WhatFinger


Female Genital Mutilation

The Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault wants to keep the state safe for sex offenders



How does it happen that a thing called the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault ends up testifying against female children who are in danger of having their sex organs butchered and siding with the pro-rapist ACLU by publicly opposing state legislation that would outlaw this barbaric practice known as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)? Easy: follow the money. But first let’s define our terms. The AHA Foundation (AHA stands for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a victim of FGM and ex-Muslim), which says its “work is built on the belief that there is no culture, tradition or religion that justifies violence against women and girls,” offers this primer on the horrifying, illicit surgical procedure:
Female genital mutilation (FGM) is any procedure involving the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs. FGM is often performed on girls between the ages of 4 and 14 to ensure their virginity until marriage. The World Health Organization reports that FGM has no health benefits and can cause a number of health problems. Immediately following the procedure, girls are at risk for severe pain, shock, bleeding, bacterial infection, and injury to nearby tissue. In the long term, girls and women who have suffered this procedure are at risk for recurrent bladder and urinary tract infections, cysts, infertility, and complications during intercourse and childbirth. Psychological issues resulting from the trauma of the procedure are also possible.
There are currently about 513,000 women and girls at risk of FGM in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. FGM was made a federal crime in 1996 that can lead to a five-year prison sentence. In 2013, the Transport for Female Genital Mutilation Act was enacted. It modified the original statute to outlaw “vacation cutting,” which involves taking a girl outside the United States for the procedure. According to AHA, FGM is not a state-level crime in these 25 states:

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Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wyoming Which brings us back to Maine, one of the states that has no law on the books that forbids FGM. Contrary to popular belief, groups like the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault often engage in political activism that has little to do with the goal of getting rapists off the streets. Even as they are tasked with administering the grants for good services like emergency room nurses who collect DNA evidence kits, the activists at the top of such coalitions are often seasoned political operatives pushing a leftist agenda. At the higher levels of anti-rape activism – the state boards and national groups, the politics grow ever more leftist. National leaders of anti-rape groups spend little or no time fighting for laws that would send actual rapists to prison or keep them there once they’re behind bars. Instead, they spend their time engaging in an activity called “educating the public about rape.” This “education” usually consists of blaming all men for the existence of something they call “rape culture.”

And that is the way the grant money is packaged, too: federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) funding is heavy on “educating the public about rape culture” and far too light on actually doing anything about actual rape. Rape is just one more issue that has been absorbed into the great machinery of leftist identity politics, and as such, there is nobody in the official anti-rape movement who would dare to come out and support the anti-FGM bill in Maine because the official leftist line on that bill is that it is racist, and that is the official line because the people out there mutilating their daughters are Muslim immigrants and refugees, and the very, very, very last thing the ladies of the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault would wish to do is appear to be targeting – gasp – minority Muslim immigrants and refugees, even if those minority Muslim immigrants and refugees are hacking their girl children’s genitals to bloody shreds. It’s not merely money that motivates these ladies: it is politics and influence and power used both as a carrot and a stick – along with money. It is the unspoken understanding that any lowly rape crisis worker who speaks out against the official line that ‘there is no FGM occurring in Muslim immigrant communities in Maine’ will be labeled a racist and cast out from the anti-rape movement. The co-opting of the anti-rape movement by other leftist causes is old news. Anti-rape activism never sat easily on the Left in the first place because it is supposed to be about putting people in prison and the Left is supposed to be about getting everyone out of prison, no matter how heinous their crimes. And so rape crisis activists are always eager to prove their leftist credentials to their peers, even if that means throwing little girls with mutilated genitals under the nearest legislative bus.


Defining what is and isn’t sexual assault by sexual mutilation?

In a report in the Scarborough (Maine) Leader last week, Elizabeth Ward Saxl, executive director of the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault, took the position that the idea that FGM is being committed in Maine is just a myth. This statement is a particularly dirty piece of work from a putatively anti-rape spokesperson whose job description includes defending victims of any type of sexual assault from cultural myths that deny the existence of sexual assault. But it’s also the perfect role for the Ms. Saxls of the world to play: after all, who else possesses as much cultural capital, so to speak, to squander in the service of defining what is and isn’t sexual assault by sexual mutilation? According to the Scarborough Leader:
There is some debate how much female genital mutilation (which is often simply referred to as FGM) is occurring in Maine. Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault testified before the Committee of Criminal Justice and Public Safety May 5 arguing it is not happening in Maine.

“We know that there are many Mainers who have been victims of FGM. However, what I have not seen any proof of yet is if it is being practiced in Maine. I have only heard, third hand, of one case from 10 years ago. What I hear from members of the impacted community is that it is not being done in Maine and that there is no confusion about whether or not it is appropriate or legal in this country,” Elizabeth Ward Saxl testified.

And it’s pimping it in the service of the sort of sleazy anti-victim, pro-offender leftist politics that keeps the money flowing to fund organizations like the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault

That’s not opposing rape. It’s pimping it. And it’s pimping it in the service of the sort of sleazy anti-victim, pro-offender leftist politics that keeps the money flowing to fund organizations like the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault, which took in just under $1.3 million in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2015, the last period for which figures are publicly available. Nice work if you can get it. And then live with yourself as you do it.

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Tina Trent -- BombThrowers -- Bio and Archives

Tina Trent writes about crime and policing, political radicals, social service programs, and academia. She has published several reports for America’s Survival and helped the late Larry Grathwohl release a new edition of his 1976 memoir, “Bringing Down America: An FBI Informer with the Weathermen,” an account of his time infiltrating the Weather Underground.

Dr. Trent received a doctorate from the Institute for Women’s Studies of Emory University, where she wrote about the devastating impact of social justice movements on criminal law under the tutelage of conservative, pro-life scholar Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.

Dr. Trent spent more than a decade working in Atlanta’s worst neighborhoods, providing social services to refugees, troubled families, and crime victims. There, she witnessed the destruction of families by the poverty industry, an experience she describes as: “the reason I’m now a practicing Catholic and social conservative.”

Tina lives with her husband on a farm in North Georgia. She blogs about crime and politics at tinatrent.com.


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