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So two pieces of drug related news that are in need of noting. Firstly, there will be a year ban on ‘legal highs’ so that research into the harms of the drugs can take place. Secondly, the government is now considering the proposals to withdraw benefits from those who don’t take treatment.

Again, further piece meal reforms that do little to help the problems around drug use. These are deeply undermining and regressive drug policies that ignore the ever increasing body of scientific and intellectual (and real life examples) work of how well decriminalisation works!

Consider the Vienna Declaration – it is a perfect example of the growing decriminalisation movement. However, for some reason or another, the government like to run their drug policy on the fear of the media moral panic frenzy that erupts at the slight noise of drug decriminalisation. However, the evidence is clear, we shouldn’t treat drug abuse as a criminal offense, it is a medical condition. Furthermore, as many have pointed out before, only certain drugs are problematised, others – conveniently the ones which bring in a heap of revenue – are left relativity unscathed.

All this ban will do is drive the market further underground, result in an increase in harmful substances, and make the whole situation worse.

And now onto the withdrawing benefit idea. As many of the critics have pointed out, all this will do is drive people into things such as prostitution and crime in order to fuel their addictions. Only when the government realise that its own war on drugs is what is actually creating many of the problems, will real reform take place.

You can’t help but think that the government’s revival of the plans is also part of IDS’s attempts of wide-ranging cuts to get through his slim lining of the benefit system proposal.

Again, two rather illogical policies that will only seek to further undermine the existing help that drug abusers get (which is very poor as it is). It is about time that the government start listening to all the scientific evidence that they are always increasing the funding for.

**Trigger warning for descriptions of violence and sexual abuse**

Today I sat in a room with a man who admitted to stabbing his step-father to death. This isn’t the first time I’ve met with someone who has murdered, but it was the first time I’ve had to tell that person I couldn’t help him because he’s not claiming innocence. And that fact – that fact that I was not allowed to help him – has been eating at me all day.

The truth of the matter is, there is a tension between defense attorneys who work on death penalty cases and those that work on innocence cases. In the former, attorneys work to get courts to recognize the humanity in folks who the law labels “the worst of the worst.” In the latter, we only represent those deemed “worthy” of receiving it – the innocent ones, the ones who did not do anything wrong. I do not like this tension.

As someone who has crossed over and worked on both sides of the issue, I believe innocence work is necessary to ending the death penalty. Yes, the death penalty is expensive; yes, it has no deterrent value; and yes, the process is completely unfair. However, until the public believes that we are, and still stand, at risk of executing innocent folks, they aren’t going to buy into abolishing the death penalty. And while I’d like to say that the fact that the public doesn’t find the other arguments compelling is the only thing that makes me sad about this debate, what really makes me sad is that the discussion surrounding the death penalty doesn’t even attempt to recognize the vulnerability and humanness of the folks on death row. Because by the time someone reaches death row, we no longer think of them as human. They are incapable of being vulnerable, of having acts committed on them. Instead, they are only actors – perpetrators – who can commit acts on other people.

This framing of individuals as either victim or perpetrator troubles me deeply. Truthfully, while there are exceptions to every rule, I generally believe that in the case of major crimes, the following rule applies: not all victims are perpetrators, but all perpetrators are victims.

I know, I know. No one wants to think of the person who did something awful to them as being a victim. And honestly, I’m not asking you to. There’s a reason the criminal justice system isn’t supposed to be about what the victim wants* – you can’t be objective. Heck, you shouldn’t be objective. But law and society should be. Which means that before we punish someone, we need to take into account that victimization is a cycle—it’s those who have been hurt that go on to hurt someone else.

