

The former vicar general took full responsibility for the decision to reinstate the priest to pastoral work. “I deeply regret that this decision resulted in offenses against youths and apologize to all who were harmed by it,” he said, according to a statement posted on the archdiocese’s Web site.

There was immediate skepticism that Benedict, as archbishop, would not have known of the details of the case.

The Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, who once worked at the Vatican Embassy in Washington and became an early and well-known whistle-blower on sexual abuse in the church, said the vicar general’s claim was not credible.

“Nonsense,” said Father Doyle, who has served as an expert witness in sexual abuse lawsuits. “Pope Benedict is a micromanager. He’s the old style. Anything like that would necessarily have been brought to his attention. Tell the vicar general to find a better line. What he’s trying to do, obviously, is protect the pope.”

This is really sad for those sick about what this is doing to the faithful, to see the hierarchy neck-deep in scandal.

You can’t make this stuff up.

At one time you might have thought what you’re about to read was an extreme looney-toon statement, but given the vortex of evil coming to light—the criminal pedophile priest protection enterprise sitting at Benedict’s door of responsibility, the pimping out of undocumented immigrants, members of the Vatican choir, Papal Gentlemen and seminarians...it’s like a bad novel come to life.

Well, this story is like a novel, The Exorcist. The Vatican’s exorcist-in-chief, who was the basis for the priest in the film, thinks there’s evil inside those walls and he’s not shy about saying it.

In the last few months, the Catholic Church have been rocked by a series of sex scandals in Ireland, Holland and, most recently, Germany.

Even the Pope’s brother, Father Georg Ratzinger, has admitted he hit choir boys.

Italian priest Fr Amorth said: “His Holiness fully believes in casting out evil.
”The Devil lives in the Vatican. Naturally it’s difficult to find proof but the true consequences are visible.

“We have cardinals who don’t believe in Christ, bishops connected with demons. Then we have these stories of paedophilia. You can see the rot when we speak of Satan’s smoke in the holy rooms of the Vatican.”

I was chatting with Mike Signorile about this hot mess. Can you imagine what is going on in the Vatican’s PR shop right now? From what I can tell, not a lot is going on because people are leaking like a wood-rotted boat, magnifying the scandal. Since the Pope is considered infallible, it’s not like anyone is going to effectively call for his resignation, no? The only one who’s going to make the UnHoly Father step aside is...Benedict himself.

So what’s the answer? I think the public relations staff have such a nightmare on their hands—who knows when a coerced rent boy’s going to emerge to tell tales of priests in all sorts of compromising positions, or more papers implicating Cardinal Ratzinger emerge that show he repeatedly allowed children to be raped and pedophile priests to remain free to victimize more?

I personally don’t think the Pope would step aside; he’s not shown to be even a tad self-aware of his image around the globe.  All I can think of is we may see some sort of cloak-and-dagger end to this thing; it’s all that’s left to make the bad novel ready to hit the press.

Does this mean the Devil really does wear Prada!?

UPDATE: This story is traveling like wildfire. It’s in the New York Daily News with a photo of the exorcist that is truly frightening, as in “the power of Christ compels you” creepy.

Amorth, who told the paper, that he knows a thing or two about exorcisms having handled 70,000 cases of demonic possession, said the Holy See was infested with “cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the demon.”

Amorth’s accusations come at a time when the Vatican is facing scrutiny on a number of fronts:

* One of Pope Benedict’s ceremonial ushers was among those implicated in a gay prostitution ring – after being caught on a police wiretap.

* Catholic authorities in Germany on Wednesday announced a probe into allegations the Regensburger Domspatzen Boys Choir – once led by the Pope’s older brother.

* Major pedophilia cases involving priests have also surfaced in Ireland and the United States.

Related:
* The child-rape scandal has closed in on Pope Benedict XVI
* Papal aide and elite men’s Vatican choir caught in gay prostitution ring

A must-read article about race, class, caste and the American prison system. A few facts from the piece:

• There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
  As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

The mass incarceration of African Americans over the past 30 years is primarily related to the War on Drugs — a convenient cover for a program essentially targeted at the black community. The talking points all came back to the supposed rates of drug-related violence, but that doesn’t exactly compute with historical fact:

President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

The vast majority of people arrested for drug-related offenses are non-violent, and are arrested for possession rather than selling. Just read the whole thing.

