REVISITING VICTIM RIGHTS 4

As promised, I am going to continue looking at Lynne M. Henderson’s 1999 Victim-Rights (V-R) article, which follows up on the 1985 article which I looked at two Posts ago. Instructions for accessing the text of the article are in Note* below.

This is my last Post on Henderson’s 1999 article and I am focusing on the section in which she more specifically discusses Victim-Rights (V-R) dynamics in regard to Domestic Violence and SO law.

Her concern throughout the article has been the then-proposed (that subsequently failed to pass) Constitutional Amendment for V-R: especially its insistence that victims of crime (however defined) be granted certain Constitutional rights specifically attaching to the status of being the victim of a crime (however defined).

“Surely”, she says (p.68), “if victim’s rights are to be corrective to defendant’s rights, victims should be entitled to counsel to represent them in court”.

And (p.68) that can’t be the prosecutor, because the prosecutor’s responsibilities and agenda may not coincide wholly or even largely with the victim’s. (This flows from the problem that while a civil tort action is designed precisely to adjudge the ‘harm’ caused to the complainant-plaintiff-‘victim’, the criminal trial process is designed to adjudge matters of the State’s interest in conducting formal punishment for illegal acts and crimes.)

As there is a vital asymmetry created when you attempt to insinuate or inject V-R concerns into the criminal trial process, so there are significant potential conflicts of interest created among the relevant participants, i.e. the victim(s) and the prosecution.

Prosecutors (p.68) must i) represent the community’s and the State’s interests and ii) as Officers of the Court must ensure that Justice is done and Truth is served. Adding a third responsibility, meeting the needs of the Victim and carrying out an agenda acceptable to the Victim’s desires and feelings and ‘needs’, is doubly ill-advised.

First, it loads another task onto an already burdened Prosecution.

And second, it loads a task that may at rather vital points create demands that conflict with Prosecutorial responsibilities (i) and (ii) above.

For one thing, it is well within the realm of possibility and a prosecutor’s discretion and responsibility to Truth and Justice that an accused not be charged – which, of course, does happen and quickly enrages the V-R advocacies, fueling demands that legislation be passed to force prosecutors to charge and try anybody whom any self-declared victim accuses. The V-R presumption, blended with the radical-feminist presumptions, implies that one is innocent until accused – so they can’t quite see what all the ‘complication’ and ‘delay’ is, unless it is motivated by ‘insensitivity’. And, of course, a strong thread of radical-feminist thought holds that all (heterosexual) sex is crime and all males are guilty even if not yet accused.

I would add that since ‘truth’ and the search for ‘facts’ is not really high on the advocacy list (the only real Truth is that of the Victim’s feelings and ‘facts’ simply confuse that matter and delay the vengeance) then the Prosecution is put in an awful fix.

Now it was precisely the law-and-order Right that got this V-R thing going in the early 1980s to begin with, but what you are starting to see here in the late 1990s is the Victim bunch – perhaps emboldened and advised by the already revolutionary radical-feminist advocacies – starting to actually take on a life of their own, beyond the ‘front’ and ‘puppet’ status for which the Victim was originally embraced by the Right in the 1980s.

Henderson (p.69) mentions certain very real tactical concerns that would not occur to a lay reader: for reasons of a successful prosecution, a prosecutor may not want a complainant to reveal all the facts and ‘tell her story’, simply in order to avoid “opening up possible avenues of defense” by providing the defense with what is known professionally as “free discovery”.

This conflicts with the emotions and agenda of victims who are seeking to ‘tell their story’ and have been led to believe (by advocacy spin) that that is pretty much what courts are all about (and in the case of ‘victim-friendly’ courts, that may well be too disturbingly true).

I add that if complainants have either been prepped by advocates or have simply read or watched too many media stories and ‘reports’, they may come to the prosecutor already assuming that V-R visions are official legal praxis: finding out that such is not the case, they may well immediately feel betrayed, and it is those (mistaken) feelings of ‘betrayal by the system’ that simply create even more juicy if whackulent ‘news’, which is then battened upon by advocates for even more ‘coverage’ to generate even more ‘pressure’ for their demands.  Again, the self-licking ice-cream cone dynamic.

Henderson then observes (p.69) that “advocates of the [V-R] amendment often point to feminist law reforms as examples of the need to have victim’s rights”.

But Henderson quickly observes that many feminist law reforms have (in 1999) already been passed without any need for a V-R amendment at all.

She continues (p.69) that “until the needs of rape and battering victims were brought to public attention, violence against women was ignored by the public and prosecutors”.

I would add here that I think Henderson is far too generous referring to all the changes as simply and purely “reforms”; I think it is clear that to a far larger and deeper degree than is acknowledged they were derangements, and lethal ones, and insidiously injected into the American legal and cultural Universe.

She continues (p.69): “Yet massive law reforms, accomplished by feminists in alliance with crime control conservatives, have in no way been dependent on whether victims have [V-R type] rights”.

She has noticed the alliance between Left and Right even back in 1999.

And again, I am going to say that many of those ‘reforms’, and many of the consequences of those ‘reforms’, have been precisely hostile to the primary responsibilities of the criminal-justice system.

 And she continues (p.70) that “rape survivors and prosecutors may frequently be at odds with one another about whether to prosecute”.

I point out again that “survivor” – a term once used only in regard to people who walked away from a plane crash – gained massive (and legitimate) credence in this country in the late 1960s as a term referring to those who escaped alive from the Holocaust. It was quickly taken over by feminist and victimist advocacies both to describe the recipients of this or that targeted experience and also as a sly framing of the targeted experience itself: thus, for example, a woman is (an innocent and helpless) ‘survivor’ of rape because rape (or all heterosexual activity) is a Holocaust and men are the Nazis who create and sustain it. Neat.

