What I see in the way that we reacted to the Komen debacle is perhaps the perfection of our coming together to say,

NO MORE!  We have had enough!

For me, the Komen story has been deja vu.  Many of the issues that have been highlighted by the many wonderful people who have documented this story are things I have written about before and I am so glad they have finally been aired in a way that has reached critical mass.

Without hesitation, I can say that of all the many topics I have ever written about, the Komen story is one of my least favorites.  But yet I have felt compelled to write about it again  last week and I am gratified by the attention the two pieces that I wrote on this blog received.  Today The Washington Post ran a piece that linked to my work and last week, the Institute for Public Accuracy included a link to one of them in a press release, the result of which was requests for numerous interviews with radio stations and print media from all corners of the country.  Here are links to two of them:

Sonali Kolhatkar interview with FPN’s Lucinda Marshall on KPFK’s Uprising

FPN’s Lucinda Marshall interviewed on WORT’s Her Turn

Let’s take what we’ve learned from the Komen incident about raising our voices together and keep this rolling because enough is enough, women’s rights are human rights and our lives and our health can no longer be used as political footballs!

Newt Gingrich upped his attacks against President Obama on Sunday over his administration’s requirement that some religious hospitals offer co-pay-free birth control under the new health care law.

Gingrich’s comments come after a week of outrage from the Catholic Church and his fellow GOP presidential candidates over the policy.

“This is a tremendous infringement of religious liberty,” Newt Gingrich said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Every time you turn around the secular government is shrinking the rights of religious institutions in America.”

And then there is this gem from Santorum making the absolutely false, debunked a gazillion times, connection between abortion and cancer,

“I don’t believe that breast cancer research is advanced by funding an organization where you’ve seen ties to cancer and abortion,” he added. “So, I don’t think it’s a particularly healthy way of contributing money to further cause of breast cancer, but that’s for a private organization like Susan B. Komen to make that decision.”

Romney also decided to jump on the anti-Planned Parenthood wagon,

“I also feel that the government should cut off funding to Planned Parenthood,” the former Massachusetts governor added. “Look, the idea that we’re subsidizing an institution which is providing abortion, in my view, is wrong. Planned Parenthood ought to stand on their own feet, and should not get government subsidy.”

Of course he doesn’t want the government to provide those services either.  But the win in the right wing misogynist hate fest goes to Ron Paul for coining the baffling phrase, “honest rape”,

In an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan, Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul was asked whether or not victims of rape should have access to abortion services. He said that while he believes that life begins at the moment of conception, the issue is too complex for him to give an answer that will “satisfy everyone.”

In an interview from Las Vegas on Piers Morgan Tonight, Morgan asked whether as a man with daughters and granddaughters, Rep. Paul (R-TX) thinks that abortion is warranted if a woman has been impregnated by a rapist.

“If it’s an honest rape,” Paul replied, “that individual should go immediately to the emergency room, I would give them a shot of estrogen.” He claimed, however, that if a woman is “seven months pregnant” and says that she was raped, “It’s a little bit of a different story.”

Okay, all of the above is revolting, but they are all Republican candidates, so ixnay on the surprise but here is the one that makes me spitting mad:

A top adviser to President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign suggested on Tuesday that the administration was open to working with Catholic hospitals and universities over their objections to providing birth control services to women.

That the political dialog has reached a point where a Democratic President running for re-election feels he can sell out women with the same impunity that Republicans candidates assert, women’s lives are in deep peril.

The National Action Plan On Women, Peace and Security offers a powerful opportunity to move towards a gender responsive and informed framework of peace and security, but it will require vigilance to insure that it is truly implemented in a way that assures women’s human rights.

Click here to read the entire WMC piece.

Feminist activists are making their presence known in the Occupy movement in many locations, in the U.S. and throughout the world:

Occupying Patriarchy in Rome

The Occupy Albany Women’s Caucus takes on the Department of Social Services

In San Francisco

Creating a safe place in New York

The OccupyDC Gender Equality Committee mic checks the anti-abortion March for Life

This says it all.

The Ukrainian group Femen protests at Davos (warning–nudity)

Wonderful graphic by Liza Cowan

Special note–I thought Liza’s graphics rocked so much I hired her to design a new logo for the Feminist Peace Network website. Also check out her other work here.

(a)  The United States recognizes that promoting women’s participation in conflict prevention, management, and resolution, as well as in post conflict relief and recovery, advances peace, national security, economic and social development, and international cooperation.

(b)  The United States recognizes the responsibility of all nations to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, including when implemented by means of sexual violence.  The United States further recognizes that sexual violence, when used or commissioned as a tactic of war or as a part of a widespread or systematic attack against civilians, can exacerbate and prolong armed conflict and impede the restoration of peace and security.

(c)  It shall be the policy and practice of the executive branch of the United States to have a National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security (National Action Plan).

Sec. 2.  National Action Plan.  A National Action Plan shall be created pursuant to the process outlined in Presidential Policy Directive 1 and shall identify and develop activities and initiatives in the following areas:

(a)  National integration and institutionalization.  Through interagency coordination, policy development, enhanced professional training and education, and evaluation, the United States Government will institutionalize a gender responsive approach to its diplomatic, development, and defense-related work in conflict-affected environments.

(b)  Participation in peace processes and decisionmaking.  The United States Government will improve the prospects for inclusive, just, and sustainable peace by promoting and strengthening women’s rights and effective leadership and substantive participation in peace processes, conflict prevention, peacebuilding, transitional processes, and decisionmaking institutions in conflict-affected environments.

(c)  Protection from violence.  The United States Government will strengthen its efforts to prevent    and protect women and children from    harm, exploitation, discrimination, and abuse, including sexual and gender-based violence and trafficking in persons, and to hold perpetrators accountable in conflict-affected environments.

