If you enjoy being inflamed, Jennifer, scan this Salon article in which writer Rebecca Traister interviews O’Beirne over lunch here.

Here is my favorite passage:

In the chapter about VAWA [Violence Against Women Act] you describe some of the signs of abuse — like having a partner who monitors what you’re doing, humiliates you in public, and controls your money — as trivial. Do you really think those things are trivial?

I think they are potentially trivial. Could any one of those things rise to the level of a real abusive situation? I suppose so. But it strikes me as a sort of alarmist [attempt to define] domestic violence down in order to find some epidemic of it. [If those were true] every dating relationship in high school would be abuse. I mean constant, constant humiliation in front of people? It’s all so subjective: like every time I go out he asks me where I’ve been?

What I see there is an attempt to define it down because it has to be an epidemic — because there’s a lot of money in it being an epidemic.

Right. You complain about all the jobs VAWA created. But you also write about how the domestic crime statistics fell between 1993 and 2002, calling that bad news for all the people who need the stats to be high to keep their VAWA jobs. But given that the numbers fell with all those people in those VAWA jobs, isn’t it conceivable that those jobs helped lower the domestic violence rates?

The overall crime rate’s also down; you just don’t ever know, frankly. But I do know that they have an incentive to hype an epidemic. We don’t know. Because it’s so unclear what they’re doing [in VAWA jobs] except advocating and hyping the epidemic.

Goddamn VAWA for inventing and perpetuating the domestic violence epidemic just to get jobs, and perhaps good holiday bonuses! It’s as underhanded as Gay Recruitment!