But toooooo neat.

And as the ‘trauma-recovery’ business has expanded, there are now untold numbers who derive some satisfaction from describing themselves as “survivors” (of this or that) while the term also automatically does the heavy (and dirty) lifting of shrieking that the ‘perps’ (so often males) are the Nazis bent upon wiping them off the face of the earth (who, being Nazis for all practical purposes, deserve to be eradicated forthwith and who, being Nazis, have no rights that the government need recognize or honor).

You can’t seriously conduct the grave and vital business of a great commonwealth and Republic while governed by such melodramatic and manipulative scripts. It is wrecking the legislative and judicial and law-enforcement systems, deforming the very political dynamics that are the life-energy of the Republic, and – as it has migrated into foreign policy – has led to massive military misadventures.

Henderson also observes (p.70, Note 135) that there is a distinction to be made between “rape by strangers – real rape – and rape by acquaintances”. This distinction is precisely what the date-rape advocates have been trying to eliminate, yet it is precisely the boundary between the relatively solid-ground  legally-workable territory of adjudicating a crime perpetrated by a stranger upon a thoroughly uninvolved victim and – on the far side of the boundary – the swampy jungles of he said-she said, where for centuries any sober and serious and responsible agent of law would be hesitant to tread with the dread Sovereign power, for fear of misapplying it and further engorging Leviathan while simultaneously undermining the credibility of its legitimacy.

So, she determines (p.71), you can’t take V-R and “simply graft it onto” prosecutorial responsibilities. Nor can you take V-R and simply inject it into the criminal-trial system.

But that is precisely what the radical-feminist and victimist agenda has been working to accomplish. (See Note ** below.) And the SO Mania Regime is a Frankensteinian product of those efforts.

Henderson also shares that she prefers the term ‘relationship violence’ to ‘domestic violence’ since nowadays so many of the cases involve incidents that take place outside of marriage.

Henderson notes (p.71) a then-recent article that demanded the mandatory prosecution of batterers. (I note that the legal qualification for being a “batterer” now can include simply maintaining silence in a phone conversation, even a long-distance one. When speaking of “battering” now, one must include those quotation marks I use here not to ‘scare’ readers but simply to remind them – like yellow flashing barriers around road hazards – that the term is not necessarily what it would appear to be on first glance; the actual legal working definition has expanded far beyond any dictionary’s power to describe. So too, of course, in so many SO terms, from ‘abuse’ and ‘molesting’ all the way up to ‘rape’.)

But the author (herself a female former prosecutor) of that article is pushing for mandatory prosecution because in her own experience so many victims of ‘battering’ do not want to prosecute (and not simply because they are ‘afraid’).

This reveals, I would say, a deep abyss that is obstructing the feminist-victimist agenda: too many of the alleged (and apparently the actual, too) victims do not want to prosecute, yet it is in the advocacy’s agenda to ensure as many prosecutions (and guilty verdicts) as possible in order to achieve their purpose of ‘changing society’; a purpose for which they seek to dragoon the criminal justice and judicial systems, come hell or high water.

This abyss was potentially there in the 1980s, but at that time the Right saw – accurately – no equally organized political pressure groups on the Left who might develop an agenda of their own and actually pull the entire legal (and legislative) system into territory that not even the law-and-order Right dared to envision.

And, indeed, it would have to be said that in light of subsequent developments, up to and including the SO Mania Regime, no genuine and conscientious law-and-order advocate would dare to create such a profoundly deranging pressure on law-and-order as have the Domestic Violence and SO Mania Regimes.

But, I would also have to add: what conscientious and Constitutionally-grounded law-and-order advocate would have really plumped for the Victim-vs-Accused gambit in the first place? After all, the most essential thrust of this whole gambit has been to derange the Framing Vision’s and Constitution’s guarantees to any accused Citizen. This whole thing was profoundly anti-Constitutional from the get-go 30 years ago.

The Correct justifications for mandatory prosecution, rehearsed by the article’s author (p.72), are that the female-victim must think of financial considerations since she is dependent on the accused male for economic independence; and because – perhaps being a more sensitive creature than the lumpish and brutish male – she would not want to “feel responsible” for his punishment; and she may be “subject to the controlling behavior” of the accused and even the subject of “threats” from him (however defined or interpreted); or she might fear his retaliation.

But if this is all true – and how on earth to determine it in many cases? – then the accused will be subjected to a court process already greatly deformed against the rights of the accused. And that doesn’t include a secondary deformation: judges who have been appointed (perhaps to a ‘special’ court) precisely because they are committed ‘revolutionaries’ (my term) who come to each case committed thoroughly to the presumption that all males are presumable perps in matters of sex and violence.

This is no way to conduct fair and impartial justice. This is also no way for a government to assault one-half of its Citizenry with its Sovereign authority. And it cannot end well.

Henderson also observes (p.73) – and sensibly enough – that at the heart of these cases is a relationship of actual love and care that governs the attitudes and actions of both complainant and accused.

She quickly points out the Correct comeback to this possibility: that the victim is herself deluded by “false consciousness”, i.e. that she ‘just doesn’t get it’ because she is not completely governed by the advocacy presumptions about the inherent violence of all men and most sex.

So you wind up with the advocacy itself turning upon the purported victim. Funny how the Mania night moves.

Henderson also notes (p.73, Note 144) the advocacy claims that women are more ‘relational’ and thus “fear abandonment and isolation”. But if this is true – and we are now veering close to making rather general judgment statements about all women, as the advocacy thinking itself is doing here – then a profound question is exposed, which is relevant to both Domestic Violence and SO matters: if women generally are possessed of such characteristics, rendering them greatly liable to initiating relational and even sexual encounters, then from the get-go, decades ago, legislators should have been hugely careful in trying to figure how – and to what extent – government authority, especially the Sovereign police power, could be deployed in regard to such matters.

