Objectify This

[trigger warning] What is this?

Who defends women in the Department of Defense? Not Republican senators, apparently.

When Al Franken brought forward legislation to combat the horrifically hostile and sexually abusive environment found in the Department of Defense and amongst  its contractors on October 6th, a block of thirty white men rose up in opposition.

It’s worthy of note that “two-thirds of female service members experience unwanted, uninvited sexual behavior in the military,” according to Terri Spahr Nelson’s book For Love of Country: Confronting Rape and Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military, discussed further in this post, Jane Doe.

While women in the military are often college-aged, there is a completely separate standard of sexual respect in colleges. This legal distinction between the sexual rights of young women working for the Department of Defense and young women who can afford to pay for schooling implies a class-based valuation of human dignity.

The human rights of women in college are guaranteed by the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act, as Title IX is now officially called. While only enforceable on college campuses, Title IX requires

“immediate and appropriate steps to investigate or otherwise determine what occurred and take prompt and effective steps reasonably calculated to end any harassment, eliminate a hostile environment if one has been created, and prevent harassment from occurring again regardless of whether the student who has been harassed complains.”

Furthermore, some women have  Kafkaesque, horrifically disempowering experiences at the hands of the Department of Defense in which they are denied basic human rights,  and then are denied a trial. That was the experience of Jamie Leigh Jones, which Franken cited in his case for the amendment:

Luckily, the amendment did pass, and Al Franken will always have Jon Stewart on his side.

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It’s interesting that social class has taken such a back seat in these discussions. If this vote is indeed about social class, that would explain Stewart’s point that these same senators would like to protect wealthy Halliburton’s rights to contract privately with its workers while vociferously interfering with Acorn’s rights to counsel low-income people (okay, posing as prostitutes) about how to do their taxes.

Here’s one Republican senator explaining his position in a hallway interview with The Crooked Dope‘s sharp Mike Stark:

Stark asks if Senator Thad Cochran (R.–Miss) would let anyone sign themselves into slavery. That is essentially the question: if being an employee makes a person subordinate in terms of human dignity. I hope that the U.S. will soon open its eyes to its own class warfare. It so often seems like the ghost of McCarthyism still lingers in our society, because that legacy of union-busting, that resistance to workers’ rights, would never be tolerated in many other developed and developing countries.

The Huffington Post reports that

“North Carolina GOP Sen. Richard Burr’s spokesman David Ward sends in this statement: “Senator Burr believes violence against women is despicable and intolerable, and those who have committed or abetted such heinous crimes should be subjected to the full weight of the law. Unfortunately, the Franken amendment would not do anything to protect women from violence or to punish criminals. If it had, Senator Burr would certainly have voted for the amendment. Instead, rather than protect women from rape, the Franken amendment prohibits contractors who have employment arbitration agreements with their employees from being paid for the work they have done for the military. In fact, the Obama Defense

Jamie Leigh Jones

Department opposed the amendment. As current federal law states and the courts have already upheld in the Jones case, arbitration agreements are non-binding when it comes to criminal acts, like rape. Unfortunately, the Franken amendment was a cynical attempt by the trial lawyers to eliminate arbitration agreements, which limit their fees, behind the guise of protecting women.”

This makes it sound like the lawyers are to blame, when in fact anyone who’s grown up believing they have certain unalienable rights is not going to enjoy being gang-raped and locked in a shipping container. Most people would be pretty ready for a lawyer after that.

The offering of lawyers’ financial motivation to seek a change in this government contract is a handy attempt at deflection. But it can’t hide the truth: Halliburton and other government contractors make fortunes  at the expense of the human rights of some of the women who work for them. They’re the ones with a real financial motive not to allow changes to those contracts: they’re going to have to pay those women’s legal fees and a hefty settlement.

Hat tip to Marissa C-M for the story. For more, check out Jezebel and Feministing on the issue. Photo at top: Sergeant Kornelia Rachwal gives water to a Pakistani girl as they are airlifted to Islamabad. Photo by Mike Buytas.