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But the vote was 6–3, with dissenting justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor and Harry A. Blackmun finding abortionists and women having abortions a “class of persons” analogous to black people being lynched by Democrats in the South.

Feminists latched their cause to the suffering of blacks—and then completely forgot about the blacks. A majority of blacks oppose abortion, so they probably wouldn’t mind a judge who did so, too—especially if he also happened to have prosecuted the Klan in Mississippi.

In 2001, President George W. Bush nominated district court judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. As a Republican prosecutor in Mississippi in the sixties, he had put his life, and the lives of his wife and children at risk, by standing up to the Klan.

This wasn’t a Hollywood movie; it was real life. Back then, the Klan held Mississippians in terror, committing dozens of murders and at least seventy-five church bombings. Pickering signed affidavits for the arrest of Klan members and voluntarily testified against the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan being tried for the murder of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer. The FBI was required to provide full-time protection for Pickering and his family.

Not only that, but while phony liberals like Al Gore, Bill Clinton and Tom Wicker sent their children to 99-percent-white private schools to avoid the diversity of public schools, Pickering sent his kids to overwhelmingly black Mississippi public schools. He served on the boards of the Mississippi Baptist Convention and the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi.

Not surprisingly, Pickering’s nomination to the federal appellate court was supported by past presidents of the Mississippi NAACP and Charles Evers, brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

But the feminists opposed Pickering because of his opposition to abortion. So Senate Democrats blocked the nomination of this civil rights hero to a federal appeals court on the grounds that he was bad on “civil rights.” Senators Charles Schumer and Edward Kennedy demanded to see Pickering’s unpublished opinions “involving civil rights, labor and reproductive
issues.”
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They didn’t care about civil rights—it was the “reproductive issues” that got their dander up.

Doing the bidding of the abortion ladies, the Congressional Black Caucus and the national NAACP came out against Pickering, claiming his “record on civil rights is a grave concern.”
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Yes, his “record on civil rights” was also of concern to his family when they risked death so that he could prosecute the KKK.

Nearly exploding with rage, Charles Evers challenged these modern “civil rights” leaders on CBS’s
60 Minutes
:

Pickering’s nomination was blocked by the same political party that had once harbored the Klan he had battled for so many years. The Democrats’ refusal to confirm him marked the precise moment that “civil rights” ceased having anything to do with black people and became a front for abortion rights and other feminist enthusiasms.

In 2007, then-governor Eliot Spitzer spoke to a proabortion group in Manhattan, vowing to protect a woman’s right to partial-birth abortion, grandly proclaiming: “New York State will continue to be a beacon of civil rights.”
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Puncturing a baby’s skull and suctioning its brains out is another one of those fast-growing “civil rights movements.”

The feminists’ most risible misappropriation of the black experience was the 1994 Violence Against Women Act. To justify VAWA, women claimed to suffer in twentieth century America as much as blacks had during the Jim Crow era.

Feminists wanted their own civil rights law. So when they were riding high during the first two years of the Clinton presidency—with Hillary as copresident, Janet Reno as the first female attorney general and Al Gore as first lady, in addition to huge Democratic majorities in Congress—Democrats enacted VAWA.

The real civil rights laws were generally passed under Congress’s authority to enforce the equal protection clause and to regulate interstate commerce. With Democratic elected officials in the South denying black Americans their basic constitutional rights, the federal government had to step in and provide a federal remedy for federal rights. Hotels and restaurants that refused to serve blacks made it difficult for blacks to travel across state lines, giving Congress authority to ban such practices under the interstate commerce clause.

Liberal women believed their situation in America, circa 1994, was comparable.

Democrats claimed Congress had authority to pass VAWA based on the exact same constitutional provisions underlying real civil rights laws. Led by Senator Joe Biden, congressional committees set to work collecting evidence for the proposition that state criminal justice systems were a living nightmare for women, so teeming with woman-hating Cro-Magnons that federal judges were required to ride into town and secure women’s basic civil rights. In the alternative, they found that violence against women had a major impact on interstate commerce.

Operating on the theory that women were being treated just like blacks in 1961 Alabama, the Democrats claimed that there was a “pervasive bias in various state justice systems against victims of gender-motivated violence,” including the perpetuation of “an array of erroneous stereotypes and assumptions.” This apparently included the erroneous assumption that women want to have sex with their husbands: VAWA included a cause of action for marital rape.
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Congress also found that violent crimes based on gender deterred “potential victims from traveling interstate, from engaging in employment in interstate business, and from transacting with business, and in places involved in interstate commerce;…by diminishing national productivity, increasing medical and other costs, and decreasing the supply of and the demand for interstate products.”
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Presumably crimes of violence generally would have an even larger effect on interstate commerce, but VAWA provided a tort remedy only for violent crimes “committed because of gender or on the basis of gender, and due, at least in part, to an animus based on the victim’s gender.” As explained by Pat Reuss of the National Organization for Women, VAWA was carefully limited because it would not cover “a rapist who rapes men, women, dogs, and simply is a horrible, vicious assaulter.” Only rapes committed because of the victim’s gender.
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Essentially, VAWA duplicated state criminal laws on rape and domestic violence, except instead of being crimes, rape and domestic violence became torts, to be litigated in civil court for monetary awards.