Take for example the man I met today. His life has not been an easy one. Because of his limited mental capacities, he quit school in the 4th grade, and still cannot read or write. By the time he was 12, he had seen his biological father attempt to kill his mother twice – once by trying to drown her in the toilet, and another by beating her in the head with a phone. That second time, he stepped in, pulled a pistol on his own father, and chased him into the street. His father came back the next day, and remained with the family until he was 16. In the meantime, the boy was beaten daily: first with his father’s belt, and then when he got bigger, with the grown man’s fists. Besides the physical abuse he received, he was also sexually abused from the age of 7 until he was 12, after which he turned to drugs and alcohol for support; he began drinking at 12, and started smoking crack at age 15.

Throughout all this time, no one stepped in to help this child. No one stopped him from quitting school. No one kept him away from the man who beat him mercilessly and tried to kill his mother. No one protected him from sexual abuse. No one loved him and taught him how to find solace in anything other than drugs and alcohol. Removed from the fact that he later killed, it would be difficult to imagine that anyone would not agree that this man had been a victim.

Yet, once a victim crosses that line to perpetrator – once this man killed his step-father – no one wants to remember the victim he once was. And that, I believe, is one of the fundamental flaws in our criminal justice system. No one wants to acknowledge that a perpetrator has been a victim, because if that’s true, then that means we are also punishing victims.

Robert Lawrence Smith writes in the Quaker Book of Wisdom about how people never look at the homeless. Folks avert their eyes and look away–ashamed, guilty perhaps. According to Smith, we don’t want to look at them because we don’t want to recognize our humanity in them. It’s difficult to think that we would let someone live in such conditions. So instead of recognizing them as human, we simply ignore them. This is similar to the response of the general public when we convict someone and label them a perpetrator: rather than acknowledge their humanity, we simply shuffle them away where no one can see.

However, I think it’s more than just not wanting to recognize a criminal as human. I think we don’t want to realize that we too had a role in creating someone who could commit this crime. Because the truth of the matter is, if this man hadn’t been abused–if he hadn’t become crack-addicted–it is highly unlikely that his step-father would have died. And in that way, we failed. We let these things happen. But we don’t share in the responsibility.

Generally, I feel tremendous responsibility for the acts my clients have committed. I do not mean to suggest they, too, are not culpable and should not be punished. But I do believe that some of that culpability is society’s too, and as a member of society, I must carry my share. So today, when this man asked for my help, and I turned him down, I can’t help but feel that I’m just continuing the cycle of denying this man assistance when he needed it. But yet again, it will be he, and not I, that suffers for it.

*Society’s failure to provide support for victims is a whole different issue. I believe we should be doing things to help victims. But those things typically aren’t punishing someone else, and shouldn’t be limited to the criminal justice system.

by Amanda Marcotte

Every time I hear or read an excuse for Mel Gibson or Roman Polanski, I immediately flash to this song in the movie “Run Ronnie Run”. 

Lyrics:

I thought that my home was my castle
With no one scrutinizing me
No pigs, no lyin’ bitch, no hassle
Y’all are brutalizing’ me
Can’t a man not drink his beer in silence?
Can’t a man not crudely lie and scream?
Can’t a man not control his bitch with violence?
Y’all are brutalizing me

What’s your problem, Whoopi? I used to think you were cool.

by Pam Spaulding

Back January of last year, America got a look, courtesy of a cell phone camera of a rider on a BART train in Oakland, CA, at the cold-blooded murder of a handcuffed, down-on-the-ground 22-year-old named Oscar Grant on a train platform.

Yesterday, his assailant, transit officer Johannes Mehserle, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for killing the supermarket butcher with a 4-year-old daughter. (SFGate):

Involuntary manslaughter might seem an unsatisfying outcome for the killing of the unarmed Oscar Grant on Jan. 1, 2009, but it was consistent with the evidence that could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt against former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle. Anything less would have been an injustice. Anything more would have required conclusions about Mehserle’s state of mind that were not sufficiently supported in trial.

The bottom line is that the jury agreed with what any fair-minded person who saw the videotape of the shooting on the BART platform at the Fruitvale Station had to conclude: There was no reason to use fatal force on Grant, who was being physically restrained at the time.

