Eideard

This post is a year old. Republicans haven’t gotten better. Their goals have retreated further into darkness and hatred.

Here is a list of misogynist bills introduced by Republicans in the past two weeks showing what they want for women.

1) Rape: Republicans are actually trying to redefine rape to exclude drugging a women and raping her, or getting her drunk and raping her. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they haven’t the language is still out there.

2) More Rape. A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to “accuser.” But victims of other crimes, like robbery, would remain “victims.” Apparently in Georgia if a women is raped, she isn’t really – is just an annoying accuser. Which means the rapist is not really a criminal.

3) Murder. In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that could make it legal to murder anyone who injures or threatens a fetus, including a doctor who provides abortion care and the mother. He denies it has anything to do with abortion so I guess it is aimed at makingit OK for a husband or boyfriend to kill his partner if he thinks she might injure the fetus- like in a car accident, or he just doesn’t like her anymore.

4) Starvation. Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids. But payments to corporations to not grow food to keep prices up is still in the budget.

5) Death. In Congress, Republicans have proposed a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life (so she and fetus die.)

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Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The University of Vermont’s Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity is under investigation after a survey surfaced online asking fraternity brothers whom they would rape.

The national Sigma Phi Epsilon organization said in a statement that “the fraternity has instructed the chapter to cease all operations, pending further investigation.” It added that “any behavior that demeans women is not tolerated by the fraternity.”

Leadership from the fraternity’s national office was in Burlington on Wednesday, working with university administrators to look into the survey, which was discovered this week, CNN affiliate WCAX reported.

“We want to make sure that any individuals that were responsible for that document or any other faults are held accountable,” Tyler Boggess of Sigma Phi Epsilon told the affiliate.

“It is technically free speech, and yet it is deplorable and just absolutely inappropriate and offensive,” Annie Stevens, associate vice president for student and campus life, told the affiliate.

Dumb, thoughtless, misogynist, dumb, out of touch with the real world and – in case I forgot it – dumb!

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A jury has been chosen Monday for the trial of a man charged with raping a 15-year-old fellow church member who was forced to stand before the congregation and apologize for getting pregnant.

A hearing on legal issues in the case of 52-year-old Ernest Willis of Gilford was set for Tuesday in Merrimack Superior Court in Concord. Opening statements in his trial were scheduled for May 23.

Willis is charged with forcibly raping Christina Anderson twice during the summer of 1997, when she was his children’s baby sitter and he was 39.

The Associated Press generally does not identify people who say they were victims of sex crimes, but Anderson, now 29, asked that her name be made public…

Once Anderson realized she was pregnant, she said her mother took her to their then pastor, Chuck Phelps of Concord’s Trinity Baptist Church, for counseling. Phelps arranged for her to move to Colorado to live with a Baptist family there and place her baby up for adoption. He said he did so at the request of her mother, Christine Leaf. Leaf has declined to comment on whether she sought or consented to her daughter’s relocation.

Concord police officials say they tried to investigate the case but were stymied because they could not locate Anderson. The case remained unsolved until 2010, when online posts and friends of Anderson led police to her in Arizona…

Phelps is also on the prosecution’s list of witnesses. Anderson told police that Phelps forced her to write a letter of apology she had to read to the fundamentalist congregation.

RTFA. These good Christian folks appear to have treated this young lass like a chattel slave. Not the first time for this kind of advocacy, denial of equal rights for women and girls in an American fundamentalist church. Probably, not the last, either.

Thanks, Mr Fusion

Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed an appeal by gang rape victim Mukhtar Mai against the acquittal of five men she accused of attacking her…

Mai, now 40, was gang raped in June 2002 on the orders of a village council in Meerwala town of Punjab province as punishment after her younger brother was wrongly accused of having illicit relations with a woman from a rival clan.

The boy was 12-years-old at the time.

A local anti-terrorism court (ATC) had sentenced the six accused men to death, but the Lahore High Court acquitted five of the men in March 2005, and commuted the sentence for the main accused, Abdul Khaliq, to life imprisonment.

