Don’t think of it as rape – think of it as suprise sex!
I watch our political figures tap dance around issue after issue and often wonder what they are doing for us – their constituency. I’m puzzled by it; because it would seem lately (and by lately I’m talking about the last 15 – 20 years) there is an awful lot of political wrangling going on with the well defined party lines. It reminds me of that F. Lee Bailey quote: “Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn’t even get out of committee”. Here’s the scarier thing he said that in 1967!
Yet nearly forty years later it seems worse than ever, and I believe that if the Bill of Rights was brought before committee today it wouldn’t get out of committee and in fact it might be stomped out before getting that far – after all who would profit from such a bill? It always seems to fall on a line, the party line and the bottom line – all the while you and I are expected to tow the line. The debate around health care is ridiculous and has been going on for far too long. The whole thing keeps getting tangles up in posturing and politics. I get that we’re a country that’s divided. I know theirs is this whole left right thing but frankly it’s wearing me out. I know that if a Republican Senator brings something to a vote the Democrats won’t vote for it because they would have to cross party lines and vise versa.
Most of the time issues are brought up about a proposed bill and those issues would present well enough to at least sound sane, but at the end of the day you’re just throwing a wrench in to the works. But recently one of the most offensive party stances took place when Al Franken – Senator from Minnesota posed a piece of legislation that would require defense contractors to allow their employees access to U.S. courts in cases of rape or sexual assault. It stemmed from the 2005 gang-rapping of Jamie Leigh Jones who at the time was working for Halliburton/KBR in Bagdad, then locked in a storage container to keep her from reporting the incident. She tried to sue – her employment contract basically said she couldn’t!
When I first read this story I was absolutely floored that someone needed to even propose the idea! It was brought to a vote and passed 68 – 30! How does this get 30 nay votes? Does that mean that there are 30 people on our Senate floor that think Rape and Sexual Assault are not a crime? Even I find that hard to swallow, but what I do believe is that a Democrat proposed it and 30 Republicans opposed it. Twenty-two those who voted Nay represent 100 percent of their states, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wyoming. So am I to understand that a little over 20 percent of this country believes what the senators from these states believe? Which is this (and I can only get this from their Nay vote), if you are working for a government contractor off US soil and you are raped – too bad – you have no recourse. And I’m about a thousand percent sure if you conducted a run off vote on this it would probably show overwhelmingly that those Senators do not match up with the folks that voted them in.
So, where does that leave us? Well if that vote shows you anything it shows that we need to be paying attention to what is going on. Even on little things that seem like they don’t even belong on a Senate floor. It’s not a fore gone conclusion that these people have our best interests at heart, in fact more often than not – they don’t, they end up voting with their party so they can continue to get funding and money, and yes some of it may trickle down to you and I – but trust me when I tell you it’s not enough.
Some Republican’s did vote yes for the Franken bill but some states were divided on it, like New Hampshire, Judd Gregg voted Nay – What the Hell is Up with that?