Mehserle, 28, claimed it was an accident, that he thought he was firing a Taser instead of a handgun at the detainee. The explanation stretched the bounds of plausibility, given the difference in weight, feel - and position on his holster - between the nonlethal weapon intended to immobilize and the Sig Sauer P226 pistol that is used to kill. He clearly was negligent.

The thoughtful Adam Serwer, who now has his own feature blog at The American Prospect, reads between the lines of this verdict that captures my sentiment perfectly when I read about the verdict. It’s something you will not see in the above-cited San Francisco Chronicle report that has the ironic headline of “The right verdict in Mehserle case.” What is behind a “technically correct” verdict are also matters that have little to do with precision objectivity, and everything to do with human nature in the U.S. in 2010.

I want to focus for a moment on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. To convict on the higher charge of voluntary manslaughter, the prosecution would have had to prove that Mehserle’s fear of Grant and his friends was “unreasonable.” It decided the crime was involuntary. In other words, Mehserle’s fear? That was reasonable.

Fear is at the core of questions of justice involving the deaths of black people at the hands of the authorities in the United States of America, dating back to when Toussaint L’Overture put the fear of G-d in slaveowners by revealing that their “property” might someday rise up against them. L’Overture still has that effect on some people. Following emancipation we were the days when “justice” was meted out in the South by terrorists posing as vigilantes. Even then, when such atrocities were an accepted part of black life, people inside and outside the South found ways to sympathize with the anger and fear white Southerners felt towards their black neighbors--The New York Times editorialized in the 1890s that no “reputable or respectable negro” had ever been lynched.

Even decades after the Civil Rights era, a cop shooting an unarmed black man is barely a crime—a 2007 ColorLines investigation of police shootings in New York City found that in 12 instances when the victim was unarmed, only one officer was found criminally liable. There hasn’t been a murder conviction on a police shooting in Oakland since 1983. As Kai Wright wrote in the aftermath of the Sean Bell verdict, “American law has been sanctioning the killing of black people to mollify white fear for centuries...We scare the shit out of America. And that fear excuses just about any reaction it spawns.” Mehserle is profoundly unlucky to be punished at all.

Times change, but the radioactive fear of black people, black men in particular, has proven to have a longer half-life than any science could have discerned. This is not a fear white people possess of black people--it is a fear all Americans possess. It makes white cops kill black cops, it makes black cops kill black men, and it whispers in the ears of white and nonwhite jurors alike that fear of an unarmed black man lying face down in the ground is not “unreasonable.” All of which is to say, while it infects all of us, a few of us bear the brunt of the suffering it causes.

Thank you, Adam, for putting this out there. He also raises the very point I share with my readers time and again. That fear, embodied in the third rail of discussing race matters openly, seems to paralyze otherwise intelligent, highly-opinionated people into silence.

What’s worse is that we we don’t just fear, we fear talking about it. Our president tried once. He mentioned the fear his own grandmother felt for men who looked like he does, and we responded with the level of maturity we’ve come to expect from our political discourse. If you’ve ever had a relative of another race confess to you that they’d find you frightening if they ran into you in a dark alley, you know what he meant. But we fear what this fear says about us more than we fear letting it go.

When can we have these conversations? What will it take for those with privilege to speak openly about this fear, and for those who are minorities to hold back the desire to be defensive to engage.

For instance, why do some white people say they fear or are cautious of all black men after they were mugged by one? If they were mugged by a white guy, they wouldn’t fear all white men. And many blacks fall prey to the same fear, as Adam noted.

We have to explore that fear for what it is, rather than assign guilt for feeling it in the first place. You cannot let go of internalized racism (that is reinforced by our culture) without first owning it and peeling the layers back. And that can only occur in an environment where all concerned let their defenses down.