Well this is messed up. A UMass Amherst student allegedly raped an alumna of the school back in October. The alumna reported the rape to campus authorities, and apparently opted to go through the university’s disciplinary process instead of filing a formal complaint with the police. The dude confessed to the rape, and “was found responsible for sexual assault.” Which is a pretty serious crime.

His punishment: Deferred suspension. Meaning that he is allowed to continue living on campus, and he’ll graduate on time.

This is especially troubling when we know that campus rapists are often serial offenders, and when the university disciplinary process is supposed to be a way for sexual assault survivors to avoid the stress of going to court. Instead, it seems like too often the university is trying to cover its own ass and avoid a public relations nightmare instead of advocating for its students.

Sexual assault trigger warning on this post.

Matt Yglesias writes about incidences of sexual assault in college, and a recent NPR story about David Lisak’s extensive research on college rapists. Thomas has also written extensively about this, and I would recommend reading his takes. NPR summarizes Lisak’s findings thusly:

There’s a common assumption about men who commit sexual assault on a college campus: That they made a one-time, bad decision. But psychologist David Lisak says this assumption is wrong —-and dangerously so.
…
It might seem like it would be hard for a researcher to get these men to admit to something that fits the definition of rape. But Lisak says it’s not. “They are very forthcoming,” he says. “In fact, they are eager to talk about their experiences. They’re quite narcissistic as a group — the offenders — and they view this as an opportunity, essentially, to brag.”

What Lisak found was that students who commit rape on a college campus are pretty much like those rapists in prison. In both groups, many are serial rapists. On college campuses, repeat predators account for 9 out of every 10 rapes.

In other words, the people who insist that on-campus rapes are the result of two people getting drunk and making a bad decision and the woman regretting it in the morning? Those people are wrong.

Unfortunatley, Matt’s take on the issue is… somewhat troubling. I’ll preface this by saying that Matt is a really smart guy and a feminist ally, and I also initially misread his post (I confused his comments about Lake’s quote to be about Lisak’s research) and I made the mistake of reading some of the comment thread, so that’s probably coloring my take a little bit. But I find his take-away from the NPR piece to be a bit lacking.

Here’s what NPR writes, and what Matt posts, about Lisak’s research:

[Lisak] found them by, over a 20-year period, asking some 2,000 men in college questions like this: “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated [on alcohol or drugs] to resist your sexual advances?”

Or: “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used physical force [twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.] if they didn’t cooperate?”

About 1 in 16 men answered “yes” to these or similar questions.

And these dudes who admit to having sex with people against their will? They don’t define what they did as “rape.”

Later in the NPR story:

“It’s very common for them to go out Wednesday through Saturday at a minimum, drink fairly heavily and hook up sexually with people that they may not know particularly well, may have met for the first time that night, or had been introduced through friends, or MySpace or Facebook,” [Peter Lake] says. “So you have a lot of sexual activity, you have alcohol, you have a population that’s sort of an at-risk age, and it’s in some ways, it’s a perfect storm for sex assault issues.”

And here’s what Matt says:

It’s seems incredibly pernicious to me to be running these things together. Lisak’s question specifically posits that the victim “did not want to” have sex, but was “too intoxicated … to resist.” What Lake is talking about conjured up an imagine of a young woman with impaired judgment doing something while drunk that she later regrets. Obviously, that does happen. But it’s quite a different situation from an encounter where even the perpetrator acknowledges that the victim was unwilling.

He updates later by saying:

Let me clarify this, as I don’t think I made my point very clearly. What I’m trying to here is that insofar as we’re talking about rapists who are clearly aware that their victims are unwilling, the effort by Lake to paint this as a situation where “drink[ing] fairly heavily” is the key variable is hugely problematic. A person who’s going to rape women he knows perfectly well don’t want to have sex is engaged in pathological violent behavior and would be a menace even if all alcohol were extirpated from the planet. The booze is incidental.

Well, no, the booze isn’t totally incidental. The booze is what makes the victim more accessible to the rapist. The rapist is seeking out situations where he knows he can find targets who will be less able to defend themselves. It’s like muggers who rob old ladies — the age of the old ladies isn’t incidental. Matt is right that a rapist is pathological with or without booze, and would be a menace even without alcohol. But it is important to recognize that some rapists do purposely use drugs to incapacitate their victims.

Matt also says that “What Lake is talking about conjured up an imagine of a young woman with impaired judgment doing something while drunk that she later regrets.” Now, he’s talking about that final quote about people going out drinking and whatnot — he isn’t talking about the Lisak study. But that line about how young women go out and get drunk and then regret their choices later? That is used all the time both to justify sexual assault and to warn women of the dangers of leaving the house to socialize. So if Matt is wondering why his feminist readers are a little salty at this post, that might be why.

That said, I do think Matt makes a good point that it is dangerous to conflate so-called “hook-up culture” and college drinking with rape. As Lisak’s research bears out, dudes who commit rape do it on purpose. These aren’t one-time misunderstandings or miscommunications or next-day regrets. These are men who know that the person they’re with either does not want to have sex or cannot possibly consent to having sex, and they have sex with that person anyway, explicitly against that person’s wishes. They know they are doing harm. They get off on doing harm. The Lake quote implies the opposite — that with a bunch of people drinking, it’s a “perfect storm for sexual assault issues,” because alcohol impairs everyone’s judgment and, whoops, now someone is saying something about rape!

It’s tough to discuss the interplay between alcohol and sexual assault, because too often the conversation veers into “drinking will get you raped” territory, with women being warned of all the things they should or shouldn’t do in order to avoid rape. Of course, drinking won’t get you raped — only being in the presence of a rapist will result in rape. At the same time, though, rapists do use certain tools to get to their victims. Often, they exploit trust — if you’re a regular feminist blog reader, you probably know by now that most sexual assaults are committed by people the victim knows. Women are also much more likely to be assaulted in their own home or in the home of someone they know than in a public place — the rapist in the bushes exists, but isn’t nearly as common as the rapist you hung out with a few times.

And college dudes who rape their classmates? A lot of those dudes rely on alcohol. It makes their victims less able to physically resist, and it has the bonus of laying some of the blame on their victims. After all, dudes know that women are treated to Ways To Not Get Raped lectures all the time — don’t go out at night by yourself, don’t walk down a dark alley, don’t drink too much. I don’t have any actual statistics on this, but my bet is that the woman who is raped by the stranger who jumps out of the bushes is more likely to report the rape than the woman who is raped at a party by the dude in her Bio class, especially if she was drinking. Men who rape on campus are repeat offenders in large part because they can get away with it. The discourse around sexual assault assumes that women must take self-protective steps, and if they’re raped anyway then they must have done something wrong. Campus serial rapists rely on that bias.

As Thomas points out, serial rapists also tend to embrace hyper-masculinity and woman-hate. If a dude sounds like he hates women or wants to control them? He’s probably not lying. And dudes on campus use alcohol instead of (or in tandem with) brute force as their tools. Thomas’s thoughts draw an apt conclusion:

Guys with rigid views of gender roles and an axe to grind against women in general are overrepresented among rapists. That won’t come as a surprise to most readers here, I expect. But it is important confirmation. Guys who seem to hate women … do. If they sound like they don’t like or respect women and see women as impediments to be overcome … they’re telling the truth. That’s what they think, and they will abuse if they think they can get away with it.

Lisak doesn’t actually say this, but having read some of his work in depth now, I really think the major difference between the incarcerated and the non-incarcerated rapists are that the former cannot or do not confine themselves to tactics that are low-risk to them. The undetected rapists overwhelmingly use minimal or no force, rely mostly on alcohol and rape their acquaintances. They create situations where the culture will protect them by making excuses for them and questioning or denying their victims. Incarcerated rapists, I think, are just the ones who use the tactics that society is more willing to recognize as rape and less willing to make excuses for.