Because clearly the Framework and the Framing Vision of the Constitution presumed the maturity and general life-competence of each Citizen (and thereby focused on preserving the independence of those Citizens from the arbitrary and excessive intrusions created by deploying the Sovereign police power against them).

And ‘rape’ and wife-beating have been crimes in Western civilization for as far back as the records go.

The argument that the former prosecutor’s article puts forth (p.74) is that “aggressive prosecution” would serve as a ‘signal’ (would ‘send a message’, you might say) that the ‘offense’ is ‘serious’ and this would lead to “deterrence and proper punishment”.

But the first and foremost Framing concern (and this should also constitute a compelling State interest) is not to be sending messages in the service of this or that advocacy agenda, but rather primarily to ensure the careful deployment of the Sovereign police power so that Leviathan doesn’t consume the lives of its own Citizens.

To declare that “quaint” or to insist that the Framers ‘just didn’t get it’ is a profoundly dangerous gambit, since it opens the door – a watertight protective door, I would add – to all sorts of pressure groups and agendas getting control of the Sovereign police power for their own purposes. (And in that regard I envision the government nowadays as looking very much like the government of Chicago in the 1920s, where the pressure brought by the organized mobsters dragooned or bought the entire apparatus – legislative, executive, and judicial – of the City and County so that all would function in the service of the mobsters’ interests.)

The former prosecutor then makes the assertion (p.74) that “failure to prosecute leads the State back to being a silent partner in condoning” all of the relational and sexual violence. 

That assertion doesn’t work, I would say.  

The key reality is that the State can only do so much before it deforms itself and betrays its Framing role and mandate, thereby deranging the entire Constitutionally-envisioned machinery and dynamics that allow the Republic to operate.

But it gets worse (p.74). “Allowing battered women [however defined] to refuse to participate in prosecutions undermines the State’s important interests in prosecuting violent criminals, preventing revictimization of women and any children involved, and ending the cycle of violence that may occur in these relationships”.

So as you see, the advocacies here wants to refuse a batter-ee (however defined, and the thresh-hold has become remarkably low) her choice not to be involved.

This dragoons batter-ees into the advocacy Scheme, whether they want to participate or not. Some liberation.

The element of coercion in so much of advocacy Theory becomes clear here. And of course the Sovereign police power will be the agent of that coercion (against both complainants and accused).

Indeed, this author will (p.75) assert that prosecutors should force (mostly female) battering victims to participate in the prosecution, even if it means jailing them if they refuse to do so.

The claim is that the State has an “interest” in requiring participation in order to prevent the battering (however defined). There is most surely a sound logic to this position. Although this logic quickly leads to the State having an “interest” in prosecuting just about any evil or unhappiness that may arise in relationship and sexual-relationship issues. Which rather profoundly undermines the Framing Vision’s determination to boundary the scope and intensity of the government’s intrusion – especially with its police power – into the lives of Citizens.

And taken in the context of the widespread and deep deconstruction of any cultural Shape to relationships – in the service of ‘total freedom and autonomy’ for women to do whatever they like in initiating or entering into relationships of any kind – you can imagine that the horizon for such a dynamic becomes almost infinite, with no boundaries to it at all.

Against which – as I have been saying – one must ideally balance the compelling State interest in adhering to the Framing Vision or otherwise risk profoundly deranging the whole Vision (leading to some type of America that is hell-and-gone from any faithfulness to the legitimacy of the Framing Vision). But this is the type of common-sense and deeply vital consideration and analysis that the radical-feminist and victimist advocacies in this country have always sought to short-circuit, stampeding the public into simply recoiling in horror and outrage at the (relatively rare) actual horrific incidences of genuine battering.

And by opening the most intimate relationships to criminal law, there is thus absolutely no realm of Citizens’ lives that is immune to the intrusion of the State and the Sovereign police power.

So there is a vital calculus and balancing here, and one that must be governed by a) the Framing Vision and b) a wide public deliberative political consideration of the core Question: how far should the government be allowed to go in rectifying (or preventing) crime and the evils of human life before some vital balance and dynamic is hopelessly deranged?

Ideally, Citizens would be presumed to be mature and responsible in their life-choices, though the criminal law would always be available for dealing with individual cases.

But this is not what ‘revolutionary’ praxis seeks, and thus the almost literal ‘construction’ of this or that Mania is required to generate the unthinking public emotion that will lubricate the slide into some Alien Universe.

“Police will not investigate carefully or take relationship violence seriously if prosecutors will not pursue these cases” (p.74). But in the context of the necessary Mania, such ‘investigation’ becomes skewed from the get-go against the accused, and such ‘trials’ become heavily weighted against the accused, even to the extent of deranging vital Constitutional protections for any accused Citizen.

And thus such trials also come perilously close to Stalinist ‘show-trials’, where the purpose is not to discover Truth and adjudge the guilt or innocence of the accused in the particular case. Rather, the trial is designed to ‘show’ all the Citizens the power of the State, and that they will not be able to ‘hide’ from the State behind any ‘abstract’ rights. This is a recipe for Constitutional disaster and for a slide into some Alien type of America.

For all Branches of the government to collude in this and enable it … this is one of the most vividly lethal developments of the Age of Advocacy. And the Domestic Violence and SO Mania Regimes are the result and the clear example of this.

Further, as Henderson quotes (p.75) this former female prosecutor, the purpose of all this is not to put the Victim at the center of events (which is a departure from most Victimist thinking) but rather “to punish the batterer [however defined] in order to protect potential victims via deterrence and incapacitation”.   

So whatever Constitutional rights the accused might have, whatever prosecutorial discretion the State might have, whatever deformity such an agenda might produce and whatever consequences might flow from such deformity, the Constitutional rights of the accused and the Framing Vision itself … must run a distant second to the demands of the advocacies’ agenda.

This is the result of pressure-politics and ‘deal politics’. (I will have something more substantial to say about this in the Addendum to this Post; see below.)

Henderson makes the professional observation (p.76) that “overidentification with victims can result in a loss of perspective and judgment” on the part of prosecutors (and judges and juries, I would add).

But it is precisely “perspective” that the radical feminist and victimist gameplan seeks to prevent. To ask if the ‘cure’ is more dangerous than the illness is to somehow demonstrate that you ‘support’ the violence and the ‘criminal’. This is a vital element in stirring up a Mania: you foreclose the opportunities for Citizens to exercise their deliberative and analytic capabilities, and instead substitute a manipulative whipping-up of ‘public opinion’ to lubricate whatever demands your agenda makes.

Henderson quickly balances that by noting (p.76) that prosecutorial and judicial “biases against victims can lead to unequal representation of their interests”. And I agree.

But I would say that a) you have to clearly and precisely define (i) their “interests” and (ii) what distinguishes such “unequal representation” from simply exercising legitimate and necessary prosecutorial, judicial and police discretion in conducting criminal process.

And surely some legitimate ‘consciousness-raising’ or training sessions in dealing properly with claimant-victims is apropos. But that excludes the type of cadre-brainwashing that is far too prevalent nowadays and has been for some time, whereby personnel are simply forced to accept all of the Theory and demands of the Agenda and are told that they must operate on those assumptions totally and in all cases, regardless of any reservations about a particular case or – the horror! – any Larger concerns about the Constitutional and Framing Vision’s integrity and the subsequent integrity and legitimacy of the criminal justice system as it conforms itself to the Demands of the Agenda (and of the Mania).

It’s perfectly legitimate for advocacies to conduct such dogmatic ‘consciousness-raising’ among themselves, but to then seek – with the collusion and collaboration of the Branches – to impose it on the criminal-justice system’s personnel and through media-assisted manipulation on potential jurors … this is not legitimate, at least not in the American Universe. And it cannot and will not end well for the Republic.

Henderson, again speaking from a professional experience, says (p.77) that “Even well-trained prosecutors can do more harm than good if they become overidentified with the victim … The rescuer impulse can lead to a sacrifice of critical judgment and loss of perspective, and therefore such sympathy is not necessarily good for the victim … To see oneself as a champion of victims is dangerously self-righteous and can lead to promises that cannot be fulfilled … By taking over for the victim prosecutors can console themselves as heroes, but in the process deprive the victim of autonomy and choice”.

That’s a mouthful.

I would add that this is precisely the reason why one must be extremely careful in accepting the creds of prosecutors or attorneys who flaunt a large experience in domestic violence or ‘sex crime’ trials. There is no small chance that that ‘experience’ includes the assumption of the ‘rescuer’ and ‘hero’ and ‘champion of victims’ mindset that necessarily must degrade any professional concern for the Constitutional rights of the accused.

And, of course, such a mindset – so psychologically and emotionally rewarding for the prosecutor or attorney (or judge or jury-member) – would lubricate a blithe and callow (even self-righteous) ignoring of the profound ill-consequences that are the truly portentous down-side of all this.

And I support Henderson fully when she notes (p.78) that one quite possible result of such pressure is to incite a counter dynamic: “an unthinking identification with the perpetrator” (I would say ‘the accused’).

My hope is for a criminal-justice system rooted in the search for Truth and Justice, and not skewed and deeply deranged by some pre-existing dogma in favor of either the complainant or the accused. Anything less will unleash uncontrollably anti-Constitutional dynamics which may create so much damage to the integrity of the system and the Citizenry’s deliberative capacities that, if allowed to go on for long, will create irreversible damage to the integrity and legitimacy of not only the criminal-justice system and its various agents but of the Citizenry’s basic capacities to govern the government.

Henderson then goes on (p.80) to observe that some attorneys have now (1999) specialized in representing alleged crime victims. There is very little reliable information on how they go about this specialization. “Financial rewards, however, appear to be gained in any civil action that exists”.**

Henderson concludes her article with a personal reminiscence section that I won’t discuss in this Post.

But I think it is clear that any analysis of the radical-feminist influenced Victimist Agenda – which is still very very much alive even though the actual V-R Amendment failed – demonstrates the stunning range of complications and vital derangements that are required to impose the Agenda.

And that huge and deep Questions are raised by all such agitation and ‘pressure’: How far can an American government go in deploying its Sovereign police power without essentially becoming an Alien government operating on an Alien Vision that is hell-and-gone from and antithetical to the country’s Constitution and Framing Vision?

And surely the Methods used by now highly-organized and professional advocacy organizations in and of themselves lethally undermine the civic competence of the Citizenry, while in the process also derange (to the point of delegitimizing?) not only judicial process in the civil and criminal forums, but also utterly undermine the legislative responsibility to a deliberative democratic politics in which The People (regardless of whether they ‘just don’t get it’ or not) must be accorded their proper role in the Framing Vision as governors of the government and as having an indispensable authority to weigh in on matters of wide and deep concern to the common-weal.

In that regard I invite your attention to the Addendum below, following the Notes.

NOTES

*To access this article (and it’s free and well worth the look): follow this link; it will take you to an abstract of the article. Then at the top of that abstract page click on the option for One-Click Download; that will take you to several options depending on what part of the country you are in and you can simply click on one of them and the article will come up.

**Probably the most vivid example of this is the attorneys who represent alleged victims and complainants in the seemingly sempiternal sex-abuse claims against the Catholic Church.

In that regard, I note here one very recent listing of the complexities facing an attorney seeking to defend against such charges or – far far more often – lawsuits made in this arena: the alleged abuse took place more than half a century ago; the alleged offender is dead; the accuser never reported the offense to the authorities; the accuser never contacted the alleged offender’s ecclesiastical superiors; the school where this allegedly happened no longer exists; the accuser says he never remembered the alleged abuse until he watched a TV show about molestation in the late ‘00s; the accuser says that the Penn State case has added to his pain; the accuser says he doesn’t trust people; the accuser has been married seven times; the accuser has had by his own count 82 jobs.

I do not say that this list pretty much demolishes the plaintiff’s lawsuit.

Rather I say that the defense attorney’s task – especially in a time of Mania (which is still burning strongly in the arena of lawsuits against the Catholic Church) – is rendered almost ludicrously complex. Which is a situation no attorney for an alleged victim would want to see changed.

ADDENDUM

I am putting this material in the Addendum because it deals with political theory and dynamics which, although they underlie the derangements caused by the Mania Regimes, are not specifically involved with them.

As Henderson herself notes, there is some deep connection between Victimism and radical-feminism.

I am not at all opposed to improvements in the status of women in American society.

But I am deeply concerned not primarily for the Content of some of the demands of that political agenda, but first and foremost for the Method by which those demands and that Agenda have been introduced into American culture, society, and all aspects of government.

It is the Method even more than the Content that has, I believe, profoundly damaged the health and vitality of the Framing Vision and the Constitution that was meant to embody that Vision.

This is, I believe, the elephant in the middle of the room that all current commentary – and legislative Findings and so very many judicial Decisions and Opinions – seek to ignore.

This is, I would say, blatantly obvious in, for example, the 1995 Poritz case in New Jersey and the 2003 Smith v. Doe Opinion by the US Supreme Court (both cases which I have discussed in Posts on this site).

In what is almost a magician’s trick of distracting attention from the ‘real action’, the thinking sought to restrict itself to surface elements without going near the ‘elephant Issue’: how far can this Sex Offense legislation go before it becomes an entity from an Alien and anti-Constitutional and anti-American Universe?

I offer this  entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in regard to feminist political theory to indicate just to what extent most feminist philosophical thinking is opposed to “deliberative democratic process” in way or another, for one reason or another.

Whether that thinking embraces a “Maternal” approach (modeled on Carol Gilligan’s idea of Mommy At the Breakfast Table, with government being the Mommy and the Citizenry being the squalling kiddies) or an oppositional approach of one kind or another (that doesn’t trust deliberative democracy to provide the desired outcomes for feminist theory), the point is that the dynamics of deliberative democratic process are not and have not ever been well-received by the feminist agenda which – as I have said in the essay – was embraced by the Dems after 1972 and by the Republicans later in the decade for their own purposes.

I also offer this link from Wiki in regard to Antonio Gramsci, the early-20^th century Italian Communist thinker who took aspects of Marx’s and Lenin’s thought to develop his theory of “cultural hegemony”. Gramsci called for the undermining of a culture’s established traditions and institutions by means of the working class (changed to ‘women’ for feminist purposes) first developing its own culture and then forming a “historic bloc” by making whatever (temporary) alliances and compromises (again temporary) in order to take over the core institutions of a targeted culture and then subverting it to Marxism-Leninism (or feminism, as it were) from within.

For those interested, I go into these matters at more length in an essay on the legacy of Supreme Court Justice William Brennan on my other site.

As one of the most vulnerable ‘weaknesses’ of male ‘hegemonic culture’, sexual activity (and the apparently Evolutionary tendency of males to seek to propagate – which I am not here proposing as a justification for genuine sexual imposition on anybody), sexual activity no doubt provided logically a ready-made vital target for the Gramscian-Leninist strategy of attacking and weakening and subverting the male ‘hegemonic culture’.

And given the delectable political prospect of catering to (or pandering to) a ‘new and really big demographic’, the Beltway put its full faith, credit, and authority behind this – can there be any lesser word for it? – assault.

And the media, eager to increase viewership by running the easy melodramatic script of Innocent and Pure Good ruthlessly attacked (and ‘oppressed’) by Pure and Incorrigible Evil, went with the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ gambit.

Nobody – including those who have a sworn responsibility to look into these things – cared to consider what would be the consequences of introducing and actually injecting by imposition Leninist political praxis into the American political bloodstream, and thereby deranging the entire government into the embrace of political dynamics that are not only from an Alien political Universe but are literally from an avowedly and deliberate anti-democratic (and anti-Constitutional and anti-American) Universe.

This is what lubricated the construction of the Mania Regimes.

And it is what is even now and still now continuously eroding the genuine American dynamics that are the ‘genius’ of the great American Experiment that constituted this nation’s most enduring and valuable gift to human history and to humanity.

So much remains to be done.

ADDENDUM 2

I just came across this quote that seems too relevant to pass up.

David Frum, former Bush 2 staffer and speech-writer, has come to realize that things have gotten verrrrrry bad and gone verrrrrry wrong with American politics.

Although he is writing here about the economy, his thought on how Beltway pols seem to be dealing with things is also of relevance to the SO community, as an example of a new variable and new force pushing pols away from facing up to their mistakes.

Speaking of economic problems that require a serious and effective response, Frum observes that the all he can see coming from the Beltway is basically to promise more of what they have already been doing “followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares”.

I can’t help but thinking that this is precisely the attitude taken by pols when they allowed themselves to be seduced or dragooned into supporting the SO Mania Regime. If, as Frum says in his article, they really didn’t care too much for the commonweal or the general Citizenry, but only about their own short-term political advantage, then, I wonder, how much concern could they be expected to show toward SOs, even though potentially the Mania would assault the entire male half of the Citizenry.

