This is a question I've been wrestling with since the last election cycle showed an implosion of the Republican party. While a lot of my early mentors leaned a bit right, the Republicans have shown less and less of a desire to be the party of small government and fiscal responsibility, and more of an inclination to embrace as much hatred and bigotry that they can find.

As I laughed watching the GOP blatantly pander by promoting Michael Steele (probably trying to trade on some of that "Barack the Magic Negro" sparkle they thought was falling from Obama), and cheered when Christopher S. Buckley decamped from the GOP, I still felt a twinge of sadness.

I strongly believe that we need at least two viable political parties to have a constructive dialogue about governance in this country, and that has not been the case for a very long time.

Meghan McCain seems to agree. Through her blog and her columns on the Daily Beast, McCain has been trying to steer the party away from the demagogues and back toward relevance. She strongly calls out pundits like Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter who trade in intolerance:

To make matters worse, certain individuals continue to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Republicans. Especially Republican women. Who do I feel is the biggest culprit? Ann Coulter. I straight up don't understand this woman or her popularity. I find her offensive, radical, insulting, and confusing all at the same time.

McCain is right to express bafflement - the personas that Coulter and Malkin use to promote themselves and their work are inherently sensationalized, valuing sound bytes and screaming over thoughtful, reasoned arguments.

Sometimes, the rhetoric is so ridiculous, I start to think that maybe Ann Coulter is just making all of this up:

Okay, so maybe it didn't happen like that. However, Ann Coulter is so over-the-top it is difficult to find any semblance of argument within her rantings and distortions. If she admitted this was all for publicity, it would be a relief. Examining Michelle Malkin's work doesn't provide much more to work with - after all, someone who wrote a tome defending internment during World War II in order to justify using racial profiling in the wake of 9/11 is obviously ready and willing to overlook inconvenient things (like facts) to make a point.

McCain's columns, by comparison, tend to be a breath of fresh air. In a very basic and personal way, she explains some of the key components of the GOP platform and explains why she embraces (or, in some cases rejects) these planks. Her discussion of the divide between Dems and Repubs focuses mainly on age and religion. But, she did speak out against Audra Shay titling her piece "Do NOT Elect a Racist," noting, "She represents the same old stereotypes about "young Republicans"-apparently racist and more middle-aged than youthful. In short, disconnected from the real youth of this country."

I suppose "the real youth" didn't show up to vote - Audra Shay won the election, putting yet another nail into the Republican coffin.

McCain herself seems to recognize this, often questioning is there room for a moderate in her party of choice. As she ends her latest piece against Michelle Malkin, she notes:

It's true that Democrats make being a member appealing in a much different way than the Republican Party does. The Democrats seem to have mastered inclusiveness-whereas Republicans, like a country club, seem to require a litmus test. But if people like Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter think they can bully me into giving up this fight and what I am doing, they are going to be severely disappointed. And I can assure them that unless they start being realistic about the cultural and generational differences between the two sides of the party, there will not be a new generation of Republicans.

Is Meghan going to be the future? Her assertions in her piece are correct. She does represent a clearer vision of the youth in this country than anyone currently ranking in the Republican party. And she does pwn Michelle Malkin on Twitter - Meghan has 53,664 followers on Twitter, versus Michelle's 25,897 (which may, as she states, be a better indicator of demographic clout that the New York Times bestseller list.)

But if we have seen anything over the past eight years, then we know that the Republicans aren't really interested in understanding the times.

As Christopher Buckley wrote in his send off note last fall, "to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me. "

Meghan, your party has left you.

Perhaps it's time stop trying to reform the old and look at creating something new.

My Message for Michelle Malkin [The Daily Beast]

Related: Barack The Magic Negro [Wikipedia]
My Beef With Ann Coulter [The Daily Beast]
Do NOT Elect A Racist [The Daily Beast]
Sorry Dad I Was Fired [The Daily Beast]
Screed: With Treason, Ann Coulter Once Again Defines A New Low In America's Spiritual Debate [Spinsanity]

First up, Matthew Clark from the Christian Science Monitor has a piece about the work DC-based non-profit Women for Women International is doing to educate men about the consequences of rape to Congo and the women in their own lives. It includes a video segment incorporating interviews with the husband of a rape victim, a rapist and a police officer who spends her days trying to imprison rapists, only to see them bribe their way out of punishment. Women for Women International focuses on Congolese men not just because some of them are the perpetrators, but because they are the leaders of the society.

