Monthly Archives: February 2002

Throw the Bums in Jail

Posted on by
Reply

A Canadian judge was very angry this month for a very odd reason — a man who admitted he wrongfully accused his wife of assaulting him was arrested and jailed for several days. Judge Dianne Nicholas railed against prosecutors, arguing that the man should not have spent a night in jail!

Nicholas’ reasoning is straightforward. She told prosecutors that routinely sees women recant claims of assault against men, and yet such women are not arrested. Why should the policy be any different when it is a man who is making up the allegation? The Ottawa Citizen quoted Nicholas as “fuming” that,

It smacked to me of discrimination on the basis of gender. Women lie every day. Every day women in (domestic) court say ‘I made it up. I’m lying. It didn’t happen’ — and they’re not charged with obstruct …

Although this might seem like a blow in favor of sexual equality, this writer has to wonder about the effects of not imposing any sort of punishment at all on men or women who make up false allegations of assault or abuse. How can we possibly trust that such allegations are genuine if there is no penalty for making up a false allegation?

Spending a few days in jail might do a lot of good for people who admit making false allegations, regardless of their sex.

Source:

Gender-bias issue raises ‘optics’ problem in domestic court. Dave Brown, The Ottawa Citizen, February 21, 2002.

Share

Women Obtaining Concealed Weapons Permits in Michigan

Posted on by
Reply

A concealed weapons permit system went into effect in Michigan several, and the Detroit Free Press focused on women who are lining up to obtain their weapons permits. Under the new state law, anyone with a clean criminal history can obtain a concealed weapons permit.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that large numbers of women are obtaining the permits. So far 3,278 pistol permits have been issued in Michigan. The law forbids the release of information about the identities of those seeking permits, but a gun shop owner cited by the Free Press estimates that as many as 40 percent of those seeking permits are women.

Jessica Lutz of Huntington Woods, Mich., tells the Detroit Free Press,

When I found out how much safer women could be . . . what’s my choice there? One of the things taught in my house was, you have to be self-sufficient.

The article also quotes Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence spokeswoman Nancy Hwa claiming that in other states permits have been revoked after permit holders committed crimes. Of course she forgets to mention that permit holders in those states have tended to commit gun-related crimes at rates that are often even lower than those committed by off-duty police (and, frankly, I’d be more inclined to trust a woman with a concealed weapon than an off-duty Detroit cop).

Source:

Weapons law draws women to get arms. Kathleen Gray and John Masson, Detroit Free Press, February 21, 2002.

Share

Is Positive Discrimination the Solution to Gender Imbalances in British Parliament?

Posted on by
Reply

After last summer’s elections in Great Britain, women made up only 118 of 659 politicians elected to the House of Commons. Great Britain is now considering requiring political parties to nominate women. Is this legal or even a good idea?

In the 1990s, Great Britain experimented with a system that forced parties to nominate more women for the British version of primary elections. That system was ruled illegal when it was challenged by law professor Peter Jepson.

On Jan. 28, Parliament approved a bill that would reinstate this system, essentially allowing political parties to engage in “positive discrimination” that would be illegal for private entities to do.

It is not clear that this is either legal or desirable.

Jepson told Women’s ENews that he would again challenge the practice, this time under European Union law. “I’m not at odds with the Labour Party over the inadequate representation of women in Parliament,” Jepson told Women’s ENews, “But there is nothing positive about discrimination.”

Current Member of Parliament Anne Widdecomb said she opposed the planned change not only because it would violate the human rights of men, but would also create a two-tiered group of female MPs. Widdecombe said,

It would create two groups of women MPs, one who could look everyone from the prime minister down in the eye, and the other that got there because of special favors. I wouldn’t find that helpful. I’d find it humiliating.

Widdecombe believes that the gender balance will shift when women who grew up in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister reach their 40s and 50s. Even then, though, it is questionable if women will ever achieve the exact 50/50 split that some feminists seem to desire.

By comparison, Women’s ENews notes that only 14 percent of U.S. House of Representative members are women. That percentage will almost certainly be higher 20 years from now, but I suspect the same sort of factors that result in a rather persistent wage gap will also result in large gender imbalances in democratically elected legislatures.

Source:
British Parliament passes bill to elect more women. Paul Rodgers, Women’s ENews, February 15, 2002.

Share

Glenn Sacks on Bogus V-Day Statistics

Posted on by
Reply

Glenn Sacks wrote an interesting article about a lot of the statistical claims that Eve Ensler‘s nonprofit V-Day was spreading around about domestic violence. The entire article is worth reading, but I was especially intrigued by this claim which Sacks debunks,

1 in 3 murdered females are killed by a partner, versus 3.6% of males.