It apparently goes without saying that none of them cared to give a thought about the integrity of the Framing Vision or the compelling government interest in preserving it.

And, at this point, as I have said before on this site, the attitude that Frum observes in them is precisely the attitude of the Soviet nomenklatura as their long-running scam began to unravel in the later 1970s: let’s just stick around long enough to qualify for the pension and scoop up as much as we can, then get out of town – and after that it’s not our problem.

Let’s hope things haven’t reached that point in the Beltway.

But even if it has, and if the Republic of the Framing Vision goes, the Mania Regime may well remain. Because it is based in an anti-democratic and anti-Constitutional scheme of government that has now been instituted here; a scheme of government precisely designed to impose its will on a Citizenry that ‘just doesn’t get it’.

So let’s not be under any illusions about what urgent work remains to be done.

And more than perhaps any other group of Americans, the SO community has seen the awful shape of things that may come.

Let us work while the daylight lasts, as the Apostle saith.

1         http://nymag.com/print/?/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/

WHITE HOUSE AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

In an article on Truthout, assigned to a female intern writer and dated October 30, 2010, it is announced that “the White House acknowledged October as Domestic Violence Awareness Month on Wednesday”.

It’s not worth my time or yours to conduct a stereotypical blog-investigation to find out whether this is a typo or not.

Perhaps it is a typo, although the site didn’t put it up until the end of the month. Perhaps it isn’t a typo and the site put it up at the end of the month because the editors figured it wasn’t all that important. Or perhaps the White House announcement itself was put out at the end of the putative Awareness Month as an election ploy (the ‘base’ presumably not having the memory capacity to remember at the beginning of November what it read at the beginning of October).

When anything’s possible, then not even the Powers That Be can control what might be considered possible. (That was the premise of many an episode of the comedy “Hogan’s Heroes” back in the 1960s: since life in the Third Reich was so far beyond rationality in the first place, then no Nazi colonel in a remote camp could afford to imagine that Hitler or Goering wasn’t out in the yard to conduct a distracting conversation just for the hey or that Himmler himself hadn’t come to Paris just to take a buxom Resistance prisoner out of Gestapo headquarters .)

At any rate, there are some classic ploys deployed in the whole thing that make it of interest to the SO community, just as a handy drill for honing your field-recognition skills.

“Many advocates” report themselves “heartened”, although the only one quoted is Eleanor Smeal, formerly of NOW and currently President of the Feminist Majority Foundation, who opines that “they’re really doing a lot on the subject”. Stupendously faint praise indeed.

It was a “government-wide effort”, although this should not be meant to imply that the government had organized itself to total and ultimate victory like it did in late 1941.

Rather, it appears that the President or his staff was in need of whatever ‘progress’ might be cobbled together that would satisfy the demands of some snippet of ‘the base’ but that wouldn’t cost much in the long run and that wouldn’t expose the government to having to defend yet more Constitutionally-dubious laws (the torture and Guantanamo stuff, itself following the same ‘emergency-necessity’ path as the original DoVi legislation in a hell-hot irony, has cost the Pres dearly in both image and substance and at this point the damage is probably irreparable).

So a Senior Adviser said “in a press conference call Wednesday” (there’s that date thing again; and this is only a call) that “various federal governments have taken a solid approach to how we have tried to manage [the] challenge” of domestic violence. The punctuation and placement of quotation marks is confusing, but then she herself seems confused in her comments, referring to what appears to be more than one federal government. And since Our Modern American Reality is so far beyond rationality, especially in the matter of the Mania Regimes, who can say, really?

This Senior Staffer also “chairs the White Council on Women and Girls” then went on and “lauded the accomplishments of the Violence Against Women Act, passed in 1994” which, in the event, ran into Constitutional problems in the eyes of the Supreme Court. But it provided over a billion dollars to “support the investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women” (about which more later).

I don’t think there’s that kind of cash lying around any longer.

She tries to re-frame the thing: it’s not just a women’s issue – it’s a national issue”. I was half-expecting the next phrase to be “it’s a national security issue” but apparently things haven’t gone that far inside the Beltway.

I would think that to the extent it’s a legitimate issue it’s also a men’s issue, but she doesn’t go there.

It’s a “tragic and senseless crime”, she says – which I would say is true of almost all crime.

AND THEN We are treated to – wait for it – “statistics”. And “the statistics noted in the White House report are grim”: “One in four women will be the victim of domestic violence in the course of their lifetime” – and nobody familiar with the mini-series on Victimology on this site can help but wonder just how reliable such a statistic really is. Ditto that “one in six will be sexually assaulted” – presumably by a husband, significant other, or person staying overnight. Or whatever.

There is no mention of how many of these assaults – and (see below) they are verrrry broadly defined – are committed by same-sex partners and thus perpetrated by females. Nor is there any discussion of how many of the victims might be males, with the female initiating the assaulting.

“Currently more than twenty million women in the United States have been the victims of rape” – which is again a statistic that seems rather inflated, although the definition of ‘rape’ nowadays is broad enough to encompass an awful lot of behavior and situations that wouldn’t strike somebody as ‘rape’ in the dictionary sense of the word. Nor is the statistic completely relevant here, since there is no indication that these ‘rapes’ took place in the ‘domestic’ setting – although ‘domestic’ is itself perhaps broadly defined. It gets to be a hall of mirrors, as so often is the case in the Mania Regimes.

But “since fewer than one in six rapes are reported to police” than this number “may not reflect reality”. That ‘reality’ would then be that there may be 120 million rapes, although how one arrives at reliable numbers of un-reported acts is anybody’s guess. The evidence might be ‘anecdotal’ – which means that somebody ‘says’ it at some point afterwards, or the evidence might be arrived at merely by taking the number of reported ‘rapes’ and multiplying by a factor of somebody’s choice: two, ten, a hundred or more. Once ‘facts don’t matter’ then you are into verrry fuzzy territory indeed.