And that’s where we often fail. So many people just don’t want to take the time or the energy to engage in educating themselves and others in conversations that can involve painful admissions and hard questions that don’t have easy answers.

by Amanda Marcotte

I Blame the Patriarchy recently wrapped up Art Week, but I think Twisty may have to reopen it just to discuss this insanely fucked up story about the archives of artist Larry Rivers, who I feel pretty assured was a child-abusing pervert.  NYU has acquired these archives, but Rivers’ daughter Emma Tamburlini wants them to turn over some pieces of the archive to her to be destroyed.  Pretty crazy, right?  What kind of daughter wants to destroy her father’s Important Art?  Well..... because it’s basically filmed child abuse.  Tracy Clark-Flory describes it:

Rivers, who died in 2002, filmed his daughters, starting at the age of 11, every six months for five years, asking them “about their breasts and whether boys have started noticing them.” There are “close-up shots of one daughter’s genitals and detailed commentary by Mr. Rivers on the girls’ changing bodies.” In some scenes, his wife, Clarice Rivers, “appears with her daughters, displaying her own breasts and talking about them.” The clips were edited into a 45-minute-long film. He titled it “Growing.”

In case you’re indulging the urge to say, “Hey, they’re arty-farty people, and so they don’t live the same way the rest of us do. Those girls probably think fondly of their kooky dad and his artistic interests!”, well, think again.  No matter who you’re born to, this kind of pervy shit feels like abuse. 

Ms. Tamburlini said the filming contributed to her becoming anorexic at 16. “It wrecked a lot of my life actually,” she said.

Calling something “art”, though, tends to obscure issues like, “Is it okay to torture your teenage daughters with quasi-incestuous videos about their sexuality that involve nudity?” Which is why I respect Becky Sharper’s desire to say that this is basically not art, because it’s child pornography, and it’s stupid to confuse the two. 

Apparently a grand jury in San Diego declined to prosecute Rivers for child pornography, which strikes me as utterly ridiculous. If a stranger did this to minors, or this kind of work was found on someone’s hard drive, the police would intervene. When Rivers says that the girls “kept sort of complaining?” That means what he was doing was not consensual, and from Tamburlini’s account, he coerced them into doing it. Of course, the girls were below the age of consent for this kind of sexually-charged activity anyway, but their parents were able to get away with it because they were the parents.

I can see why this is a legal question, but as an ethical question, it tends to obscure the major issue, which is that exploiting children isn’t right no matter what you call it.  Twisty gets right to the heart of this dilemma:

I get it! Like, if you are unenthusiastic about 2008 Chicken Butt Viognier, and somebody hands you a glass at the taco-tasting party, you don’t say, “this damned Chicken Butt is too green and minerally to pair well with smoked avocado tacos.” You merely state that it isn’t wine. End of discussion. Talk to the hand. Well, perhaps you insinuate that wine is elitist first.

In other words, arguing whether or not it’s art is missing the point, which is that it’s child abuse.  And it reveals that Rivers treated his daughters like they were his personal property, fit to use how he’d like, even if it was sexually.  Even if they refuse to consent.Tracy Clark-Flory explains:

In a voice-over for the film, Rivers explains that he continued with the project despite “the raised eyebrows of society in general and specific friends and even my daughters—they kept sort of complaining.” Indeed, Tamburlini says she resisted at the time and was called “uptight and a bad daughter,” as the Times paraphrases it.

NYU is wanting to hang on to these films in order to release them after the subjects pass away. That’s not enough.  Rivers abused his children, and NYU shouldn’t cooperate in the abuse, even in the name of art.  They should let Tamburlini destroy the videos if she wants.  After all, she was part of the making of them; they belong to her as much as they do her dead father.

[Trigger Warning: discussions of sexual assault and deadly State force.]

Love your enemies.

For feminists, is there any phrase more terrifyingly reactionary?

Love your enemies. Even the one who assaults you in private and reaps accolades as a brilliant community organizer in public. (One of my mom’s former boyfriends.)