A four-judge bench of the Supreme Court on Thursday “dismissed” all appeals and ordered the release of those arrested, according to a copy of the court order received by AFP. It however upheld the life sentence for Khaliq…

Mai, whose case garnered much attention in the West as an example of oppression suffered by Pakistan’s women, expressed her disappointment over the Supreme Court verdict while human rights groups also voiced discontent…

Mai, who now helps protect women facing threats at the hands of influential men, said she would not file any appeal against Thursday’s judgement…

“This is a setback for Mukhtar Mai,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement urging the government to “ensure her safety.”

Pakistan’s government refuses to ensure honesty. Why should you expect safety?

Almost a thousand women were raped in Pakistan during 2010 while more than 2,000 were abducted and almost 1,500 murdered, according to the Aurat Foundation, an organisation working for the protection of women in the country.

A further 500 were the victims of “honour killings”, a custom under which relatives and other fellow tribesmen kill a woman if they believe she had an affair.

There are many nations devoting every opportunity afforded to bring the lives of their families, their neighbors, their nation to a healthier, better life. I’d be hard pressed to qualify Pakistan as one of those progressive nations.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Former Israeli president Moshe Katsav has been sentenced to seven years in prison for rape and other sexual offences following a year-long trial which ended with his conviction in December.

Katsav, president from 2000 to 2007, said he was innocent and was being persecuted by the courts and Israeli society at large. He is expected to appeal.

Katsav was convicted of two counts of rape of an employee at the tourism ministry, where he was minister from 1996-1999. He was also convicted of the indecent assault and sexual harassment of two other employees at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem during his presidency.

The president was given the chance of a plea bargain in which he could admit lesser charges but chose to fight all charges in a trial which, although conducted in private, was accompanied by leaks from both sides in the media.

The judges told the court: “The crime of rape damages and destroys a person’s soul … Due to the severity of the crime, the punishment must be clear and precise. The defendant committed the crime and like every other person, he must bear the consequences. No man is above the law…”

The former president was also ordered to pay 100,000 shekels ($28,000) to the rape victim and 25,000 shekels to each of the other victims.

He isn’t the first president – nor will he be the last – to end up in prison. There is an endless supply of politicians seeking the highest office in their land – who think they are above the law.

In a path-breaking judgement, the Supreme Court today allowed “passive euthanasia” of withdrawing life support to patients in permanently vegetative state but rejected outright active euthanasia of ending life through administration of lethal substances.

Refusing mercy killing of Aruna Shanbaug, lying in a vegetative state for 37 years in a Mumbai hospital, a two-judge bench of justices Markandeya Katju and Gyan Sudha Mishra, laid a set of tough guidelines under which passive euthanasia can be legalised through high court monitored mechanism.

The apex court while framing the guidelines for passive euthanasia asserted that it would now become the law of the land until Parliament enacts a suitable legislation to deal with the issue…

The apex court said though there is no statutory provision for withdrawing life support system from a person in permanently vegetative state, it was of the view that “passive euthanasia” could be permissible in certain cases for which it laid down guidelines and cast the responsibility on high courts to take decisions on pleas for mercy killings.

Overdue. Not only in India, of course; but, most civilized nations should have reached palliative conclusions on such questions by now. Only interference from those whose devotion to religion outweighs consideration for human beings generally oppose humane alternatives to a lingering death.

One more instance of why you should take care of establishing a living will before the choice is removed from you or your loved ones.

Eight years after the American-clergy sex-abuse controversy erupted, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams yesterday lobbed a bombshell into the still-simmering scandal.

Williams announced the grand-jury indictment of one of former Archbishop Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua’s top aides for allegedly endangering children by shielding pedophile priests from detection and shuffling them into unsuspecting parishes where they could continue the perversions of which they are accused.

It’s believed to be the first time a high-ranking Catholic official has been accused of being criminally accountable for covering up priest abuse.

Monsignor William Lynn, 60, was charged with two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. As Bevilacqua’s secretary for clergy, he was the Archdiocese’s personnel director and responsible for investigating reports of priest sexual abuse from 1992 until 2004.

Grand jurors had aimed even higher, saying that Bevilacqua may have been involved in the coverup.

“We do know that over the years Cardinal Bevilacqua was kept closely advised of Monsignor Lynn’s activities, and personally authorized many of them . . . [but] we cannot conclude that a successful prosecution can be brought against the Cardinal – at least for the moment,” they wrote in their 124-page report…

Lynn, now parish priest at St. Joseph’s, in Downingtown, faces up to 14 years in prison if convicted…

Advocates for abuse victims celebrated the indictments.