Ditto that “nearly 15.5 million children are exposed to domestic violence every year” – and how that number is arrived at is equally curious. But of course it gives the opportunity to bring ‘the children’ into the matter – almost a requirement of the form nowadays.

These are the White House equivalents, I would say, of legislative Findings, those weird and deathless creatures by which the SO Mania Regime has been fueled from Day One.

So then, true to the form, the White House must “address” the emergency.

There are – gently put – “several initiatives to strengthen the legal system”. And nobody in the SO community can read that bit without concern and a dark sense of déjà-vu. Especially since the police-state gambits already enshrined in the DoVi Regime (the ones that survived the Supreme Court’s scrutiny) are already ominous and lethal enough: police intrusion into the home; deprivation of property and family and residence on the say-so of a single (and hardly uninterested) party; removal of any discretion on the part of investigating officers or prosecutors; the placing of an impossible burden of proof (that he did NOT do it) on the accused; the truly frakkulent scam of claiming that the entire process is ‘merely civil’ (although the violation of any court Order resulting from the foregoing is instantly and most assuredly and lethally ‘criminal’); and the erection of nearly-ineradicable ‘registries’ of all accused persons even if they are found not-at-fault by the court Hearing.

The goal is “to increase sexual assault arrests”, charmingly. Although again, whether this refers to DoVi incidents or incidents of the even more broadly and nebulously defined ‘sexual assault’ is unclear. But then, clarity has never been a major concern and – in Mania dynamics – is considered something along the lines of obstructive and counter-productive. Reality and ‘facts’ are the enemies of Mania Stampedes as a result of the very dynamics of Mania and Stampede.

“There has never been this kind of focus on sexual assault” says a “domestic violence policy expert and the first-ever White House adviser on violence against women”, although she apparently has forgotten about the previous two decades of the DoVi Regime. Or doesn’t figure anybody will remember. And again, the confusion in terms between ‘domestic violence’ assaults and ‘sexual assaults’.

Getting a bit more specific as to just what is being newly promulgated now in this White House activity, We are told that HUD will now “provide guidance to housing authorities and landlords, allowing them to ‘evict perpetrators of abuse, keep their properties safe and make sure victims do not lose their housing due to crimes committed against them’". Just how “perpetrator” will be determined (Accusation? Conviction?) is left unsaid. Just what housing authorities and landlords will be empowered to do to “keep their properties safe” is also left unsaid.

Further, “the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women is launching a national campaign against sexual assault, holding regional forums throughout the country to stimulate public dialogue”. I am going to imagine that ‘public dialogue’ isn’t really going to be the objective here, but rather a bunch of ‘consciousness-raising’, klatschy type sessions which since the beginning have been the source of ‘stories’ and ‘anecdotal evidence’ that fuel – far more than any stringently-conducted research – the fuel to keep the fires burning among the faithful.

And I am going to imagine that staffers of this Office are not going to take kindly to any information or opinion to the effect that things might be somewhat overstated. Government ‘Offices’ erected specifically to deal with X are not greatly interested in evidence that there isn’t so much X out there.

Meanwhile “the National Institute of Justice will investigate the root causes of backlogs in rape kit processing”. At this point, after almost two decades of government pressure, I’m going to imagine that the reason for the lack of prompt processing is not that the police are a macho, rape-friendly organization besotted with ‘patriarchy’, but rather that there are now so many accusations – allowable under the broad and vague definitions and conflations and conceptual confusions – that no police department larger than Mayberry can handle the load, especially given the other crimes which the police must also handle.

But given the fact that accused persons might actually be exonerated – at least in those cases of rape where sexual penetration and ejaculation was achieved, which is not necessary in all definitions of ‘rape’ – then it would help to move the processing along.

Smeal asserts that “One of the major [excuses] we got was that there's not enough money" to process rape kits, Smeal said. "Police departments find another reason to spend it... now [that] money has been appropriated, they say there's not enough scientists and labs to process them." Which could well be true. It’s possible that the police are finally realizing that this type of beyond-factual evidentiary Mania is impossible to keep up with, and it’s highly probable that not even the labs – civilian as well as official – can keep up with it.

But the kicker in this whole Mania type of thing is that even when the plan is proving to be unworkable in the field and on the ground, the advocacies can simply claim that the ‘badges on the ground’ are dragging their feet and diverting funds and coming up with “excuses”. Perhaps they might take a lesson from the ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq and Afghanistan: when you’ve been tasked with a poorly-conceived and impossible mission, ‘victory’ is not going to happen.

Then things get interesting indeed. A 2009 Navy ‘study’ is mentioned, by way of a study of the study by a sociology Ph.D. candidate. Apparently the Navy interviewed 1,146 newly-enlisted recruits in 2009. And apparently from the answers that these gentlemen gave in some form of questioning or questionnaire, the ‘study’ decided that “repeat offenders committed 95% of completed or attempted rapes”.

Thus, the White House is apparently convinced, “because of the high rate of recidivism” something has to be done about the rape-kit processing problem.

“High rate of recidivism” is a phrase that should set the whiskers of any SO community-member twitching.

More curiously, the 2009 Navy study – itself a replicant of a 2002 college-male study – seems clearly focused on non-domestic ‘rapes’ (and given the ‘college’ setting, probably a lot of the verrry nebulously defined ‘date rape’). So its relevance to a DoVi initiative seems tenuous at best.

Even more curiously, the gist of the 2002 and 2009 studies appears to be that only a small group of repeaters – between 4 and 9% - are responsible for the rapes. Which seems to work directly counter to the DoVi claims of millions of incidents and, given the DoVi setting by definition, millions of (male) perpetrators.

