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On May 26, 1995, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service introduced guidelines for adjudicating gender-based asylum claims. The guidelines identify female genital mutilation (FGM), the cutting of the clitoris and removal of external genitalia, as a form of persecution. Recently, however, several immigration judges have denied asylum to women fleeing FGM, which is practiced predominately in African countries, on young girls between infancy and adolescence, and usually without anesthetic.
Fauziya Kasinga, an 18-year-old from Togo, is being detained pending the appeal of her asylum claim. After her father's death, her family planned to "circumcise" Fauziya following her forced marriage to a 45-year-old man with three other wives. She escaped to the United States and sought political asylum. Judge Donald Ferlise denied her claim, commenting that she had not been "singled out for circumcision."
In another case, Judge John F. Gossart, Jr., denied the asylum request of a woman from Sierra Leone, who was herself forcibly "circumcised" at the age of 13 and feared that her three daughters, two of whom were born in the US, would be subjected to genital mutilation. Judge Gossart described FGM as an "important ritual" that "binds the tribe." He stated, "[She] cannot change the fact that she is female, but she can change her mind with regards to her position towards the FGM practices."
Write to the Honorable Janet Reno, US Attorney General, Department of Justice, Tenth & Constitution Avenue NW, Room 4400, Washington, DC 20530. Express concern that FGM is not being accepted as a basis for granting asylum, despite the INS guidelines on gender-based asylum claims. Urge her to reissue these guidelines as regulations that would be binding both on asylum officers and immigration judges.
A write-in campaign on this issue is being conducted by Equality Now, an organization that works for the civil, political, economic, and social rights of women around the world. Please send a copy of your letter to them at PO Box 20646, Columbus Circle Station, New York, NY 10023
Many public and school libraries have inadequate collections of books on women, women's history, and women's lives from feminist women's perspectives. If the collections on rich, white women are awful, the collections on minority women are atrocious. Some librarians use the excuse that "no one checks out those kinds of books". Go to the library regularly and check out feminist books for, on, and by women of all races, classes, and creeds. Each time you go, request in writing that a specific book to be added to the library's collection.
Jerry Falwell on the current crop of Republican contenders for the Presidential nomination: "Anything short of Adolf Hitler is better than what we've got."
March 1996 issue of Church & State, a publication of American United for Separation of Church and State
The first formal request by a group of women for the right to vote was at the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention in 1848. This was the most controversial of all resolutions adopted by the conference because giving women the right to vote would take them intellectually far away from their assigned domestic sphere.
Most women who meet the same qualifications as men could vote at the time of the American revolution. After the Revolution, suffrage qualifications for men and women were tightened: states gradually took the right to vote away from all women and added religious (Protestant) and property requirements for male voters. The rise of Jacksonian democracy in the 1820s and 1830s which eliminated many of these new restrictions on male suffrage was probably one of the stimuli for the woman's suffrage movement. Upper class, educated, prosperous women were chagrined to find that poor, uneducated, illiterate, frontiersmen and immigrant men who could barely speak English were qualified to vote while they were not. Further, these property owning and income producing women were expected to pay their taxes just like men and were subject to all the penalties of the law, yet, they had no say in creating such laws. Still, the idea of universally suffrage for (white) males was still a novel idea so most women and men did not see the lack of women's suffrage as an issue of justice.
It is easy to understand why Elizabeth Cady Stanton created such a stir when she proposed a resolution in support of woman's suffrage at the Women's Rights Convention. Not until 72 years later, would women be given the right to vote.
The Republican War Against Women: An Insider's Report from Behind the Lines by Tanya Melich, Bantan Books, February 1996
Melich, a life-long Republican party activist who comes from a family of Republican Party activists, fought for pro-choice and pro-ERA planks at all of the Republican National Conventions between the 1972 nomination of Richard Nixon and the 1992 nomination of George Bush. At the 1992 convention, Melich, a loyal Republican who worked hard to elect even anti-choice Republicans to office, became convinced that the Republican Party intentionally advocated a racially bigoted, sexist, religiously intolerant agenda in order to garner votes. She documents in detail the internal party struggles of the moderates against the growing power of the radical right, the religious rights' all out war against women, and Reagan-Bush era policies and actions that undermined women. This party insider makes it clear that the sexist speech only underlines the sexist policies of the Republican Party which is now dominated by religious zealots.
A few quotes show the tenor of the book and summarize her observations:
"By playing on fear and hatred in its quest for votes and discovering that this paid off, the national leadership of the Republican Party has sown a cancerous divisiveness across the land."Referring to a "human life" amendment sponsored by North Carolina's John East in 1981, she wrote, "East's amendment championed the words of the Republican platform that gave a fertilized egg more rights than a woman."