"While we are an organization that values investment in women, you have to engage larger communities," says Lyric Thompson, policy analyst at Women for Women. "In many places we work, the community leaders are men, so we use men's position of influence. Our program in Congo is a model for other programs. It involves a huge paradigm shift from approaching men as the perpetrators – the enemy – to engaging them as allies; as fathers, sons, brothers."

It's a similar approach to those used by groups in the U.S. like Men Can Stop Rape. Both groups seek to inculcate in men empathy for and identification with women, as studies show that rapists often don't think of their victims as people. Women for Women International's consciousness-raising workshops — which they and the participants refer to as "sensitization" as opposed to education — are led by men, as their experience is that listening to women talk about the effects of rape on them as individuals or as a group is less effective.

But sensitization has its limits in a society ruled by corruption. Maj. Honorine Munyole, who leads a police battalion focused on sexual assault, sees those limits every day.

Still, 217 suspected rapists were arrested last year, and 20 so far this year: But most escape justice by paying off judges. And, Munyole says, each of them threatened her and her staff: "We can't work after 6 p.m., when it starts getting dark. Sometimes they throw stones at us. They broke my glasses with a stone."

Munyole had to transfer her daughter to a new school after she was threatened with rape because of her mom's work. "The perpetrators need to be punished, but there are always calls to release them," she says.

Even the "sensitized" soldier of the story seeks to mitigate the horror of rape in the Congo, claiming that some of the women they raped were spies, or the wives of enemy combatants.

But even as men blame women — or even lack of access to consensual sex — on the one hand, reports of soldiers raping men continue to skyrocket. Jeffrey Gettlemen reports in the New York Times that even though most men don't seek treatment or counseling for rape unless there are medical complications, 10 percent of the June rape reports to the American Bar Association's sexual violence clinic in Goma alone were from men.

According to Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, United Nations officials and several Congolese aid organizations, the number of men who have been raped has risen sharply in recent months, a consequence of joint Congo-Rwanda military operations against rebels that have uncapped an appalling level of violence against civilians.

Aid workers struggle to explain the sudden spike in male rape cases. The best answer, they say, is that the sexual violence against men is yet another way for armed groups to humiliate and demoralize Congolese communities into submission.

That is, of course, in addition to raping women, killing civilians, and looting and destroying communities.

In Congolese society, there is such a taboo on homosexuality that male rape victims are ostracized if their violations are discovered — they're often called "bush wives" — despite the fact that their part in the act is non-consensual. The stigmatization not only hurts male victims' psychological recovery, it can be deadly.

Aid workers here say the humiliation is often so severe that male rape victims come forward only if they have urgent health problems, like stomach swelling or continuous bleeding. Sometimes even that is not enough. Ms. Van Woudenberg said that two men whose penises were cinched with rope died a few days later because they were too embarrassed to seek help. Castrations also seem to be increasing, with more butchered men showing up at major hospitals.

Analysts blame the uptick in violence on the Western-supported joint Congo-Rwandan military operations designed to root out the last of the foreign and rebel fighters.

But Adam Hothschild in the New York Review of Books traces rape as a weapon of war and subjugation back far further than the start of the recent conflicts.

Unimaginably horrifying as ordeals like Kamate's are, they are all too similar to what Congolese endured a century ago. Rape was then also considered the right of armies, and then, as now, was how brutalized and exploited soldiers took out their fury on people of even lower status: women. From 1885 to 1908, this territory was the personally owned colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, who pioneered a forced-labor system that was quickly copied in French, German, and Portuguese colonies nearby. His private army of black conscript soldiers under white officers would march into a village and hold the women hostage, to force the men to go into the rain forest for weeks at a time to harvest lucrative wild rubber. "The women taken during the last raid...are causing me no end of trouble," a Belgian officer named Georges Bricusse wrote in his diary on November 22, 1895. "All the soldiers want one. The sentries who are supposed to watch them unchain the prettiest ones and rape them."

Forced labor also continues today. The various armed groups routinely conscript villagers to carry their ammunition, collect water and firewood, and, on occasion, dig for gold.