RTFA for the history of abuse, priests sharing victims, passing them around through the ranks – and the inevitable coverup.

The worst any of these thugs suffered was being defrocked. A delightful medieval term that matches the out-of-date mindset of the church leaders who feel they and their acolytes are above secular law.

He also says gold is the only legal tender

A Georgia state lawmaker with a history of operating on the political fringe has filed a bill stripping the term “victim” from rape, stalking and domestic violence cases…It would eliminate the word “victim” from statutes dealing with stalking, rape, obscene telephone contact with a child and family violence…

The proposed change angered some who felt that Bobby Franklin meant the legislation as an attack on rape victims and on women, who comprise the overwhelming majority of victims of sexual assault…

Carolyn Fiddler, the communications director for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, wrote on the organization’s website that the legislation diminishes rape victims by questioning whether what happened to them is even a crime.

“Burglary victims are still victims. Assault victims are still victims. Fraud victims are still victims,” she wrote. “But if you have the misfortune to suffer a rape, or if you are beaten by a domestic partner, or if you are stalked, Rep. Franklin doesn’t think you have been victimized…”

This is the second controversy this month over Republican legislation mentioning rape. Last week, U.S. House Republicans changed the language in a bill limiting taxpayer funding for abortions after Democrats and others argued it narrowed a longstanding allowance for government funding of abortion in the case of rape by using the term “forcible rape.”

Critics said that the language would exclude abortion funding for the rape of unconscious or mentally incapacitated women, for instance.

Franklin, who also has filed legislation that would outlaw abortion in Georgia…recently attracted attention for filing legislation that would eliminate the need for Georgia residents to get driver’s licenses, saying the government cannot abridge an individual’s right to travel.

He has also filed a bill that would abolish all zoning laws in the state.

Unlike most of his KoolAid Party contemporaries who would take American law and justice back to the 19th Century – and the Confederacy, Franklin apparently is aiming for the 18th Century or earlier.

No doubt he’d love the Inquisition.

Hanging out with too many guys in long black dresses

A top cleric in the Russian Orthodox Church is under fire for saying that women who wear miniskirts and get drunk should not be surprised if they get raped.

Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the head of the Orthodox Church’s department for relations between the church and society, complained that Russian women dressed like strippers and suggested a nationwide dress code should be introduced to ensure both sexes dress more conservatively.

“If she (a woman) is wearing a miniskirt, it is provocative,” he said. “If she is drunk at the same time then she is even more provocative, and if she herself is actively seeking contact with people and is then surprised when that contact ends in rape she is wrong…”

Human rights activist Ludmila Alexeyeva said: “It’s all nonsense. Let people dress how they like. Next they’ll be telling women not to wear lipstick…”

Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the cleric who likened women to strippers, appeared to be in no mood to apologise however. He said he was glad he had started a public debate, denied he was justifying rape, and said a nationwide dress code was needed.

He also criticised men for wearing shorts, trainers and T-shirts.

The dude has serious problems with recognizing the outline or form of the human body. Methinks he’s transferring his own anxieties and hangups to everyone else.

Demonstrators supporting the women Katsav assaulted
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Israel’s former president Moshe Katsav has been found guilty of rape and sexual harassment following a year-long trial, largely held behind closed doors to respect the privacy of the three complainants, all former subordinates.

Political leaders and analysts praised the ruling, saying it showed that the law applied to everyone, including the president. But many expressed shame and embarrassment that a former head of state had been found guilty of such serious offences…

The sexual offences took place during Katsav’s terms as president and as minister of tourism. Complainant A accused him of raping her on two occasions, while complainants H and L accused him of sexual harassment. The verdict confirmed all the three accusations. Katsav was acquitted only of charges that he had harassed a witness…

The rightwing former president has portrayed himself as a victim of ethnic discrimination. Israeli political life has long been dominated by Jews of European origin, while Katsav and many of his supporters are of Middle Eastern origin.

Katsav became the eighth president of Israel in 2000 and was forced to resign in disgrace in July 2007, after the accusations emerged in 2006…

Outside court, women’s rights groups cheered…

The White House, Congress and the State Department ignored the event – as they do with anything negative about the government of Israel.