Civil Rights

Last week, the House of Representatives passed its reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). Originally enacted by Congress in 1994, VAWA has been reauthorized twice in the past and has been instrumental in saving the lives of thousands of victims across the country. 
 
As a survivor of domestic violence and former deputy sheriff, I have seen the benefits of VAWA firsthand. For 18 years, VAWA has been successful because it has focused on providing services to all victims, and has not “gone Washington” with carve outs for special interests. My legislation, H.R. 4970, continues that long, all-inclusive history without pitting victim against victim. 
 
Additionally, the House-passed legislation ensures that limited resources go to victims, not Washington bureaucrats. It also streamlines programs that are duplicative and consolidates certain grants, while saving taxpayer dollars. And in an effort to keep perpetrators off the streets and behind bars, it focuses on eliminating the backlog of unprocessed rape kits.

During the recent House floor debate on the Republican Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle questioned my motives for opposing the legislation as grounded in politics. I think it’s time to set the record straight.

The truth is that I refuse to support legislation that would protect only some victims of domestic violence and would make women less safe than they are under current law. This is not about politics, it’s about good policy.

When I helped draft the Violence Against Women Act nearly twenty years ago it was grounded on the bipartisan belief that we should protect all women from sexual and domestic violence, particularly vulnerable minority and immigrant women. Now, behind the veil of reauthorizing certain grant programs, this bill would roll back the very protections that Republicans once championed. Specifically, the bill eliminates provisions that protect immigrant victims of serious crimes, such as trafficking, who want to help law enforcement put dangerous criminals behind bars and it weakens critical and longstanding provisions that allow the battered immigrant spouses of US citizens to escape those abusive relationships and obtain the permanent immigration status to which they are already entitled. These provisions were enacted in past VAWA bills with near-unanimous congressional support.

Few issues unite Democrats and Republicans, much less bring people together from across the entire political spectrum. But provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), authorizing military detention without due process, did just that.

This week, Congress has the opportunity to join a rare bipartisan chorus rising across the country. An amendment to the NDAA, sponsored by Representatives Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Justin Amash (R-Mich.), has galvanized everyone from Occupiers to Tea Partiers, united by the specter of domestic military detention without trial.

In the last two months, state legislatures in Virginia and Arizona passed, with broad bipartisan support, bills forbidding state cooperation with any attempts at federally sanctioned kidnapping under the NDAA. A dozen city and county councils in eight states from coast-to-coast -- led by Democrats, Republicans and even Green Party members -- have passed similar resolutions.

Why the fuss?

Throughout the history of our Republic, religious freedom has been one of our nation’s core founding principles and a central part of our American heritage. A key component of that freedom is a respect for the rights of religious people and institutions to practice their faiths without the fear of being compelled to engage in, or support, acts that go against their deeply held religious beliefs. In 1809, Thomas Jefferson rightly said, “No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority."
 
Today, this proud tradition, our most cherished freedom is under attack, coming from the Obama Administration’s HHS mandate. This policy would, for the first time in our nation’s history, trample on religious freedom and force, inter alia, religious institutions to violate their own faith,  jeopardizing the great work that they do every day serving those in need, regardless of their faith. Fortunately, leaders of all faiths have awakened to the dangerously far-reaching implications of this policy and understand the precedent it will set. Rabbis, priests, ministers, Republicans and Democrats are joining together to oppose this mandate, which would sweep conscience protections of the First Amendment under the rug.

There is a group of criminals, on Native American lands, who assault, rape, and abuse Native women and they can’t be arrested. These criminals are non-Native men. They don’t have to face a judge, spend any time behind bars, or be hounded by a criminal record. Instead they remain free to go after the next victim or the same one, time after time. Congress, the one legal body able to fix this problem, could let these injustices continue if they don’t act.

The epidemic of violence against women on tribal lands is staggering; 34% of American Indian and Alaska Native women will be raped in their lifetimes, 39% will experience domestic violence, and as a Department of Justice study found, non-Indians commit 88% of these heinous crimes. Tribal justice systems are the most appropriate entities to root out these criminals, yet they are the ones with tied hands—restricted by antiquated jurisdictional laws established the U.S. government limiting tribes from prosecuting non-Native criminals.

The prospect of an ever-diversifying nation raises the hopes of many for a more inclusive society. For others, these demographic changes arouse feelings of anxiety over a future that looks decidedly different from our past. While Americans may differ on how we should adapt to this new reality, most of us agree that these changes matter – and that it’s important to our future as a nation to document and understand them. For hundreds of years, this has been accomplished through the census.

But Congressman Gowdy (R-S.C.) and a cadre of other lawmakers are advocating the wholly unsupported notion that a key aspect of the census — the American Community Survey (ACS) — is unconstitutional as currently configured. Based on this assertion, they have introduced legislation to make responding to this part of the census voluntary as well as engaged in a parallel effort to achieve the same result through the census funding bill being considered this week.

The United States experienced an inspiring moment earlier this month, when a 747 carried the space shuttle Discovery to its new home at the Smithsonian. I was fortunate to be in Washington that day; as I looked up at the sky, I was moved to feel pride in the intelligence, the vision and the scientific knowledge of this great country that made the space shuttle possible.
 
I keep thinking about that day as I consider Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, former chief of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center Jose Rodriguez’s book that praises the benefits of the torture he helped inflict on 9-11 detainees. It’s difficult to rationalize how the visionary work of something like our space program can come from the same country as the cowardly and inhumane work of our detainee interrogation program. This country can do such good, but we can also make terrible mistakes, and when we do, we must admit them, not justify them.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) passed in the U.S. Senate  last Thursday after the tireless championing of co-sponsor Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT). The bill is inclusive of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) victims, immigrant victims and Tribal women. These underserved communities were determined to be priorities of the more than 2,000 victim services advocates across the country who worked for the past two years to create a bill that reaches all victims. The day after the legislation was passed, and in response to a tweet about VAWA, some random guy called me  a cunt. (So much for civility on twitter) .
 
That certainly seems anti-woman. I wasn’t called a dyke - although that may be  coming. I was called a specifically anti-woman word. And it plays right into the “war on women” debate that has dominated this country’s discussions about birth control, working women and violence against women. But I don’t think that’s entirely what’s going on with here.

Our Senators must act now to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), the landmark achievement in the movement to end violence against
women and girls. VAWA revolutionized the way violent crimes against women are prosecuted and prevented, reshaped the way victims receive services and transformed the way communities respond to survivors.

Authored by then-Senator Joseph Biden and signed into law in 1994, VAWA was the first federal legislation to acknowledge domestic violence and sexual
assault as crimes. It created the first federal funding stream to support rape crisis centers across the country. VAWA provided federal resources to
encourage coordinated community responses to combating violence, and it saved money while saving lives: nearly $12.6 billion in averted social costs in its first six years alone.

I carry no brief for Florida Rep. Allen West—as I wrote just last week for The Root, the Republican congressman’s recent cheap shot at his Democratic colleagues, describing “78 to 81” of them as “communist” at a constituent town hall meeting—was, among other things, “just plain lazy.” The pander hearkened back to the ‘50s-era scare-politics of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and sent a message to constituents that they needn’t take him seriously—because thus far, he’s long on insults and woefully short on solutions.
 
But if West is lazy, then—frankly—so is the Martin County, Florida chapter of the NAACP: because just like West’s constituents should be able to expect more out of him, the members of the local NAACP should be able to expect that their leadership won’t cut off access to West—or any other politician who’s looking to engage them.
 
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what they did.