Lovely that — again — the "women" were causing the trouble by being too pretty to deflect rape. Then, like now, it was looked on as a substitute for sex, and not as a crime of subjugation and violence.

Kamate, mentioned above, is a three-time rape victim who runs a reporting and counseling program and was, earlier this year, brutalized for her troubles. She was raped after Ugandan forces tortured, eviscerated and killed her husband in front of her and her daughters; she was forced to lie in his viscera for her own rape. She started a shelter for women and children of sexual violence called The Listening House, where she takes in victims, refers them for medical assistance and keeps track — since the judiciary is unenthusiastic about punishing them — of the perpetrators. Rapists aren't so keen on her work.

The last time Kamate herself was raped was on January 22 of this year. The attackers, members of the CNDP (Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple), a Tutsi-led rebel group that has since been integrated into the Congolese army in a new peace deal, were four soldiers who targeted her because they knew of the work she was doing. It is for fear of this happening again that she asks me not to use her real name. "After having raped me, they spat in my sex, then shoved a shoe up my vagina. When I arrived home I cried a lot and was at the point of killing myself."

Hothschild documents that the many amnesty efforts by the Congolese government to integrate rebel forces into the military has led the Congolese government to allow war crimes perpetrators, rapists and warlords into the halls of power and the officer corps, undermining efforts by groups like Women for Women International to sensitize men to the problems sexual violence can cause the entire nation.

In other words, Hillary Clinton — and the world — have a lot of work on their hands.

Confronting Rape As A Weapon of War [Christian Science Monitor]
Symbol of Unhealed Congo: Male Rape Victims [NY Times]
Rape of the Congo [New York Review of Books]

Related: Women for Women International
Men Can Stop Rape
Democratic Republic of Congo [American Bar Association]

Earlier: Rape In The Congo Is Not, And Never Was, About "Sex"

She says:

A shocking increase in witch-hunt deaths in Papua New Guinea has prompted the government to launch a parliamentary commission of inquiry with a view to toughening the law. Joe Mek Teine, the chairman of the nation's law reform commission, has publicly declared that sorcery killings are "getting out of hand". Most witch hunts happen in the Highlands, the remote mountainous interior wracked by centuries of tribal wars and blood feuds. Contact with the outside world was only established in the 1930s, when some of the many ethnic groups were still living stone-age existences. Although there are no official statistics on sorcery killings, more than 50 were reported to the police in just two Highland provinces last year.

Apparently, a couple a year are fine, but they're getting more common, so it's an issue.

In matter of fact, though, it's not that they're becoming more common, it's that their commonness is becoming more visible outside remote areas of the region.

A worrying new development is that the crime, which has historically been a rural phenomenon, is now spreading to urban areas as families are driven out of villages by poverty and tribal fighting, and into towns and cities. Mount Hagen, the largest city in the Highlands, has recently been rocked by a wave of witch killings, and there have even been cases reported in the capital, Port Moresby.

In other words, the killings might not actually be increasing in number, they're just increasing in visibility.

The reported root causes are much the same as those behind the witch hunts in Tanzania.

Witch hunts nearly always occur after a death or an illness of a community member. "Natural causes for death or illness are just not accepted," said Pastor Jack Urame, a researcher at the Melanesian Institute and one of the country's leading experts on sorcery killings. "So whenever someone dies in a village, a person must blamed," he said. According to Mr Urame the victims are typically older women or women on their own, who have no extended family to defend them. Witch hunts can also be used as a pretext to settle scores or land disputes he said.

Hari identified another reason in his research:

The victims are almost invariably old women, living alone. These women are frightening anomalies here: they have a flicker of financial independence denied to all other females. It has to be stopped.

In both cases, the supposed witches are to some very minor degree defying social norms of the community by remaining unmarried (whether through choice, widowhood or accident) and the social discord caused by death and disease are laid at their doorstep, simultaneously resolving the community's discomfort with women defying the patriarchal order of things and finding a scapegoat for the death and/or disease visited on the community.

