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Thursday, January 11, 2007
A New Standard For Political Hideousness
Most Americans have at some point heard the phrase "He needed killin'," if only in a Western movie. It expresses an important point that all too many persons fail to understand intellectually or reject emotionally: there are some crimes for which the only appropriate punishment is death.
But have you ever heard the phrase "She needed rapin'" -- ? Your Curmudgeon would bet a year's salary that you haven't -- and another year's salary that you'd react to those words with revulsion and anger.
Rape is a uniquely horrible crime, worse in some ways than murder. It reduces the victim to a thing, to be used, abused, and discarded at another's fancy, and leaves her alive to suffer the memory. Its effects on the perpetrator are almost as bad; either self-loathing eats him alive, or he turns into a sociopathic monster.
Rape is never excusable on the grounds of "extenuating circumstances." No rapist has ever been acquitted for lack of mens rea, the intent to commit a crime in full knowledge of its criminality. Even severely retarded men who rape have traditionally been subject to the full weight of the law, on the grounds that to do otherwise would unacceptably degrade the safety of innocent women.
Time was, rape was punishable by death, nearly everywhere.
Given that rape is as loathsome as it is, what are we to make of those who politicize rape and charges of rape -- who use this foulness to advance another agenda?
Eternity Road readers might remember the Tawana Brawley scandal, in which the claim by a young black girl that she had been raped by a group of white men became a national cause celebre. Among other things, the spectacle catapulted the odious Al Sharpton to national prominence, where he's remained ever since. As the investigation proceeded, it became clear that Brawley's claim was totally fictitious. Her story in all its editions was contradicted by the physical evidence. None of the men investigated in connection with Brawley's story was ever charged with a crime. Sharpton and his henchmen continued to press the matter, escalating to ever wilder accusations of governmental cover-up, finally even accusing Dutchess County prosecutor Steven Pagones of having participated in the rape.
It wasn't the first politicized rape case, but for thirty years it's set the standard for vile accusations made to support a political agenda. The agenda was, of course, the advancement of the politically ambitious Sharpton through the exploitation and amplification of unmerited white guilt.
Your Curmudgeon is of the opinion that he who charges another with a crime, knowing full well that the charge is false, should be indicted and tried for it, in jeopardy of the same penalties the crime itself would carry. In some senses and for some accusations, this is already so. For example, in most states the penalty for perjury in a capital case is life imprisonment. The equity in this attitude toward false witness is obvious: He who maliciously sought to inflict an unmerited punishment upon another should himself suffer that punishment. It's practically straight from the lex talionis.
But what of the man, or group, that treats an accusation of rape as equivalent to a conviction, and seeks to use it to promote a vicious political agenda? Not only is this a denial of the innocent-until-proven-guilty rule; it creates an incentive for partisans of various causes to lodge malicious charges of this hideous crime against their political adversaries. Decent persons react so powerfully and viscerally against rape that the accused, even if ultimately vindicated in all particulars, almost never recovers from such an ordeal. In the usual case, he's shunned by his employer, his family, and his friends -- not because they believe the charge, but because even a false accusation of rape is so powerful that they fear to be tainted by association.
Clearly, the politicization of rape is as vicious and indefensible as a non-criminal act can possibly be.
The infamous accusations of gang rape lodged by a black stripper against a group of white Duke University students have made national headlines, in large measure because of the racial stereotypes: "poor, exploited black woman" being abused by "rich, privileged" white boys. It was practically Tawana Brawley II. The revelations that the stripper's story had shifted several times, that all its versions were inconsistent with the physical evidence, that several of the players charged had indestructible alibis, and that DNA evidence confirmed the students' protestations of innocence has made it into a perfect case study in the use of prosecutorial discretion for personal advancement. Mike Nifong, the district attorney at the center of this atrocity, might soon find that the case he hoped would propel him to greater things will be the one to end his career in disgrace. By dropping the rape charges a couple of weeks ago, after it was revealed that he had sought to conceal the exonerating DNA evidence from the attorneys for the accused students, Nifong seems to have acceded to reality.
But not everyone has.
Ann Coulter has given us her usual excellent survey of the political exploiters in this case:
About a month after members of the Duke lacrosse team were falsely accused of raping a stripper last year, 88 members of the Duke faculty fanned the flames of hysteria by signing a letter announcing that they were "listening" to students "who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism."Maybe they should have been listening to the accused, several of whom had iron-clad alibis. Now the professors are going to need a new example of "racism and sexism" at Duke since their case in chief has turned out to be a fraud....
Duke English professor Cathy N. Davidson recently wrote an opinion piece defending her signing of the "listening" letter, noting that it was "not addressed to the police investigation," but rather "focused on racial and gender attitudes all too evident" after the alleged rape. She explained that the letter had merely "decried prejudice and inequality in the society at large."...
Professor Davidson's column—written when it was clear to everyone except Nancy Grace that three innocent men were facing 30 years in prison for a rape they did not commit—notes that she remains "dismayed by the glaring social disparities implicit in what we know happened on March 13" and says the incident "underscores the appalling power dynamics of the situation."...
According to the Los Angeles Times—in an article about another hoax "hate crime" on a college campus—false reports of racist hate crimes on college campuses have averaged about one a year for 20 years.
Liberal professors believe that crying wolf is valuable for calling attention to the societal problem of wolves, even though there's never a wolf in any particular case. Evidently, awareness of an alleged societal ill—of which we have no actual examples—is worth ruining the lives of three innocent people. After all, they're just powerful white men.
Decent Americans are properly appalled by this. Yet we're perplexed about how to prevent it, or how to punish it when it occurs. After all, we wouldn't want to muzzle freedom of speech. Well, most of us wouldn't. Leftists, certain that they could make their social-fascist Nanny State work just fine if we'd all just stop talking about its faults and failures, are of another opinion. Still, one gets the sense that there ought to be some sort of penalty for politicizing a false charge of a heinous crime.
There is such a penalty. It lies in the hands of common men. We merely have to enforce it.
It cannot be clearer that the Duke faculty members described above deserve to be as thoroughly ostracized as any human being ever has been. They deserve to lose their jobs for grotesquely misusing the prestige of their positions. They deserve to lose the love of their families for viciously slandering others presumed innocent under the law. They deserve to lose the allegiance of their friends for subordinating the rights of others to their political agenda. That might not be adequate punishment, but for a non-criminal action it's the best we can do.
If these outcomes seem unlikely to you, Gentle Reader, you're not alone. But other outcomes, less satisfying but still constructive, are somewhat more likely. Duke University will lose some of its prestige for not censuring the vicious faculty members. It will lose donations and endowments from alumni disgusted at the affair. It will also lose prospective students, who might otherwise have chosen to attend Duke. Last but far from least, its current students will be much less inclined to follow unquestioningly where their instructors lead -- a stiff punishment for a leftist academic, and a good thing for American society in general.
Will it be enough to prevent similar politicizations in the future? Probably not. The death penalty reduces the frequency of murders, but it cannot prevent them. As long as there are leftists who subordinate objective facts and individuals' rights to the promotion of their pet causes, there will be incidents like the Tawana Brawley and Duke Lacrosse scandals. Those who think they can get away with their scurrilities won't be deterred by any amount of punishment, any more than the man who believes he's planned the perfect murder is deterred by the penalty of death.
But we can refuse to listen to them, to respect them, or to finance their occupations. May God grant that we will.
Comments
One hopes that the students who do choose to educate themselves at Duke University will publicly shun these “professors,” and make it very clear why they are doing so. There are nothing like empty classrooms to give reality checks to unethical faculty.
I think that the University should be given their chance to distance itself from the accusations and the “professors;” if the University chooses not to do so, an organized blog campaign should begin, to publicize the concept that ethical donors, endowers, and students should take themselves elsewhere.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/11/2007 at 06:16 PMPerhaps having the old form of having an escort for the women is not such a bad idea.
Sometimes society does not change for the better.
Nice post, Fran. Thank you.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/11/2007 at 06:24 PMIts funny how people have forgotten that perjury (or lying or bearing false witness) is in the top Ten Commandments given to us Judeo-Christians: right up there with murder.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/11/2007 at 06:36 PMThis hits home with me. Several years ago my husband was falsely accused of breaking and entering. The “witnesses” picked him off the street, and pointed him out to the police. After a year of court dates, and an enormous amount of stress the case was thrown out at the prosecutor’s request.
Nothing was done to the “witnesses” who falsely and maliciously accused my husband of breaking into their home. Those people had even gone around bragging about what they had done. Which came out in court.
Those people put our family, and particularly my husband through a hell I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I can’t even begin to describe it.
My husband’s Sgt Major actually looked him dead in the eye when it was all over and said, “just because the case was thrown out, doesn’t mean you are not guilty!”
I feel for those young men down there in N.C. I can somewhat relate to what their families must be going through.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/11/2007 at 09:49 PMI was in court 3 years ago dealing with someone who was a habitual liar - or should I say he lied to get whatever advantage he was looking to attain.
