Help for ALL Surviving Domestic Abuse

Republicans Back out of Domestic Violence Help


All they had to do was renew the damn bill.


In a discussion online about this article it was mentioned that undocumented working women that were being abused would be "rewarded" by the proposed changes. I got really angry and responded:


... REWARDED?!? REALLY? What kind of "reward" is it when you have to get your ass jacked, sometimes for years, before you can get it? And lawbreakers?!? Give me a goddamn break! We have protections in place for mass murderers on DEATH ROW but some lady that came here for a better life and can't navigate the multi thousand dollar convoluted piece of shit we call an immigration system is fair game?!? Holy hell!


So then I took a deep, cleansing breath while waiting on a reply. I am not posting the other side of the conversation here because it was casual and there was no shared understanding at the time that I might extrapolate on my responses for my blog.  


Okay. Human rights are not contingent on being a citizen. Full stop. And there is nothing about DV/DA help that actually makes one a citizen. So no crime is "washed away." Offering a minuscule number of undocumented women visas only gives them a bit of temporary help, moving one issue out of the current stressors while one works ones way out of the living hell that is domestic abuse and/or violence. It will not make these women citizens, not by a long shot, and to argue that it is a reward of any kind is disingenuous at best, and  out and out lying manipulation at worst.

I am so fucking tired of people acting like a accident of birth that put them within the fabricated and stolen USian boarders some how makes them special or better than other people. Or that other human beings are some how less human or their suffering is less important because their moment of birth put them (usually, in these arguments) south of an artificial line made of murder and theft. The fact that we are having these "rights of birth" arguments in a country founded on the idea that birth status does not make one better or worse than any other person is disgusting.

My point above, about mass murderers, is not to say the people in our prison system should not be protected from the tyranny of the system or their peers. They should be subjected to the cruelty of their sentences but not a jot more. My point was to juxtapose one "law breaker" with another, highlighting the differences in protection each receive. One has been convicted of taking lives, the other committed, or their parents committed, a crime of geography.


But there is nothing in our laws that makes one birth better than another, something that seems to be missing in every one of these arguments I have seen. If your main focus regarding help for the survivors of domestic violence is illegal immigration, I have not no help for you. I believe that this serves as an illustration of exactly how much some people are being distracted from the issues at hand. All people surviving domestic abuse, assault, and violence deserve help. No one deserves to live in fear: man, woman, child, citizen, non-citizen, cis or trans, disabled or TAB. This is about human rights, and and what we do about it will show who we are as a country.