With all this feminist discussion as of late---and because I live in a brand new state with brand new politicians---I’d be remiss in not talking about this David Paterson situation. Seems the trade-off is between governors who do their evil at home and those who inflict it on their constituents, as is the tradition in Texas, at least since we gave up Ann Richards.  As a constituent, I prefer the former, of course.  As a feminist, I must weigh in on this scandal, and why domestic violence and the aiding of it isn’t really a “personal” issue at all.

The NY Times has been building the case against Paterson for awhile now, and the latest tip off can be read here.  If Gov. Paterson did pressure a girlfriend of one of his aides to drop charges of domestic assault against her, then he’s done something very serious indeed.  Of course, what he did is also excruciatingly common, far more common than situations where a man beats his wife or girlfriend and faces actual consequences with his friends---which is what Paterson was to the accused, as well as his employer.  What I want from this whole sordid situation is for people to understand that what happened is so common as to be mundane, and to start thinking about what it would take to really address domestic violence. I suggest that we start by considering it truly awful to beat a woman.  The dirty little secret of the Paterson situation is he reacted like many and I’d guess most people that know a man who beats his partner do---by backing up the man, and blaming the woman if she makes a fuss.  It’s one of those many male privileges you hear so much about. 

Do people back up abusers and pressure victims to shut up and behave because they love wife-beating?  No.  It works the same way as rape.  They just define what their friend did as somehow not the behavior in question.  Real wife-beating looks like X, they tell themselves, and this looked like Y.  If a victim cried too hard, protected herself, or yelled at the abuser during one of his rages, then they chalk it up to “fighting” and blame her as much if not more, even if she was actually cowering below his fists.  With that in mind, let’s look at the information the NY Times gathered.

In an interview with The New York Times, the governor had characterized the fight as being “like breakups you hear about all the time.”

What are the actual accusations, though?

Mr. Johnson’s girlfriend had accused him of choking her, smashing her into a mirrored dresser and preventing her from calling for help during a Halloween altercation in the Bronx apartment they shared.

Well, yes, you do hear about those all the time.  Domestic violence happens all the time, sadly. But what we can say is that if the accusations are true, then Paterson is a classic enabler, minimizing the abuse and using common tropes to do it.

Why does this happen?  From the literature on domestic violence I’ve read and people in the know I’ve talked to, the reason is as simple as it is depressing: In most cases, the people in the couple’s social network like the abuser more.  You know how you know couples and you like one more than the other, and it’s because you either know them better or find them more charming?  Abusers deliberately set out to create that impression in their friends’ minds. First of all, abusers can be very charming, and in lieu of that, they can make themselves indispensable.  (That’s how they got their victims to commit, after all!) Second of all, abusers find excuses to separate victims from their friends and family, not letting victims socialize much (and blaming them to others for being shy when asked about it, making people like the victim less), or letting her only socialize on his terms.  This strategy can be implemented pretty subtly---making it so miserable for her when she sees her friends through complaints that she starts to roll back on those relationships, poisoning her against her friends, or even moving her away from her support system.  Abusers exploit sexism, notably the sexist belief that men are fun-loving guys while women are nagging bitches.  And the abuse itself also helps.  Abusers can be glowing with power after they’ve forced a woman to submit, but she will be tired and depressed.  Glowing people are more fun to be around than depressives, and so he gets more points against her.  When the abuse finally comes out, their social network is ready to turn on her. 

What Paterson purportedly did is super-duper common.  But that it’s common is all the more reason for the public outcry to be strong, and for him to resign.  The only way to start taking domestic violence seriously is for people to, you know, actually take it seriously. And to start blaming wife-beaters, instead of making excuses for them or finding ways to discredit or intimidate their victims when they finally speak out. 

You know, if they were really pro-life, they would also criminalize masturbation and menstruation. Every sperm is sacred! Every egg is a potential baby!