This statistic is both impressive and absurd at the same time. It is absurd because, of course, it is completely misleading, but impressive nonetheless because somebody obviously spent a great deal of time thinking about the best way to spin the fact that very few women are murdered and then turn that on fact on its head.

As Sacks notes, very few men or women are killed by a partner. According to Sacks the figures are about 1,300 women killed by intimates as opposed to 600 men murdered by intimates. In absolute numbers, of course, almost 2,000 people killed by intimates is a horrific tragedy, but in a nation of 260 million or so people, the risk of being killed by an intimate for both men and women is very low and, more importantly, the rate of intimate murder has steadily been declining (along with other murders).

Few people will look at that statistic, though, and realize that what it really means is that only about 4,000 women are murdered in any given year in the United States compared to almost 17,000 men.

So a completely different way to frame V-Day’s claims about violence against women is that almost 81 percent of murder victims are men and that we have a crisis of male murders and need to respond as a society to do more to reach out to the underserved male population with specialized violence programs offering men help and counseling.

But, of course, Ensler and her ilk take the opposite view and insist that violence (both being a victim of and a perpetrator of) is strictly a male vs. female phenomenon. Or as Sacks sums up his article,

Ensler, whose popular play “The Vagina Monologues” is the primary financial and public relations force behind V-Day, says that, for women, “Afghanistan is everywhere.” Unable to find an Afghanistan for American women, Ensler has used discredited statistics to invent one.

The obvious question being why do radical feminists prefer to live in this dark fantasy land of their own making rather than face the world as it is and work to improve it rather than simply regurgitating back their ideology through false and misleading statistics?

Source:

Eve Ensler’s V-Day: For Women, Afghanistan is Everywhere. Glenn J. Sacks, GlennJSacks.Com, February 22, 2002.

Share

Let Mike Tyson Fight Already

Posted on by
Reply

The other day an e-mail from the National Organization for Women crossed my desk. The e-mail was outraged that Washington, DC, had granted Mike Tyson a license to fight and called for people to protest to city officials to have Tyson’s permission to fight revoked. Huh? Let Tyson fight already.

The NOW e-mail complained that Tyson was being investigated for sexual assault by Las Vegas prosecutors. Fine, then lets see police arrest and/or indict him, but until then Tyson has just as much right as anybody to pursue his career and applying political criteria to decide whether or not to allow him to fight is obscene.

As George Getz puts it in a Libertarian Party press release on the Tyson controversy,

If Tyson is willing to fight; if an opponent is willing to step into the ring with him; if the bout is sanctioned by professional boxing organizations; and if fans are willing to pay money to see the fight — then no meddlesome government bureaucrat should have the power to veto it.

Exactly. I was trying to figure out what NOW was thinking with its idiotic e-mail. You’d think a group of feminists would be the last people in the world wanting to blacklist someone from working at his profession simply because he is unpopular or has a criminal record. As Getz said in the LP press release, “We don’t need Soviet-style economic commissars deciding who can work, and where they can work, and under what conditions they can work.”

Boxing commissions should be required by law to render fight decisions based solely on objective criteria as Getz outlines, not based on who NOW or other groups like or dislike. Let Tyson fight already.

Addendum: After this was written, Las Vegas announced, in fact, that it did not have enough evidence to pursue sexual assault charges against Tyson.

Source:

Let Mike Tyson box in Washington: It’s a matter of economic freedom. Libertarian Party, Press Release, February 21, 2002.

Share

North Carolina Boy Wants Tryout for Girls Softball Team

Posted on by
Reply

Josh Godbold is in an odd position — the 8th grader desperately wants to obtain some experience so that he can have a shot at trying out for a high school baseball team next year. There’s only one problem. The middle school Godbold attends has a girl’s softball team but no boy’s baseball team — and the school and state law forbid him from trying out for the team.

Although there are a few hundred female athletes playing on boys teams in North Carolina, where Godbold live, Title IX has never been interpreted by courts to allow boys to participate in girls sports, even in cases such as Godbold’s where the school does not offer an equivalent boys version of a girls sport.

NewsObserver.Com notes that North Carolina relies on a 1994 interpretation of Title IX written by the then-director of the Southeast regional director of the Office for Civil Rights for the U.S. Department of Education. In language that is purely Orwellian, that interpretation maintains that,

For example, a male may not argue that his opportunities to play on a female volleyball or softball team have previously been limited because his school has never offered these sports for males. … Overall athletic opportunities for males are not limited because, at a particular school, females may be permitted to try out for all teams while males may not try out for female teams.

