In phonetic Hebrew, Clavim medibrim Ivrit yoter tov mimeni. Gam korim.

Then, in further correspondence, my reader wrote, “I would be interested what you think should be done in case of future Israeli captives. The one thing I don’t understand is the position of people, who were for Shalit deal, while saying that in case of future captives Israel should behave differently. Why not start this different behavior now, then? Is his blood redder than of future soldiers? And I am unfortunately 100% sure there will be future captives since the war won’t stop anytime soon.”

My initial—and lasting reaction—to the exchange for Shalit was, the price paid was too high. However, over the years, Israel has traded 13,509 prisoners for 16 soldiers. (As irrational as these one-sided prisoner exchanges are, they are preferable to the IDF’s obsession with recovering the bodies of dead soldiers, to the point of endangering living soldiers.)

However, listening to the Hamas entity (in Arabic) saying that they would take more Israelis captive to win the release of their fellow terrorists, I had a different reaction, along the following lines, which is not of course anything close to a policy statement.

You want the Palestinian prisoners? They’re yours, every single last one of them except for those who reject repatriation. We will not forcibly repatriate prisoners. But those whom we release are liable to be summarily executed should they come again to the attention of our security services. Nor in the future will we negotiate for our hostages. We should have taken Gaza apart seeking Sergeant Shalit during Operation Cast Lead, and in the future, that will be our response to such behavior. And we will do it again and again until you get tired of this nonsense.

We give you a choice. You, Hamas, can pick up the phone and recognize Israel and start dismantling your arsenal. We will lift the blockade as Egypt also recently did, and we can trade and you can get down to the business of making something of Gaza. Frankly, we would be delighted to help.

As for the West Bank, we will make the same deal. You want a Palestinian state? You’ve got it. We’ll do everything we can in our power to help you make something of it because frankly, we know what it is to be refugees. It is a simple fact that the Arab world would be delighted to see you continue to be refugees. We, on the other hand, are sick of it. But if you start a war or harbor those who do, we will annex parts of the West Bank and expel those who live there. And then who will take you in? The Jordanians did, and you gave them cause to regret it. Lebanon did, and you helped create a hideous civil war. Gaza? How many of you want to live under Hamas?

We Jews have learned to be builders. We would like you Palestinians to build, too. You need to make something of your lives. But if you want war instead, or simply to feel yourselves victims while victimizing others until it becomes another war—you can have that too. Whichever decision you make, we will honor it.

In the meantime, we’re returning some 6,000 prisoners to you between now and Passover. Figure out what to do with them and how to reintegrate them into society.

We have nothing more to say on the subject.

One of the things I realized, reading Begin’s The Revolt, is that part of the reason for the lasting Israeli Arab/Palestinian bitterness is not that there is no Arab state of Palestine, for there never was (unless you count Jordan, which is reasonable but that’s another story), but that the Jews did what they set out to do in those years of the first Aliyah. In the last years of the Mandate after World War Two, the Jews made the British give up and go away. The Arabs did not. I can’t think of any successful Arab anti-colonial movement with the possible exception of the Free Officers movement in Egypt. Certainly, they did not in Palestine: Begin writes of Arabs gathering around the detritus of Irgun and Haganah actions and thoughtfully considering the situation but doing little else. And then, having let the Israeli Jews drive out the British, the Israeli Arabs expected the other Arabs to do their fighting for them. In fact, during the War of Independence, the Arab armies encouraged Israeli Arabs to flee even from areas where there was no fighting and despite the fact that there was remarkably little Jewish pressure on them to leave. Very likely had the Arabs won the War of Independence, people like Mahmoud Abbas’ father would have returned to their pleasant homes (his was not a poor family) to hear something along the lines of, “an Arab Legion colonel lives here now.”

When I speak of lace, I am not speaking of the trim you can buy at Wal-Mart, but of fine handmade lace, whether needle or bobbin, knitted or crocheted. And when we wear such things, we often stand straighter and behave with more dignity, imbued by the virtue needed to create or to appreciate such work. We also fear a great deal because we have given these pieces hostage to the clumsy, the careless, the genuine accident and the occasional act of malice. (Some are spurred to accomplishment by envy; others to destruction.) I suppose the same could be said of a good suit, whether one has ordered it made or bought it second hand and had it altered to fit. Clothes do not make us, but they do inform how others think of us—and how we think of ourselves.

In that sense, wearing lace (or a good suit) is something that the Occupy Wall Street movement needs to do. America is in the process of looking into the abyss. The old Cold War political compact has failed completely. It began to fail in the protest movement of the Vietnam era and has now been utterly shredded by corporate greed in a time of globalization. If on the one hand, Communists were seen lurking in every attempt to make America live up to its proclaimed ideals, whether by the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, or the gay rights movement, Communism was seen as the competition. Capitalism had to have something to offer the average worker, both theoretically and materially. When Soviet communism collapsed under its lunatic military spending, as well as the drinking that people used to cope with generations of very bad memories, American-style capitalism gradually ceased to believe it had to offer anything to American workers. We are now at the point that the average American has the same political worth that the average Soviet did during the Brezhnev era—and we are approaching the point that unemployed Americans will have far less human worth.

The true numbers will not be available until the 2020 census, but there is probably no one who does not know someone destitute. And when people have been destitute long enough, they die. They die by their own hand, or provoking someone else’s; they die of hunger and cold and untreated illness, of abusing drugs or alcohol. And there will be political violence: if there is one common theme in human history, it is when the gap between rich and poor is wide enough, the poor figure that if they’ve got nothing, they’ve got nothing to lose. Read Isaiah—after a lifetime of avoiding the Bible, I’m starting to read it—and you see that he is overwhelmingly concerned with what we call social justice. Sin as imagined impurity is really not on Isaiah’s radar screen.

America’s only hope is an organized, serious, cohesive third party that can target vulnerable seats, win them, and form a bloc of votes that the Democratic Party must take seriously. The time for protest movements that were about expressing yourself is long past—was long past during the run-up to the Iraq War. Four and a half years ago, I spoke atTulane University on (amongst other things) the need for a serious protest movement; the need is still there. The text of that speech does not reflect the fact that I was called a Nazi for saying that protest organizers should banish from their ranks those who did not dress and speak like serious adult citizens. (Sure, you can protest—but not with us. Get your own permits.)

The few photos I’ve seen of Occupy Wall Street protestors are disheartening depictions of self-indulgence. Self-expression is even more worthless as a form of political protest—which is to say, political participation leading to redress of grievances—than it was 10 years ago. Self-expression materially enabled the Bush Administration to go to war in Iraq, killed feminism, made the struggle for gay rights needlessly hard, and destroyed the armed wing of the civil rights movement. (Yes, leftist America, the civil rights movement survived because black men and a few black women armed themselves, and no, I’m not talking about the Blank Panthers—who were little better than criminals–I’m talking about the Deacons for Defense and Justice.)

We need people speaking with each other in words of meaning and dignity and reason about creating an economy that works for the bottom 99% of us, particularly the bottom 20%. And if dressing better than Americans are accustomed to—and by better, I do not mean more expensively, because there’s plenty of expensive shoddy clothing out there, but with more formality and dignity—helps us speak with and listen to each other as serious citizens, then we need to do so. You don’t have to make or wear lace to do so, any more than you have to wear a suit. But dressing like a mature, polished adult—rather than a slob or sexual meat—does help. And lace is actually an accurate symbol of civilization and citizenship: something made with infinite skill and patience, usually from material no more rare than silk (and usually linen, cotton or wool), often fragile, which until now has endured because of the care with which it has been treated. In that sense, lace is the antithesis of how we normally dress, and particularly adorn ourselves, which often degrades us.

The alternative to speaking and listening to each other as serious citizens trying to create a workable future is political violence, most likely serious violence. And it is always those with the least political power—on both sides of the divide—who suffer the most. It would be tragic for America and the world if yet another movement for absolutely necessary political, economic and social change in America disregarded the need for mature, dignified presentation to collapse into the indulgence of self-expression.

In November 2010, I began knitting my first Shetland lace shawl. This involved knitting some 125,000 stitches on a pair of 3 mm needles with 1975 meters (1.22 miles) of yarn that weighed 150 grams. The first step in this project was to knit 84 points of edging, each 360 stitches for a total of 30,240 stitches. After the first ten points, when I understood the pattern, I began saying, I hate this! When I finished the points, I took a deep breath and said, 95,000 stitches to go! I hate doing this! But I persevered, and as the beautiful deep border of the shawl began to emerge from my needles, I stopped hating it. Knitting the beautiful center onto the top of the lower border and up the border stitches as I went—the traditional construction is to sew each side of the center to the border; no thank you—was addictive and I was torn between wanting the project to end so I could wear my shawl and never wanting the project to end for the sheer satisfaction of making something so delicate and complex with nothing more than two pointed sticks and some pretty string. When I blocked my shawl on 2 July, which is to say, washed it, wetting it thoroughly, then pinned it out to dry under tension, I saw each and every tiny error, everything I could have done better and will do better the next time, because knitting this shawl has been one of the most challenging and worthwhile things I have ever done. Wearing it in public—it feels like feathers—is very strange. It feels as ostentatious as wearing Buccellatti on the bus. Except that I made this, I did not buy it.

Pattern: Granny Cheyne’s Shetland Shawl      The true color

When I began knitting in the summer of 2006, I had shopped at consignment and thrift stores for years as a statement of principle. I wanted to buy American, which was increasingly difficult to do, so I did the next best thing and bought second-hand. Since I had taught myself to knit a decade before, making my own clothing was a logical next step. I was soon bitten by the lace bug and in the summer of 2009, I began deliberately working my way towards an exceedingly complex pattern, Sharon Miller’s Princess Shawl; it will be the next pattern I buy.