Snark aside, I do think it’s interesting that anti-choicers will put significant effort into a bill like this and into, say, prosecuting women who use drugs while pregnant, but they do absolutely nothing about the fact that enormous numbers of fertilized eggs — unique, individual lives, they argue — naturally fail to implant and are flushed out of a woman’s body. When I bring this up with anti-choice people, they always point to the causation factor — abortion is bad because a woman takes steps to end a pregnancy. It’s the difference between murder and natural death. Prosecuting women who used drugs while pregnant and gave birth to stillborns is acceptable because the woman did something which may have ended the baby’s life (that’s scientifically debatable, but a detour from the actual point of this post, so I’ll leave it alone for now). The Utah miscarriage law is understandable because it targets women who intended to have miscarriages.

I understand that. We do hold people more culpable for things that they do on purpose; we also hold people accountable for a lot of things that they do negligently. My question, though, isn’t with the punishment aspect, but with the activism aspect. Let’s say that we take anti-choicers on their word that they really, truly believe that a fertilized egg is a unique, individual human being, and that the death of that egg is like the death of a person. If that’s the truth, then why no activism around trying to find a cure for the close to 50 percent of fertilized eggs that naturally don’t implant, and are flushed out of the woman’s body? Sure, it’s not intentional, but if there were some disease that killed 50 percent of all five-year-olds, I’m pretty sure we’d be doing something about it, no?

I realize this is all pretty far afield from the actual Utah legislation, but it’s illustrative, I think, insofar as it demonstrates that the concern here isn’t really about fetuses or life or any of that. It’s about punishing women.

Lynn Harris has a bone-chilling article up at Salon about yet another incident of fundamentalist Christians taking their beliefs to an extreme and getting someone hurt or killed, usually and inevitably someone in a vulnerable position.  In this case, the story is that of 7-year-old Lydia Schatz, whose parents beat her to death using a tool---a quarter inch plumbing supply line---recommended by the wildly popular authors Michael and Debi Pearl, who have an entire series about “child training” for evangelical Christians.  Like James Dobson of Focus on Family, the Pearls are big on spanking kids, and not just small pats on the butt.  In both cases, the idea is to beat the kid into submission. Dobson wrote about his preferred technique like so:

[T]he spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely. After the emotional ventilation, the child will often want to crumple to the breast of his parent, and he should be welcomed with open, warm, loving arms.

The Pearls take a similar stance:

Light, swatting spankings, done in anger without courtroom dignity will make children mad because they sense that they have been bullied by an antagonists. A proper spanking leaves children without breath to complain.

Naturally, some children will complain until they’re beaten to death, a situation the Pearls apparently didn’t account for.  Now they’re scrambling to avoid any moral responsibility for the death of this little girl, the severe beating of two other children.  (The ones who got it the hardest were adopted children from Liberia.)

Lynn describes the debate going on inside the evangelical community about the Pearls, and what is considered “too far”.  It’s all very interesting, and I suggest you read her article.  But I’m going to argue that the continued debating over the line between forcing someone to submit and overt abuse that goes on in this world completely misses the point.  When you define entire classes of people, whether children or women, as existing to submit and suggest that willfulness is an evil brought upon your family by the devil, then abuse is inevitable.  The idea itself is abusive and dehumanizing.  Everything else that follows from it is simply logical. 

I’m struck, when reading right wing Christian child-rearing advice, on how much the advice resembles the tactics that wife beaters use against their victims. 

With grown women, of course, phase 3 gets a little complicated, but phase 3 is explicit stated by these spanking proponents---once you’ve broken down your victim, everything is hugs and tears.  The Pearls highlight stage 4 as the goal of their techniques, it appears. 

“The focus when their teachings are promoted isn’t on the spanking, but on the ‘tying heartstrings’ and enjoying your kids,” says Alexandra Bush. “It is easy to filter out the harsher teachings, the extremism, when surrounded by word pictures of peaceful, loving, fun families. The Pearls seem to tell parents that they just have to ‘win’ once and make sure their children know who is in charge, and then they will never have to spank again. That’s how parents get sucked in—promises of a fun, peaceful home, minimal confrontation, doing the ‘right thing’ for their children. Basically, the BS detectors are turned off by the pretty promises that are made.”