Godbold’s father, Ricky, offered a much more common sense interpretation of fairness saying, “He’s being discriminated against playing a sport because he’s a boy. If a girl has a chance to try out for any sport at a school, he should, too.”

Laws to alleviate sexual discrimination should, at a minimum, be symmetrical when it comes to sex — if it is wrong to sexually discriminate against women in a given situation, it should also be wrong to sexually discriminate against men in a similar situation. Godbold should be allowed to try out for the softball team.

Source:

Girls’ team only option, boy says. T. Keung Hui, NewsObserver.Com, February 15, 2002.

Share

Upcoming Abortion/Breast Cancer Trial in North Carolina

Posted on by
Reply

Women’s eNews recently reported about an upcoming trial in Fargo, North Dakota, in which a judge will be asked to weight the claims and counterclaims about whether or not abortion contributes to increased risk of breast cancer. Not only are anti-abortion advocates relying on junk science, but they’re own claims are deceptive. Rather than urge women not to have abortions, their advice would be more accurate if they said: have a child before you are 22 or face increased risk of breast cancer. Lets look at the epidemiological evidence before moving on to the biology of abortion, pregnancy and breast cancer.

Anti-abortion advocates always cite the same weak epidemiological data. There are quite a few studies showing that women who have induced abortions have increases risk of breast cancer anywhere from 20 to 30 percent higher than women who do not have induced abortions. The proper reaction to such studies is — big deal.

Those are very low increased risk levels for epidemiological studies — they are so low that it is difficult for even well-designed studies to accurately measure such low levels of risk.

This problem is compounded by the fact that most of these studies suffer from a number of flaws. The most obvious of these, which Womens’ eNews does an excellent job of explaining, is recall bias. Women’s who have breast cancer are far more likely to tell researchers that they had an abortion than are women who do not have breast cancer. A Swedish study, for example, found that women with breast cancer were 50 percent more likely to report having had an abortion than were women without breast cancer. Women’s eNews quotes Lancet Oncology editorial as saying that, “healthy control women have been more reluctant to report on a controversial, emotionally charged subject such as induced abortion, than have patients with breast cancer.”

Of course, a major study involving 1.5 million Danish women that relied on medical records rather than women’s recall. The results? No increased risk of breast cancer at all for women who had abortions compared to women who did not.

The claim that abortion increases risk of breast cancer is nonsense. Sort of. An interesting possibility is that some women may in fact increase their risk of breast cancer if they do something that is increasingly common in the Western world — delay the age at which they have their first child.

A recent study of 100,000 French women, for example, found that women who gave birth to their first child in their 30s were 63 percent more likely to develop breast cancer compared to women who gave birth to their first child by the age of 22. The study also found that women who started having periods the earliest also had a higher risk of breast cancer compared to those who began having periods the latest.

Why should the age at which women have their first child or begin menstruating have anything to do with breast cancer? Dr. Steven Austad offers an excellent summary of the link in his book, Why We Age,

Simply put, estrogen and progesterone increase the risk of breast cancer because they cause the cells lining the milk ducts in the breast to divide prolifically during the latter part of the menstrual cycle, when the body is preparing for pregnancy. When no pregnancy occurs, these newly formed cells die, returning the breast to its original condition. During the next cycle, there is another round of cell division and cell death if no pregnancy occurs.

And of course, the more this cycle occurs, the higher the risk of a mutation that might later develop into breast cancer. But once a woman gives birth, this cycle stops — the cells become permanently differentiated and the monthly division/death process comes to a halt.

So women who want to really reduce their risk of breast cancer should have a child as soon as possible after menstruating. Or if you want to do even better than that, go for a hysterectomy — studies have found that young women who have been forced to have hysterectomies for one reason or another have much lower rates of cancer than do healthy women. This applies to men as well — studies of men who have been sterilized find that they have far lower rates of cancer than men who have not.

If there is any increased risk of breast cancer attendant with abortion, it almost certainly is due to the women using abortion to delay the age at which they first give birth. Women who are on birth control or celibate will also experience the same risk, though this writer has to wonder if abortion activists are prepared to warn all childless women that they are endangering their lives. Would they require the Roman Catholic Church to inform childless women who want to become nuns that they are imperiling their health? Somehow I suspect now.

Sources:

Cancer risks for older mothers. The BBC, February 13, 2002.

