People in Florida’s 12th congressional district may not have a representative who supports the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), but at least he’s keen to talk to them about “a woman’s guide to financial planning.”
That’s one of several topics Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) has invited voters to discuss with him on June 9 at a Women’s Summit planned by his campaign. Others include “Maintaining a Healthy Weight and Promoting Wellness” and “Community Gardening,” ideas Bilirakis told the Tampa Bay Times were generated by attendees of a “women’s stakeholder session he hosted in Lutz in 2014.”
He has apparently not sought renewed input from his women constituents in the four years since.
The Bilirakis Women’s Summit agenda does not include a discussion of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which Bilirakis opposed in a reauthorization vote in 2013, or the gender pay gap, which Bilirakis sought to keep wide when he voted against the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009.
Bilirakis’ 2011 vote to permanently defund Planned Parenthood might conceivably fit into the parameters of the breakout discussion of “Community Healthcare Resources,” as the oft-smeared reproductive and sexual health services nonprofit is the single largest provider of health care services to women in the United States.
And all three could come up in a discussion titled “How to Get Involved in Government, Recruiting Women for Positions of Leadership,” which ticketing information on the Eventbrite page for the summit suggests is currently set to be the best attended of the discussion groups.
After his election opponent shared a pink flyer touting the summit in a Facebook post, the six-term congressman told the Times he’s “fought tirelessly to advance causes that benefit women.” He cited his support of funding for children’s health insurance and a Jacksonville-based educational charity for young women.
Summer Robertson, a spokesperson for the congressman, told the Times he actually did support VAWA originally. He voted against extending it in 2013 when Democrats sought to widen the bill’s offerings to include sexual assault prevention and investigation funding outside the original bill’s focus on intimate partner violence, she said.
Bilirakis’ VAWA vote has dogged him prior to the optics-challenged Women’s Summit announcement. Robertson has previously argued that the expansion and renewal of VAWA in 2013 would have forced states to shift funding away from domestic violence work and into sexual violence work, a top-down mandate Bilirakis objected to on principles related to federalism rather than his views on distinct types of violence that primarily targets women.
He also didn’t like the idea of granting tribal courts authority in cases involving non-Native American defendants in sexual assault and intimate partner violence cases, she told FloridaPolitics.com in March.
Native American women subjected to violence are among the most neglected populations in the entire justice system, in part because the courts built to serve their communities were long restricted from prosecuting attackers from outside those communities — a problem Bilirakis’ spokeswoman says he was uneasy about solving.
Out of every six native women in the country, five have been attacked at some point in their lives — and nearly always by someone outside their race. Ninety-seven percent of such assaults were committed by a non-native attacker, according to a 2016 National Institutes of Justice study.
The language Bilirakis opposed on tribal court jurisdictions was not even automatic or self-executing. Tribal governments have to opt into those new regulations — and “only 13 out of 562 federally-recognized tribes have adopted these regulations as of March 2017,” according to the Lakota People’s Law Project.
Bilirakis was far from alone among fellow Republicans in standing against the 2013 VAWA proposal, as Molly Ball detailed for The Atlantic at the time. Republican opposition then was broadly tied to an ideological backlash against feminists, she found.
Women eager to discuss the possibility that feminists might have too much influence over public policy, or the details of how best to support state efforts to combat sexual and domestic violence, can find Bilirakis at 10:30 a.m. on June 9 at East Lake High School in Tarpon Springs for the Women’s Summit.