He made an oath to God and to the courts to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth and then proceeded to… bear false witness.
The 3 other witnesses I brought with me could not believe what they were hearing. But if he can say it with utmost confidence and build a concrete story, well, it is hard to sort out, isn’t it?
I guess that is what lawyers are for: to get to the bottom of the truth and expose falsehood - or at least break down their opponents case.
and I… lets just say my perspective on life took a major turn because of that.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/12/2007 at 02:23 AMFran, vis-a-vis the Brawley affair: when she first made those charges everyone here believed her; things like this simply do not happen in this small corner of Dutchess County every day. No one knew who Sharpton was until he and his circus troupe arrived, and they proceeded to get louder and more vile the more information that came out that cast doubt on Ms. Brawley and her story. The story of what happened to Mr Pagones is particularly instructive. Sharpton and his confreres, Messrs. Maddox and Mason, did not just pick Mr Pagones out of a hat.
Just before this story broke, a local policeman named Harry Crist killed himself. Mr Crist worked in one of the small town police forces in southern Dutchess and had dreams of joining the New York State Police. The state troopers are at the apex of the local police hierarchy and if you are a young and ambitious local police officer the NYSP is where you want to go if you are not interested in staying in the one place for the rest of your career. Mr Crist tried several times to fulfill this dream, but every time he tried he came up short on the tests, and finally his failure made him despondent and led him to take his own life. For Sharpton & Co., Harry Crist’s suicide was manna from heaven. They claimed that Mr Crist was one of the police officers who raped Ms Brawley and he’d killed himself because of a guilty conscience. It made absolutely no difference to them that Mr Crist’s family was grieving, grieving terribly; they had someone who couldnt fight back and they were going to make the most of their opportunity. There was only one problem; he was in Connecticut with Mr Pagones the weekend it happened.
Fran, for those of your readers unfamiliar with the economics of the New York tri-state area, I should point out that it is not uncommon for people in upstate New York, especially in the Hudson Valley, to drive to Connecticut to buy clothing and other goods. The reason is easy to understand; Connecticut’s sales tax, then and now, is much less than that New York’s. Mr Pagones and Mr Crist were in Connecticut that weekend Christmas shopping, and Mr Pagones had the sales receipts to prove where he was. Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason (the 3 Stooges, as they are still known locally)wasted no time in smearing Mr Pagones in the vilest possible terms; no one would be allowed to disturb the story, not even if they had real evidence to prove that what she was saying was hokum.
And hokum piled high and deep was what that story was all about. The grand jury found that Ms Brawley, for all her claims at having been kept outside for an entire weekend in November, showed no signs of exposure; Dutchess County, outside of places like Poughkeepsie and Beacon, is not at all like New York City; there are no steam grates here to keep a homeless person warm on a cold night. Then there was the small matter of someone seeing her around an apartment her family had lived in prior to their moving elsewhere in the county and actually saw her step into the plastic garbage bags she was later found in, seeing her at a time Sharpton said that vicious racist cops were raping her somewhere else. And then, there was the testimony of a friend of hers, who placed Ms Brawley at a crack house across the river in Orange County at the time Mr Pagones and Mr Crist were supposedly raping her in Dutchess County. None of this mattered to Sharpton et. al.; the more evidence that came out that Ms Brawley was a liar, the louder they screamed racism and smeared anyone who even tried to get at the truth (cf. Mr Maddox’s claim that then NYS AG Robert Abrams masturbated to police pictures of the naked Ms Brawley).
In the end, the grand jury found that Ms Brawley had made the whole thing up, probably to explain why she wasnt in school to her stepfather, a violent man who’d done time for manslaughter for killing his first wife. Ms Brawley herself has never testified at any kind of legal proceeding; she didnt even testify to defend Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason when Mr Pagones, after ten long years of unconscionable delays, finally got his day in court. He won his libel suit against Sharpton; I dont remember what the ultimate judgement was, but I do remember that Sharpton didnt pay the fine, someone else paid it for him. But no matter what the court’s ultimate judgement, many people will always believe that Mr Pagones is a criminal; facts and prejudice go ill together, and most of us prefer our prejudices to the facts anyway, and that Mr Crist’s family will have to bear not only the terrible pain of his suicide, but the vile things that Sharpton and company said about him when he was not longer able to defend himself. As for Ms Brawley, she lives in Virginia now, I think, having never testified to anything. She will sometimes tell her story to audiences like black church groups, where she knows that her version of events will not be challenged and she can go on being a symbol of African American victimhood.
Posted by Akaky on 01/13/2007 at 03:18 PM
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