In short, I have had the satisfaction of doing what I set out to do five years ago this summer, just as I had the satisfaction of writing Women in the Line of Fire and my first novel (I am now at work on my third). Just as I became a writer, I have become a craftswoman: if it can be knit, I can make it. And in the process, I have learned a great deal about civilization, which is not the hot air being spouted in many a university, whether it is about art or literature in the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, war in the Departments of Military Science and Aerospace Studies, or a modern economy in the Departments of Economics and the Schools of Businesses. What I have learned about civilization is the infinite capacity for taking pains, as well as the sense of beauty, required to learn a skill, master it, and soon, I think, begin adding to it with my own patterns. (I have one in mind.) And not once, amongst these satisfactions, have I hurt my country or my culture, despite the fact that the surest way for Americans to make money has been, for decades now, to hurt our country and our culture.

The bitterness of that knowledge haunts and stalks America now and there is no easy, short-term cure for it. The only cure for the harm itself is for each of us who can—I am not speaking of those trying to cobble together a living on three part-time jobs, or barely surviving on unemployment or disability or Social Security—to master a craft.

Obviously, it is both emotionally and intellectually important for a human being to be able to look at something beautiful and useful and think, I made that! But mastering the ability to make something that is both beautiful and useful is also moral and economic statement. That statement says to the marketers and manufacturers of the mountains of cheap, imported goods that choke us: What do I need you for? Most importantly, mastering a craft says to our ruling—I cannot even call it governing—imperium: I create.

I invite you to take a break from all the garbage, especially the material and intellectual garbage, that now chokes America for about the next year and a half—I pick that time frame only because I plan to finish the Princess Shawl by about December 2012—and with that time and money, commit yourself to making something useful and beautiful for yourself or for someone you love. If, at the end of that year, you wish to reject craftsmanship for garbage, the garbage will be waiting for you.

And of course, I’m dealing with anti-Semites when I say, there needs to be an independent state of Palestine on the West Bank now, formally, de jure as well as de facto (Because there is a de facto Palestinian state on the West Bank and Israel, the US and Russia are all in cahoots to keep the place from being taken over by Hamas.) and I get called a racist and all kinds of other names. This kind of non-sequiteur is simply not an alternate, but nevertheless rational and realistic view of the world.

I have often wondered if I called for Israel to cleanse Israel of all Arabs and the West Bank of all Palestinians, I would be called a friend of Palestine and pan-Arab nationalism. Probably. Such an evil policy would justifiably enrage the Arab world and while I’m not certain Arab governments would do anything about it, they might as well, perhaps leading to Israel being obliterated and that would be ugly.

Thanks, I prefer to be called a racist because I believe that Palestinians should have an independent state of Palestine, de jure as well as de facto, on the West Bank, and I wish them all good things, and hope and pray that they build a state that is a marvel. Since that wish is apparently the definition of racism here in Seattle, Yup, that’s me, you got the right one, Baby.

Obviously, this is Orwellian language.

Anti-Semitism is for losers. Israel and the Palestinians are what you rant about because you dare not face the big issues. And there are a lot of big issues in America today. In my previous post, I referenced an insurgency of absolutely horrifying cruelty south of the border that is spelling over into America. I dare you, I double dog dare you to click the link I posted there and read the essay, Extreme Barbarism, a Death Cult, and Holy Warriors in Mexico: Societal Warfare South of the Border? Fair warning: some of the writing there is extremely graphic and disturbing. I have previously written here about immigration, about the economy, about the political psychology of obesity and psychoactive drugs, the political economics of craftsmanship, American defense contracting, etc. (I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like because life gets in the way. Mine has been eventful.) These are huge issues, concerning as they do the current reality and future of a nation that is fundamentally coming apart: economically, politically, intellectually.

There are three nations on the planet that ought to be friends, that have something really good and beautiful and wonderful to give the world. America, which if it chose to could turn itself around overnight, Israel, which has its problems with the religious but is in far better shape than America, and Russia, which is slowly, messily, and awkwardly being dragged into a place that people can live in. I am also thinking of Japan, with its tradition of tremendously skilled craftsmanship, something the world desperately needs more of.

Anti-Semitism is what you spew when you have nothing, absolutely nothing, worthwhile to say about the problems facing your country or your world: if Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, Arabs would still be Arabs—desperately in need of 50 years’ creativity—while Israel would still have been Israel, tiny, poor, embattled, and one of the world’s high tech and biomed powerhouses. In that sense, anti-Semitism has always been for losers: Arab, Russian, German, American.

It took me a long time to calm down enough to write this.

I was angrier than I have been in years when I heard the President lecturing Prime Minister Netanyahu about Israel’s borders. All in all, fan though I am not of the President, even though I voted for him and would do so again providing his opponent was John McCain, I tend to think better of him than I do the Prime Minister. However, it is a fact that America has lost control over its southern border at the same time that a war of terrifying cruelty is raging inside Mexico and slowly spilling into America. The sheer arrogance of a President who appears to be blithely and blindly unconcerned with this reality, lecturing a Prime Minister who lives under the ghosts and reality of genocide made my skin crawl.

But President Obama was nevertheless right.

And not in the way you think. Every rational Israeli favors a two-state solution and knows that the 1967 borders, with land swaps, are going to form the basic outline of a sovereign Palestinian state on the West Bank. After all, geography has not changed. Jerusalem is not on the table: it is the Israeli capitol. Nor is any Palestinian right of return: Israelis are simply not going to commit national suicide. Every sovereign state has the right to decide who is a citizen, and if it seems a bit odd that Jews should have the right of return to a nation where neither they nor their ancestors have lived, is no odder and certainly far less evil than Jews being considered at best guests in the nations where they had lived for generations, even millennia. Including much of the Arab world. Israel is out of most of the West Bank: the occupation is de facto over and Israel and America are pretty much paying the Palestinian Authority.

Rather, a two-state solution is about what type of state Israel wishes to be. And even more importantly what type of state Palestine wishes to be.

For Israel to say: OK, Palestinian Authority, here is your state; here are the borders we are going to accept and while there is no right of return, we will pay reverse sal klitah benefits to Israeli Arabs who wish to leave, is to say something very important. Which is that Israel is a great power and great powers do not permit their borders to be defined by Bible stories and their futures defined by the fanatics who believe in them. Choosing this future would mean the beginning of Israeli maturity as a Jewish social welfare state that is also a vibrant liberal democracy. It would mean the rejection of a theocracy of cruelty and obscuratanism (as all theocracies are) and of the current status quo, a strange combination of American pop culture, Middle Eastern self-indulgence, religious hyperorthodoxy and militarism.

For Palestine to say, OK, We’ll take this two-state solution means being a dependency of Israel. Which in turn requires accepting from Israel what the Arab world could have given them in 5 minutes any time up to 1967—and didn’t. The 1947 UN resolution establishing Israel also established Palestine, which Israel accepted, including the partition of Jerusalem. Accepting the reality of a Palestinian state means answering the question: How do we wish to live? Do we want to be Hamas? Or do we want to try to do what our Israeli Jewish cousins have done: build a small, powerful state that offers good things to the world? Choosing the latter, of course, means a holy alliance with Israel because it’s gonna be Israel—especially Israel—Russia and America defending Palestine against the Arab crazies. The Palestinian people have a choice: Hamas, or building a state that all people of good will wish to succeed. If he chooses the good of his people, Mahmoud Abbas could pay with his life. As did King Abdullah. As did Anwar Sadat. As did Yitzhak Rabin. And he knows it.

While the rest of the Arab world does not want a Palestinian state because the humiliation of the Palestinian people will no longer serve as a pressure relief valve. No matter who controls the Western Wall, the Arab world will still be the Arab world, trapped in religious obscuratanism and crippled by misogyny. Rather like the Haredi community in Israel. Which is the way they both want it.

It is my fervent hope that Israel unilaterally recognizes a Palestinian state now, preemptively and embraces a future of modernity—and that the Palestinians do the same.

Dear President Abbas:

Next week, we will hold Yom HaZikaron, Memorial Day for our Dead, of all these wars, and the day after, we will celebrate Yom HaAtzmanut, Independence Day. You call it the Nakba, the Catastrophe. There is no need to hash out all the rights and wrongs. Suffice it to say, we Jewish Palestinians accepted partition, and even partition of Jerusalem. You Muslim Palestinians did not. And then you waited for your Arab brethren to do your fighting for you. Had they won, the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Iraqis and the Lebanese would all have taken their share. We fought for what we considered ours, and thus the modern state of Israel was born.

But we are cousins. After a series of disastrous wars with the Romans, many Jews converted. Perhaps your family was amongst them. A few remained and remained Jewish, while others fled or were dispersed aboard by the Romans, and yet also did not convert.

We are never going to agree about the borders of Israel and Palestine. As a modern great power, most Israelis are not prepared to base their future on Bible stories. Therefore, Israel has decided to resolve the Palestinian issue once and for all, the more so given that we have already handed over Gaza to you and we are out of most of the West Bank settlements.

Accordingly, Israel unilaterally recognizes the West Bank as the Independent State of Palestine, a sovereign nation. No Palestinian, from anywhere in the world, or their descendents, has the right of return to Israel, no more than the hundreds of thousands of Jews fled and expelled from the Arab world, do to Syria, or Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Ethiopia… The list is long. Or for that matter to Europe. If the Independent State of Palestine wishes to grant those Palestinians and their descendents a right of return, of course it may do so. Nor may you have a single centimeter of Jerusalem. It is the Jewish capital and Palestinians are not Jews any more than Mecca and Medina are sacred to us. But more than the fact that Jerusalem is ours, with all its history of heartbreak and slaughter, madness and horror, you are mad to want the dust of its streets. Build your own capitol. Found it on your hopes and your dreams.

