With Liberty And Justice For SOME? Cynic's View Re Palin & Rape Test Kits

[Vogon_Glory]

The late liberal columnist Molly Ivins used to describe Texas as the national laboratory for bad ideas. Under right-wing Republican control of the Texas legislature and the Texas Governor’s mansion, Texas is indeed one of the venues where the far right rolls out its ideas for making the USA a poorer, more unjust, unequal country than the America in which most of us were born in. However, as the right-wing tide has surged higher in state legislature across the country, it is becoming more and more apparent that a lot of the bad ideas are coming forth from other legislatures as well as city and county governments.

We’ve certainly seen a lot of bad ideas make their roll-outs at state and local levels. Most of the proposals to provide school vouchers for those parents who would like to shave some bucks off their school taxes but not cover the cost of tuition and fees for less-advantaged families have come at state level. The so-called “vote fraud prevention” legislation has also been state-level proposals. The anti-abortion movement has been famous for rolling its proposals in different states, seeing if they can then pass into law, and then survive subsequent court challenges.

Seeing such legislative patterns occurring among different segments of the political coalition that makes up the so-called “conservative movement,” it’s not too difficult to conclude that moving new ideas (bad and even worse) forward on a state-by-state or city by city basis is an established right-wing tactic.

Recently, evidence has turned up showing that the Wasilla Police Department had initiated a proposal to make rape victims (or their health insurers) pay the police for having “rape kits” administered to them after sexual assault. This was while Mayor Sarah Palin was in office; her signature was on the budget document.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-alperinsheriff/sarah-palin-instituted-ra_b_125833.html


I can’t help but wonder if Mayor Palin’s decision to force rape victims to pay for rape kits is actually a ploy for a new right-wing idea—forcing crime victims to pay for the prosecution of the criminals who victimized them. Today rape victims are forced to pay for rape test kits in small towns like Wasilla where the city government is firmly under republican control. Tomorrow some small-time politico will implement charging burglary victims for the police to make fingerprints or to take lists of stolen property or to make impressions of the pry-marks used to break into their homes or businesses. The day after that, some right-winger will bully his fellow Republicans into forcing through legislation requiring survivors of criminal assaults or murder victims’ estates to pay for the ballistics and fingerprint tests that would put their assailants away.

Doctrinaire “anti-gummint” ideologues might think this is a nifty way to cut the cost of law enforcement. Many middle-class readers might think this is no big deal because they could afford to pay (At least so long as their insurer or HMO doesn’t find a way to weasel out of paying the admitting hospital or clinic). Ivory-tower theoreticians might think that public outrage will always be high enough that crime victims will usually find some way to scrape up the processing fees some way, some how.

The trouble is that the world operates on a very different basis. Most street crime is committed in poorer, less-advantaged neighborhoods. The victims, like the criminals, are also poor and have enough trouble financing their daily lives without paying extra to prosecute their assailants. A lot of those assailants will go scot-free and understandably conclude that they got away with it.

The complacent middle and upper classes should worry about such developments. Emboldened criminals can just as easily step beyond the bounds of their neighborhood and strike elsewhere, as occasional robbery and assault victims in South Florida mall parking lots have found out. Gun-toting wanna-be Matt Dillons can find themselves disadvantaged should some of the smarter thugs either have their pieces out already or be set up for cross fire.

The result of such a bone-headed initiative is that crime rates will go UP not down. We can again have the sort of terror on the streets from the 1960’s and 1970’s that many of us older citizens remember only too well.

Mind you, there are some developments about law and order that I’ve liked about the last couple of decades. Watching the crime rate drop after the end of the crack epidemic was one of them. Watching more of the career criminals get put away is another one of them. New DNA science and forensic techniques that drop the unsolved crime backlog gets more street thugs off the streets and give the survivors of cold case crimes some solace and resolution is very cool. I remember the constantly-mounting street crime of the 1970’s all too well and I don’t want those days coming back.

Fortunately, sometimes ideas are so bad even state legislators will stand up and strike them down. The Alaska state legislature subsequently squashed the idea of forcing rape victims to pay for their test kits. American citizen-voters should nevertheless stand by to squash right-wing “make the victim pay” initiatives before they ever get to their legislature or city council.

Almost all of us remember the rest of the Pledge of Allegiance after the “Under God” clause. I liked the part with the “With Liberty and Justice for All.” I think it ought to stay as local, state, and national policy.