Well, yeah.  Everyone enjoys phase 4, but then the person beaten into submission starts to act like a human being again, seeking to control their own life and express their individuality, and things get tense again, and then there’s a beating.  Abuse exists because abusers desire complete control over their victims.  I fail to see how Christian child rearing manuals that replace terms like “rearing” or “nurturing” with their preferred term “training” can be considered anything but abuse.  The very idea that another human being should be trained, that their will should be completely subject to yours, is abuse by definition.  The Pearls aren’t exactly wrong when they argue that you can only completely control a person by beating them until ”crying turns to a true, wounded, submissive whimper”.  The problem is the premise, accepted even by many of their critics, that children should be so thoroughly controlled.  (And that wives should be obedient.)

Not to say that this issue isn’t confusing, even for liberal or secular parents.  Kids don’t know how to behave, and they need their parents to guide them.  I’m the last person who thinks that a child should never be controlled, particularly when your 4-year-old that you’ve brought to a fancy Italian restaurant keeps running into my table and splashing wine and sending the bottle tipping into precarious positions that cause me to completely drop the pleasant adult conversation I’m having to rescue myself, my companion and your 4-year-old from having wine spilled all over us.  I have zero issue with picking the child up, putting them in their seat and telling them they either stop running around or privileges will immediately start to disappear, or whatever other non-abusive form of discipline is the thing now.  In fact, I beg you to do it.  Sometimes the little ones, be they pets or people, in our care need to have decisions made for them, as well.  But that’s a far different cry from the fundamentalist Christian view, where children exist to glorify you and your belief system, and their beings are subject to that.  I imagine that parents who give their children the right to be individuals and whose goal is to move their children towards being able to make more and more of their own decisions end up being frustrated a lot less than fundamentalist parents, who are encouraged to see every bit of non-submissive behavior as the devil’s work.  And who see every attraction to pop culture as a threat, whereas most parents tend to feel neutral about large swaths of that. 

I’m just blown away by how much the wife beater’s M.O. is actually taught as the moral pathway when it comes to child rearing in the fundamentalist culture.  Wife beaters use various tactics to separate their victims from outside influences that might keep their victims from submitting completely to their control; fundies are openly concerned with outside influences and create entire industries to shield their children from them, as well as embrace home schooling.  Wife beaters are paranoid, seeing threats to their control even when they aren’t there, and escalating the amount of time they spend monitoring their victims.  Again, this is treated as the best way to raise your children in fundie circles, which is another reason home schooling is such a big deal.  And of course, the cycle of abuse is glorified as the right way to get children to submit in fundie circles.  Which is why I’m never surprised when something like this murder happens.

That’s immediately the discussion that’s forming around this situation in Austin. (Which is different from the first question I asked, which is, “Why does Austin and the area around it attract so much hellacious, random violence?  The Ft. Hood shootings weren’t that long ago, you know.") My first inclination was to say no.  Perhaps it was the combination of Austin with a random dude angry at the world acting out a personal grudge---my mind went to the Ft. Hood shootings and to the Charles Whitman shooting.  In fact, this is highly reminiscent of the Whitman shooting.  Whitman was boiling with frustration and rage and he aimed it at an institution he likely blamed for his troubles.  Whitman killed his wife and mother before he went on his rampage, and Stack burned down his house (but thankfully spared his family).  So that’s where my mind went, and thus I wasn’t inclined to see this as a terrorist incident. 

The FBI defines terrorism:

Domestic terrorism is the unlawful use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States or Puerto Rico without foreign direction committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives.

Terrorism is all about intent, in other words.  And reading the guy’s suicide note he posted online, it’s clear that he intended this to be an inspiration to others.  However, his political ideology is a little hard to figure.  Most anti-tax nuts come from the right, of course, but as someone from Texas I can assure you that we manage to breed all sorts of wide-eyed political lunatics, and they often have a real mish-mash of ideological beliefs .  It is a state with a functioning, powerful Libertarian party, after all. That’s why we gave you both Ross Perot and Ron Paul.  If I met someone there who claimed to be an anti-tax anarchist communist, I wouldn’t bat an eye.  There’s just a high tolerance for weirdos in Texas.  It’s both one of its charms and one of its drawbacks. 

