Posted on 08/30/2010 2:37:01 AM PDT by RogerFGay
A series of high-profile cases of lesbian-perpetrated domestic violence has sent shock-waves through Massachusetts communities in recent months:
1. On February 16, a Suffolk Superior Court jury convicted Nicole Chuminski on two counts of second-degree murder, following a fire that killed the two daughters of her lover Anna Reisopoulos. During a heated argument between the two, Chuminski reportedly fell into a fit of rage. A few hours later Chuminski returned to her partner’s apartment and hurled an acetone-laden firebomb into the front door.
Sophia and Acia, ages 2 and 14, were burned beyond recognition, so dental records were needed for positive identification.
2. On March 29 Annamarie Rintala of Granby, Mass. was found dead by strangulation in the basement of the house she shared with her domestic partner Cara. Cara had been previously charged with domestic violence after she struck Annamarie in the back of the head with a closed fist.
3. Eunice Field of Brockton, Mass. found herself on the losing end of a bitter ménage à trois. So on August 9 she marched to the apartment of Lorraine Wachsman. There she grabbed a serrated knife and stabbed Wachsman in the back and neck. Dispelling any doubt about her intentions, she then penned a note admitting she had killed Waschsman “for taking away the love of my life.”
Ms. Field is now being held without bail pending a September 3 court appearance.
Experts on lesbian domestic violence were shocked, but honestly not surprised by these incidents. Last November a report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs reported a 125% increase in domestic violence fatalities in lesbian and gay couples around the country during the prior year. According to Beth Leventhal of The Network/La Red of Boston, “partner abuse in LGBT communities can be just as lethal as that in heterosexual communities.”
Ms. Leventhal’s commentary actually understates the extent of the problem. Earlier this year the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research published the results of a survey of over 51,000 California adults . The UCLA study found 28% of persons in lesbian/gay relationships had experienced intimate partner violence, compared to 17% of persons in heterosexual relationships.
It’s also believed that lesbians are more likely to engage in partner violence than gay men. According to the Boston Gay Men’s Domestic Violence Project, one in three homosexual women experience partner aggression, compared to only one in four homosexual men. Kaitlin Nichols of The Network/La Red notes, “The myth of women’s communities as safe communities has prevented many women from reaching out for support. If they have shared what is happening, they are met with disbelief from their community.”
And why are lesbians more likely to abuse?
According to Nomi Porat, an abuse-prevention expert, the reason is poor limit-setting: “An issue common to women, particularly battered women, is the fear of demanding physical and emotional boundaries. In part, battered lesbians are afraid their lovers will leave or become more violent if any limitations are set in the relationship.”
A nearly impenetrable double wall serves to keep lesbian battering tucked away in the proverbial closet. The first wall is the stigmatization invoked by lesbians themselves who believe in a sort of same-sex utopia, the feminist belief that maintains female-female relationships are inherently more peaceful, gentle, and “pure,” compared to male-female relationships.
In Naming the Violence: Speaking out About Lesbian Battering, Barbara Hart maintains that female batterers should be subjected to a form of shunning by the lesbian community: “one of the consequences of [female batterers’] violence is that they may have to limit any contact with the person they assaulted/abused. This may mean that the batterer cannot attend public gatherings or movement meetings.”
The second wall is the broader domestic violence industry that maintains a cult-like belief in the notion of patriarchal sexism, the theory that men abuse their wives due to an innate and irrepressible urge to oppress women. So every time a woman pummels, rapes, or otherwise abuses her female partner, the patriarchal dominance theory takes a body-blow.
These ideological blinders serve to justify shelters policies that turn away of needy women. According to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, the problem of abuse shelters that discriminate on the basis of gender identity is widespread.
Intimate partner aggression is not a problem limited to any particular sex, or gender identity, or economic group. Indeed, research shows women are at least as likely as men to engage in partner abuse.When the Sisterhood gets over its denial of the truth, we’ll stop seeing so many women and men victimized by domestic violence.
Blaming society for their choices will not help them nor society.
And some blacks and Jews voted for McCain in the last election.
And some blacks and Jews voted for McCain in the last election.
What is your proof of that assertion? Did you dissect their brains soon after birth?
But aruanan, your original post was meaningless psychobabble that added nothing. DJMacWow’s mistake was in responding to it at all.
Here's a real FR phenomenon.
FR is a conservative site. We do not appreciate our members fighting against us on our conservative values and issues. If you wish to support homosexual marriage or homosexuals in the military or hate crimes against us for speaking out against government promotion of homosexuality that’s your business, but you’d better do it somewhere else and not on FR. If you value your posting privileges, that is. FR is pro-God, pro-life, pro-family, pro-marriage, pro-military, pro-traditional American conservatism and it is a privilege to post here. Those who support the godless liberal/Marxist destruction of our free society and our country are free to exercise their free speech rights elsewhere. I won’t stand in your way.
I wasn’t going to bother responding again. How do you respond to nothing? Lots of words hung together do not make a point.
