Connect with us

It’s Not Rape If Your Wife Is ‘Wearing A Nightie’ Says GOP Candidate For Congress

Published

on

var addthis_config = {“data_track_addressbar”:true};

A Republican candidate for the U.S. Congress is under fire today after a video surfaced showing him opposing a bill that to make it illegal for a person to rape their spouse. It’s not just that Virginia state Senator Richard H. “Dick” Black was against the bill, but — just like Todd Akin — it’s his comments that have many up in arms.

“I do not know,” Black said in an ad made from a 2002 Virginia House debate, “how on earth you could validly get a conviction of a husband-wife rape when they’re living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie, and so forth…”

Citing state police statistics, the ad at the end notes that between 2002 and 2010, “there have been more than 800 reported victims of spousal rape in Virginia.”

Black, who is 69, despite the video (below), won his 2011 election for the Virginia Senate, having served previously in the Virginia House of Delegates.

Now, just two years after taking office, Sen. Black wants to become a U.S. Congressman. And given Virginia’s recent history of electing anti-gay, anti-women Republican politicians like Governor Bob McDonnell (Gov. Ultrasound, as Rachel Maddow called him) and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, Black may have a good chance of going to Washington.

In fact, here’s Black with Ken Cuccinelli:

(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = “//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1”; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));

Post by Dick Black for State Senate.

 

Noting that Black “commands substantial support among the conservative grassroots,” Mother Jones reports today that he “has referred to emergency contraception, which does not cause abortions, as ‘baby pesticide.‘ Black also fought to block a statue of Abraham Lincoln at a former Confederate site in Richmond. He wasn’t sure, he explained at the time, that statues of Lincoln belonged in Virginia. He has argued that abortion is a worse evil than slavery. And once, to demonstrate why libraries should block pornography on their computers, Black invited a TV reporter to film him using a library terminal to watch violent rape porn.”

A former military prosecutor, Black “spoke frequently to media outlets about sexual assault in the military,” Mother Jones adds, “and called military rape ‘as predictable as human nature.'”

“Think of yourself at 25,” Black told a newspaper in 1996. “Wouldn’t you love to have a group of 19-year-old girls under your control, day in, day out?”

Talk about disrespecting the honor of U.S. military forces.

Black also blamed the “counterculture revolution of the ’70s” for “the war into the classroom” which, he claims, “began this thing we’ve seen play out at Columbine” — referring to the infamous 1999 high school massacre that left 12 students and one teacher dead and another 24 injured. Black’s solution? Mother Jones writes that Black “suggest[ed] legislation requiring Virginia students to address their teachers as ‘Ma’am,’ ‘Sir,’ ‘Mr.,’ ‘Ms.,’ or ‘Mrs.'”

Of course, Black, a Loudon County Virginia Republican, is virulently anti-abortion:

For two years in a row, Black introduced legislation requiring women younger than 18 to provide a notarized note from a parent before having an abortion. To justify the bill, he said abortion was a greater evil than segregation or slavery. In 2005, according to the Richmond Times Dispatch, he promoted a bill that would have required abortion providers to tell women that a fetus being aborted 20 weeks after conception may be able to feel pain, a medically unsupported claim. Black sent senators plastic figures of fetuses with a letter asking, “Would you kill this child?” as a Senate committee prepared to vote on the bill.

But being anti-gay is definitely among Senator Black’s greatest achievements.

Sen. Black, according to Mother Jones, “was at his most virulent when targeting Virginia’s same-sex couples. He championed legislation to ban same-sex couples from adopting children, claiming that gay men and women are more prone to violence, alcoholism, and suicide.”

In 2003, Black tried to pass legislation preventing same-sex couples to apply for low-interest home loans from the Virginia Housing and Development Authority. The current policy, he explained, “subsidize[s] sodomy and adultery.” Black even, in 2005, urged his constituents to picket a local high school that had staged a student’s one-act play about a gay high school football player. Portraying same-sex relationships in “a cute or favorable light,” he contended,put children at risk of contracting HIV. “If I’m the last person on the face of this Earth to vote against legalizing sodomy,” Black once said, “I’ll do it.”

We’ll take him at his word. So should Virginia voters.

//www.youtube.com/embed/lvRb4NtrRVQ

Image via Frank Black’s Facebook page

Hat tip: The Raw Story

Related Topics:
Continue Reading
Click to comment
 
 

Enjoy this piece?

… then let us make a small request. The New Civil Rights Movement depends on readers like you to meet our ongoing expenses and continue producing quality progressive journalism. Three Silicon Valley giants consume 70 percent of all online advertising dollars, so we need your help to continue doing what we do.

NCRM is independent. You won’t find mainstream media bias here. From unflinching coverage of religious extremism, to spotlighting efforts to roll back our rights, NCRM continues to speak truth to power. America needs independent voices like NCRM to be sure no one is forgotten.

Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Help ensure NCRM remains independent long into the future. Support progressive journalism with a one-time contribution to NCRM, or click here to become a subscriber. Thank you. Click here to donate by check.

