Ah, values.
A pregnant woman is brutally murdered by the father of her children, and all some “conservative values” bloggers have to say about it is, I’m not saying she deserved it, but she pretty much deserved it. First, Dan Riehl:
Any murder is tragic; the murder of a pregnant woman is even more so. And nothing should distract from an expedient investigation and prosecution, or fail to appreciate the family’s profound suffering because of this crime. Unfortunately, if this is what constitutes crime in the heartland of America, that heart is very sick and we can only expect more of the same.
(Emphasis mine)
Yes, you read that right — Dan does appear to be saying that it’s unfortunate that the murder of a pregnant woman constitutes a crime in the Heartland.
I’ve no desire to insult the victim or her family and no one should. But the sad reality is that Jessie Davis was either the victim of poor self, or impulse control and poor decision-making, perhaps both, long before she became a murder victim. And to suggest that one isn’t in any way related to another only endorses the notion that values don’t matter. They do. And while Ms. Davis certainly isn’t in any way directly responsible for her own death, had she been a bit more responsible with her life, it likely wouldn’t have ended in such a tragic crime.
Right. Because if she had just, say, married the guy, I’m sure there would have been a storybook ending.
Now, her remaining child and all of the other children linked to this crime are victims of a crime far more significant than any one or two murders. They are victims of a culture where nothing much seems to matter anymore, so long as people are free to act or behave on impulse as they wish, with no regard for the consequences. And all Americans suffer as a result of that tragedy.
Unfortunately for Ms. Davis and her friends and family, it is the crime beneath the crime we shouldn’t simply ignore in this instance.
The fact that her two-year-old apparently witnessed the murder isn’t nearly as bad as the fact that he lives in a free society.
One has to wonder what Riehl et al would like to see happen when people “act or behave on impulse as they wish, with no regard for the consequences.” Apparently these guys are under the impression that murder is something women should expect for not following the rules of proper male authority — get pregnant out of wedlock, especially in an adulterous relationship, and prepare to die, bitch. Now, I’m no big fan of adultery — I think it’s incredibly damaging and I find it generally abhorrent — but I’d much rather live in a society where it happens with limited consequences than in a society where you get stoned to death, or even “just” jailed, for it. I also recognize that we’re human, and life is complicated — I think adultery is a bad thing, but I also know that there are plenty of good people who do it. And there are clearly many people who believe themselves to have solid values whose moral compasses are completely off the mark.
Case in point: Emporer Misha I, who I think might be one of the most disgusting human beings on the planet:
There is nothing about this crime that ought to surprise us. Crimes like these are the natural consequences of a society where anything goes as long as it feels good, “whatever gets you through the night” and “don’t you dare judge me.”
See what’s funny is that these crimes aren’t the natural consequences of a live-and-let-live society — they’re the consequences of a society in which certain classes of people feel that they have the right to punish others when those others don’t behave according to the social rules. If we truly lived in a non-judgmental society, Jesse’s murderer would have had no reason to kill her. “Live and let live” generally allows others to, you know, live.
In all of the gushing talk about St. Jessie, nobody has yet asked the question: “How the fuck did you expect the life of somebody who had, knowingly, let herself get knocked up not once, but twice by a married man to turn out?”
Uh… not dead, that’s for sure.
Reading Misha’s post will give you some real insight into the minds of misogynist right-wing fuckwits. There are a lot of possible responses to the question, “How do you expect the life of someone who got pregnant twice by a married man to turn out?” I don’t think most normal people would answer, “Brutally murdered, duh!”
But I also will not shut up about the society and culture that led to that situation, a society where screwing around is not only accepted, it’s actively encouraged (turn on TV and watch any major “show” if you doubt me), where nobody is held to account for anything and where breaking up a family is more acceptable than daring to wag a finger at the home-wrecking slut in the first place.
There’s a big difference between “wagging a finger” and “pissing on a corpse.”
Nothing is sacred anymore, no actions are scorned and looked down upon, everything is a “valid life choice and nobody’s business” and our pre-teen children are being taught in school how to put on condoms, have anal sex and how to fist each other to orgasm.
Wow, where did he go to middle school?
Don’t give me any shit about how a crime like this horrid murder is a surprise to you. It was as predictable as a sunset, and it’s only going to get worse and worse until what used to be a moral nation has become a horror making the last days of the Roman Empire look like Sunday School.
A woman getting pregnant by a married man leads to murder? It’s “as predictable as a sunset”?
Why do I suspect that it was predictable at least in part because the victim was white and her killer is black?
This is disturbing. It’s disturbing that values voters like this guy think that there’s a cause and effect relationship between getting pregnant out of wedlock and being killed. It’s disturbing that he feels like he could have predicted this — it makes me think that he can put himself in the shoes of her killer and somehow justify his actions, because she was a slut and she had it coming. It’s disturbing that the supposed decline of our morality goes hand in hand with misegenation, gay rights, women’s rights, birth control and sex for pleasure. It’s disturbing that he thinks our country is immoral because we don’t level punitive punishments on women who get pregnant out of wedlock, women who have affairs, interracial couples, and gays and lesbians.