Any Israeli Arab who wishes to leave Israel to live in and help build Palestine, we will pay a fee to, equivalent to the absorption basket we pay to new immigrants, while the Jewish Agency will buy their homes and other property at fair market value. Or they may sell to any Israeli citizen they wish at a mutually agreeable price. By that standard, every Israeli Arab who stays, we will understand as staying because they wish to remain Israeli citizens, rather than merely to enjoy the social services. They will have all the rights, responsibilities and privileges of any Israeli citizen, including national service and military service. Accordingly, those who break faith with their country of Israel will be regarded as traitors, not as a conquered native population with loyalties of their own. In the past, the Israeli security services have had real sympathy for those Palestinians who fought as soldiers—not mere butchers and murders, but irregular soldiers—for their homeland. After today, that will change. As for the relationship between Israel and Palestine, that depends upon you. Hot war, cold peace, cold war, warm peace, you may have whatever you choose.

Because today, you have a country. We give it to you for this simple reason. Everyone should have a home. We needed a home and for it, we took part of our historic homeland. Yours and ours. Your fellow Arabs took the vast majority of what should have been Palestine, then washed their hands of you. Well, we’re tired of living like this. And we’re tired of seeing you live like this. It’s been nothing but a curse for both of us, so we’re ending it.

I don’t know what country you will build. I do not know if you will take in any Palestinian, anywhere in the world, who can prove ethnicity. I do not know if people of good will all over the world will help you. I do not know if your Palestine will be a country people want to visit, even live in. I do not know if you will create an astonishingly rich and vibrant country even while struggling to live.

There are many other things I do not know about what kind of country you will build. I don’t know if you know the answers, just now. We all do know that the history of the Arab world since Israeli Independence in 1948 has been one long, dreadful, boring story of oppression and ignorance, murder and torture, and the existence of Israel was used to justify this behavior, even within families. Well, after today, the Arab world will still be the Arab world. But you will have a country. And it will be the kind of country you want it to be: it can be like Denmark or North Korea or anything in between. Your choice.

The only thing I know about your new country is that all Israelis of any decency wish you well.

Happy Independence Day.

Sincerely,

Erin Solaro

Prime Minister of Israel (not that I am)

Dear President Abbas:

Today is Yom HaZikaron, Memorial Day for our Dead, of the Holocaust and all these wars. Tomorrow will be Yom HaAtzmanut, Independence Day for us. You call it the Nakba, the Catastrophe. There is no need to hash out all the rights and wrongs. Suffice it to say, we Jewish Palestinians accepted partition, and even partition of Jerusalem. You Muslim Palestinians did not. And then you waited for your Arab brethren to do your fighting for you. Had they won, the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Iraqis and the Lebanese would all have taken their share. We fought for what we considered ours, and thus the modern state of Israel was born.

But we are cousins. After a series of disastrous wars with the Romans, many Jews converted. Perhaps your family was amongst them. A few remained and remained Jewish, while others fled or were dispersed aboard by the Romans, and yet also did not convert.

We are never going to agree about the borders of Israel and Palestine. As a modern great power, most Israelis are not prepared to base their future on Bible stories. Therefore, Israel has decided to resolve the Palestinian issue once and for all, the more so given that we have already handed over Gaza to you and we are out of most of the West Bank settlements.

Accordingly, Israel unilaterally recognizes the West Bank as the Independent State of Palestine, a sovereign nation. No Palestinian, from anywhere in the world, or their descendents, has the right of return to Israel, no more than the hundreds of thousands of Jews fled and expelled from the Arab world, do to Syria, or Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Ethiopia… The list is long. Or for that matter to Europe. If the Independent State of Palestine wishes to grant those Palestinians and their descendents a right of return, of course it may do so. Nor may you have a single centimeter of Jerusalem. It is the Jewish capital and Palestinians are not Jews any more than Mecca and Medina are sacred to us. But more than the fact that Jerusalem is ours, with all its history of heartbreak and slaughter, madness and horror, you are mad to want the dust of its streets. Build your own capitol. Found it on your hopes and your dreams.

Any Israeli Arab who wishes to leave Israel to live in and help build Palestine, we will pay a fee to, equivalent to the absorption basket we pay to new immigrants, while the Jewish Agency will buy their homes and other property at fair market value. Or they may sell to any Israeli citizen they wish at a mutually agreeable price. By that standard, every Israeli Arab who stays, we will understand as staying because they wish to remain Israeli citizens, rather than merely to enjoy the social services. They will have all the rights, responsibilities and privileges of any Israeli citizen, including national service and military service. Accordingly, those who break faith with their country of Israel will be regarded as traitors, not as a conquered native population with loyalties of their own. In the past, the Israeli security services have had real sympathy for those Palestinians who fought as soldiers—not mere butchers and murders, but irregular soldiers—for their homeland. After today, that will change. As for the relationship between Israel and Palestine, that depends upon you. Hot war, cold peace, cold war, warm peace, you may have whatever you choose.

Because today, you have a country. We give it to you for this simple reason. Everyone should have a home. We needed a home and for it, we took part of our historic homeland. Yours and ours. Your fellow Arabs took the vast majority of what should have been Palestine, then washed their hands of you. Well, we’re tired of living like this. And we’re tired of seeing you live like this. It’s been nothing but a curse for both of us, so we’re ending it.

I don’t know what country you will build. I do not know if you will take in any Palestinian, anywhere in the world, who can prove ethnicity. I do not know if people of good will all over the world will help you. I do not know if your Palestine will be a country people want to visit, even live in. I do not know if you will create an astonishingly rich and vibrant country even while struggling to live.

There are many other things I do not know about what kind of country you will build. I don’t know if you know the answers, just now. We all do know that the history of the Arab world since Israeli Independence in 1948 has been one long, dreadful, boring story of oppression and ignorance, murder and torture, and the existence of Israel was used to justify this behavior, even within families. Well, after today, the Arab world will still be the Arab world. But you will have a country. And it will be the kind of country you want it to be: it can be like Denmark or North Korea or anything in between. Your choice.

The only thing I know about your new country is that all Israelis of any decency wish you well.

Happy Independence Day.

Sincerely,

Erin Solaro

Prime Minister of Israel (not that I am)

By this, I do not mean that I do not believe in the equal human and civic worth of women—irrespective of cultural and religious bias.  Nor do I think work, real work, does not remain to be done towards that end:  by men but also by women. 

Rather, I refuse to be associated with a movement that has become so disfigured by cowardice that it has become a putrefying corpse of its former self.  No woman who even briefly reflects upon this fact can call herself a feminist without admitting her own cowardice.  And I am not a coward, which means I do not glorify my own fear, or the fears of others. 

Politically organized modern American feminism has been conspicuous by its absence from the two great issues facing America today.

The first is the economic crisis engulfing America, an economic crisis that has been developing since 1975, the last year we ran a trade surplus.  This has been exacerbated by the tens of millions of aliens, legal and illegal, imported by the corporations who own our political process, to further enrich themselves by lowering wages for native-born Americans—and exploiting immigrants.  This is an economic crisis that will probably turn violent as millions of people run out of money on which to live.  Americans—and I have never believed in moral equivalence—now have the same kind of political worth—and are worth scarcely more as human beings—that Soviets did under the Brezhnev years. 

The second is the issue of Islamism and sharia.  I do not know of a place in the world where canon law—Christian church law—is the law of the land.  Halakha—Jewish religious law—is not the law of Israel.  But there are Muslims in America who want sharia to supersede civil law, and this is particularly a matter of women’s liberty and freedom.  Wearing the burka, the Chador, and the niquab is not about a few agoraphobic women attending to the necessities of life without too many panic attacks, it is about men to imprisoning women.  (Nor is it about modesty.  It’s really not hard to dress attractively without looking like meat.  Indeed, I would argue that dressing attractively requires not dressing like meat.)  And, not coincidentally, to hide any damage they may have done to their faces or their bodies.  (When veiling is adapted by non-Muslim men, it serves the same function.)  The headscarf, like the Orthodox Jewish insistence on women covering their hair, sexualizes women and makes women responsible for men.  (But Halakha is not the law of Israel.)  And the bodies of Muslim women are the ground on which Muslim men, unable and unwilling to create functional societies that work for most people in them, assert their “superiority.”

Modern American political feminism has refused to confront these two crisis because it has always founded on the issue, and philosophy, of pacifism.  Pacifism has been how modern political feminism confronted the issue of equality in the 1960s and 70s, which were a confluence of three major events.  First, modern medicine had given women about a generation—the first in human history—of relief from their deaths in huge, horrendous numbers in childbirth.  (Oral contraception then gave women a reliable way to control their own fertility.)  In America, these numbers outweighed male deaths in combat until about 1940, and the developed world still do:  a fact of biology and a vulnerability of women to men that was in no way offset by men’s vulnerability women and that has shaped how we think about the male and the female bodies, the human and civic worth of men and women, and sex itself.  Second, the Cold War was entering its seemingly endless phase, and the Soviet leadership did not inspire confidence in its intellectual vigor or flexibility.  Leonid I. Brezhnev’s brain was dead for years before his heart got the word.  Konstantinople Cheerios—err, Konstantine U. Chernenko—anyone?  The only one with a brain was Yuri V. Andropov (his brain functioned pretty well for about a year after the death of his body) and he had been ambassador to Hungary in 1956 (during the Hungarian Uprising) before he became Chairman of the KGB in 1967.  These people had nuclear weapons. 