Stack’s beef with the IRS seems to have developed from personal problems stemming from possible tax evasion on his part.  But it appears to have turned into a full-blown ideological stance, and again, it’s clear that he hopes others who share his ideological stance---and believe me, there are a lot of crazy right wing nuts in the area who do, and I have no doubt Stack was aware of this---will act on his wishes.  This is what I mean by a mish-mash.  Most of his ranting seems very left wing, but if you’re living in central Texas and you do something like this, you’re sending a signal to right wing nuts, and you know it. 

And on that basis, I have to conclude that this was in fact a terrorist attack, even if there was no criminal conspiracy (and it looks like there wasn’t).  I wish I could say with certainty that the whole world, including the right wing nuts, will not look to Stack as a hero and an inspiration, but I can’t.  Unfortunately, he performed this deed in a part of the country that’s thick with crazy conspiracy theorists, militia types, and extreme right wing nuts.  I mean, for fuck’s sake, I’ll bet Alex Jones has a conspiracy theory about how the government is covering this up somehow and Stack was innocent or something like that by tomorrow.  People like this go beyond thinking the government mishandled the David Koresh situation and go straight into acting like Koresh was some kind of hero.  They lionize Randy Weaver, who to my mind was a nasty piece of work who deliberately provoked a confrontation with the government that got his wife and son killed.  The Oklahoma federal building bombing was orchestrated on the anniversary of the Waco shootings, if you’ll recall.  So while Stack may prove to be unaligned with any radical groups, he was sending a signal.  And unfortunately, it’s a signal they want to hear.  So yes, it was terrorism. And even if the President won’t call it that, I’m sure the FBI is going to be monitoring how militant right wing groups react to this attack very carefully. 

The airplane crash is Austin is obviously dominating my thoughts right now, but I haven’t fully processed.  Need to get some exercise and clear my head.  In the meantime, I spent part of this afternoon as a guest on the BBC’s ”World Have Your Say”.  The topic is the very one you really want to get into a heated discussion about, if you’re a masochist: Is rape ever the victim’s fault? (Just kidding!  I had a fine time and was not at all tortured.)

The panelists were me, two other feminists working in victims’ services and law, and the token anti-feminist, a particularly grating Heather MacDonald.  (Or maybe she just seemed that way next to the calm British commentators.) I highly recommend downloading it here and listening. The callers who called in were all very interesting, as were the other guests.  Except, of course, MacDonald, who accused the vast majority of rape victims (since most rapes are committed by someone you know) of lying to cover up for their slutty, drunken behavior.  The other guests and hosts called her out for conflating the campus “hook-up culture” with all acquaintance rape ever, but I felt like I had to spend time pointing out that she was full of shit about even that narrow topic. 

Not to be a broken record about this, but the notion that most rapes are a matter of women making drunken choices and regretting it later doesn’t match the realities.  It’s not like “the feminists” running the “campus rape industry” (I can’t wait for my checks that keep not rolling in), as MacDonald kept calling us, are just making shit up.  There’s actual research into who rapes and why they do it, and it looks nothing like the picture of innocent frat boys who had consensual sex with deceitful women, as anti-feminists like to claim.  A very small minority of men commit most rapes.  Offenders rape because they like to rape.  Contrary to the stereotype of the victims as flighty sluts who are making shit up, rape victims are often selected by rapists because the rapist feels they are sending off submissive signals, and that this means they won’t put up a fight.  And yes, you can intend to consent to sex with a man and withdraw that consent, and if he keeps going, that’s rape.  Anti-feminists imply women withdraw consent to be capricious.  In reality, consent is withdrawn more often than not because things went from fun to weird or violent really fast.  I fail to see why it’s hard to imagine a man could suddenly decide that it was going to happen without a condom, or insist that he introduce violence or other acts the woman doesn’t want, and she suddenly withdraws her consent.  I mean, duh.