And then the kicker:
It’s not your fault if you’re raped going down a back alley downtown in the middle of the night dressed only in a bikini, but let’s be honest here; you shouldn’t be fucking surprised either.
Not if you’re walking down the alley with Misha, you shouldn’t be.
His comment section pretty clearly demonstrates just how moral and enlightened his readers are. When they aren’t jerking off to images of dead and mutilated women (for real — I’m not going to post it, but there’s a detailed description), they’re referring to interracial relationships as “breeding” and “animal husbandry.” I generally shy away from comparing conservatives to the Taliban, but read the post and the comments about how she bears the responsibility for her own demise, how slutty women need to make a choice between shaping up or being killed, how men basically have no responsibility for anything, and tell me the comparison isn’t kind of apt.
Murder is the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States. However, it’s worth noting that intimate partner homicides have significantly decreased over the past 30 years — with the number of men murdered by intimates dropping 71 percent between 1976 and 2004, and the number of women killed by intimates reaching a record low in 2004.
That’s the supposedly sick culture they want to turn back the clock on.
Intimate partner violence remains a huge problem. But as women gain greater rights, as men lose some of their previously almost-unlimited power over their female family members, and as social norms shift and women are increasingly considered as human as men, violence decreases — on both ends. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the number of intimate partner homicides has decreased so steeply since more progressive legal policies took root. No-fault divorce laws, a decreased stigma for divorce and single motherhood, greater educational and occupational opportunities for women, pregnancy prevention, domestic violence resources, and stricter police policies for intervening in domestic disputes have all contributed to allowing both partners the chance to get out of bad relationships, and allowing women and men greater ability to choose their partners freely, or to choose to be single rather than settle for someone abusive.
Dan and Misha don’t like this system very much. They prefer a time when men could do whatever they wanted with their female family members, and when women were thoroughly socially shamed for doing anything other than getting married and having babies. This system obviously hasn’t been completely obliterated yet, or anything close to it — after all, conservative bloggers are calling a murder victim a slut who had it coming because she had two kids out of wedlock, without mentioning that her murderer had children with three different women and, you know, murdered someone. They also ignore the fact that marriage isn’t exactly the antidote to abuse or murder, and that controlling and punishing women isn’t exactly going to decrease the rate of violence against us.
Riehl and Misha fail to recognize that the problem is people who haven’t changed to adapt to a more progressive, inclusive society. Murder and violence have long been means of controlling women; with liberalized laws and greater options for women, those methods have been weakened. The fact that violence as a means of social control still exists speaks to the fact that we need more progress, not less. We need to demand that the class of people who have long felt entitled to commit violence evolve, not tell victims that they should regress to a time when things were even worse. We need to point out that these crimes are about punishing women for sexual behavior that men disapprove of (or for just being women) — that they’re about men feeling entitled to control, hurt and kill women. We need to recognize that men like Riehl, Misha and their many commenters will blame female victims almost no matter what they do, because simply existing in a female body is enough to assume deviance and guilt.
Women are far more likely to be assualted or killed by an intimate than by a stranger; the opposite is true for men. Men are more likely to be assaulted or killed in general, and men are more likely to assault and to kill. And yet it’s women who should change.
Their commenters make no bones about the fact that they think she had it coming — that it was a “natural” consequence of her behavior. I don’t know what kind of “natural” world they envision, but it is telling that they think it’s normal for women to be killed simply for breaking social rules of sexual morality. Of course, their general feelings toward women are pretty evident from the number of times terms like “dumb bitch” come up. Some of the comments:
Chances are I’d have voted for a bullet for them both. These sort of vermin are why our society is turning into a cesspool. We let these amoral morons outbreed us by the dozen then provide for their mewling offspring so they too can spew forth another pointless, senseless, thoughtless tide before they’re out of their wasted and taxpayer funded education that barely 10 percent of them will have any respect for.
We’re doing nothing but drowning ourselves in those who do nothing to better society one jot and patting ourselves on the back for our “caring and reasonable society”. There’s a reason they used to shun the adulterer and the unwed mother and that reason is that they are the symptom and agent for decay. I’m about as irreligious a man as you might find, but I’m wondering if we need a little of that Ol’ Time Religion to stem this moral rot.
The simple fact of the matter is this: Each party involved in this sordid affair either has reaped, or will reap, that which they have sowed …
Now to the girl.
Actions have consequences. We seem to have somehow forgotten that. We want to touch the hot stove without getting burned. We want to eat the five cherry sweet rolls for breakfast, the triple-triple-cheese burger, jumbo fries and chocolate malt laden with Oreo© and Butterfinger© and Cthulu-knows-what-else, then the quad-layer, double-sauce lasagna for dinner, then we get pissed off when suddenly the 501s don’t quite fit anymore. And we want to fuck Whomever The Hell We Please™ without anyone else either getting their knickers in a wad, their feelings torched or raising the slightest stink about it. Then we wring our hands in angst and take umbrage at the archaic notion that The World. Doesn’t. Play. Nice.