OPINION

‘Doesn’t Care if Pregnant Women Live or Die’: Alito Slammed Over Emergency Abortion Remarks

Published

2 hours ago

on

April 24, 2024

By

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case centered on the question, can the federal government require states with strict abortion bans to allow physicians to perform abortions in emergency situations, specifically when the woman’s health, but not her life, is in danger?

The 1986 federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), signed into law by Republican President Ronald Reagan, says it can. The State of Idaho on Wednesday argued it cannot.

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, The Washington Post’s Kim Bellware reported, “made a clear delineation between Idaho law and what EMTALA provides.”

“In Idaho, doctors have to shut their eyes to everything except death,” Prelogar said, according to Bellware. “Whereas under EMTALA, you’re supposed to be thinking about things like, ‘Is she about to lose her fertility? Is her uterus going to become incredibly scarred because of the bleeding? Is she about to undergo the possibility of kidney failure?’ ”

READ MORE: Gag Order Breach? Trump Targeted Cohen in Taped Interview Hours Before Contempt Hearing

Attorney Imani Gandy, an award-winning journalist and Editor-at-Large for Rewire News Group, highlighted an issue central to the case.

“The issue of medical judgment vs. good faith judgment is a huge one because different states have different standards of judgment,” she writes. “If a doctor exercises their judgment, another doctor expert witness at trial could question that. That’s a BIG problem here. That’s why doctors are afraid to provide abortions. They may have an overzealous prosecutor come behind them and disagree.”

Right-wing Justice Samuel Alito appeared to draw the most fire from legal experts, as his questioning suggested “fetal personhood” should be the law, which it is not.

“Justice Alito is trying to import fetal personhood into federal statutory law by suggesting federal law might well prohibit hospitals from providing abortions as emergency stabilizing care,” observed Constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis.

Paraphrasing Justice Alito, Kreis writes: “Alito: How can the federal government restrict what Idaho criminalizes simply because hospitals in Idaho have accepted federal funds?”

Appearing to answer that question, Georgia State University College of Law professor of law and Constitutional scholar Eric Segall wrote: “Our Constitution unequivocally allows the federal gov’t to offer the states money with conditions attached no matter how invasive b/c states can always say no. The conservative justices’ hostility to the spending power is based only on politics and values not text or history.”

Professor Segall also served up some of the strongest criticism of the right-wing justice.

READ MORE: ‘They Will Have Thugs?’: Lara Trump’s Claim RNC Will ‘Physically Handle the Ballots’ Stuns

He wrote that Justice Alito “is basically making it clear he doesn’t care if pregnant women live or die as long as the fetus lives.”

Earlier Wednesday morning Segall had issued a warning: “Trigger alert: In about 20 minutes several of the conservative justices are going to show very clearly that that they care much more about fetuses than women suffering major pregnancy complications which is their way of owning the libs which is grotesque.”

Later, predicting “Alito is going to dissent,” Segall wrote: “Alito is dripping arrogance and condescension…in a case involving life, death, and medical emergencies. He has no bottom.”

Taking a broader view of the case, NYU professor of law Melissa Murray issued a strong warning: “The EMTALA case, Moyle v. US, hasn’t received as much attention as the mifepristone case, but it is huge. Not only implicates access to emergency medical procedures (like abortion in cases of miscarriage), but the broader question of federal law supremacy.”

READ MORE: ‘Blood on Your Hands’: Tennessee Republicans OK Arming Teachers After Deadly School Shooting

 

 

 

Continue Reading

News

Gag Order Breach? Trump Targeted Cohen in Taped Interview Hours Before Contempt Hearing

Published

4 hours ago

on

April 24, 2024

By

Hours before his attorneys would mount a defense on Tuesday claiming he had not violated his gag order Donald Trump might have done just that in a 12-minute taped interview that morning, which did not air until later that day. It will be up to Judge Juan Merchan to make that decision, if prosecutors add it to their contempt request.

Prosecutors in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office told Judge Juan Merchan that the ex-president violated the gag order ten times, via posts on his Truth Social platform, and are asking he be held in contempt. While the judge has yet to rule, he did not appear moved by their arguments. At one point, Judge Merchan told Trump’s lead lawyer Todd Blanche he was “losing all credibility” with the court.

And while Judge Merchan directed defense attorneys to provide a detailed timeline surrounding Trump’s Truth Social posts to prove he had not violated the gag order, Trump in an interview with a local television station appeared to have done so.

READ MORE: ‘They Will Have Thugs?’: Lara Trump’s Claim RNC Will ‘Physically Handle the Ballots’ Stuns

The gag order bars Trump from “commenting or causing others to comment on potential witnesses in the case, prospective jurors, court staff, lawyers in the district attorney’s office and the relatives of any counsel or court staffer, as CBS News reported.

“The threat is very real,” Judge Merchan wrote when he expanded the gag order. “Admonitions are not enough, nor is reliance on self-restraint. The average observer, must now, after hearing Defendant’s recent attacks, draw the conclusion that if they become involved in these proceedings, even tangentially, they should worry not only for themselves, but for their loved ones as well. Such concerns will undoubtedly interfere with the fair administration of justice and constitutes a direct attack on the Rule of Law itself.”