Fittingly, the first case brought under VAWA involved a white woman in the South falsely accusing two black men of rape. On September 21, 1994, Virginia Tech student Christy Brzonkala and a female friend were returning from a late night of drinking when they stopped by the dorm room of two black football players, Antonio Morrison and his roommate, James Crawford. After some sexually suggestive chitchat, Crawford and Brzonkala’s friend left, and Brzonkala was alone in the room with Morrison. She and Morrison then proceeded to engage in…interstate commerce.

More than six months later, after overhearing Morrison boast in the college dining hall that he liked to get girls drunk and have sex with them, Brzonkala claimed both men had raped her. She did not go to the police, but to university officials. After two administrative hearings, the school cleared Crawford of any misconduct whatsoever—he wasn’t there—and found Morrison guilty only of “using abusive language” toward Brzonkala. (After they had sex, he told her, “You’d better not have any f—ing diseases.”)

Brzonkala still didn’t pursue criminal charges against her alleged rapists. Instead, she sued Morrison, Crawford, Crawford’s alibi witness and Virginia Tech under the newly enacted VAWA. As professor Jeremy Rabkin has said, VAWA enshrined into law “the feminist doctrine that every affront to women is tantamount to rape.”
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There’s a reason we have criminal rules of evidence and burdens of proof for serious accusations such as rape. But Brzonkala wanted to punish Morrison and Crawford by having them labeled rapists and making them pay her money without having to prove her charges beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal court. This, VAWA allowed her to do.

After Brzonkala went public with her story about being raped by two Virginia Tech football players, the state attorney general ordered a criminal probe—something she had never requested. Following a two-month investigation, the state police’s findings were presented to a grand jury—which, in Sol Wachtler’s famous phrase, would indict a ham sandwich. The grand jury—which was all white, by the way—refused to indict the black football players.

But Brzonkala still had her civil suit against her alleged rapists and the university under VAWA. She demanded damages from Virginia Tech of $8.3 million—a number chosen because it was the exact amount the university had won in that year’s Sugar Bowl. She also requested an injunction “directing Virginia Tech to provide at least five hours of mandatory sexual assault awareness education to student athletes…and to bring nationally recognized speakers on sexual harassment and sexual assault issues to its university forum at least twice a year.”

The conservative public interest law firm Center for Individual Rights took Morrison and Crawford’s case, arguing that Congress had no constitutional authority to pass a law creating a federal civil action for violence against women. The Supreme Court agreed and this feminist lunacy was ruled unconstitutional. Yale law professor Judith Resnik compared the Court’s decision to those upholding slavery.
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The two most celebrated interracial rapes in the last quarter century illustrate the shift in civil rights from blacks to the ladies: the alleged gang rapes of Tawana Brawley and Crystal Mangum. In many ways, the cases were identical: there was mass hysteria, we had a nationwide consciousness-raising session on the scourge of white men raping black women—and then both accusers turned out to be lying.

There was one big difference in the alleged rapes: The Tawana Brawley incident was a race hoax; the rape claim against the Duke lacrosse players was a feminist hoax.

The transition from the oppression of blacks to the oppression of women was smoothly accomplished because feminists are concentrated in academia and media, which happen to be the most closed-minded, reason-free,
quick-to-accuse, unfair, standardless environments in the universe. Sometime in the 1990s everything became rape—metaphorical rape, historical rape, institutional rape. We didn’t hear a lot about actual rapes, however.

The left has got to understand that it is wrong to falsely accuse people of crimes. Calling someone a rapist is a very serious charge. It doesn’t matter if it’s drawing attention to an important issue. Making false rape claims ruins people’s lives. But liberals have given women unlimited free shots to cry “rape!” with no penalty, ever, for false charges.

Once the feminists take over, not only do blacks get moved to the back of the bus, but facts and honest scholarship fly out the window. The uproar over white-on-black rape is an example of the feminists advancing under the flag of black people to promote their own agenda.

Contrary to feminist blather, white-on-black rape is an exceedingly rare crime. If there were a single unequivocal example of a white-on-black rape in modern times, a lesbian folk singer would have written a song about it and won an Oscar for the accompanying documentary.

For those hoping not to look foolish by jumping to conclusions the next time a black woman claims to have been gang-raped by white men, here are some recent Department of Justice statistics for white-on-black rape: