Are battles never won?

The law is about to be changed on provocation to murder, as Kit blogged about earlier this week.

The current set up, as Kit points out, has meant that (overwhelmingly) men who murdered their wives and girlfriends after finding out they were cheating often got off with reduced sentences, while (overwhelmingly) women who ended up killing their husbands and boyfriends, after years of domestic violence, were sentenced to full prison terms for murder.

I’d always thought that this was a glaring example of unfair operation of the criminal justice system, that anyone could spot.

In the Daily Mail, though, Melanie Phillips published a rabid defense of the status quo. That’s right, she really does. And she calls the proposals by Harriet Harman to at long-last change things for the better, “man bashing”.

As Rhetorically Speaking says:

You have to stand back quite a long way to fit Phillips’ supposed morality into view: that rage at infidelity should be treated as a justifiable defence for murdering someone because it’s mainly men who do it.

To do otherwise would be to unfairly benefit women (who have apparently made the mistake of not flying into “spontaneous” murderous rages more frequently). It would also turn morality “inside out” because it fails to privilege the solemn vows of marriage over, you know, the health and lives of women. This, in turn, is “man-bashing.”