Violence against women is unacceptable

With more than 330,000 New Mexicans living in poverty (that’s some 17 percent of our population), more than 35 million Americans needing food stamps to survive, costly health care crippling family budgets and plunging people into debt, and hard times turning the nation’s politics into a bare knuckle brawl, deep seated pathologies of our culture have been released into society more virulently than ever.

New Mexico, for instance, finds itself ranked 7th in the country for the number of women killed by men. In 2007, 22 women were killed by men, over half of them either wives or girlfriends of their murderers. One anti-domestic violence Web site, divorcesupoort.com, reports that over a third of such murders of women nationally were at the hands of an “intimate partner.” Strikingly, only 4 percent of male murder victims were killed by an intimate female partner.

Misogyny, rape, domestic violence, racism, homophobia, hate crimes and hate speech are cultural sicknesses that plague our society and many others around the world. They are always with us like some terrible repeating infection. The stress of hard times tends to make them worse. There’s no absolute cure for them. Law and custom, though, can keep them at bay.

I was shocked to find that Minnesota Senator Al Franken’s recent effort to strengthen anti-rape laws, although successful, was opposed by 30 senators purporting to defend labor laws and protect business. The deep moral customs of respectful speech, decorum, politeness, general decency of behavior and a humane concern for the well-being of others have been overwhelmed in the last decades by savage talk radio, public political vileness and an explosion of hate speech that aid in creating an acceptance of verbal assault and potential physical violence that’s dangerous to us all.

Franken’s amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriation bill would make it illegal for subcontractors to require female employees to sign a contract requiring them to forgo their right to due process in open court in cases of rape and sexual harassment, instead submitting to a process of private arbitration. The amendment passed 68-30 with bipartisan support.

Franken’s amendment does not preclude arbitration if the employee wants it, but restores a woman’s right to an impartial trial in a court of law.

The amendment arose in response to a 2005 gang rape of Jamie Leigh Jones by fellow employees working for a Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, in Baghdad. After the barbarity of the rape, she says, she was held without food or water for 24 hours in a shipping container, and threatened with the loss of her job if she talked publicly about what happened.

Acts like this have always been the darkest of brutal secrets in American life and in most of the cultures of the world. The misogyny began to gain ground again in this country with the so-called defeat of the latest version of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982. The ERA reads “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

The KBR contract that Jamie Leigh Jones had to sign, which took away her constitutional rights to due process, would never have been possible if the ERA had been ratified.

The recent ongoing nadir in misogyny started symbolically, at least, in the early years of the Clinton Administration when Rush Limbaugh made an unthinkably wretched, hateful remark on his now defunct 1993 TV show about the President’s teenage daughter.

To quote the late Molly Ivins, “On his TV show…Limbaugh put up a picture of Socks, the White House cat, and asked ‘Did you know there’s a White House dog?’ Then he put up a picture of Chelsea Clinton, who was 13 years old at the time and as far as I know had never harmed anyone.” Five years later, John McCain went even deeper into the sewer at a Republican Senate fund raising function asking “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.”

Those early public breaks with decency and decorum played right into the woman-hating wing of American politics. It took a decade and a half for things to get so abysmal that an entire political party, the Democrats, would be slandered by being called Nazis and Maoists.

Rough and tumble speech in American politics is protected by the First Amendment. Even hate speech is, unless it is judged to have been the immediate cause of violence. And that’s as it should be. How else are we to know what people are really thinking and what atrocities of rage they are harboring?

Hate crimes are another matter. Most states and the federal government see the motivation of hate as an aggravating circumstance in an act of aggression which triggers a harsher sentence.

Rape is always a hate crime. And hate crimes arise from the predispositions of a person’s character in the context of his culture. American misogyny, flaunted even by a few national “leaders,” is at the root of the rape and most murders of women. The only way to lessen the power of misogyny is to begin to heal our cultural pathology about women.