I am a 42 yr old straight woman in the process of divorce. I would have loved for my husband to take over the finances. He however thought that his job was done after going to work all day. I was in charge of holding a job, outside of the home, paying the bills even though he was in the habit of spending money that we did not have, raising the kids and running them everywhere, keeping up the housework, and I even went back to school and earned my BSIT. What he wanted out of me was for me to do all of these things and get a better paying job than he had so he could stay home. And even if he had stayed home I probably would have had to do the above mentioned things. He was also mentally abusive, and sorry to say but that is most of the time worse than physical abuse.
He was raised in a family that had a very strong father and a mother that worked all of the time to support the family also. He saw himself as the head of the family and we all had to do things exactly as he wanted them. So where does he fit in in all of this?
Wow. Just. uh. ...wow
That pic is instant repellant.
You want to lose weight? Stick it on the fridge.
Quite drinking? Stick on the Liquor cabinet.
That’s a control freak, not a husband. He has emotional/psychological issues.
It seems not to have occurred to you to review your own posting to see how such a misunderstanding by so many could possibly have come about. Either defend what you believe, or sharpen up your beliefs with the help of others here, but lay off attacking others for questioning the utility of your off-point theorizing couched in supercilious tones.
The more likely scenario is that there is an inborn predisposition to heterosexuality that, for various reasons, genetic, biological, psychological, and cultural may be weakened or suppressed.
You are excusing behavior that is rooted in mental illness by suggesting it may be "genetic or biological". There is NO proof that the behavior is genetic or biological. None.
Born or Bred?: Science Does Not Support the Claim That Homosexuality Is Genetic
In his book Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth, Dr. Jeffrey Satinover writes:
We will see later the falsity of activists' repeated assertions that homosexuality is immutable. They seek to create the impression that science has settled these questions, but it most certainly has not. Instead, the changes that have occurred in both public and professional opinion have resulted from politics, pressure, and public relations.
Yes I know a lot of women who going through divorces, band together for support that still date men and do not go for lesbian activities. It not only makes rent cheaper being split between the two of them but most of the time they work different shifts so that daycare is not necessary either.
Yes and he does not believe in getting psychological help, he would not even go to counseling for our marriage.
ok thanks for the intel
My mother had a friend whose husband came home from work and put on white gloves to test the cleanliness of the fridge front, table tops, whatever. If the glove had a smidgen of dirt, she had to clean again while he told her what a pig she was. She finally left him.
There is a big difference between being the head of your family and taking responsibility for their care and being a little Napoleon.
Deanna, I wouldn’t give his stories much creedence. My fiancee’s late husband gave her the same schtick. He was uneducated, had a GED but did mostly manual labor jobs. He got into pain medication then the anti-depressants, next thing she knows, he’s a lump on the couch and she’s working 50 hours weeks. When she wasn’t home, he would go drain the bank account at strip clubs. Her credit was devastated, and she had had enough.
Strong figurehead households usually generate motivated, well-mannered children. Even having one parent acting as the figurehead yields positive results. Based on your story, I would bet he was either abused as a child or his father was abusive to his mother thus he thought it was acceptable to do so.
See, what happens is that men put on facades to lure in the women. They come off as the innocent aloof jock or the sheltered but attractive bookworm. Once you’re lured into their web, they start to rely on you for more and more. They stop doing the dishes, the laundry, then yardwork, home maintenance, you get the point. The longer you allow them to siphon off of you, the more empowered they become. You did the right thing by leaving him. No one deserves to be abused like that. My step-father did that to my mother, and I learned what NOT to do in a relationship by observation.
These men, deep down, are cowards. Spousal abusers usually control the entire household. They’re imposing, loud, and they’re incredibly rough with the handling of the kids and the wife. They use their size to their advantage. Physically smaller men use more devious means through emotional and mental torture and abuse. They find the low self-esteemed women and feed off of their misery. It’s really sick.
Heterosexual marriages are prone to abuse just as much as homosexual relationships, but I believe the mature adults among us understand conflict resolution and have loving relationships with our spouses. Homosexuals are usually in it for the physical. As soon as that’s gone, they’ve lost access to the focus of their perversion, and they start to see their partner for the pitiful, loathsome human being he or she is.
thank you both. I would have left earlier but I did not really know I could. He had his high school diploma and had spent time in the military and he never once hit me or our girls. And the only “drug” he abused was alcohol, because it was legal. He came straight home from work and planted in front of his computer and then got mad if we made noise and disturbed him. I always told everyone that if he hit me or the girls, cheated on me, or started not coming home that I would leave him. He never did any of that. Even when I was having a mental breakdown, that I got over shortly after I asked him to leave, he made me feel like I was faking it and told me to get back to work.
But the past is the past and I am working on the future, and it is starting to look better all of the time. Thanks again.
I want to rebump this, because of this little puff piece that says lesbians have zero cases of child abuse. I believe the sample was about 78 couples? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/10/lesbians-child-abuse-0-percent_n_781624.html?ref=fb&src=sp
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