Witch Hunts, Murder And Evil In Papua New Guinea [The Independent]

Earlier: Fighting Misogyny & Women's Oppression In Africa, One Country At A Time

A series of articles — including ones in The Guardian and by Reuters — were spurred by this week's release of a report by ActionAid titled "Hate Crimes: The Rise Of Corrective Rape In South Africa." The Guardian's Annie Kelly writes:

Research released last year by Triangle, a leading South African gay rights organisation, revealed that a staggering 86% of black lesbians from the Western Cape said they lived in fear of sexual assault. The group says it is dealing with up to 10 new cases of "corrective rape" every week.

"What we're seeing is a spike in the numbers of women coming to us having been raped and who have been told throughout the attack that being a lesbian was to blame for what was happening to them," said Vanessa Ludwig, the chief executive at Triangle.

Although South Africa legalized same sex marriage in 2006, men are targeting black lesbians for rape and then murder in a supposed effort to cure them of lesbianism.

"When asking why lesbian women are being targeted you have to look at why all women are being raped and murdered in such high numbers in South Africa," said Carrie Shelver, of women's rights group Powa, a South African NGO. "So you have to look at the increasingly macho culture, which seeks to oppress women and sees them as merely sexual beings. So when there is a lesbian woman she is an absolute affront to this kind of masculinity."

The government is, of course, not necessarily keen to do much about it.

A statement released by South Africa's national prosecuting authority said: "While hate crimes – especially of a sexual nature – are rife, it is not something that the South African government has prioritised as a specific project."

Neither, it seems, are the police, who rarely go to much effort to track down offenders, even as sexual abuse rates skyrocket.

"Every day I am told that they are going to kill me, that they are going to rape me and after they rape me I'll become a girl," said Zakhe Sowello from Soweto, Johannesburg. "When you are raped you have a lot of evidence on your body. But when we try and report these crimes nothing happens, and then you see the boys who raped you walking free on the street."

Not that police and prosecutors don't often turn a blind eye to sexual assault in plenty of other places in the world, but this a whole class of women being systematically victimized, and the local and federal government is ignoring it for so-called cultural reasons. One woman told Reuters:

"We get insults every day, beatings if we walk alone, you are constantly reminded that you deserve to be raped," ActionAid quoted one lesbian as saying. "They yell, 'if I rape you then you will go straight, you will buy skirts and start to cook because you will have learnt how to be a real woman'."

It boggles my mind that this is actually a legitimate thought that occurs to anyone.

But there are more incomprehensible thoughts to be had in a piece in The Independent by Johann Hari who travels to Kenya and Tanzania to report on the problem of murdered elderly women and the ongoing practice of FGM and its side-effects. He starts in Tanzania, where the killing of supposed witches is widespread (and reminds Americans of our own origins).

Witch killings are a daily event in Sukumaland. The victims are almost invariably old women, living alone. These women are frightening anomalies here: they have a flicker of financial independence denied to all other females. It has to be stopped. "Of course witches must be killed!", Emanuel Swayer tells me, leaning forward. "They are witches!"

Many male villagers blame the vagaries and hardships of life on the elderly women in the community, who are them targeted for mutilation and death in a manner that just happens to dispose of examples of quasi-financial independence that might influence other women.

Sato [Magdalena Ndela] can remember when they came to kill her. "It happened in the night. I heard people opening the door without knocking," she says. "They shone a light in my face. I thought – what is happening? What can I do? That was when I felt the first cut into my body. I looked down and saw my hand was cut right off. Then they cut into the right one and it was hanging. Then I felt a blow against my head and I lost consciousness."

[snip]

Sato tugs off her headscarf to show me the wounds. Her head is one long scar, and her ear is a twisted lump. Ever since the attack in 1995, her right eye has been weeping salt tears and pus. She mutters: "Now I can't do anything. I wasn't born like this. I can't do anything."

At least in Tanzania, there is an organization — called Maparece — that attempts to teach villagers of the actual causes of the problems them blame on widows. Its founder, Juliana Bernard, explains:

"Witch-hunting is the most extreme end of the extreme views towards women held by many men here. Women do the vast majority of the work. They build the houses, care for the children, and work in the fields. They work 24 hours a day – but they have nothing at the end of it. We are seen as the property of our husbands. Women are not allowed to decide anything about our own lives. We have no rights, no property, and no say. Widows are the exception – and that is why they are targeted. Anything bad is blamed on us, and we can't answer back. It ends with us being blamed even for disease and death."