Love your enemies. Even the ones who throw cherry bombs at you in the school bathrooms. (My dad’s fellow students at Yale, in the 1950s.)

Love your enemies. Even the one who tells you women should be seamstresses, not lawyers. (Opa — my mom’s dad.)

Love your enemies. Even the one who tells you, as a child, to bit down on your lower lip so it won’t grow too big. (Grandma — my dad’s mom.)

Love your enemies. Even the white police officer who shot and killed you while you were lying helpless, face-down on the ground with another officer’s knee on your neck. (Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old Black man killed Jan 1, 2009 in an Oakland subway station.)

Jury deliberations began yesterday for Johannes Mehserle, the Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer who fatally shot Oscar Grant. All of Oakland awaits the verdict. Both police and non-profits are making preparations to quell the “violence” anticipated after this “deadly lightning rod” of a trial.

Deadly? Violence? According to CNN’s coverage, not one single person was seriously injured in the 2009 protests following Grant’s death. Nobody injured, let alone killed. Windows were broken; dumpsters set afire. Is this violence? Sounds more like property destruction to me.

Whatever happens, whether riots flare up or not, things will once again settle, and the ordinary state violence will resume as usual. After all, there’s only one individual on trial — not an entire racist police force armed with deadly weapons. Not an entire patriarchal, militaristic, anti-immigrant, plutocratic (ruled by wealth) law enforcement system. Not California, the US state running “the largest prison system in the Western world.” That won’t be standing trial anytime soon. So what are we supposed to do?

Love your enemies.

What an injunction, huh? Just how are we supposed to achieve this? And why?

The “how” I’ll leave aside for now. Let’s focus on the why.

Why should we love our enemies? Why not hate them? Or at least get angry?

Audre Lorde, one of my all-time favorite feminists, has one answer. With hatred we harm ourselves, and anger only takes us halfway to where we need to go. From “Eye To Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger”:

And true, sometimes it seems that anger alone keeps me alive; it burns with a bright and undiminished flame. Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus on what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it – hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.

Thirty years after “The Uses Of Anger: Women Responding To Racism,” her keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Lorde’s questions about anger are just as relevant now as then. When and how is our anger useful? When and how is it harmful?

One of my best clues at the moment comes from the dhamma — the teachings of the historical Buddha. Dhamma does not condemn anger as wrong or sinful. Instead, it shows us how to look at our own anger objectively, and start breaking it down. See its useful, neutral, and harmful qualities.

Meditation, not cogitation (thinking) is really the key there. But on the intellectual tip, a very useful explanation for me came from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s book The Myth of Freedom: a chapter called “Working With Negativity.” I don’t have the book on me, but this online excerpt gets at the essence:

“We all experience negativity–the basic aggression of wanting things to be different than they are. We cling, we defend, we attack, and throughout there is a sense of one’s own wretchedness, and so we blame the world for our pain. This is negativity. We experience it as terribly unpleasant, foul smelling, something we want to get rid of. But if we look into it more deeply, it has a very juicy smell and is very alive. Negativity is not bad per se, but something living and precise, connected with reality.

Negativity breeds tension, friction, gossip, discontentment, but it is also very accurate, deliberate and profound. Unfortunately, the heavy handed interpretations and judgments we lay on these experiences obscure this fact. These interpretations are negative negativity, watching ourselves being negative and then deciding that the negativity is justified in being there. This negativity seems good-natured, with all sorts of good qualities in it, so we pat its back, guard it and justify it. Or, if we are blamed or attacked by others, we interpret their negativity as being good for us. In either case, the watcher, by commenting, interpreting and judging, is camouflaging and hardening the basic negativity.

. . . . . The basic honesty and simplicity of negativity can be creative in community as well as in personal relationships. Basic negativity is very revealing sharp and accurate. If we leave it as basic negativity rather than overlaying it with conceptualizations, then we see the nature of its intelligence. Negativity breeds a great deal of energy, which clearly seen becomes intelligence. When we leave the energies as they are with their natural qualities, they are living rather than conceptualized. They strengthen our daily lives….”

