Equality with a Vengeance: Men's Rights Groups, Battered Women, and Antifeminist Backlash

2. Booth v. Hvass

26 2 Booth v. Hvass The purpose of this suit is to cut off the main source of public money which fuels sexist bias against men in our family court system. —Legal Action Committee 2001b The Legal Action Committee has brought together the resources to initiate a federal lawsuit to remove this discriminatory legislation from Minnesota law and deny Battered Women Shelters [sic] this public funding for an obviously private and destructive purpose. —Legal Action Committee 2001a The r-kids Legal Action Committee, the Men’s Defense Association, and the National Coalition of Free Men, Twin Cities Chapter, filed the Booth v. Hvass case in October 2000 in the United States District Court for the State of Minnesota. The lawsuit attempted to eliminate the mechanism for the disbursement of state funding to battered women’s shelters and other agencies serving what Minnesota law refers to as “battered women and other victims of domestic abuse.” Booth v. Hvass also sought to effect a broader fundamental change in contemporary understandings of violence and abuse. The case characterized discourses about and services for battered women as discriminatory. The plaintiffs argued that the state discriminated against men when service providers acknowledged that sex and gender differences were involved in woman battering and other forms of domestic abuse. Booth v. Hvass joined other antifeminist efforts to reclaim patriarchal authority and the rhetorical space won by women over the past fifty years by enforcing a gender-blind understanding of a highly gendered social problem (Dragiewicz 2008). Booth v. Hvass shows how symbolic battles over language and representation relate to concerns as concrete as the allocation of resources and as abstract as cultural norms for social life. In particular, the case shows how discourses on violence and abuse are a site of conflict over gender. Booth v. Hvass | 27 Booth’s amended complaint included twenty-three sections which sought to establish the plaintiffs’ standing to sue; confirm the jurisdiction of the court to hear the case; argue the unconstitutionality of the statutes the plaintiffs referred to as the “Minnesota Battered Women’s Act”; enumerate the specific pieces of legislation to which the suit refers; articulate the reasons for targeting the selected defendants; list a series of complaints about the legislation in question; argue about the alleged effects of the legislation; assert that women are as violent as or more violent than men; contend that “female violence is, in any event, a major social problem”; provide citations to support claims about sex symmetry in intimate-partner violence; and demand that the current legislation be declared “null and void as if never passed, insofar as it funds battered women’s shelters certified and approved under the act” in order to prevent any further state funding of services for battered women and other victims of domestic abuse in Minnesota. (Amended complaint 2000) The plaintiffs sued officials including the Commissioners of Correction , Human Services, Public Safety, and Children, Families, and Learning for the state of Minnesota. After attempting to establish the plaintiffs’ right to sue as state taxpayers, Booth argued that men were denied domestic violence services in the state. The plaintiffs asserted that targeting services to battered women was discriminatory because men are just as likely as women to be victims of domestic violence. Booth also charged that the rhetoric disseminated by recipients of state antiviolence funds created prejudice against all men as members of a sex class (Amended complaint 2000, 5). The plaintiffs argued that “the legislative history of this Act decisively proves that it was intended on bigoted assumptions to discriminate against men in favor of women” (Plaintiffs’ omnibus answer to amici curiae 2001, 14). The plaintiffs argued that this discrimination arose because Minnesota domestic violence laws had been inspired by “defamatory falsehoods about men in general” (Amended complaint 2000, 3). Minnesota’s shelter funding was established based on the unmet needs of battered women,which the Booth plaintiffs asserted were“ideological tripe and contrivances” (Plaintiffs’ omnibus answer to amici curiae 2001, 7). 28 | Equality with a Vengeance Thus, the plaintiffs argued, state funding for services should be abolished, and the research the state relied upon to justify the creation of the shelters should be disregarded in favor of a new approach to intimate partner violence that would exclude gender and treat violence as a disease in which women and men are mutually implicated. Significantly, the desired outcome of the...