And pointed at them were the nuclear weapons of our own leadership, which had had a very public nervous, moral and intellectual breakdown in Southeast Asia, a war in Vietnam that martyred Laos and incinerated Cambodia.  More to the point, it seemed that Ronald Reagan was bent upon repeating the same insanity in Latin America, possibly with a draft—and you draft to replace combat casualties.  Rather than do the hard work of articulating a rational and humane foreign policy—a foreign policy that accepted that women, like men, might be called upon to bear arms and fight and die, in exchange for creating a republic that made our human equality a point of law—including challenging the draft as anything other than an unconstitutional measure to be employed only in extraordinary circumstances, feminism embraced pacifism.  Equality became about “Me” rather than about equality itself—and the ultimate point of feminism:  to live in, and contribute to, the world as a human being and a citizen.  And yes, when need be, defend the civilization one enjoyed and to which one contributed.

And so pacifism and cowardice have cost feminism, as an organized political movement, its moral creditability.  Indeed, you can even date feminism’s moral and political suicide:  12 September, 2001, when NOW, which had quite rightly advocated expanded military roles for women, refused to call women to the colors to fight, amongst others, the Taliban.  The only reason so many of us kept calling ourselves feminists was because we had nowhere else to go:  we knew that traditional marriage, for example, has never been good for women, had never been a fair trade.  Other women—including perhaps many police officers and servicewomen—who would have been delighted to call themselves feminist, had the movement had the image of proud, self-respecting dignity and of the moral and intellectual courage that so often enable physical courage, left a long time ago.

But with catastrophe looming over America, a economic catastrophe brought down upon us by, frankly, a very few wealthy men, and an America increasingly imperiled by an undeclared, violent war on its Southern border and Islamicist colonization, women such as myself who believe in the entire civic and human equality of women can no longer call ourselves feminists.  Like any prudent man, while we might help those unable to help themselves, even attempt to rescue them, we will not ally ourselves with a movement that refuses to defend itself or other women—human beings and citizens, with hopes and dreams and responsibilities as well as rights and fears and concerns.

I do not know what comes next for women in the effort, barely a century and a half old—approximately a month in the span of recorded human history—to create a polity in which women’s lives and dignity have the same human and civic worth as men’s.  Particularly as America becomes a more impoverished and violent place. 

That issue is part of my writing, but it is not all of my writing.  And so I will simply say, I am no longer a feminist because I am not a coward.  Perhaps there are more women like me.

I will be increasingly writing about American-Israeli-Russian-Palestinian relations.  And a few other odds and ends, such as lace knitting.

Americans are expendable to their government and the corporations.  That is the simple meaning of refusing to extend unemployment benefits to Americans, on the theory that unemployment benefits keep people from working and lead to inflation.  Never mind that there is no work to be had—having exported its manufacturing base, America has not run a trade surplus since 1975, while importing legal and illegal immigrants by the tens of millions to do the work that remains—Americans are supposed to be grateful for whatever the corporations give us.  

And for their own reasons (I nearly typed treasons; a Freudian slip if there ever was one), both the US government and the corporations that own it want Americans destitute, which millions are.  Some are starving.  Some are committing suicide.  Back in June, the New York Times published an article noting a sharp rise in suicides amongst the middle aged.  The author wrote that the rise was probably due to increased access to guns and drugs, but problems related to jobs and finances are also important factors.  You think?  Today the Times profiled Terry Sadler who, down to $44 and a quarter tank of gas, is contemplating suicide.

Sadler is a woman who contributed to America in two ways:  she had a child and worked at honest, boring, unfulfilling blue-collar labor.  When she was laid off,  she moved to a trailer; exhausted what she could save from a job that didn’t even pay $15/hour, the help of family friends, and charities after her unemployment has run out; and she’s now applying for jobs that pay less than her unemployment.  She did not earn a $100 million bonus for selling credit default swaps and running up the price of gas and for it, as Andrew Hall of Citigroup did, or be paid an $8.5 million book advance for being the worst-ever chairman of the Federal Reserve, as Alan Greenspan was.  

They are fine.  She is destitute, expecting to be out on the streets with her dog, and no money.  

She won’t last long.  

And there are millions who are either like her or going to be like her very shortly, whether, like Ms. Sadler, they had their children when they were children themselves, and dropped out of high school to raise them, or have Ph. Ds.  Because they have exhausted their resources:  the charities, the family and friends, some of whom are in little better shape themselves, their savings.  They’ve sold every gram of gold and silver. They’ve sold their furniture, their appliances, they go without heat and good groceries.  They’ve sold even their weapons, perhaps keeping a final piece because fast is better than slow:  a bullet in the head or chest is better than starvation or even exposure.

There are going to be a lot of deaths this winter.  By this time next year, expect there to be blood in the streets.

And it suits both the government and the corporations that own the government for millions of Americans to be reduced to this.

The simple fact is that every suicide of a working-age American who has paid into Social Security and Medicare saves at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in unemployment, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and veterans’ benefits.  Drive enough Americans to suicide and you can save real money over the decades.  

And the corporations have no need to invest in America.  Why should they?  They have all the capacity here that the need to satisfy what little demand there will be for years to come.  America has been picked clean:  of houses and cars, jewelry and cash.  Now the surplus population is being reduced, and not by individuals, but whole classes, including what remains of the American middle class.  It started with blue collar workers and is now extending to Ph. Ds.  Americans haven’t been needed to produce for decades; now we are no longer needed to consume, either.  China and India is where the growing markets are. 

And the American reaction is not a hard, sustained, creative, above all humane rage.

It is to dive more deeply into our addictions:  cheap food and alcohol, for as long as they are available.  Psychoactive and illegal drugs, shades of the former Soviet Union.  Coarsening, stupefying entertainment, such as Twitter and pornography.  Vitriolic politics, whether the anti-Semitism of the left even more than the right, the racism and homophobia of the right, and the blindness to Muslim and Hispanic colonization and the profound misogyny of the left, defending its porn and its prostitution.   

And all of it, every last bit of it, permitted by the willful refusal of Americans to think.  Ayn Rand was wrong about a few of things, but she was also right about more.  (How did Alan Greenspan manage to get it so wrong when he’d read her books?)  One of the things she was right about was the cowardice of those who proclaim themselves intellectuals, yet regardless of their politics, steadfastly refuse to think any thought that has not been thought before—and approved for them by their funders.  Thinking, she once said, was a volitional act.  And Americans haven’t been needed to think since at least Vietnam—by either the Left or the Right.

 Americans willfully refuse to think because they know that once they start, they are going to be unable to stop until they have made some very serious and profound changes, in themselves, their lives, their country.  

 They would rather be expendable.

by Erin Solaro 

I wasn’t going to write this for a while, I figured I’d write about Israel for a time, but I expect there will be plenty of opportunity to do so later this summer. 

Instead, I thought I would write about McDonald v. Chicago, the Supreme Court decision that incorporates the Second Amendment.  What this means is that the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, applies to the several states, not just the federal government. 

I have not read the whole decision.  Even the best legal writing (think Elizabeth Warren, Catherine MacKinnon and Akhil Reed Amar, all of whom write like angels) is dense for those of us who are not lawyers by training.  But I am working my way through it, and for once I find myself agreeing with Justices Thomas and Scalia.  Now, I do not particularly respect Justice Scalia because he is a strict constructionist.  This means that he believes that the Constitution’s interpretation is fundamentally rooted in a time when male human beings could own other human beings, and women, regardless of their race, were not human beings, much less citizens for any purposes other than paying taxes and bearing children, particularly sons, and could if their husbands so pleased, be treated as beneath all human, much less civic dignity, and they had little recourse.

And even the Framers knew that this was wrong.  Knew that Civil War over slavery was a threat running through the heart of the new republic, knew serious questions over the human worth and civic dignity of women was a threat to the mastery of every man over “his household.”  Patrick Henry, in particular, was alive to the human worth and civic dignity of women, knew it was an issue that America had to consider, and it is one reason why he is substantially read out of the canon of the American Revolution. 

But Justice Thomas’ opinion is something different.  I have never liked him—I’ve always believed Professor Hill—and his opinions on the bench have not inspired my confidence.  Nevertheless, I have also had some sympathy for him as a man who has not ascribed to the conventional political pieties.

Folks, Justice Thomas has delivered the goods here.  This is a superb decision, cutting like a sword down to down to the heart of the whole matter, which is to whom does the Second Amendment apply?  Who are the citizens to whom are due all the privileges and immunities of US citizenship—including the bearing of arms for personal defense?  Is it only some of us or is it all of us?  Yes, his opinion is limited and he does his resolute best to ignore the implications of it, but he is right, and for the right reasons, and unlike Scalia, who also for once is right for more-or-less the right reasons here, he does not stoop to crabbed nastiness and ugly sarcasm.  Instead, he addresses us with absolute dignity about some of the most sustained evil in American history, evil that is almost certainly a living memory of the men and women he grew up amongst. 

Justice Thomas writes, “I agree with the Court that the Fourteenth Amendment makes the right to keep and bear arms set forth in the Second Amendment ‘fully applicable to the States.’ Ante, at 1. I write separately because I believe there is a more straightforward path to this conclusion, one that is more faithful to the Fourteenth Amendment’s text and history.” 

This is the history of black people in America and especially in the aftermath of our Civil War, when the South did all it could to restore black people to the status of slaves, and the keeping and bearing of arms by free black people, particularly men, especially firearms, such as rifles and pistols, as well as edged weapons like bowie knives and dirks, was central to that status.  Depriving black men of arms was central to the institution of slavery, in particular; keeping and bearing and using arms, in defense of themselves, their women, their children, their homes and their crops, was central to freed slaves remaining freed citizens.  Of the Reconstructionist Amendments, the Fourteenth was in fact, as Thomas convincingly demonstrates, particularly concerned with black people keeping and bearing arms–at home and also on their persons.  And those who exercise themselves about the lethality of today’s handguns know nothing about the lethality of modern rifles–or that the huge, slow, minié balls of the Civil War era almost guaranteed amputation or death from any hit whatsoever at close range.  When the Federal Government ceased to enforce reconstruction, black people were disarmed and returned to conditions close to slavery, an era that we call the Jim Crow South and that only began to end with the Civil Rights movement.  Needless to say, private and frankly often illegal use of firearms, including concealed carry, on the part of organized black citizens groups and militias–let us strip that honorable word from the white supremacist movement–such as the Deacons for Defense and Justice played a significant role in keeping civil rights workers alive.  The truth is that Dr. King’s creed of nonviolence was tactical only, not philosophical.  Lynching–and mutilation and torture, including rape, beforehand–was a very real threat.