You’d think Lorde had been reading up on this guy. “Anger is loaded with information and energy,” she says. “Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” Negativity clearly seen.

So here we have an alternative. Rather than making anger comprise our actions toward an enemy, we let it inform and energize our actions.

Instead of directing venom toward “the pigs,” we might use this precise negative mind to observe, The forces that are supposed to be keeping our communities safe — serving us — are making us less safe. Killing us. These forces control the people, but they’re not of the people. They have little to no accountability to the majority of the human beings whose lives are in their hands.

I don’t want a racist patriarch “protecting” me. This serves neither of us.

Safety and community rule enforcement groups need to protect the welfare of ordinary, working-class people, not just wealthy people. The welfare of people of all genders, not just men; of all races, not just white; of all birthplaces, not just US; of all religions, not just Christian or secular; of all mental and physical conditions, not just the ones considered “normal.”

“Community policing” — collaboration between existing law enforcement agencies and the groups they serve — doesn’t go far enough. I want people from my own community protecting me — people I know and trust. People I’ve elected to a community safety body; reflecting the genders, races, class, and national and ethnic origins of the community; not sadistic or prone to power-trips; militant but not militaristic; who can perform equally well the work of confrontation and of de-escalation, healing, and peacebuilding — who won’t just selectively enforce the laws and rules that favor the powerful. Who won’t use handcuffs and tasers loaded guns to break up young Black men’s non-fights on New Year’s Eve.

This is what my anger over Oscar Grant’s death tells me. That we’re fit to govern and protect ourselves. In fact, we’re better at it.

If Mehserle and the cops are my enemies, I know this: they and I equally deserve real safety. We all deserve to provide it and receive it, to the best of our abilities and to the extent of our needs, in the context of our own communities. We’re all worthy of that.

And if I need to disobey some existing laws in order to build toward that real, true safety, then I’m breaking those laws with love for my enemies as well as for myself.

Because, as we know, our enemies are often our very closest neighbors. And there’s that other famous phrase:

Love thy neighbor as thyself.

We love ourselves – protect ourselves – and protect our neighbors and enemies, too – as we question and challenge the state’s idea of what ’safety,’ ‘order,’ and ‘protection’ really are.

Oakland itself, hardly a stranger to up-ending conventional ideas of protection, has one of the strongest recent histories of community self-defense in the US. Imperfect and unromantic, yes, but game-changing nonetheless.

And feminists, womanists, and gender-oppressed people are among the most inspiring leaders in this kind of loving action. We create our own protective forces based on analysis of intimate violence, community violence, and state violence — preventing, healing from, and transforming all three.

We also employ whatever tools best suit us — therapy, prayer, meditation — to heal our internal selves from cancerous hatred; to patiently harvest the honey of insight from the beehive of anger; and to cultivate the quality — socially awkward and spiritually indispensable — that Che Guevara so aptly described:

Let me say at the risk of sounding ridiculous that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of love.

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Please keep in mind the comment guidelines as we come to the end of our experiment!

I have mixed feelings about this book, and the way it’s advertised isn’t helping. I found the paperback edition wedged between historical romances at an airport bookshop. The pink text on the front and the quote saying “this is a book all women should read” combine to create a campaign that doesn’t only appeal to [...]

Let me start out by saying that I’m not totally unsympathetic to gun rights. I’m not opposed to people having guns. I’m not even opposed to people having lots of different kinds of guns. I get it that people go shooting for fun, or that they like to hunt, or that guns are part of their culture. Guns aren’t necessarily part of my culture, but that’s ok. But even though people should be allowed there guns, I don’t think it’s too far-reaching to say that there should be limits on deadly weapons. If you’re a convicted violent criminal, you probably shouldn’t be allowed to own a bunch of guns. If you’re a convicted terrorist, or if you’re convicted of conspiracy to commit a violent crime, I’m ok with not letting you have guns either. I’m ok with not letting people carry concealed weapons in certain public places. If you buy a gun, I think you should have to undergo a background check, and that getting a gun license should involve some sort of safety training — just like driving a car. A lot of these rules are already in place, obviously. Basically, guns are a responsibility with great potential to cause harm, and should be treated by the government as such. So, great.

