Prominent female conservatives who defy the status quo like Sarah Palin, Stacey Dash, and Michelle Malkin have long been on the receiving end of vicious online and on-air attacks and threats. They dare to challenge the victimhood mentality that people, namely women and minorities, need government help to achieve success. They stand up for the rights of the unborn and have the audacity to promote the importance of family and family values in society. In return for speaking their opinion, they have repeatedly received death and rape threats, with one on-air media personality going so far as to suggest that someone should defecate in Sarah Palin’s mouth. Yes, he really said something that gross on national TV.
So it’s not often that I find myself agreeing with a Democrat, but today I do. In a column that appeared in March on the Hill’s website, Representative Katherine Clark (D-MA) addressed the issue of online threats of violence toward women.
From her column:
Lawmakers in Washington have already taken steps to address [online threats to women], yet implementation is profoundly lagging. In 2006, Congress recognized the real-life dangers of online harassment and amended the Violence Against Women Act to make online threats of death or serious injury illegal. Yet, even though it is a federal crime, federal prosecutors pursued only 10 of the estimated 2.5 million cases of cyber-stalking between 2010 and 2013.
Unfortunately, it took threats against GamerGate activists to spur the outrage. In a letter to the Appropriations Committee, Rep. Clark has called for the Department of Justice to “intensify their efforts to combat cyber stalking, harassment, and threats,” specifically citing GamerGate as an example.
Kudos to Rep. Katherine Clark, whose previous record in Massachusetts shows she has long been an advocate for harsher penalties for violence against women, not by asking for more laws on this issue, but by asking for better enforcement of existing laws. Hopefully the intensified efforts against violence will extend to conservative women and not just gamers.
