Four years ago Ameneh Bahrami was blinded after a man she had refused to marry poured sulfuric acid over her head. Now, an Iranian court has ruled that five drops of the acid be put in each of her attacker's eyes. Bahrami emotionally stated, "At an age where I should be putting on a wedding dress, I am asking for someone's eyes to be dripped with acid. I am doing that because I don't want this to happen to any other women." I understand her reaction, I understand the desire to show people that there are consequences for such horrible examples of social violence. But...
An eye for an eye? Really? Hammurabi's code was created in 1760 BC- hasn't the idea of justice evolved at all since then? Isn't part of the reason for a modern legal system to ameliorate individual desire for revenge? Retribution is not justice. Torture is not justice. The best thing that can be said about this (and it is a very good thing) is that the crime is being taken seriously by the courts. After all, this is a region where honor killings, disfugurements, stoning and myriad other forms of social violence go ignored, unreported and unprosecuted. I hope that other victims of such violence take courage from Ameneh's example and demand justice. But I also hope they remember that women's rights cannot be separated from human rights. One cannot be achieved at the expense of the other- that is a dangerous road that leads toward no rights at all.
But surely she deserves a ribcage. And most of her abdominal organs. You need them to drink alcohol, so oughtn't they be represented when shilling alcohol?
Or at the very, very least give her a competent photoshopper. Check out the left side of her waist- that is some awkward whittling. If you're going to hack people's bodies out of recognition, its best not to use the sixteen year old unpaid intern to wield the eraser tool.
READ MORE!READ MORE!
This week, Professional Asshole Antonin Scalia, decided that the "letter of the law" trumps a woman's right not to get murdered. Here's a delicious little exchange from the recent hearing of US vs Hayes (thanks to Jezebel for the quotes):
JUSTICE SCALIA: And this was misdemeanor assault and battery, wasn't it?
ASSISTANT SOLICITER GENERAL NICOLE SAHARSKY: Yes, that's right. I mean, I really -
SCALIA: So it's not that serious an offense. That's why we call it a misdemeanor.
SAHARSKY: Well, I mean, certainly the offense is this particular case was serious. The charging document reflects that Respondent hit his wife all around the face until it swelled out, kicked her all around her body, kicked here in the ribs-
SCALIA: Then he should have been charged with a felony, but he wasn't. He was charged with a misdemeanor.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Wasn't the — wasn't the statute responding to just that problem, that domestic abuse tended to be charged as misdemeanors rather than felonies? And it was that fact that the Senator was responding to when he included misdemeanor. The whole purpose of this was to make a misdemeanor battery count for the statute's purpose.
I can appreciate his commitment (from a legal standpoint) to the explicit text of the law, but...
...this smug dismissal: "People are governed by the law that is passed, not by the law that Congress intended to pass" makes me grind my teeth. The statute they are referring to is a 1996 effort to close a loophole which allowed those convicted of a misdemeanor domestic violence charge to retain their gun rights (hence Justice Ginsburg's argument). But unfortuntely, this law opened up a NEW loophole which meant that those charged with domestic violence now plead into misdemeanor assualt & battery "in the home," which Hayes, the state of Virginia, Scalia and thousands of other abusers argue does not fall under the 1996 statute. FUCK THAT SHIT. The intent of the law is crystal clear: domestic abusers should not have access to guns. That creates a time bomb of a situation that vastly increases the odds of domestic homicide.
Honestly, I'm seeing ulterior motives behind the arguments of Scalia et al. To me it looks suspiciously like things are being viewed through the lens of the Second Amendment, which is almost completely irrelevant- the case is based on the reading of the '96 statute. People are so paranoid over gun rights that the terror of infringing on them trumps a woman's right to a life without fear of...yknow, murder. More "women's health" from the right wing. I see derisive air quotes in almost every sentence Scalia utters.
Time to be thankful AGAIN for Obama's victory. I can't even imagine a McCain appointed Supreme Court.
AND NOW, SOME (REALLY, REALLY NOT) FUN FACTS:
-Of females killed with a firearm, almost two thirds were killed by their intimate partners.
-Access to firearms increases the risk of intimate partner homicide more than five times more than in instances where there are no weapons, according to a recent study. In addition, abusers who possess guns tend to inflict the most severe abuse on their partners.
-A study of women physically abused by current or former intimate partners found a five-fold increased risk of the partner murdering the woman when the partner owned a gun.
-Domestic violence misdemeanor convictions and restraining orders were the second most common reason for denials of handgun purchase applications between 1994 and 1998.
And one unisex reason this loophole needs to be closed:
-About 14% "of all police officer deaths occur during a response to domestic violence calls.
Ah, schadenfreude. I bathe in it like...I don't know, dirty bath water? Mud?
But still, I mourn Palin's performance and her treatment by the McCain campaign(both during the campaign and now, post-mortem). Can't help but feel that a bunch of those 18 million cracks have been patched over.
It's 100% clear to everyone with eyes that she should never, ever have been tapped for VP. VPILF notwithstanding, she was the cement shoes on the bloated corpse that was the McCain campaign. We know this. But this trend among the conservative punditry to lay blame for the loss at her feet (begun even before Nov 4th) is worrying to me. Yes, she is an easy target, yes that Couric interview was a disaster yes, she absolutely terrified the independent voters. But bottom line, she was simply a base pick in a non-base election. If this had been 00/04, and Bush had been her running mate and the world was what it was then, they would still be positively drooling over her. Awful as she may be, the scary thing is that she could have won campaigning exactly they way she did did if the election had been in another year, another context. So to me, that makes this avalanche of criticism from her erstwhile adorers disingenuous in the extreme.
But what really bothers me is the language used to rip her apart. Which is to say, decidely gendered and infantilizing.Take this video. Apart from the bitchy backstabbing nature of the McCain staffers releasing these anecdotes about NAFTA and the continent of Africa (lol @ both, if true), my red flag went flying up the moment I heard the word "tantrum." They say she was "hard to handle, emotionally." And I suppose McCain was the very manifestation of calm reason?
McCain has a legendary temper, but you wouldn't hear the word "tantrum" ascribed to him too often, at least not by FoxNews types. "Explosions" "tirades" "manly bursts of testosterone" yes, "temper tantrums" no. Disgruntled campaign managers call her a diva. These are inescapably gendered words with specific connotations that, frankly, I do not want ascribed to ANY female politicians, no matter how nut-jobby. The attention to the clothing and appearance of female politicians I have come to terms with. After all, its not as though the men are exempt. But come on, when Palin began her campaign she was kept shielded from the media like some delicate flower (cute, but sooo dumb- don't let her near those mean ol reporters!) and then when she tried to stand on her own feet (albeit without the policy knowledge or center-appeal to make it worthwile), suddenly it was Attack of the 50ft Rogue Diva. She and the ONLY OTHER visible woman in the campaign, Nicole Wallace, took the flack for Fashiongate, but dammit its not like she just went wild with Daddy McCain's credit card! McCain's campaign dressed her in a very specifc way with a very specific intent- summed up as VPILF, to be seen but not heard. She is like a political version of the virgin/whore complex.
Anyway, sigh. Sometimes it seems like between Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin the credibility of female politicians under public scrutiny is dead forever. Here's to the next generation I guess. Its all a process...slow progress until we reach a tipping point of common sense and equality.
In non-depressing, non-Palin news there's this. Rwanda becomes the FIRST IN THE WORLD to have a parliament where women are the majority.
Four years ago Ameneh Bahrami was blinded after a man she had refused to marry poured sulfuric acid over her head. Now, an Iranian court has ruled that five drops of the acid be put in each of her attacker's eyes. Bahrami emotionally stated, "At an age where I should be putting on a wedding dress, I am asking for someone's eyes to be dripped with acid. I am doing that because I don't want this to happen to any other women." I understand her reaction, I understand the desire to show people that there are consequences for such horrible examples of social violence. But... 
Posts