Thomas then explains the Fourteenth Amendment to us, an amendment that is on its face revolutionary, as revolutionary and thus as strictly constructionist as anything Antonin Scalia claims to believe in—and Thomas Paine did.  His opinion is worth citing at length, and I shall do so. 

After the war, a series of constitutional amendments were adopted to repair the Nation from the damage slavery had caused. The provision at issue here, §1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, significantly altered our system of government. The first sentence of that section provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This unambiguously overruled this Court’s contrary holding in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393 (1857), that the Constitution did not recognize black Americans as citizens of the United States or their own State. Id., at 405–406.

The meaning of §1’s next sentence has divided this Court for many years. That sentence begins with the command that “[n]o State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” On its face, this appears to grant the persons just made United States citizens a certain collection of rights—i.e., privileges or immunities— attributable to that status.

 Thomas continues:

Applying what is now a well-settled test, the plurality opinion concludes that the right to keep and bear arms applies to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause because it is “fundamental” to the American “scheme of ordered liberty,” ante, at 19 (citing Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U. S. 145, 149 (1968)), and “‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,’” ante, at 19 (quoting Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U. S. 702, 721 (1997)). I agree with that description of the right. But I cannot agree that it is enforceable against the States through a clause that speaks only to process.” Instead, the right to keep and bear arms is a privilege of American citizenship that applies to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause.

In doing so, he properly invalidates the legal “reasoning” (if one may call it such) in the United States v. Cruikshank. 

There, the Court held that members of a white militia who had brutally murdered as many as 165 black Louisianians congregating outside a courthouse had not deprived the victims of their privileges as American citizens to peaceably assemble or to keep and bear arms. Ibid.; see L. Keith, The Colfax Massacre 109 (2008). According to the Court, the right to peaceably assemble codified in the First Amendment was not a privilege of United States citizenship because “[t]he right . . . existed long before the adoption of the Constitution.” 92 U. S., at 551 (emphasis added). Similarly, the Court held that the right to keep and bear arms was not a privilege of United States citizenship because it was not “in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.” Id., at 553. In other words, the reason the Framers codified the right to bear arms in the Second Amendment—its nature as an inalienable right that pre-existed the Constitution’s adoption—was the very reason citizens could not enforce it against States through the Fourteenth. That circular reasoning effectively has been the Court’s last word on the Privileges or Immunities Clause.

Whereupon Justice Thomas proceeds to give us a lesson in American history, both Constitutional and racial, showing how deeply entwined the concepts of liberty and the free access to arms, their keeping and bearing by peaceable citizens who are written and read out of the structures of power.  This lesson is ugly:  full of mass murder, flogging, brutal beating, rape, mutilation, lynching, burnings.  And these are the crimes we know about.

Thomas concludes his opinion by writing with impeccable understatement:

In my view, the record makes plain that the Framers of the Privileges or Immunities Clause and the ratifying-era public understood—just as the Framers of the Second Amendment did—that the right to keep and bear arms was essential to the preservation of liberty. The record makes equally plain that they deemed this right necessary to include in the minimum baseline of federal rights that the Privileges or Immunities Clause established in the wake of the War over slavery. There is nothing about Cruikshank’s contrary holding that warrants its retention.

And then like a bell:  “I agree with the Court that the Second Amendment is fully applicable to the States. I do so because the right to keep and bear arms is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment as a privilege of American citizenship.”

Thank you, Justice Thomas. Happy 4^th of July to you, too.

 *** 

Justice Thomas’s writing beautifully displays both the strength of original intent and its limitations.  The strength of his opinion is that he shows beyond all evasion how clearly the Framers of both the 14^th and 2^nd Amendments understood that the bearing of arms is essential to personal as well as political liberty.  Particularly when those bearing arms, or deprived of bearing arms were, to put it mildly, not of the ruling classes, and organizations of state and social power, such as law enforcement and the militia, were used not to protect them, but to control them.

The weakness of original intent is that it is often used as a conservative doctrine to mean, “We shall think no thought that has not been thought before.”  Strict original intent means that you have to argue whether a plain reading of the Constitution in our day would apply in a similar way to similar issues that nevertheless involve different groups of people than those the Founders were familiar with.  (Think of the rights of women to vote, or of gay people to marry, or of women, like men, to bear arms in the military, particularly in the combat arms.)  Thomas’ opinion is weakened by his adherence to strict original intent, for refuses to carry his analysis into the contemporary world, where people who are in some way or another not seen as worthy of the regard of the state—and thus beneficiaries of law enforcement—are exceedingly vulnerable to those who wish them harm, and their safety would benefit immeasurably by their ownership (and when appropriate also, concealed carry) of firearms, including handguns.

Poor people, especially black, particularly living in neighborhoods beset by violent criminals, of course, particularly fit this profile; the more so if they are acting as citizens intent upon resisting criminals.  Also gay people and Jews.  But particularly women, an issue that one would think Thomas would have addressed it only in passing, the more so since he was a signatory to the majority opinion in Castle Rock v. Gonzales, which holds that “Respondent did not, for Due Process Clause purposes, have a property interest in police enforcement of the restraining order against her husband.”  The police, you see, refused to enforce a restraining order against her husband, who murdered their three children, then killed himself.  More about that case, and its significance later in this essay.  Suffice it to say here that Castle Rock was the capstone case establishing that people (gender neutral although there is nothing gender-neutral about the cases) have no right to police protection, no matter how evil the faith of the police.

Before proceeding further, it is important to get one definition up front. 

Feminism is no more and no less than the human and civic equality of women.  Nothing is more central to the status of human being and citizen, and thus to feminism, than the absolute integrity of the body:  our bodies are not our husbands’, our children’s, vehicles for the consumption of vast quantities of food or to be manipulated and surgically altered according to the fashions of the day, whether our breasts be “too small” or our feet and clitorises be ‘too large.”  Nor are our bodies and what is done to them, despite the claims of First Amendment “purists (otherwise known as pornographers and their apologists), the pornographer’s speech.  Our bodies are biologically meant to be strong, well-fed and supple with muscle—and they are ours, in order that we might fully inhabit our lives as human beings.  Yet nothing is more contentious in feminism than the resolute insistence that women, feminist women, should keep and bear concealed arms (and by this I particularly mean handguns) for self-defense.

I now turn squarely to this issue.

Let’s begin by pretending we live in a country in which male-on-female violence is more common and far more socially acceptable than male-on-male violence, and everyone thinks this is normal and natural.  

Except we’re not pretending because we do.  It’s America, not Afghanistan. 

I’m not arguing moral equivalence:  I’ve been to Afghanistan.  If you want to talk to me about moral equivalence, go there first yourself—I’ll tell you how to do it—and then we’ll talk.  If you still want to.  Which I doubt you will.  But I’m also not exaggerating. 

Let’s run the numbers.

We’ll start with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, which count murders, and they are a statistical aberration in terms of the general profile of violent crime.  Of the 14,180 murders and non-negligent manslaughters committed in 2008, 11,059 of the dead were male, 3,078, were female and 43 were unknown.  Of the 16,277 killers, 10,568 were male, 1,176 female and 4,533 unknown.  In 2008, known females made up only 21.7% of murder victims and 7.2% of murderers, a startling statistical aberration when we turn to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) for 2008. 

NCVS statistics are drawn from a statistically representative sample of US households involving crimes, reported and unreported, committed against people age 12 or older.  In 2008, there were some  4,856,510 violent crimes, excluding murder (because these statistics are complied from interviewing victims):  551,830 robberies, 839,940 aggravated assaults, and 3,260,920 simple assaults, as well as 203,830 rapes and sexual assaults.  The official BJS violent crime victimization rate in 2008, per 1,000 individuals over the age of 12 is  21.3 for men and 17.3 for women.  In other words, women make up 44.8% of violent crime victims, while men account for approximately 86% of violent offenders.

This is even more startling for several reasons. 

The first is the tremendous decrease in violent crime in modern America.  According to the BJS, in 1973, America’s violent crime victimization rate was  68:1000 males and 31.4:1000 females.  In the following 35 years, we reduced violence against men, largely intra-male, by 69.1%, and it is not simply due to improved treatment of wounds.  We have reduced violence against women, also largely male, by only 44.9% against women.  There has also been a decrease in intimate partner homicides.  Intimate partners are spouses, ex-spouses, and current (not former) boyfriends and girlfriends of either sex.  Intimate partner homicides, which overwhelmingly involve heterosexual couples, are virtually always the conclusion of severe male-on-female abuse, including rape.  This is true regardless of who kills whom and even when, as is extraordinarily rare, the female’s killing of the male is non-confrontational.  In 1976, 1,304 males and 1,587 females were killed by their intimate partners; in 2005, 329 males and 1,181 females were killed by their intimate partners.  In other words, females have largely stopped killing their male torturers; the same is not true for male torturers their female intimates.  And according to Diane Rosenfeld, a Harvard expert on domestic violence, male intimates who torture their female victims use the murders of other women by their intimate abusers to further terrorize their intimates into submission.