But the gun lobby isn’t ok with that. The gun lobby seems to think that any person, no matter how many times they’ve proven their propensity for violence and unpredictability, should be able to have a gun. Take, for example, this NPR story, which highlights the gun lobby’s decision to try to tackle one of the most common-sense gun control laws out there: The law regulating gun ownership for those convicted of domestic violence.

Similarly, Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said there’s going to be a lot of groping as to where to “draw the line.” He expects court tests on assault-weapons bans, bans on armor-piercing bullets, bans on concealed carrying of guns and many other gun restrictions.

Glenn Ivey, chairman of the board of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, asked: “Will that apply to cars? Will that apply to yards? Will people be allowed to carry them on their person under this interpretation of the Second Amendment? How far will this go before it runs into the point where reasonable regulation is going to be permitted?”

Herb Titus, counsel for Gun Owners of America, agrees. He sees challenges, as well, to registration and licensing restrictions, to age restrictions for gun ownership, and to limits on the number of guns that can be bought at one time. But first in the pipeline of challenges, he says, will be challenges to laws banning guns for those convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors.

Putting aside the question of why someone needs armor-piercing bullets, you would think it’s pretty common sense to say that people who beat the crap out of their intimate partners are probably not the kind of people who we, as a society, want owning weapons. We know that domestic abusers tend to be repeatedly violent — beating up your partner is rarely a one-time thing. We know that domestic abusers tend to get increasingly violent. We know that women are killed by their abusers at horrifying rates, and are often killed by guns. We know that domestic abuse is under-reported and under-convicted.

So really, gun lobby? This is your great Constitutional and civil rights issue? The rights of people who have been criminally convicted of violent crimes to own guns? (Here, I’ll take a minute to point out that we limit the rights of people with criminal convictions all the time; we limit their liberty, but we also impose a series of restrictions from blocking voting rights to taking away drivers’ licenses to monitoring by the state to restricting where they can live and travel. Not all of these restrictions are good, in my opinion, but at least some are justified. Point being, the ban on gun-buying is not an anomaly).

A lot of Americans are sympathetic to the rights of gun-owners. But you know who most people are actually not super sympathetic to, at least in theory? Domestic abusers. So if the gun lobby decides to advocate for gun ownership rights for domestic abusers, I sure hope that liberal and feminist groups will take them on, and loudly. I have a feeling they’re shooting themselves in the foot with this one, if you will.

by Pam Spaulding

SCOTUS is busy with the rulings today and it has now dealt a huge blow to the protectors of child-raping priests in the Vatican as a ruling came down today that could result in Pope Benedict taking the stand. (Raw Story):

Allowing a federal appeals court ruling to stand, the decision means Vatican officials including theoretically Pope Benedict XVI could face questioning under oath related to a litany of child sex abuse cases.

The Supreme Court effectively confirmed the decision of an appellate court to lift the Vatican’s immunity in the case of an alleged pedophile priest in the northwestern state of Oregon.

More on that immunity, which has been the hoped-for trump card in the Vatican’s pocket.

The lawsuit, filed by a plaintiff identified only as John Doe, claimed he was sexually abused on several occasions in the mid-1960s when he was 15 or 16 by a Roman Catholic priest named Father Andrew Ronan.

According to court documents, Ronan molested boys in the mid-1950s as a priest in Ireland and then in Chicago before his transfer to a church in Portland, Oregon, where he allegedly abused the victim who filed the lawsuit. Ronan died in 1992.