"Fanaticism has been part of the anti-abortion movement from its beginning. What too few people have been willing to recognize is that fanaticism against women can easily turn into fanaticism in other areas."
"In 1996 the right has gotten what it wanted - a political party that will follow its social agenda, backed up by a cadre of women who will champion its sexist politics."
She concludes that the party will not abandon its anti-women, anti-minority, religiously intolerant platform until it is soundly defeated at the polls. Only then can this lapsed Republican return to the party of her youth and help to rebuild it as an equal-opportunity party.
This book is a must-read for those interested in the current political scene. Encourage your local library to acquire this book.
How many Republicans does it take to change a light bulb?
According to cartoonist Ed Stein of Denver's Rocky Mountain News: "26 to investigate Clinton's involvement in the burned out bulb: 279 to deregulate the light bulb industry; 63 to cut funding for alternative light sources; 287 to cut the tax rate on light bulbs; 78 to design a block grant so the state can change it itself; 37 to select a defense contractor to build a new bulb, and 281 to blame the Democrats for the darkness."
The small numbers and low profile of the Christian Reconstructionists within the religious right belie their power. These are the people whose ideas eventually become mainstream in the ranks of the radical religious right.
One of the best known current CRs is Howard Phillips, founder of the US Taxpayers' Party. Several leading religious figures on the right have threatened to bolt the Republican Party and to give their support to the US Taxpayers' Party in the fall elections if the Republicans fail to nominate sufficiently conservative candidates for President and Vice-President.
According to Church & State, "Activists in that movement, founded by theocrat R.J. Rushdoony, condemn democracy and insist that American government conform to their vision of "biblical law." Rushdoony and his followers want to abolish all public schools, ban all abortions, and end all government programs that help the poor.
They believe the Bible condones some forms of slavery and requires the death penalty for 14 different categories of offenders, including not only murders and rapists, but also blasphemers, idolaters, fornicators, homosexuals, adulterers, witches, and "incorrigible" juvenile delinquents. (Some Reconstructionists even argue that stoning remains the most biblically correct version of execution."
The National Affairs Briefing is a meeting of "virtually the entire spectrum of Religious Right leaders and organizations" including Ralph Reed. At the last NAB held in Mephis, Tennessee on January 19-20, 1996, speaker Larry Pratt, citing Old Testament religious codes, said, "Christ reiterated capital punishment. Check it out in Matthew 15, verses 3 and 4. And he picked a very politically incorrect subject to reaffirm it too, because he said the Pharisees were replacing the commandments of God with the traditions of men by not executing rebellious teenagers."
Your editor's personal experience with fundamentalist Christians confirms that rank-and-file members of the religious right truly believe that executing "incorrigible" or "rebellious" teenagers is Christian, mainstream and pro-family. These people do not see themselves as extreme because there are groups that are even more extreme than they. But more on that some other time.
data & quotes from Church & State, March 1996
Jeanette Pickering Rankin (1880-1973) was elected in 1916 as the first woman in Congress before most women were even allowed to vote. Born and raised in Montana, she graduated from the University of Montana in 1902 before continuing her studies first in New York then in Seattle, Washington. As a graduate student at the University of Washington, Rankin came in contact with the suffrage movement. She began working for the movement in 1910. After devoting 4 years full time to the cause she was elected legislative secretary for the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
Due in part to her efforts, Montana enfranchised women in 1914. In 1916, in spite of grueling travel conditions, she ran for Congress on a peace and pro-miner platform to become Montana's only Representative and the nation's first Congresswoman.
She worked on protective labor legislation for Montana's miners, a suffrage amendment for women, and maternal health legislation. One of approximately 50 Representatives to oppose America's entry into WW I, she was defeated for reelection in 1918 when support for the war was at its height.
After her defeat, she continued fighting for suffrage and for an end to all wars. Although active in peace movements, she faded from scene in the 1920s and 1930s, but was reelected to Congress from Montana in 1940 on a peace platform. She was the only person to vote against a declaration of war against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. Explaining her vote she said, "As a woman I can't go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else." Her vote was so unpopular that she did not seek reelection.
She remained active in woman's causes worldwide until her death in 1973. Fortunately she lived long enough to see a revitalized woman's movement.
sunshine@pinn.net
Sunshine for Women encourages you to support our feminist sisters by purchasing their books, reading them, disseminating the ideas they contain, but most especially, by making their book available to our sisters, our daughters, and the community at large by requesting your school library, your public library, and area bookstores to carry their books. Remember it is not enough to write literature, history, and theology, we must pass these works on to future generations. Help us to preserve these works for a new generation by putting them on library bookshelves.
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