The second is that the number of rapes and sexual assaults, as well as domestic violence, are underestimated by the NCVS:  15% of all rapes and sexual assaults are committed against children under age of 12, a number in itself drawn from the 2004 NCVS, yet the NCVS asks about victims of violent crime who are older than 12.  But that is not the only reason:  the NCVS estimates that 41.4% of rape and sexual assault were reported to police, likely an extraordinary overestimation. 

Doctor David Lisak of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is one of the world’s foremost experts on undetected rapists.  He writes in ‘Understanding the Predatory Nature of Sexual Violence”:  “In a study of 1,882 university men conducted in the Boston area, 120 rapists were identified. These 120 undetected rapists were responsible for 483 rapes. Of the 120 rapists, 44 had committed a single rape, while 76 (63% of them) were serial rapists who accounted for 439 of the 483 rapes. These 76 serial rapists had also committed more than 1,000 other crimes of violence, from nonpenetrating acts of sexual assault, to physical and sexual abuse of children, to battery of domestic partners. None of these undetected rapists had been prosecuted for these crimes.”  It is enormously likely that any woman who lives with such a man will not tell an anonymous caller of his crimes against her or her children.  In order to avoid antagonizing their torturers, abused women commonly underplay the enormity of the crimes against them.  In order to preserve their own sanity, they very rarely acknowledge the gravity of the crimes against them until they are safe, and sometimes not even then.

For as Lisak writes, “In the hierarchy of violent crimes, as measured by sentencing guidelines, rape typically ranks only second to homicide, and in some cases it ranks even higher.”   And rightly so.  Rape and sexual assault make it very plain to women and girls, who according to the BJS are 81.2% of the victims of these crimes, that they may not even control access to the interior of their bodies.  Intimate partner violence makes it very plain to women and girls, who are 84.7% of the victims, that they cannot trust men and boys they usually think they love and often genuinely do. 

And the law is on the side of the criminals.

You are now going to tell me I’m wrong, that domestic violence laws discriminate against men, that women complaining about rape stigmatizes male sexuality and generally indulge in all the other whining that is nothing but misogyny and an apology for rape. 

So now we turn back to US case law, culminating in Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), which finds that “individuals” have no right to police protection.  While I would not, if I were a man, take any comfort from this body of law, it is nevertheless drawn almost entirely from male-on-female intimate partner violence.  Only one case involved a male victim, Joshua DeShaney, but as he was an exceedingly young juvenile, suit upon his behalf was brought by his mother against her husband, the child’s father, and we may assume with very little fear of contradiction he brutalized her as well. 

In Riss v. New York, 240 N.E.2d 860 (N.Y. 1968), the City of New York disclaimed all responsibility to protect Linda Riss from her ex-boyfriend, who had terrorized her for months before hiring a man to throw lye into her face, blinding and marring her.   In Hartzler v. City of San Jose, 46 Cal. App. 3d 6 (1st Dist. 1975), the San Jose, CA police were found not liable for allowing Ruth Brunell to be stabbed to death by her husband, despite ample warning from her that he was en route to murder her.  In Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. Ct. of Ap., 1981), despite repeated calls to the police, three women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, and forced to commit sexual acts upon each other for 14 hours.  The DC police department was exonerated because it is a “fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.” In DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 109 S.Ct. 998 (1989) held that Joshua DeShaney, who was savagely beaten into permanent and severe brain damage by his father, was not entitled to police protection even though local officials knew of his abuse and said they were willing to protect him but refused to liberate him from his father’s custody.  In DeShaney, the court held “The affirmative duty to protect arises not from the State’s knowledge of the individual’s predicament or from its expressions of intent to help him, but from the limitation which it has imposed on his freedom to act on his own behalf.”  In Balistreri v. Pacifica Police Department (901 F.2d 696 9th Cir. 1990), the court ruled that Ms. Balistreri had no right to police enforcement of a restraining order against her estranged husband, who beat and otherwise terrorized her because he did not have custody of her.  (Note that his father’s custody of him did not require the law to protect Joshua DeShaney.)  And things have not improved since 1990; they have in fact, gotten worse.  In Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005), the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Castle Rock was not liable for the outright, willful refusal of its police department to enforce a restraining order held by Jessica Gonzales against her husband, who promptly murdered their three children.  In fact, according to Rosenfeld, approximately a quarter of all women murdered by their abusers have restraining orders against them. 

It is worth stating bluntly that none of these cases were tragedies, in which police officers acted urgently on the information, but as is the norm for even the best-trained, most honorable, energetic and conscientious officers and departments, were simply too late.   The universally dishonorable nature of police conduct in these cases, combined with the statistics, represent an utter contempt for the lives and liberty of women and their children.

We are blinded to the sine qua non both of humanity and citizenship, which is a person’s inalienable right to her body, period, full stop, regardless of her relationships or fertility.  It is a crime—and should be punished as such—to touch us, much less to penetrate our bodies without our full, willing, undrugged, uncoerced, completely free—consent, let alone ever strike us.  Force always, automatically, and fully, invalidates the very idea of consent, just as the lack of meaningful consent trumps the absence of overt physical force—yet the law of rape says, “by force and without consent.”  And no one can validly consent to be harmed or damaged in any way.  No matter how much she loves or cares for the man who does it to her.  And that when he harms her, he harms society itself.  (And you know very well I am not talking about peering into people’s windows to see if she’s most enthusiastically asking him to pull her hair or bite her neck, and he is energetically but nevertheless kindly obliging her, then hauling them into court, so let’s just not play these games.)

The fact that I even have to write this speaks volumes.  The fact that we even have to have this discussion speaks volumes.  When Jefferson spoke of unalienable rights, he was speaking of rights that can neither be given nor taken; that can be violated or unexercised but not abrogated.  A right is a precondition of human existence, and the first right is the right to your life and your own body.  

The famed and brilliant legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon once asked if women are human.  Writing on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document that is mostly honored in the breech of men’s lives, but nevertheless envisions them as human in a way it simply does not envision women, MacKinnon offered a litany of crimes against women that, taken together, hugely circumscribe our lives.  They range from deliberate impoverishment (refusing to pay women a living wage for themselves, let alone for their children too), slavery (pornography, prostitution, child and forced marriage, forced reproduction and abortion) to torture (rape) to mutilation (female genital cutting, which is not remotely comparable to male circumcision) to murder (burning to death for inadequate dowries).  When men are treated in comparable ways, these crimes are denounced as profound injustices, if not also crimes against humanity—and often violations of their civil rights as well.  However, when these crimes are committed against women, they are not only often enjoyed, “women’s entitlement to an end of these conditions [is] still openly debated based on cultural rights, speech rights, religious rights, sexual freedom, free market—as if women are social signifiers, pimps’ speech, sacred or sexual fetishes, natural resources, chattel, everything but human beings[.]”  She then asked a simple, powerful question.  “When will women be human?”

And the answer is, very simply, when we insist upon our own humanity and are prepared to defend it, by force of arms if necessary. 

I repeat myself.  Nothing, nothing, is more controversial amongst feminist, or for that matter many “liberal” men, then women bearing arms to the end of defending themselves, whether against strangers or acquaintances.  You will hear any number of things described as empowering, feminist choices, rather than sometimes the only half-rational option in a hideous situation:  abortion, prostitution, pornography.  If you suggest that women fight back with one of the best equalizers for physical strength that is available, you will hear any number of things. 

One of my personal favorites is that a feminist like myself, who suggests women bear arms in self-defense as citizens, meaning as members of a society that is harmed when their physical integrity is violated, does more harm to feminism than sexists.  Which by definition includes rapists and wife beaters, pornographers and pimps and johns and human traffickers.  Another favorite argument is, I can’t help but think you, or any other woman, has made some mistakes in her acquaintances if she ever has to defend herself with a gun.  Deliberately heedless of the modus operandi exposed by Dr. Lisak in “The Predatory Nature of Sexual Assault,” that undetected, often so-called “date” rapists are far from the victims themselves of too much alcohol (if so, how could they function sexually?) and too little communication.  Instead, they are in fact violent, predatory men

extremely adept at identifying “likely” victims, and testing prospective victims’ boundaries;

plan and premeditate their attacks, using sophisticated strategies to groom their victims for attack, and to isolate them physically; 

use “instrumental” not gratuitous violence;

exhibit strong impulse control and use only as much violence as is needed to terrify and coerce their victims into submission;

use psychological weapons—power, control, manipulation, and threats—backed up by physical force, and almost never resort to weapons such as knives or guns;

and use alcohol deliberately to render victims more vulnerable to attack, or completely unconscious. 

The truth is that to question the victim’s actions or choices is to assume that women are morally responsible for men because any man, given the opportunity, will do such things to women.  And the rule, very often spoken, of a woman’s life in dealing with such men, who as Lisak noted test and probe boundaries to see if she is a safe target:  placate, don’t fight back, appease.  A man touches you in a way or a place you don’t like?  If he touches you at all, for example, by social-kissing you when it would be inappropriate to do so to a man?  Don’t let him know that it angers or insults or humiliates you.  No matter how rude he is, or how threatening, or how insulting.  If you get angry, he will feel he can get angry back, and then who knows what he might do?  If he touches you and you knock his hand off of you, and he decks you, you might not have started it, but you escalated it and you have only yourself to blame.  If he drives you from a place you have a legal right to be, and you go, but you give him the finger as you leave, you escalated it.  And if you go out with him or go over to his place or let him into yours, thinking you like him and you might like to get to know him a bit better, maybe even make out a bit, well, what did you expect?  Why didn’t you…well, you didn’t have to fight back, but you should have done more than just say No.