Judge to Rule on Abortion, Breast Cancer Link. Margaret A. Woodbury, Women’s eNews, February 17, 2002.

Why we age. Steven N. Austad, 1997.

Share

Anti-Abortion Groups Challenges Morning After Pill in Great Britain

Posted on by
Reply

Since January 2001, women in Great Britain have been able to buy the emergency contraception drug levonelle from pharmacists without a prescription. Now an anti-abortion group is mounting a legal challenge to this policy that could also threaten the availability of other forms of contraception.

The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Children is challenging the law based on Great Britain’s 1861 Offences Against the Person Act which makes it a crime to sell any “poison or other noxious thing” in order to cause a miscarriage.

Levonelle acts by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting itself in he womb — essentially causing a spontaneous miscarriage. SPUC agues that on that basis the drug should be illegal under the 1861 law.

Of course commonly used birth control drugs operate on the same principle, so if the court agreed with this line of reasoning all chemical birth control might be illegal. As Anne Weyman of the Family Planning Association told the BC,

Their case is about the provision [of emergency contraception] in pharmacies but in fact the same argument would apply to all methods of contraception which can prevent implantation and that would affect every method except barrier methods, sterilization or natural family planning.

So we’re talking here about something like 4.5 million women being told overnight that their method of family planning is illegal.

And beyond that, what exactly would be the legal status of abortion?
This is in the courts now, but a better approach would be for the British Parliament to pass new legislation overturning that part of the 1861 law being used here.

Sources:

Legal challenge to morning-after pill. The BC, February 12, 2002.

Head to head: contraception challenge. The BC, February 12, 2002.

Share

Female Genital Mutilation Hospitalized 21 Girls in Kenya

Posted on by
Reply

This happened back in October but is an frightening example of the dangers of |female genital mutiliation|. At the end of October, 21 girls in Kenya had to be hospotailized due to serious infections they developed after being forced to undergo female circumcision.

The girls, aged 9 to 14, were pulled out of school by their parents to make sure the government would not interfere, and forced to undergo the procedure. Kenyan woman’s activist Naomi Okul told the BBC that in this case, “The traditional operators used dirty knives and most of the grisl ahve infections in their wounds.”

Kenya only outlawed female genital mutilation for girls under 17 a few months ago, and the high rate of the practice among some of Kenya’s peoples is believed partially responsible for that nation’s extremely high maternal mortality rate.

Source:

Circumcision hospitalizes Kenyan girls. Muliro Telewa, The BBC, October 31, 2001.

Share

The Ever Expanding Problem of Domestic Violence

Posted on by
Reply

Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick wrote an excellent debunking of a widely publicized study published in the British Medical Journal claiming that extremely large percentages of women in Great Britain were victims of domestic violence. It turns out that is true only if you push the definition of domestic violence to the breaking point.

Specifically, Fitzpatrick points out that the study looked at three separate categories of domestic violence — controlling behaviors, violent incidents and consequent injuries.

Under controlling behaviors, for example, researches asked women if their partners had ever “shouted, screamed at you,” “criticized you,” “put you down in front of others,” “restricted your social life,” “checked your movements,” “threatened you,” “shouted at, threatened the kids,” and “kept you short of money.”

It is probably no surprise that 69 percent of the 1,700 women interviewed by a mailed questionnaire reported experiencing some form of controlling behavior. But who has been in a relationship and not experienced any of these? I find it hard to believe that only 69 percent of women in this survey have been in shouting matches or been criticized by their partners.

I suspect if you gave this survey to men, you would find very similar levels as well. Which is not to suggest that there would be any point in doing so, because it’s not quite clear what the point is in measuring the number of people who have partners who have “criticized you” or “restricted your social life.”

As Fitzpatrick writes,

This ‘reframing’ of diverse forms of interpersonal conflict as manifestations of violence reveals a simplistic and misanthropic view of human relationships. From this jaundiced perspective, all men are bastards, all women are victims; all human beings are vicious or pathetic, degraded creatures, and the only hope for humanity lies through expert professional intervention.

In fact, it seems to go further — the survey items here clearly imply that interpersonal conflict in and of itself must be eliminated for there to be a healthy relationship between men and women, which is downright absurd. In fact, interpersonal conflict can be health — certainly no one is benefited by a childlike “your partner should never criticize you,” which sounds a lot like a feminist version of that Surrendered Wife nonsense.

Source:

Doctoring domestic violence. Michael Fitzpatrick, Spiked-Central.Com, February 7, 2002.

Share