Her program is simple: she eats with the supposed witches and survives. She provides them with chimneys for their wood-fired ovens that redirects the smoke from their eyes, reducing their bloodshot (and thus "witchy") appearance. She helps bring polio vaccines to villages, so that polio cannot be blamed on witches.

Hari then goes to Kenya, to bear witness to female genital mutilation.

First, Margaret puts her finger under the hood of the clitoris, "and then I cut it completely off." Then "I cut out all the meat. I know when to stop when I feel the bone and there's nothing left to cut away." Then "we take her to bed and cover her with a cloth. In the evening, the women come back to check I have done a good job. If I have left anything by mistake, because the girl kicked and screamed too much, we cut her again."

More than 90 percent of the women in some countries in Africa undergo some form of FGM (though not all are, apparently, as extreme as the procedures witnessed by Hari). The explanation for the procedure is clear:

Outside a tin shack in the emptiness, Margaret explains why they do it. "It is to please the men," she says. "They will not marry a woman who is uncut. They think that a woman with an uncut vagina will be sexually insatiable, and have sex with anyone. But if she is cut, she will not enjoy sex, so you know she will be a virgin on her wedding night, and she will not cheat on you after you are married."

If you make sex so painful for a woman, then she won't pursue pleasure with anyone else. And, if there are other problems, well, so be it. Controlling women is more important.

Dr Guyo Jaldesa sees the consequences every day. "Instead of a normal vagina, these women just have scar tissue," he says. "This causes all sorts of problems. It is basically torture for the women to have sex. One of the purposes of female genital mutilation is to make it terribly painful and unpleasant for women." When he gets married, "the man has to prove his virility by forcing open the closed scar tissue. If he fails to perform this the man is ridiculed, but it can be very difficult. So often the man will use objects – like a knife or broken bottle – causing even more terrible damage to the woman."

During childbirth, the woman's vagina has no elasticity. "The scars cannot stretch to let the baby out – so it often becomes trapped there," he explains. The World Health Organisation calculates this causes a 20 per cent increase in still-born births.

FGM is also a contributor to fistulas, in which tissue separating a woman's vagina from her urinary and digestive tracts dies from prolonged childbirth, leaving her incontinent and leaking urine and feces through her vagina.

Kanako Sampao is a lean, drawn 25-year-old woman who wanders the streets, her head covered with a red bandana. She keeps her distance from everyone, in order to hide the stench that constantly leaks from her. "I was cut when I was 10," she says, looking around nervously, and smirking at odd intervals. "I screamed but they did it anyway." She didn't heal very well – it was months before she could walk again. When she was 14 she was married off and had her first and only baby.

"He became stuck. I couldn't push him out," she says. "They cut me to pull him out but it was too late. He died." The punishment didn't end there. When the baby becomes trapped in a scarred vagina, there is huge pressure on the rectum, the bladder and the urethra – and a lot of the tissue can become damaged and die. This happened to Kanako. Her insides were crushed – and never recovered. She has what is called a fistula: now all her urine and faeces leak in a long incontinent streak from her vagina.

She admits that she is shunned and beaten by society, scavanging from the trash of her own relatives to survive.

In Kenya, Hari highlights the work of Agnes Pareiyo, who was herself so mutilated and now works to end the practice through education, providing alternatives for practitioners and sheltering girls who flee their families to avoid it.

Agnes' defence of her girls is legendary in the Rift Valley. Everybody knows about the time an enraged father turned up at the gates of the shelter with a sword to reclaim his daughter and have her cut. The gates were sealed; the girls were gathered, unarmed, behind Agnes. The father was howling revenge – and Agnes stood firm and shouted: "Come on then! Try it! We're not afraid of you!" After a moment's silence, he fled. "I am a Masai woman," she says, and chuckles.

The shelter triggered such a mass rebellion of young girls running away from home that the Kenyan government finally made it illegal to subject a girl to genital mutilation in 2001. But the first prosecutions are only beginning now.

The difficulty, as Agnes sees it, is not just FGM but the fact that FGM and child marriages share a strong correlation in Kenya.