We, men and women alike, might think that someone who is almost always larger and stronger than his partner, might find it an absolute moral imperative, not to speak of common courtesy and perhaps extremely arousing, to make certain she quite wanted him in her body.  We might regard affection or prior sexual intimacy or desire not as something to be exploited, but any such exploitation as a betrayal of “the highest favor a woman can offer a man,” to borrow from the great British historian of the French army, Sir Alastair Horne in Verdun:  The Price of Glory.  We might think that women have the absolute right to go about our legal business without assault, harassment, or insult, and the man who does such things has only himself to blame if the woman is angered.  And if he responds to legitimate anger with abuse, he not only started it, he escalated—indeed asked for anything the woman does to terminate the situation, including killing. 

We might.  But we don’t.  Often even those of us who would be shocked to our very cores by the thought of behaving otherwise.  And it is not just men who say these things.  It is women, too.  Think not only of “men’s rights activists” but of women who are worried about being “fair” and “sex-positive.”

The truth is that for some people, especially those hurt by sexual violence, discussing prevention is just another way to name, shame, and blame the “real criminal”, the victim—for it is the victims of sexual crimes who are almost universally on trial.  Self-defense instructors of various sorts who do train women who have been victimized often find it incredibly important to reassure their students that at the time of their crime, they could not have done anything, and they did not fail.  They are, in fact, alive to prevent it from happening again. 

So when I write that women’s defense of themselves—of our lives and the absolutely liberty of our bodies—is central to our citizenship, and that women, especially women who call themselves feminists , needing to support all women who fight back, it is in this context that I write.  This is not a call for women to jeopardize themselves by ineffective resistance.  Nor is this blame for not resisting, or second guessing ways that were inadequate to stop the perpetrator.  I do not, in any way, find women culpable in the crimes committed against them.  The criminal is always responsible for his behavior.  To lessen in any way the criminal’s responsibility by questioning his victim’s behavior, behavior the criminal often attempted to elicit, is to admit that, if a woman, you are playing Let’s pretend that if I don’t do that, nothing bad will happen to me.  If you are a man, your questioning means that you would rape in similar circumstances.  Whether you would or would not, this is what you are saying about yourself.  And your friends.

And it is a sad fact that for all the men who rape with impunity, and all the more men who like the benefits that accrue to them, both real (in terms of money and power) and fictive (in terms of thinking themselves better than women, even when they make less and don’t dare touch a woman who doesn’t want them), it is not just men who do not want women to defend themselves effectively.  For some of both sexes, this is a subset of the belief that no one but a police officer should defend a citizen from a criminal.  Of course, many of those who espouse that belief are the first to point out that the cops cannot be trusted, especially by women, to do the right thing. 

There are only two types of men who do not want women to be able to defend themselves.  The first are their assailants and their apologists and propagandists, the collaborators and accessories after the fact.  We need say no more other than that some of these men do enjoy inadequate, ineffective resistance from women.  It adds some frission to the rape, as well as justifies them in brutalizing their victims.  Not only in their eyes, but also in the eyes of society.  Some of these men cloak their defense of male violence against women in anti-violence terms, particularly if a woman uses a handgun.  In the name of ending male-on-male violence, women are supposed to fight hand-to-hand against men who substantially overtop and outweigh us.  (Marine and Army infantrymen are not so stupid, but women apparently are.)

Then there are honest, worthy men, who in the language of our times have difficulties or issues with women violently defending themselves.  At best, and very often sincerely, they believe that as men are violent to women, it is a male responsibility to defend women.  However, with or without a man, a woman still remains, and her life and liberty are worth defending.  If such men genuinely wish to protect women, the worst thing they can do is infantilize the women in their lives by insisting they will physically protect them.  The best thing they can do is aggressively denounce, shame, and ostracize all men who are predatory and violent towards women, and openly scorn and revile the belief that this is ever acceptable—and the more the woman likes or desires or has had sex with the man, the deeper the betrayal, the worse the violation.  And if these men are intelligent and honest enough to admit that a woman’s unalienable human right to the integrity of her body and its defense does not trump their discomfort with the idea, they will look further into themselves.  For a woman to need a man to defend her against other men—defense which she has, let us be honest, often gained through a sexual relationship, against, let us also be honest, often against male sexual violence—is the classic definition of a protection racket.

We come now to those women who do not want women to defend themselves.  

Yes, there are some professional victims who claim to be feminists, who want women to continue to be brutalized, if only as a way of maintaining their grant funding (never mind that there are far easier ways to earn a living), or to claim unearned moral superiority. 

But there are three profoundly serious reasons why women believe women should not defend themselves, particularly by force of arms.

The first is that some women genuinely, reasonably, fear that the unspoken rule for women when dealing with predatory and violent men—placate and appease—means that women who successfully fight back, particularly with firearms, will be judged more harshly than men.  On April 25, 2009, Sara Brereton boarded a Seattle bus with her (presumptively female) partner and their 4 children.  They were seated at the front of the bus.  Emmanuel Salters got up from the back of the bus, walked up to them, stood next to them, swayed back and forth, then “fell” onto Brereton.  Understandable offended by this assault, she pushed him off of her, saying, “Excuse me!”  Harsh words were then exchanged with her by Salters.  Eventually, she and her partner (the Seattle Post-Intelligencer refuses to identify Brereton’s partner even by sex) exited the bus with their children.  What is fascinating about this case is that both the Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Times apparently edited their websites to remove the fact that Salter was harassing Ms. Brereton and her partner for their sexual orientation and their children, and in fact rubbed his crotch against Brereton. 

In short, Brereton allowed herself and her family to be driven from a place that was legally theirs, and where they were engaged in legal, not to say by the rational standard of the human and civic equality of women to men, inoffensive, behavior.   Perhaps foolishly, but entirely reasonably, Brereton and an unidentified member of her family, probably her partner, made “obscene gestures” to Salters as they walked away from the bus.  Salters then made the bus driver make an unscheduled stop, got off and followed the family.  When he closed to within 20 feet, which is the distance within which someone armed with a handgun is vulnerable to someone who is not, Brereton showed him her weapon and told him to go away.  Undeterred, he closed the distance between them to spit upon her, cursing as he did so; she shot him when he was within 1 or 2 feet of her body.   Perhaps fortunately, Mr. Salters lived.  Yet despite the fact that Ms. Brereton cooperated with the police and both witnesses and a Metro surveillance camera video confirmed her account of the shooting, she was jailed for two days and it took seven months for the King County prosecutor’s office to admit that her shooting was an entirely justifiable act of self-defense.  Had an armed man removed his family from a place where he had been insulted and sexually assaulted without the most remote provocation, with no more than angry but civil words and a final gesture of disgust as he left, a few would laud his restraint.  Most would question his manhood.  Yet Ms. Brereton violated the unspoken law that a woman must placate and appease her attacker.

Second, women also fear that if a woman takes measures to defend herself, if she is raped or otherwise victimized, her perpetrator and his defense attorneys will argue that it wasn’t a crime because she was able to defend herself.  Never mind that, as Lisak pointed out, men who prey upon women take enormous care to groom their victims as a way of attempting to guarantee their physical safety, liberty, and the sympathy of bystanders should their behavior come to light.  We may only think of the sympathetic excuses made for Mike Tyson and Kobe Bryant, Roman Polanski and Bill Clinton.

And finally, women, often feminists, argue that it is not the responsibility of women to defend themselves, it is the responsibility of men not to be violent, and that violent self-defense only means putting more violence into the world.  The first part is true but the second part is not because it misses the point of effective self-defense.  The deliberate refusal (we are not speaking of genuine inability or lack of preparedness) of the peaceable citizen to respond to violence visited upon her with violence that dominates the escalatory ladder in order to terminate the escalation—killing per se is not the issue—rewards the criminal and makes it more likely he will continue to victimize citizens and damage their civilization.

In other words, for women to refuse to encourage ourselves and other women to respond to criminal violence with violently effective self-defense as we are able, then demand that the law and society uphold and praise our right to have done so, is to refuse to acknowledge that we have the unalienable, human right of self-defense.  It is to refuse to acknowledge that we are human and citizens.  And until women insist that our bodies and access to them are ours, always and everywhere, full stop, and defend that sine qua non of humanity and citizenship with deadly force, men will not.  If we do not value our lives and liberty, our intimates may but our laws and our society will not.

This brings us to the bearing of arms, particularly handguns, by women.  Do not presume to tell me the Founders didn’t know from handguns, especially not in the context of military arms.  I bid you note only that when President Washington was buried, his horse, saddled, with the General’s pistols in their holsters near the pommel, was led in his funeral cortege.  Many equestrian portraits of him show him with those pistols, holstered at the pommel of his saddle.  Anyone who thinks handguns are not modern military arms had best acquaint herself with the Marine Corps’ marksmanship badges:  crossed rifles for rifle marksmanship, of course, and crossed pistols for…yes, indeed.

Which brings us to handguns, as a shorthand for arms, particularly concealed carry.  Handguns are the sine qua non of self-defense for women.  This is not because they are magic.  They are not.  You need to not only know how to use them, you need, if you are going to own and carry one for self-defense, to be utterly and completely willing to kill another human being, much as you hope never to have to do so.  This is not sophistry.  Many is the woman (or man) out there who has had to kill in self-defense, who did everything they could to dissuade an attacker who would not be deterred.  I will not say, Good for them, because these righteous shooters often have nightmares for years after the fact.  This is the normal reaction of a good human being who, never wanting to hurt another never preyed upon another, but deeply grieves killing their would-be predator.  I am, however, glad that these citizens were not killed.  And when wielded by a citizen resolutely set upon self-defense, handguns are tremendously effective.

