National Clearinghouse on
Marital and Date Rape
http://ncmdr.org
mirror site:
http://members.aol.com/ncmdr
Protest the
Mexico Supreme Court Decision that Spousal Rape is a Mere
"Undue Exercise of a Right."
(Read the IPS News Story)
Please forward widely!
UPDATE, 23 Nov 1997: On Tuesday, November 25, the Congress of Mexico will vote on a bill to overturn a June 97 Supreme Court decision which violated women's human rights by saying that marital rape is not rape, only a mere"undue exercise of a right".
Mexican women's organizations have been protesting the Supreme Court decision with burros with the faces of the justices!
Our organization, the National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape, has called for suspension of US trade and tourism to Mexico until the Mexican government rights this wrong.
Oct. 6, 1997 (first Monday of October, opening day of US Supreme Court)
We begin US Domestic Violence Awareness Month with a reminder that women still do not have the same human rights men enjoy, sovereignty over their own bodies.
We are calling for groups and individuals to protest at every level including not visiting Mexico and demanding SUSPENSION OF TRADE BY THE US with Mexico until the Mexican government does right by the entire human race. As the US is supposed to have learned from the Civil War, it is not good even for the master's soul to own another person! Indeed, one of the precipitating factors in that war was our own Supreme Court's disgraceful decision that one person did have a property right in another person, i.e. Dred Scott.
The US government has frequently moved to protest other countries human rights violations by using trade as leverage. Protest to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at: secretary@state.gov
We are asking Amnesty International to consider the point that these women are political prisoners, victims of repellent, unconscionable government abrogation of individual rights. Contact your local chapter or the NY office.
We have alerted the US Catholic Bishops D.C. office. They have taken excellent stands against the sexual abuse of wives, including when a spousal rapist protested his conviction last year in Los Angeles by saying that he had a First Amendment Religious Freedom right to demand sex from his wife because they are both Catholic. Contact them directly or through local churches.
Please check out our web site for background, correspondence in this campaign, analysis and to find out how to contribute financially as well, or contact:
National Clearinghouse on Marital and
Date Rape
(contact information deleted 11/25/2005)
You can also join our network to connect through our database.
The Mexico Supreme Court web site is: http://www.scjn.gob.mx/
Staff attorney Ursula Hernandez's email address at the Mexico Supreme Court is: 105623.1735@compuserve.com
Patricia Mercado of Diversa is requesting international support for their ongoing protest of this terrible violation of women's human rights. With copies to us, please send newspaper and journal articles and protest letters DEMANDING A REVERSAL OF THE DECISION BY THE SUPREME COURT and Mexican Government, and why you must boycott going to Mexico with your husband or otherwise, to Patricia Mercado in support of their protest. She and Diversa can keep you posted as the cases and bills progress.
Patricia Mercado's email: "Diversa, Asociacion Politica Feminista" <diversa@laneta.apc.org>
Alternate email address: equidad@laneta.apc.org
Mailing address:
Patricia Mercado
Diversa
Coatepec No. 1 Interior 5
Col. Roma Sur
TEL. 011 525 264-30-63
FAX 011 525 264-31-52
The original news source from which the InterPress Service of the Third World News Agency lifted the story is La Jornada: http://serpiente.dgsca.unam.mx/jornada/index.html Their email is jornada@condor.dgsca.unam.mx and the phone is 011-525-728-2900. It will be on pages 2-6, most likely in the 4th week before the 16th of June, says Eduardo Molina of IPS who wrote the IPS story. He is in Buenos Aires and returns Nov 3. But the Mexican Bureau is headed by Jose Luis Alcazar, phone 011-525-578-0417. Their New York office is directed by Robert Savio and their Rome office is headed by Alejandro Kirk at online@ips.org NOTE : no US paper has broken this story yet.
No woman is an island. Each woman's rape diminishes all women and men. (To paraphrase John Donne)
NCMDR's director Laura X took that name in 1969 to protest the legal slavery of women in marriage.
BACKGROUND
Recently the Supreme Court of Mexico ruled that forcing a spouse to have sex is not rape but the ''undue exercise of a right." This is not only a violation of women's human rights according to several international treaties, but also a contradiction of the unanimous resolution on this very issue at the UN conference in Beijing, September '95, which Mexico signed along with every other UN country. The resolution guarantees every woman's right to say no to sex as she wishes, specifically wives.(NY Times, Sept 10, '95)
The court has condemned women to sexual slavery in marriage. For example, the definition of slavery and involuntary servitude in the U.S. Constitution (13th amendment) is if you can require a specific service of someone and back it up by force. In this situation of cohabitation, the threat of the force is omnipresent. It is a crime in all fifty states to rape one's wife in the USA (in most situations), but more importantly, in New York in 1984, the highest court, in the LIBERTA decision, struck down the marital rape exemption as an unconstitutional denial of equal protection and of a wife's right to privacy and bodily integrity.
The judge who wrote this opinion believes the Mexican Supreme Court has violated the human rights of women and has supported our demands of the US government.
Won't you join us and ask your colleagues to join as well in protesting the enshrining of a "right" to another person's body?! Mexico's going back on their signature to the resolution in Beijing is very dangerous to the consensus reached to pass those resolutions making women's rights human rights.
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