But Agnes soon realised that mutilation cannot be looked at on its own. After a girl is mutilated, she is almost always forced to drop out of school and sold off for a dowry to an older man. In the Rift Valley, mutilation and forced marriage are Siamese twins.

Agnes also helps provide shelter to girls that don't wish to be thus married off.

Hari argues that the West's insistence that some of these practices are "cultural" and that it is cultural imperialism to try to end them is wrong-headed. Agnes agrees:

Agnes leans forward, her hands bunched into fists. "These girls don't think [mutilation] is wrong because a white man told them so. They know it's wrong because it's their body." With that, Agnes sits back, and looks out, towards the girls playing in the yard, free at last.

Raped And Killed For Being A Lesbian: South Africa Ignores 'Corrective' Attacks [The Guardian]
South African Gangs Use Rape To "Cure" Lesbians [Reuters]
Witch Hunt: Africa's Hidden War On Women [The Independent]

Earlier: Darfur: When Assault Becomes A Case For Genocide
The New York Times Decides Not To Forget About Congo
Rwandan Women's Perspectives On Their Children, Their Rapes
Fixing Fistulas In Tanzania Can Be Beautiful

As we’ve previously mentioned, the violence against women in Congo has reached unprecedented levels. Over the weekend, NPR interviewed Eve Ensler and Dr. Denis Mukwege about their work in helping to heal the wounds caused by the sexual attacks of soldiers. Mukwege, the founder of Panzi hospital in the Congo, said that first “we need to help them feel like human beings again before we can do any medical help.” Eve Ensler became involved with the crisis in Congo through several interviews she conducted with Dr. Mukwege in 2006. She continues to raise awareness about the violence in Congo, partially through V-Day, a global movement she founded to end violence against women. In this clip, Eve Ensler and Dr. Mukwege calls for help from Americans to help “put pressure on the political actors of the countries of the great lakes so there will be a political will to prevent these horrible crimes.” [NPR]

What Gettleman finds during this trip, in addition to thousands more reported rapes, is a little bit of progress. Women are learning to tell the stories of their brutalization without shame, and to seek justice without fear. The police and the government are slowly realizing that these survivors are their mothers, their sisters, and their daughters and that the men that would sexually brutalize women to the point where they are left infertile, incontinent, permanently disabled or dead are more horrifying than their actions. Is it full scale change? No. With continuing violence of all types, no one expects an end to the rape epidemic any more than they expect a full end to the military conflict any time soon. But with people like Gettleman and playwright Eve Ensler, as well as organizations like the United Nations and the American Bar Association, attempting to draw attention to the issue and assist in pragmatic ways like helping women press charges, the police to investigate and, in Eve's case, establishing centers to provide counseling to victims, it's possible the tide of sexual violence is starting to ebb just a little. That's probably cold comfort to the women who have already been victimized, but it's a start to trying to make sure that there are some women in Congo who won't be.

Rape Victims’ Words Help Jolt Congo Into Change [NY Times]
Breaking The Silence [NY Times]
Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War[NY Times]
Brutality in Congo [NY Times]

Earlier: In Congo, They Rape Three-Year-Olds
"Here At The Hospital, We've Seen Women Who Have Stopped Living"
Critics Find The Greatest Silence "Chilling" But "Frustrating"
"They Said If My Parents Didn't Give Them Money They Would Rape Me"

The Greatest Silence: Rape In The Congo [HBO]

Related: The Greatest Silence Official Site The Greatest Silence: Rape In The Congo [Women Make Movies]

Earlier: Critics Find The Greatest Silence "Chilling" But "Frustrating"
"Here At The Hospital, We've Seen Women Who Have Stopped Living"
In Congo, They Rape Three-Year-Olds

War Against Women, Anderson Cooper Reports On the Use Of Rape As A Weapon [CBS News]
Earlier: In Congo, They Rape Three-Year-Olds

Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.

Anyway, the rest of the story is about how the problem is exacerbated by the hiding spaces afforded by the hills and the jungle, and poor policing, and the fact that no one really saw this type of cruelty coming; I mean, why would you; but yes, if you ever wondered "where is the worst sexual violence in the world, and how bad is it?" now you know. And yeah, they do it to three-year-olds and generally burn the babies who are too young to rape.

Sexual Violence In Eastern Congo [New York Times]