(d)  Conflict prevention.  The United States Government will promote women’s roles in conflict prevention, improve conflict early warning and response systems through the integration of gender perspectives, and invest in women and girls’ health, education, and economic opportunity to create conditions for stable societies and lasting peace.

(e)  Access to relief and recovery.  The United States Government will respond to the distinct needs of women and children in conflict affected disasters and crises, including by providing safe, equitable access to humanitarian assistance.

The National Action Plan is a significant addition to U.S. policy and long overdue.  The potential impact of this order is huge.  In an address at Georgetown University, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said,

This is not just a woman’s issue. It cannot be relegated to the margins of international affairs. It truly does cut to the heart of our national security and the security of people everywhere, because the sad fact is that the way the international community tries to build peace and security today just isn’t getting the job done. Dozens of active conflicts are raging around the world, undermining regional and global stability, and ravaging entire populations. And more than half of all peace agreements fail within five years. At the same time, women are too often excluded from both the negotiations that make peace and the institutions that maintain it. Now of course, some women wield weapons of war — that’s true — and many more are victims of it. But too few are empowered to be instruments of peace and security.

Clinton went on to cite examples of why the NAP is so crucial, pointing in particular to recent attacks on women in Egypt by security forces in the aftermath of the Egyptian overthrow of the mubarek government,

“This systematic degradation of Egyptian women dishonours the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform and is not worthy of a great people,” she told an audience at Georgetown University.

She called the events of the past few days “shocking”.

Unfortunately, there is nothing shocking about what happened in Egypt.  Women’s human rights improved somewhat during the decade preceding the overthrow of Mubarek, but this State Department report from 2010 points to the still systemic misogyny in Egypt before the uprising.  Specifics about violence against women include,

The law prohibits rape, prescribing penalties of 15 to 25 years’ imprisonment or life imprisonment for cases involving armed abduction. The number of cases investigated was small because women were reluctant to report rape. Spousal rape is not illegal. According to a 2007 study by the National Center for Criminal and Social Research, there were approximately 20,000 cases of rape annually.

Although the law does not prohibit domestic violence or spousal abuse, provisions of law relating to assault may be applied with accompanying penalties. However, the law requires that an assault victim produce multiple eyewitnesses, which is a difficult condition for a domestic abuse victim…

…The law does not specifically address honor crimes, in which a man violently assaults or kills a woman, usually a family member, because of a perceived lack of chastity. There were no reliable statistics regarding the extent of honor killings, but observers believed such killings took place during the year, particularly in rural areas.

Sex tourism existed in Luxor and at beach resorts such as Sharm El-Sheikh. Most sex tourists came from Europe and the Persian Gulf region.

There is no specific law criminalizing sexual harassment, but the government prosecuted sexual harassment under existing law. Sexual harassment remained a serious problem. A 2008 ECWR survey found that 83 percent of Egyptian women and 98 percent of foreign women in the country had been sexually harassed and that approximately half of women surveyed faced harassment daily.

Also, significantly, while women were actively involved in the uprising, like so many social movements before, women’s human rights were not an integral part of the agenda.  In fact in the aftermath, as Foreign Affairs points out,  the blowback against those rights has been a serious issue,

After the revolution, conservative forces argued that women’s rights laws passed under Mubarak, like all remnants of his regime, were illegitimate and should be repudiated. For example, several thousand Salafis demonstrated outside of al-Azhar University in Cairo in May, demanding the return of educational authority solely to fathers. The general secretary of the High Council of Islamic Affairs, a government body, called for lowering maternal custody ages from the current age of 15 to age six for boys and nine for girls. Challenges came from supposedly liberal forces as well. In April, the Freedoms Committee of the Journalists’ Syndicate held a conference condemning the current women’s rights standards in Egypt. Three months later, Judge Abdallah al Baga, president of the Family Court of Appeal, submitted a draft bill to the prime minister that called for abolishing khula divorce and reinstating, under some conditions, a practice in which husbands can forcibly return “disobedient” wives to their homes – a practice that has been outlawed since the 1960s.

That Clinton finds the recent violence “shocking” is baffling given that her own State Department produced a report pointing to systemic misogynist violence and abuse less than two years ago. Regardless of the overthrow of Mubarek, at no point has there been any indication that an improvement in women’s rights was on the table and as the Foreign Affairs quote about makes clear, there has been a great deal of concern that things may become worse for women.

There are other reasons to be somewhat guarded in being optimistic about the NAP–The U.S. didn’t give a fig about women’s rights in Afghanistan until it was politically useful to the selling of our invasion.  Ditto Iraq.   It is also worth noting that the U.S. does not consider itself subject to the International Criminal Court, which has the power to prosecute rape and sexual assault as a war crime, yet, as I pointed out in November,  it was very supportive of of the ICC’s charges of rape by Libyan forces prior to the overthrow of Qaddafi, despite the fact that neither Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch could substantiate the charges.

If the U.S. is serious about implementing the NAP, one good place to start would be in our own military.  While more sexual assaults and rapes are being reported and more charges being brought, the rate of conviction is still extremely low.  The NAP could also be used to address the severe impact that the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq  have had on women in those countries.  It can also be used to address the ongoing violence against women in countries like Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo where they U.S. has been all but silent regarding these ongoing atrocities.

So while there is cause to celebrate the creation of the National Action Plan On Women, Peace and Security, we should not do so through a rose colored lens.  The NAP has the potential of being a very potent addition to such existing women’s human rights tools as United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 which addresses many of these same points.  But as the United States’ selective support of the ICC indicates, we need to be vigilant in insisting that it not be subverted as a tool of U.S. imperialism.