Frankly, that shit like this doesn’t happen more often is a major shock. (And people say there’s no God. How bad do you think it would be if God truly didn’t exist?).
And before you start castigating me for being an unfeeling bastard, Nerby – here, have a bombshell.
My 15-year-old stepdaughter soon-to-be-adopted daughter is pregnant.
(SIDE NOTE TO MISHA: Yeah, by that piece of pond scum you saw at the wedding/reception. Now you know why I didn’t want him there.)
She wants an abortion. Says she’s being “responsible”. I told both of them that their chance at “responsibility” ended when his dick went in her p(damned WordPress filters)ussy. Told both of them that there wasn’t going to be an abortion. (And he’s a house acquisition away from being told to get his ass lost.) I said that making one mistake was not a sufficient reason to commit another.
So I think I speak with a tad bit of authority here. You reap what you sow. You hang out in troughs, you’re going to smell like hogs.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have this overwhelming urge to go kill some paper.
Hell, string the bastard up and use him for ballistic test media, as far as I am concerned.
But she was the one that kept having a relationship with him.
If some guy persists in juggling running chainsaws, I’m not going to have much sympathy for him when he grabs the wrong end.
No, she didn’t deserve to die. But she made the CHOICE to stay in that relationship. It wasn’t like she met Ted Bundy in a parking lot and got whacked over the head with a tire iron. She carried on a long term relationship with him. And made no apparent attempt to get away from him. And didn’t have the presence of mind to stick a knife or a bullet in the dopey bastard when he attacked her. If she HAD done that, we would still think she was an idiot, but at least she would have a cheering section.
A very wise person told me a few years ago that there was a difference between “asking for it” and “deserving it” whatever “it” might be. A woman wearing skimpy clothing and walking through a bad part of town at midnight is asking for some sort of trouble. She does not deserve anything horrible to happen to her and if it does the bastard who did it needs to be prosecuited to the fullest extent of the law. Back to the present murder case: Jesse Davis knew she was dating a married man yet she continued to see him and have babies with him. She was asking for trouble, whether it be a long battle for child support, stalking from an upset wife or being part of some skanky man’s “harem”. Did she deserve to die a horrible death with her innocent unborn baby? Not on your life.
There are TWO guilty parties in this. The major difference being that one of them is now a murderer as well, and hopefully the bastard will be sentenced to death. Other than that, they’re completely identical.
AA women are some of the meanest women I have ever run into. The hate Euro women who date AA men since they have a tough time finding a man. If I have to go to where my husband works, I steer clear of the back porch where most of these types of women hang out. Their behavior in public leaves alot to be desired too. I actually saw one woman grab some strange man’s nipple and twist it. I was so disgusted I had to leave. Now I have worked with many AA women who did not act like this but there is still quite a few– even educated and professional– who behave like loud screaming harpies.
The media is afraid to touch this because the Cop and his fellow perp are BLACK! Plain and simple! Get friggin real, ever since OJ (and a huge following of subsequent black murderers) where charged with subsequent Civil Rights Violations (Like for fucking example the Rodney King Cops where!)
This set the stage for black-on-white violence by tacet approval!
I guess it has to do with that BULLSHIT slavery payback issue, of which anyone remotely white is fair game!
The idiots who demand that we not follow traditional values now have what they deserve.
Hope they like the bodycount.
As far as the touchy subject of inter-racial breeding (AKA Animal Husbandry). Again, ever seen what kids do to mixed-race kids? They are, IN-MOST-CASES, usually shunned by both parties, or have to be unusually extreme (behavior-wise) to be accepted by one or the other!
WHY the fuck would you do this to a kid nowadays? Life’s hard enough without handicapping them from the get-go!!!
Every time you make a choice there is a price… the question is, are you willing to pay that price and do you know what it is really going to cost you?
Nerby, her boyfriend deserves to be handed over to my brother for execution but it takes two to tango so she bears some of the reponsibility for her own demise.
My point isn’t that she “deserved” anything, even if she’d been 100 times more of an impulse-driven, instant gratification, think with her ovaries slut than she already was, she’d STILL not deserve to be murdered for it (Cutts’ wife might think differently about it and I, for one, can’t blame her, but that’s a different subject).
My point IS that if you set yourself up for failure and tragedy, failure and tragedy is much much more likely to be what you end up with. There’s no way around the laws of probability, and having a “right” to behave in a certain way isn’t going to get you out of the morgue when you’re busy being dead.
Did she “deserve” to die? (Whatever that means.)
No, I suppose not.
Were the consequences the natural, expected results of her long string of horrible choices?
Absolutely.
So, we’re not surprised.
If these are “morals,” I’m happy not to have them.
Thanks to Michelle for the Sadly, No! link.