And the studies asked about incidents that fit “or approximated” the definitions and legal elements of ‘rape’ or ‘attempted rape’. So they are casting a net that will ‘approximate’ the incidences of what are already nebulous and elastic terms (sexual assault, rape, attempted rape, and date-rape). The possibilities for conceptual error – let alone mischief – are stupendous.

Further, you wonder if the Navy kept the fellows that were apparently witless enough to admit to such things or so morally challenged as to perpetrate them. Although, the researchers crow about how they cagily asked only questions about ‘activity’ without mentioning that to answer the questions in the affirmative would be admitting to the elements of a crime – such as these crimes are defined nowadays – and presumably didn’t give their game away by asking about ‘intent’ (i.e. Did you intend to rape the woman?)

Further, since the studies found that the majority of the repeaters said that they knew their partners and were not strangers, it’s legitimate to ask if ‘domestic’ has been expanded now to quietly include anybody who isn’t a stranger. That’s how far things have become debased in these matters.

Further there's a bit about some of the 'rapists' going to the trouble of "drugging" their (intended?) partners, although I'd want to know if alcohol is considered - at least in DoVi-land - a 'drug', especially since college and college-age folks seem rather familiar with alcohol. These are the type of suble definition-shifts that don't make it into the scare-stats, the 'reports', the Findings, and the press releases.

And as I’ve mentioned in prior Posts, the definition of “battering” in DoVi-speak includes not-talking-on-a-phone, so you really have to be inquisitive in order to get an accurate picture of the claims and assertions that are spewed into the air like smoke-stacks used to do it in the pre-EPA days.

Another piece by this same sociology Ph.D. candidate (not part of the White House material) gives you an indication of just what might be included in the range of DoVi actions: at the extreme end, there is “forcing a partner to have sex when they did not want to” and “threatening a partner with a gun” or “beating up a partner” or “choking a partner”. So far so good, as it were.

However, you then can wind up at the lower end of the spectrum: “slapping or hitting”, “pushing, grabbing or shoving a partner”, or “throwing something at a partner that could hurt”. It is hardly beyond reason to imagine that if these latter categories are feeding into the figures of ‘twenty million’ and such, then there is a big problem here – and it’s not domestic violence itself. Because if the advocacies and advocacy-friendly ‘researchers’ are including in their actual or statistically-derived ‘numbers’ every incident where two humans in a relationship push, grab, or shove … well, yes, I would imagine that you could easily reach a figure next to which ’20 million’ would be conservative.

But there’s no word – and this couldn’t be an oversight – as to where most of these incidents lie on the spectrum.

And there’s no word – ditto – on who initiated the violent act. Or – and this would be of more than passing interest – to what extent individuals, especially females, in same-sex relationships are involved in this sort of thing.

And, as a matter of good research procedure, it has to be said that if you’re only going to study males in regard to perpetrating ‘rape’ (however defined) then you are only going to wind up with male perpetrators. But you aren’t going to wind up with an accurate picture of the overall ‘rape’ situation in the country.

Joe Biden is mentioned. You may recall him as the Senator who, in response to an objection to his original Violence Against Women Act (later found to have notable un-Constitutional elements), brayed that “it may be a bad law but it sends a great message”. This gentleman is the former used-car salesman who also professed himself greatly “bored” during his time at his not-first-tier law school.

In 2008, angling for a higher office, he promised to introduce a bill in the Senate that would “train 100,000 lawyers to represent domestic violence victims”. I don’t know if he ever introduced it, or if he did, if it was ever passed.

But it isn’t hard to imagine that such a promise could be fulfilled by simply printing up a brochure or mailing out a Power-Point Presentation to every Member of every Bar Association in the country. Although you would think that the already-graduated attorneys would know how to conduct a case.

But then, of course, given the numerous hidden agendas, elastic definitions, systemic biases against the accused, and the general complexity of he said-she said (or he-he, or she-she) legal proceedings, perhaps even in these degraded times law schools don’t provide attorneys with clear training in the particular treacherous waters of DoVi cases. Or of any of the jurisprudential challenges that arise when trying to administer the laws in a time of Mania and under a Regime of Mania.

The article concludes by noting that Obama has put 130 million dollars into the budget for 2011 for all this stuff. But, the article hastens to add, 100 million of that will come “from the Crime Victims' Fund, which is supported by criminal fines, penalties and forfeited jail bonds rather than taxpayer money”.

That’s about one-seventh of all the monies available for annual distribution in the Fund (which holds about 4 billion this year) and if you take a look at its responsibilities, that money could – and apparently does – go quickly. (It also got itself into the Patriot Act, somehow.) I’m thinking that there’s going to be a lot of ‘resistance’ organizationally for dedicating a full seventh of its disbursable funds to so nebulous a crime-category. And no doubt that will fuel the claim of even more “excuses”.

Well, that’s my take on this curious article and even more curious ‘initiative’.

My assessment is that it’s yet another political effort to keep part of ‘the base’ happy in the run-up to a difficult election.

But it’s a sad state of affairs that the Mania Regimes are part of that ‘base’ to begin with, and a direct result of ‘pressure’ (in the Alinsky-ite sense) from various elements in that ‘base’.

ADDENDUM

Let me say again and again and again that I do not support the infliction of violence by any human being upon any other human being, sexual or otherwise, in the 'domestic' or any other setting. But when the Mania Regimes of Sex Offense and its immediate predecessor, Domestic Violence, are so arranged as to create Stampedes in public affairs and in law and law enforcement, and highly dubiously justified Stampedes (which almost goes without saying, given the nature of Stampedes and Manias) then I think a certain amount of Tire has to be Kicked.