...The Vatican claimed immunity under a U.S. law, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976, that allows foreign states to avoid being sued in court.

But the law contains exceptions. The appeals court cited one of those, ruling the lawsuit has sufficiently alleged that Ronan was an employee of the Vatican acting within the scope of his employment under Oregon law.

by Amanda Marcotte

One of the biggest struggles in educating people about the realities of domestic violence is the question, “Why does she stay?” There’s a million ways this question is asked, but sadly most of them implicitly blame the victim and imply that the only reason someone would stay is that she’s stupid.  Women claim that they’d leave after the first punch, men assure us they’d run interference if they knew that a man they know is abusing his partner.  Many of these people are dead wrong, unfortunately.  Feminists try to make it understandable. We explain that abusers often do a great job at portraying remorse, which, coupled with a systemic stripping down of the victim’s self-esteem, can be an extremely effective tactic at getting forgiveness.  A woman who has started to believe no one could love her---which abusers usually tell you---is often sadly grateful when the abuser whips out the flowers, tears, and pleas after a beating.  Remember, the time leading up to the beating is often a time of escalating tension, which means that her self-esteem is lowered more than usual by a combination of reminders that no one else will love her and having that reinforced by the abuser making a show out of how he can barely bring himself to be kind to her pitiful self.  Pulling away from affection, sharp comments, that sort of thing.  Then, beating.  Then tearful apology and elaborate show of love.  Most people aren’t rocks, and this kind of manipulation is startlingly effective, even on victims with a lot of intelligence.

Feminists will often also point out external factors---the abuser separates the victim from her support system.  Abusers are often highly charming people and may themselves have a lot of friends, so the victim will start to live in a world where everyone she encounters is through her abuser, and will side with him should she try to leave.  Some feminists try to emphasize the financial dependence issues, but while that’s important to point out as a tactic, it’s also important to realize this doesn’t mean victims that are ensnared by purely emotional methods are less deserving of our sympathy.  I think one can often grasp how it works intellectually, but still hit a wall emotionally in understanding how shameless abusers can be about emotional pandering to get their way.  Which is why Chris Brown may have done us all a favor with this performance:

When I first read about it, I actually thought his emotional manipulation of his audience would be more sophisticated---never bet against an abuser in terms of really thinking through his performance for getting everyone to flock to his side and turn against his victim.  And by “everyone”, I also mean the victim herself, who is often subject to the most elaborate display of “but I’m such a great guy and you’re so worthless, so clearly this is your fault and really you should be the one begging forgiveness”.  But this was pretty overt and corny.  No matter---one thing abusers usually have on their side is the cult of masculinity.  We’re all conditioned to think that men don’t cry, so when one does, we snap to and assume it must be really serious.  You know, unlike those manipulative woman tears.  You know women---they just want attention. 

Truth is, Brown’s display worked as intended. A whole lot of people are feeling bad for him now.  I even overheard a couple of 20-somethings debating this out in public today. The dude was skeptical of this display, but the woman ate it up.  She felt sorry for him!  He’d suffered enough! 

So I have to point out that if an abuser’s arsenal of tactics works so well on a bunch of strangers who don’t know anything about him but a few public images and some pop songs, imagine the impact these tactics have on victims and the people around the couple that have to be manipulated so they side with the abuser over his victim.  If you ever wonder why women don’t leave, just think about how shamelessly Chris Brown cried at the BET Awards, and you have a pretty good idea how this works.

It’s worth pointing out that Chris Brown has faced a lot more crap for domestic abuse than most famous abusers do, which shouldn’t make you feel sorry for him so much as outraged that this kind of incident doesn’t usually create this kind of public display of outrage.  There’s a lot of reasons for this, but one of the big ones is that Brown doesn’t have the strategies down as well as some---he went for the face when beating Rihanna.  Practiced abusers often realize that visible marks just bring more trouble for them.