You guys sure are chatty this weekend. Here’s a fresh thread for you.
Is the Delaware Democratic party’s website fubar-ed for you as well?
An excellent diary on anti-vaccine hysteria from Daily Kos.
Some on-line activist started a website called Republicans For Rape after
30 Republican senators (all men) voted against the Franken amendment.
The Franken amendment closes a loophole which allows defense contractors to dismiss serious crimes like rape through an arbitration clause. It doesn’t outlaw arbitration, it simply states that the U.S. government contractors can not use arbitration for crimes like rape or kidapping, only for things like contract disputes.
Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.” Speaking on the Senate floor yesterday, Franken said:
The constitution gives everybody the right to due process of law … And today, defense contractors are using fine print in their contracts do deny women like Jamie Leigh Jones their day in court. … The victims of rape and discrimination deserve their day in court [and] Congress plainly has the constitutional power to make that happen.
Watch Franken’s speech:
On the Senate floor, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) spoke against the amendment, calling it “a political attack directed at Halliburton.” Franken responded, “This amendment does not single out a single contractor. This amendment would defund any contractor that refuses to give a victim of rape their day in court.”
29 other Republican senators agreed with Sessions.
The website features some classy Republican figures like professional anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly:
Then, a year later, she granted an interview to a Washington University in St. Louis student newspaper, it went like this:
Could you clarify some of the statements that you made in Maine last year about martial rape?
I think that when you get married you have consented to sex. That’s what marriage is all about, I don’t know if maybe these girls missed sex ed. That doesn’t mean the husband can beat you up, we have plenty of laws against assault and battery. If there is any violence or mistreatment that can be dealt with by criminal prosecution, by divorce or in various ways. When it gets down to calling it rape though, it isn’t rape, it’s a he said-she said where it’s just too easy to lie about it.
Was the way in which your statement was portrayed correct?
Yes. Feminists, if they get tired of a husband or if they want to fight over child custody, they can make an accusation of marital rape and they want that to be there, available to them.
So you see this as more of a tool used by people to get out of marriages than as legitimate-
Yes, I certainly do.