Key to the safety of women and children? Married men

A letter to the editor says it better than I can:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-wills-sexual-assault-column-missed-the-mark/2014/06/12/cc2f46ae-f1a6-11e3-b140-bd7309109588_story.html

Will could have written about his concerns over colleges bypassing the justice system and thus ignoring due process safeguards without relying on simplistic categorizations. He could have acknowledged that there may be ambiguity and misinterpretation in how college-age men and women communicate without ceding all responsibility for that to the victim. Such a column might have sparked a useful discussion.

But Will wasn’t trying to spark an actual policy discussion; he wanted to bash the Obama administration and what he sees as liberal academia. So he trotted out a boys-will-be-boys argument, one made completely useless by the unsubstantiated assertion that status or other perks accrue to those who report a rape.

 

The truth? Given the lies you tell in service of your political cheerleading, and more importantly the lies you believe simply because they come from one of the many Republicans you worship, that may be the funniest thing you have ever posted on this site. Too bad the humor was unintentional.

 

Coming from a guy who believes Lois Lerner's emails really were lost because her computer crashed ... I'll give your thought the zero credibility it deserves.

 

You've never lost anything when your computer has crashed?

 

Not emails. Ever. Funny thing about email accounts. You can log into them from any computer. I can't believe I have to tell you this.

 

As the esteemed Dr. Will wrote in another piece a long time ago ... "There ... are limits to what an author can do to protect his subject from a reader determined to get it wrong." If you choose to believe that he trivialized rape in this, then there's nothing I can do to help you.

 

Will's column was appalling.

 

v.s.

 

Just to be clear, you believe the following passage DOESN'T trivialize rape?

Consider the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. “sexual assault.” Herewith, a Philadelphia magazine report about Swarthmore College, where in 2013 a student “was in her room with a guy with whom she’d been hooking up for three months”:

“They’d now decided — mutually, she thought — just to be friends. When he ended up falling asleep on her bed, she changed into pajamas and climbed in next to him. Soon, he was putting his arm around her and taking off her clothes. ‘I basically said, “No, I don’t want to have sex with you.” And then he said, “OK, that’s fine” and stopped. . . . And then he started again a few minutes later, taking off my panties, taking off his boxers. I just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything — I had already said no. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish. I pulled my panties back on and went to sleep.’”

Six weeks later, the woman reported that she had been raped. Now the Obama administration is riding to the rescue of “sexual assault” victims. It vows to excavate equities from the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults.

 

Speaking of lies. Please find the comment where I said that. We'll wait as you either try to find an excuse for your latest bit of fiction or desperately search for a comment that does not exist.

 

I think it lampoons the characterization of that incident as a rape. That isn't the same thing as trivializing rape.

I'm not going any further with this because I don't want to get caught in some morass of "You think rape is OK!" etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

I'll simply say that I think Will's column was excellent. Colleges/universities are: 1) ill-suited for this responsibility; and 2) exceedingly unlikely to exercise this responsibility in a just manner. That it is beginning to dawn on colleges/universities that government is the gift that just won't quit giving (which was Will's point)? Does the phrase "hoisted by own's own petard" ring a bell?

 

This college sexual assault conundrum is getting to be a huge deal. Stanford has a #StandWithLeah movement in support of a woman who says she was raped. The school sided with her and kicked the offender out of school, but it delayed that punishment until after he could graduate, and the student body went nuts.

Meanwhile the accused is also fighting it, because the police did not find enough evidence to even pursue a charge and the students want the university to base this life-changing decision for him on what its own non-judicial, non-investigative panel believes is the case.

Talk about throwing away due process.