(Liberal) criminologist Gary Kleck of Florida State University is the world’s preeminent expert on defensive gun use; his research was used in D.C. v. Heller, which overturned Washington, DC’s handgun ban. After the handgun ban was passed in 1976, homicides increased, and even when they dropped, the proportion of homicides committed with handguns was higher than before the ban was passed.  (This is similarly true for Chicago, as noted by the Court in McDonald.)  In Jeff Worley’s article about Heller, “In Defense of Self-Defense,” Kleck notes that the common pro-gun-control claim, that when victims attempt to use guns defensively, which they did approximately 2.5 million times in 1993, for example, nearly three times as often as the 850,000 criminals used guns in that year, offenders will take them away and use them on the victim is simply false.  (The emphasis is his.)

Over the period from 1997 through 2006, an annual average of 4.8 police officers in the U.S. were killed with their own guns, out of a total of 665,555 full-time, sworn officers in the nation. … [As for civilian crime victims being hurt because they used a gun to defend themselves] It wasn’t using the gun that got them hurt. [“Researchers reported instances of people being hurt and using guns defensively, but these were cases where someone was first hurt and then used the gun for self protection, Kleck explained.”] And once this flaw in the research was fixed, it was found that people who use guns for protection are almost never injured after that. … Criminals interviewed in prison indicate that they have refrained from committing crimes because they believed a potential victim might have a gun. … Victim defensive use of guns almost never angers or otherwise provokes offenders into attacking and injuring the resisting victims. It’s extremely rare that once a victim shows or uses a gun, he is injured. … [“In any case, Kleck says, summarizing this crime scenario, it is clear that regardless of whether gun use occasionally provokes the offender, the net effect of victim gun use is to reduce the likelihood that the offender will hurt the victim.”]

Kleck has also run statistical simulations that suggest that if criminals substitute long guns (rifles and shotguns) for handguns, the result would be more homicides, for the simple reason that these weapons have longer ranges and are more lethal.  They are also harder for a citizen to retain should the criminal close with her or him.

Very few defensive uses of guns involve the citizen shooting, much less killing, the criminal:  it is generally the citizen’s resolve to kill that ends the crime.  Anyone who genuinely believes or knows herself or himself incapable of killing, even to defend the liberty of her body, or honestly thinks herself incapable of responsible gun ownership probably should not own and certainly shouldn’t carry a handgun.  (There are people who hunt and target-shoot in these categories.)  And that’s OK.  Those of us in that group are no more sheep than those of us who carry 24/7 are paranoid:  there is a strong tradition of conscientious objectors serving with enormous distinction, usually as medics, when America had a conscript military.  Likewise, some of us have survived crimes of such violence that the rest of us would be astonished that all it takes for us to function reasonably well is to carry 24/7.  (And only the hardest-hearted of us can read of murders like Ms. Le’s at Yale and sneer that it would have been “paranoid” of her to have to follow through on the subconscious concerns that led her to write about self-defense and armed herself against a man who overtopped her by a good head; it is very possible that if she had, she might be alive today.  She might also have been committing a crime, and few feminists would have come to her defense.)  Although the police almost always get there ex post facto, none of us can be self-sufficient and civilization means we need not even attempt to live in such an atomized state, but may draw upon the qualities of others, if only we give our own for them to draw upon. 

Nor are handguns a solution to all the abuse and violence women encounter.  However,  as a shorthand for deadly force, the ownership and concealed carry of handguns by women represents our willingness to kill to defend our lives and the absolute liberty of our bodies.  The more so because a handgun is a potent physical equalizer.  There is such a discrepancy in height between the average man and the average woman that women are physically and morally, if not legally or socially, justified in using far greater force to defend ourselves against a male assailant than any man in the exact same situation, facing the exact same assailant.  “Pick on someone your own size” is an adage that simply does not apply to male-on-female violence.  This is not so much because a handgun is deadly—although those who say that handguns are designed to kill people, are correct.  (However, people who complain about the lethality of handguns but often exempt from their criticism long guns such as rifles and shotguns do not understand that rifles are vastly more lethal and shotguns in a different universe of lethality than handguns.) 

It is rather because, with the proper equipment, a handgun is easily concealed on the body.  In other words, a concealed handgun is accessible at the intimate ranges violence is done to women, and its concealed nature means than a criminal cannot tell which citizen has decided to arm herself in anticipation of his targeting of her.  He must wait until he reveals himself as a criminal.  Thus her decision to engage in armed self-defense helps cast a protective cloak over other women and girls who will encounter her would-be perpetrator.  (Conservative) economist at the University of Maryland, College Park, John R. Lott’s findings on this point buttress the research on undetected rapists, which strongly indicates that men who are cruel and violent to women and girls they do not know are rarely likely to be kind and gentle to those they do—and vice versa.  “An additional woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by about 3 to 4 times more than an additional man carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for men,” he told the University of Chicago Press.

Moreover, the concealed carry of handguns by women to the ends of use if necessary, opens up the possibility of retributive violence against our perpetrators.  Do not describe this as what it emphatically is not.  The term vigilante justice applies only when crime victims can be reasonably sure the legal system will uphold their rights.  The statistics and case law I have previously cited make it abundantly clear that any woman who entertains that idea is deluded.  It is enormously common for women and girls to be threatened by their perpetrators with harm should they tell anyone of the crimes committed against them, and it is entirely reasonable for them to fear that their perpetrators can carry out those threats with impunity.  To argue that the criminal should not fear his victim’s retribution is to argue that the criminal should operate with absolute impunity.  To call such retribution “vigilantism” is to engage in a bold-faced lie.  Clarity matters.

Finally, the bearing of arms in self-defense as part of the community to be defended is the hallmark, old as the ancient Greek city states, of the citizen.  Who may not be so much as struck or in any way deprived of liberty, except for a crime of which he has been convicted; who has the right to enter and leave marriage at will; who not only has the right to own property but also to a living wage for his labor.  None of which has traditionally, or even in much of America today, applied to women.  And has been tolerated by women for a great many reasons, beginning with the fact that until five minutes ago, in historical time, we died in huge, terrible numbers in childbirth because of having had sex with men, often sex we wanted with men we loved, and ending with the fact that we traditionally have not borne arms.  Forbidden by custom even stronger than law to defend what was ours, we could be deprived of it with impunity.  To bear arms is to take our place, against the law, in the universal militia, which according to Title 10, Subtitle A, Part I, Chapter 13, § 311 of the United States Code, consists of only of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States, but only female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.  To take our place in the universal, unorganized militia is to insist that that we are members of this civilization, responsible for its defense, and thus when we are hurt and our rights diminished, so is our civilization.   It is to insist that we are citizens not simply in word, but in deed.  It is not only to demand our rights as citizens, it is to insist that “woman”, like “man” is a way of saying “human.”

The simple fact is that if women do not value our lives and physical integrity, which is to say our liberty, enough to kill to defend them from those who would deprive us of them, we have no right to expect men to do so.  It is one thing to help the brave, and those full of a spirited defense of their human worth.  It is another to risk oneself, not for those who cannot do the impossible, but for those who argue as a matter of principle that their attackers’ lives are worth more than their own bodily integrity.  If our lives and our freedom do not mean that much to us, we should not be surprised they mean so little to others.

This is not a call for women to resist in situations and with means that are unwise, nor is it a call for women to do the emotionally impossible for them, such as kill their fathers, or brothers, or husbands, even when they behave with unspeakable cruelty.  Rather, this a call for any woman who believes in the human worth and civic equality of women to support all women who fight back, by any means necessary, and to be prepared to do so herself if she can.  This is a call for all such women to demand the courts recognize our right to our lives, the liberty of our body, and the right to defend ourselves with any means necessary.  It is a call for all of us to do what we each individually can to affirm the human and civic worth of ourselves and other women.  It is a call for us to stop second-guessing each other’s decisions when faced by a violent, predatory human being, and instead to affirm that while anything that keeps us from being raped is good, anything we can do to end our vulnerability to rape, which primarily means stopping those who think they are entitled to our bodies and thus our lives, is better.

The late, legendary Colonel Jeff Cooper was the founder of Gunsite Academy in Arizona, one of America’s premier firearms training facilities.  “Fight back!” he wrote.  “Whenever you are offered violence, fight back! The aggressor does not fear the law, so he must be taught to fear you. Whatever the risk, and at whatever the cost, fight back.”  Granted, Cooper was taught from boyhood that a man may fight back, while women may not.  If you dispute that, I need only remind you that Colonel Cooper was an infantry Marine, a career progression to this day closed to all women. 

God made men and women free and equal.  Colonel Colt, John Moses Browning and yes, General Kalashnivkov help keep us so, if we will only accept what they give us.  Those who prey upon the trusting, the affectionate, the weak, the unaware, the vulnerable (and who amongst us is none of these things with those for whom we care?) already know this.  It is time for we who would never prey upon anyone to adopt that knowledge as our own and use it to put paid to the predators.  If we do so, we can probably get some serious, long-term remission within a generation.

It is time for feminist women, which is to say those of us who are not ashamed to insist upon the civic and human equality of women, to insist that a woman is a human being and a citizen, whose body is hers and hers alone, no matter her relationships or children or whom she loves, and thus whose life and liberty are worthy of defense, to adopt and encourage others to adopt Colonel Cooper’s motto.  Because he was right:  strategically, politically, morally. 

If we do not insist upon a self-respect great enough that we will take up arms to enforce that respect upon those who would deprive us of liberty and our lives, there is no reason for men to do so and many will not.  And if we will not encourage women to do this, and demand the courts respect their right to do so, we are not feminists, which is to say we do not believe in the civic and human equality of women.

Feminism is not about choice or pacifism, or the misguided notion that estrogen is anything but an anabolic steroid, and one far stronger than testosterone—which is itself not a monster hormone.  It is about equality, and the fact that women are human beings and citizens, with the inalienable right to our lives and the absolute integrity of our bodies.  It is about defending that right, not merely legally, but physically and effectively, by any means necessary—including handguns, including concealed carry.

There are plenty of things feminist women can disagree about and still be feminists.  This is not one of them.