VAWA, Title IX, and the Tenth Amendment

The United States: feminist policy as federal insurrection

I write primarily about issues in my own country, having to do with the uses of feminist doctrine in broadening the powers of government while weakening the civil liberties of men, in part because the United States is my home and I have a better understanding of its history, politics and society than of other parts of the world.

But I also realize that programs which are implemented in the US system are also often used as templates or working models for similar programs which go on to be developed around the world.

During the past few years in which I have been researching programs funded by the Violence Against Women Act,

still another even more dangerous, far-reaching federal insurgency against the rule of law, also purportedly in service of protecting women,  has been taking form:       

A radical new interpretation of Title IX, an antique civil-rights clause in a 1972 education bill, which has recently been re-purposed into a bizarre, federally-sponsored form of vigilantism on college campuses.

Title IX's original purpose as it comes to bear on women's issues, and its application in that realm for nearly four decades, was in securing equal funding for women's sports programs and equal access to academics for female scholars.

But since the US Department of Education sent out its now-infamous Dear Colleague letter, Title IX policies on college campuses have been re-invented entirely, by means of demanding their administrations treat single acts of sexual crime involving their students on-campus or off-, as components of a general, alleged, “discrimination” against women in all society, to which colleges must now react or face being cut off from the massive Title IX funding stream that higher education has long since come to rely on.

What is being done now in the name of Title IX, I call nothing less than an open secession from the rule of law: an institutional denial of the applicability of both State statutes and procedures in whatever State a school is located, and the erasure of individual liberties as mandated and protected by the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights.

The Violence Against Women Act for its part, for twenty years or more, can be accurately described as a federal umbrella protecting a whole new form of organized crime, with billions in grants issued to broadly-defined non-profit organizations under one program or another which have gone on to be the currency in an endless array of acts of fraud, corruption, perjury and nepotism, all reprehensible enough in themselves to warrant further investigation and corrective action by the agencies of the federal government which are charged with distributing and overseeing these funds.

And during all that time, since its launch in 1994, VAWA has also been used to justify a quiet but extremely powerful infiltration of local law enforcement and court procedures across the US, by means of extensive “training” programs funded by VAWA grants, and delivered as in-service curricula in an ongoing process of indoctrinating professionals and public officials to the standard approach of presuming male guilt and female victimhood from the outset of individual cases in law.

Any American man facing any charge or civil complaint involving a woman making allegations against him since that date, knows full well just how the deck is stacked against him coming in, how even his own counsel will be pre-disposed to play along with a process that offers him only lesser guilt to confess to at best, and which never presumes his innocence prior to evidence having proven him guilty of anything.

This painstaking infiltration of the entire nation’s system of local justice as authorized by the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution, has been one form of revolution in itself, and has succeeded perhaps beyond the wildest hopes of those who originally saw the VAWA bill made into law by Congress.

But VAWA is only part of a much larger revolution: the final deciding of a power struggle in play since the beginning of the United States’ existence as an independent nation: between the powers of the federal government, and those of the individual States.

The origins of the very term, “united states”, are from an original vision of the US as not “one nation, indivisible” (as schoolchildren now recite daily as part of a required incantation of a pledge of allegiance given before the US flag), but of a coalition of the “several states”, each with its own laws and its own mechanisms of legislating and enforcing them.

In matters of both civil and criminal law involving residents of a given State, the jurisdiction has from the beginning been that of the State. To this day, a criminal complaint against any party is entitled essentially “the people of the State of (Texas, Oregon, Maryland, etc), versus (named party)…”
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It may be hard for those from outside the US, to grasp the full and vast significance of this day-to-day norm in our legal lives: while there are various ‘national” police agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the US Marshall’s Service, etc, and certainly a large and powerful federal court system with districts across the land trying federal cases, the everyday administration of civic law and order has always been tasked to, and carried out by, agencies of each State’s own government according to its own laws and procedures.

Every administration in power in Washington, DC, since the ratifying of the Constitution, has been faced with this curb on the powers of the national government, by design, and has found this vexatious and irritating to one degree or another in the ruling of an entire nation. And certain Presidents of both parties, Lincoln, Wilson, both Roosevelts, Truman, both Bushes, to name but a few, have undertaken extensive campaigns to expand the power of the central government and weaken the role of those of the States.

Federal power over the entire nation and its way of life, has always been the real prize in American politics; not the implementing of one certain ideology for its own sake, but the use of many ideologies to create or enhance a sense of crisis, and thereby explain the need for the DC regime to be ever more powerful at the expense of the States’ rights of civic self-determination.

Just those words alone, “States’ rights” have come to be an explosive and self-discrediting reference to the rights of States to allow human slavery until the end of a civil war, but that war was not fought in service of either preserving or ending slavery. The American civil war, was two coalitions of States fighting against each other to determine just how powerful any central regime ought to be. The North fought for a near-omnipotent form of internal rule by an omnipresent federal government, while the South fought to sustain a more independent and self-governing status for the several States.

The South lost. And continuing to expand the reach and grasp of federal power has been the ultimate aim of every Presidency since. It has nothing to with ideology, only power. Whatever sense of crisis or emergency gives one more reason to advance the role of the federal government, that will be put in service of the quest for greater national authority by the central government.

Here I am seeking to show, that both the Violence Against Women Act and this new “Dear Colleague” version of Title IX in higher education, are just two more examples not only of a feminist power grab, but more accurately seen as in a long history of federal power grabs, using feminist doctrines merely as a tool to achieve this far larger political aim: the ultimate end of the “several States” system of local jurisprudence and self-government, and the final implementation after over two centuries, of a singular national regime governing every aspect of American life.

VAWA has succeeded in this quest, by means of inter-systemic infiltration, a topic in itself that I have covered extensively.

But what is being done now under Title IX, is nothing short of a whole new form of secessionism, which might only be possible at all in this unique, experimental, hybridized, coalitional republic we call “united states”:

The federal US Department of Education has simply seized every college in the higher education system, by means of becoming its crucial funding source, and now threatens to cut off those funds to any school that does not, in effect, secede itself to federal rule by administrative tribunal and declare itself immune from the laws of whichever State it is located in.

In coming posts here on the Ron & Lana Panel, I will proceed in my view that both feminist doctrine and women's well-being, are but symbols, propaganda devices, and crisis-promoting tools, in the hands of those who seek to expand the power of a regime, and their own powers within it into the bargain.