Tuesday morning, Trump told ABC Philadelphia’s Action News reporter Walter Perez, “Michael Cohen is a convicted liar. He’s got no credibility whatsoever.”

He repeated that Cohen is a “convicted liar,” and insisted he “was a lawyer for many people, not just me.”

READ MORE: ‘Old and Tired and Mad’: Trump’s Demeanor in Court Detailed by Rachel Maddow

Since Cohen is a witness in Trump’s New York criminal case, Judge Merchan might decide Trump’s remarks during that interview violated the gag order, if prosecutors bring the video to his attention.

Enter attorney George Conway, who has been attending Trump’s New York trial.

Conway reposted a clip of the video, tagged Manhattan District Attorney Bragg, writing: “cc: @ManhattanDA, for your proposed order to show cause why the defendant in 𝘗𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘷. 𝘛𝘳𝘶𝘮𝘱 should not spend some quiet time in lockup.”

Trump has been criminally indicted in four separate cases and is facing a total of 88 felony charges, including 34 in this New York criminal trial for alleged falsification of business records to hide payments of “hush money” to an adult film actress and one other woman, in an alleged effort to suppress their stories and protect his 2016 presidential campaign, which experts say is election interference.

Watch the video below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Blood on Your Hands’: Tennessee Republicans OK Arming Teachers After Deadly School Shooting

Continue Reading

OPINION

‘They Will Have Thugs?’: Lara Trump’s Claim RNC Will ‘Physically Handle the Ballots’ Stuns

Published

6 hours ago

on

April 24, 2024

By

Minutes before Donald Trump addressed his MAGA crowd at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021 his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump spoke to his supporters, vowing to “take our country back” because the Trump “family didn’t get in this fight for just four years. We are in this fight to the bitter end.”

Fast forward to April, 2024.

Lara Trump is now co-chair of the Republican National Committee, after Donald Trump’s efforts to install her and his hand-picked RNC chairman, Michael Whatley. Whatley is a North Carolina Republican who served on George W. Bush’s Florida recount team for the 2000 presidential election that was decided at the U.S. Supreme Court. Years later Whatley declared, “it was really the first time that Republicans got down into the trenches and fought,” and claimed, “if we were not there, they were going to steal it.”

Now both Michael Whatley and Lara Trump are leading the RNC, and with Donald Trump as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, they are continuing the ex-president’s focus on “election integrity.”

Tuesday night Lara Trump served up some insight into what they’re planning.

READ MORE: Trump Complains He’s ‘Not Allowed to Talk’ as He Gripes Live on Camera

“We now have the ability at the RNC not just to have poll watchers, people standing in polling locations, but people who can physically handle the ballots. We want people all across this country –” she said before host Eric Bolling interrupted her.

“I want to hear this, this is really fascinating to me,” Bolling said. “You have 100,000 people who are, I think I saw paid at one point, but whatever – irrelevant, but, so they will be stationed inside polling places? I didn’t even know you can do that. Tell us about it.”

Trump replied, “there was a moratorium for about 40 years on the RNC actually training people to work in these polling locations in the tabulation centers where the mail-in ballots come in. And last year, the judge who implemented that passed away, so that was lifted, and that gives us a great ability as we head into what I assume everyone understands is the most important election of our lifetime.”

Bolling went on to ask, “Will these people, will they be allowed to physically handle the ballots as well, Lara?”

“Yup,” Trump replied. “And that means Eric that they should know and they can count how many ballots come in, and how many ballots should go out of every single polling location.”

READ MORE: ‘I’m Not Suicidal’: Kari Lake Pushes Hillary Clinton Murder Conspiracy Theory

She went on to say if anyone cheats, “we will prosecute you to the full extent of the law.”

“It is not worth it to cheat in a federal election, that is a crime my friends you do not want to commit.”

Bolling was referring to the more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers the RNC reportedly has lined up to monitor vote counting. In a joint statement the Trump campaign and the RNC called it, “the most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history.”

Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele blasted Lara Trump.

“Lara, you know why there was ‘a moratorium on the RNC for 40 years’? Because the RNC was caught cheating. The RNC was placed under a 1982 Consent decree for voter caging. Voter caging hinders an eligible voter’s ability to vote. The process involves efforts to identify and disenfranchise improperly registered voters solely on the basis of undeliverable mail. It often leads to the unwarranted purging of election rolls of otherwise eligible voters.”

“So,” Steele continued, “given the continued lies about the 2020 election and your daddy-in-law claiming if he loses in 2024 it’s because the election is rigged, you’re planning to have your people ‘physically handle the ballots’–and we’re supposed to think that’s a good idea?”

NYU professor of history Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar on fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda, and the protection of democracy, also served up strong criticism.

“What does this mean, they will have thugs to physically take the ballots to make sure they are marked for Republican candidates?” Ben-Ghiat asked. “Sounds like a perfect authoritarian election plan to me.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

READ MORE: Biden Campaign Hammers Trump Over Infamous COVID Comment

 

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © 2020 AlterNet Media.