The California Court of Appeals recently ruled that California unlawfully discriminated against men when it established programs exclusively for female victims of domestic violence.
The saying “As goes California, so goes the Nation,” never has been more true than for Domestic Violence Awareness Month 2008. On October 14, the California courts led the nation in bringing public awareness to a previously hidden Domestic Violence issue — that of battered men — and subsequently ruled that battered men deserve equal protection under the law.
Facing squarely the reality of Domestic Violence against men, the California Court of Appeals ruled that: “We find the gender-based classifications in the challenged statutes that provide programs for victims of domestic violence violate equal protection. We find male victims of domestic violence are similarly situated to female victims for purposes of the statutory programs and no compelling state interest justifies the gender classification. We reform the affected statutes by invalidating the exemption of males and extending the statutory benefits to men, whom the Legislature improperly excluded.” (page 2).
The California court ruling was based, in part, on empirical research undertaken by hundreds of social scientists who have helped to provide “the rest of the story.” This research has demonstrated that both men and women initiate Domestic Violence at roughly equal rates with some recent studies suggesting that the initiation rates for girls and women may be increasing. Furthermore, approximately 40% of the physically harmed victims of Domestic Violence are men.
The implications of the California Appellate Court ruling are clear, compelling, and require a fundamental revision of all State and Federal Domestic Violence legislation to fully recognize the need for equal treatment of battered men under the law. It is particularly important to revise the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and replace it with a Domestic Violence Act that stands in compliance with the California court ruling. By its name alone, the Violence Against Women Act now is both unconstitutional and scientifically misleading.
Hopefully, the long-term impact of the California ruling will be to raise public and political awareness to the reality that Domestic Violence truly is an equal opportunity affliction. Since the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Senator Joe Biden both is the father of VAWA and a self-defined Constitutional scholar, let us hope that he will take advantage of the closing days of the campaign to propose a revision to VAWA along the lines of the California Appellate Court ruling. Voters should be listening for such a proposed revision.
Such an action also would be in the spirit of the words of Presidential candidate Senator Obama* that: “. . . we must fight to bring domestic violence out of the darkness of isolation and back into the light of justice . . ..” On October 14, 2008 the California courts ruled that justice must serve and protect both men and women.
May it continue to hold that: “As goes California, so goes the Nation.”
* Circulated in a press release by NOW (National Organization For Women) PACs on 10/16/08.
Re: From the decision, p20-21: “We are mindful that courts should accord deference to the appropriate prison officials in the complex area of prison administration. … ‘Running a prison is an inordinately difficult undertaking that requires expertise, planning, and the commitment of resources, all of which are particularly within the province of the legislative and executive branches of government. Prison administration is, moreover, a task that has been committed to the responsibility of those branches, and separation of powers concerns counsel a policy of judicial restraint.’ … Subjecting the judgment of prison officials to inflexible judicial review ‘would seriously hamper their ability to anticipate security problems and to adopt innovative solutions to the intractable problems of prison administration.”
Would that the Supreme Court had accorded the same deference to the US military holding enemy combatants.
This is welcome news indeed. It’s possible there is more good news coming. See Professor Jeanne Suk’s article in the October 2006 Yale Law Journal entitled “Criminal Law Comes Home.” Suk and others argue that in family law, the presupposition of the male being violent had become a de facto component of legal reasoning in these areas. She attributes this in part to the influence of the feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon. If a female Harvard Law scholar is questioning the current extreme feminist orthodoxy in family law, this is welcome news indeed.
Nathan Alexander:
Re: “… presupposition of the male being violent had become a de facto component of legal reasoning in these areas.”
Speaking of MacKinnon, I had an exchange with a blogger on another site regarding sexual harassment laws, and his thesis seems to apply to domestic violence laws:
“Attainder means ‘attainting’ person/group whose status as such (i.e., names/implied person/group) existed prior to the passing of the attainder.
“The origins of attainder are acts of the British parliament extending from the late middle ages up through the last of the Stuart pretenders c. end of 17th-early 18th century, where specific persons and their heirs were declared guilty of assault/intended assault on the sovereign. ‘Attainting’ the blood makes sense in a polity were political power is passed down by bloodline relationships.
“Attainder came of age in America in a post-Civil War Reconstruction case, Cummings vs. Missouri, where the state in a new constitution declared certain groups previously loyal to or favoring to the rebellion unable to perform certain a acts or hold certain positions as a consequence. This was declared illegal by a split decision, which has gone on to be the basis of federal attainder jurisprudence ever since. The pro-commies went after Congress during early Cold War years for punishing people who were suspect of being Communists. The last major attainder case never made it to SCOTUS was when SBI sued the appropriate federal bureaucracy re: regulations governing the post Ma Bell communications company, which SBI argued declared itself guilty by the mere fact of being a large communications company. The case went for the govt. by a split decision at the appellate level. The dissenting judge, however, delivered a stinging indictment of the government that echoed all the way back to 1866, and Justice Field’s decision in the Cummings case.
“Civil Rights law was first spotted as a possible attainder issue by Archibald Cox when as a member of the DOJ in 1965 recognized that an action plan for enforcing the new Voting Rights Act was in danger of being challenged as a bill of attainder. This was because it applied only to the south and not the rest of the country. Good liberal that he was, Cox told his people to go back and rewrite the bill in such a way that when applied would only apply to the south, but of course absolutely without explicitly saying so.
“Sexual harassment law was conceived by (feminist lawyer/author Catherine A.) MacKinnon as specifically aimed at heterosexual males. When Eleanor Holmes Norton and her EEOC committee read her book – the fact that the MacKinnon book was the source is well-known (can’t cite precise source of this from memory) they cannily took over the definition of the defense, but followed MacKinnon’s argument which strategically resituated sexual harassment as a matter of gender discrimination. Given the fact that the administrators in businesses and schools are either scared of federal action, or are ‘compliance officers’ put in place specifically because they are feminists, it wasn’t necessary to actually say ‘males’ to get that result.”
It would seem that “presupposition of the male being violent” could also be construed as a bill of attainder.