Posted on 02/18/2014 10:50:18 AM PST by SAVEOURSOULS
The National Organization for Women – that deeply principled hive of feminists who never supported the impeachment or resignation of Bill Clinton for lying in a sexual harassment case – has demanded The Wall Street Journal fire columnist James Taranto for arguing against the bizarre notion that the drunker a woman gets, the more guilty a man is for being sexually involved with her.
Taranto was painted as determined to enhance a “rape culture” by daring to argue in his Monday "Best of the Web Today" column that it’s a “drunkenness double standard” to say a woman’s intoxication is an aggravating factor for a man accused of assault:
If two drunk drivers are in a collision, one doesn't determine fault on the basis of demographic details such as each driver's sex. But when two drunken college students "collide," the male one is almost always presumed to be at fault. His diminished capacity owing to alcohol is not a mitigating factor, but her diminished capacity is an aggravating factor for him.
NOW’s press release energetically distorted Taranto’s point, implying the feminist idea that in any rape accusation, there is – verdict first, evidence afterward – a male rapist and a female victim:
In his Monday Wall Street Journal column, James Taranto stated that in sexual assault cases where both the victim and rapist are drunk -- both parties are equally to blame for the attack.
Taranto even went as far as to compare rape to a car crash involving two drunk drivers saying, "one doesn't determine fault on the basis of demographic details such as each driver's sex."
Surely this ugly kind of victim-blaming is beneath the dignity of The Wall Street Journal. Approximately one in four young women will be sexually assaulted during their college career - an alarming statistic that should spur all of us to seek effective policies to provide services to rape survivors and hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes. But Taranto seems determined to maintain or even deepen the rape culture that pervades campuses and indeed much of U.S. society. What does that say about The Wall Street Journal?
If NOW really cared about a "rape culture," they would have demanded an answer when Juanita Broaddrick came forward on national television in 1999 and accused Clinton of rape in a Little Rock hotel room. They accepted Clinton's dodgy talk-to-my-lawyer defenses to reporters. They've had no credibility for decades now -- if the accused rapist will preserve abortion rights, then there is no real controversy.
Let’s now go back to Taranto’s actual point:
As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education notes, at some campuses the accuser's having had one drink is sufficient to establish the defendant's guilt:
Stanford's definition of consent to sex imposes a concept that is foreign to most people's idea of adult consent and inconsistent with California state law. Stanford policy states that sexual assault occurs "when a person is incapable of giving consent. A person is legally incapable of giving consent . . . if intoxicated by drugs and/or alcohol." In other words, any sexual activity while intoxicated to any degree constitutes sexual assault. This is true even if the activity was explicitly agreed to by a person capable of making rational, reasoned decisions, and even if the partners are in an ongoing relationship or marriage.
In theory that means, as FIRE notes, that "if both parties are intoxicated during sex, they are both technically guilty of sexually assaulting each other." In practice it means that women, but not men, are absolved of responsibility by virtue of having consumed alcohol.
That is self-evidently unjust, yet it turns out to be a matter of high principle for many feminists. Last fall Slate's Emily Yoffe, the mother of a college-age daughter, was the target of a Two Minutes Hate for a post titled "College Women: Stop Getting Drunk," even though she offered the same advice to college men: "If I had a son, I would tell him that it's in his self-interest not to be the drunken frat boy who finds himself accused of raping a drunken classmate."
Yoffe was also accused of promoting "rape culture." But NOW never asked for Yoffe to be fired. She wasn't male enough, apparently.
It is repeating today with gay rights and illegal aliens rights, etc
jauanita broadrick
Yes: ping me when NOW condems the Clintons for Juanita Broderick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones etc.
Otherwise they continue to be marginalized, irrelevant.
Got news for you, the feminists define as rape any sexual encounter which the woman later regrets.
Some years ago the NYT tried this with a front page analysis of all these situations which are “rape” but not yet legally rape.
It was the craziest thing you ever read, the stories all involved women living with men in a sexual relationship. Stuff happened like the women said one night they come home toasted from a night out with the guy. He wants to have sex and the woman didn’t really feel like it, but she doesn’t say anything and gives into the guy for various reasons.
They seriously wanted the rape laws rewritten to cover this.
Not rewritten, just reinterpreted.
And Sarah Palin-when that ugly harpy Sandra Bernhard called for her “black brothers” to gang-rape Palin if she showed her face in NYC.
This reminds me of when they called on Bill Clinton to resign.
Hell, their hero Slick Willy promoted it.
Confucius say: If drinking couples were equally responsible, there would be fewer rapes.
“The NOW nags are drunk with ego and hubris,...and generally very guilty.”
They are generally very ugly, too.
Feminist want to rape to be regret “after the fact” and feel its their right to rewrite, facts, time line and history..
But if rape is regret “after the fact”...then a lot of men are raped by women
taranto is absolutely correct.
this is not equal treatment. it is total double standards and hypocrisy.
rape culture, cover-up culture, pay-her-to-go-away culture...
Is this the same "NOW" that doesn't utter a peep when Hitlery and/or her minions, claim that Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, had control over the poor, defenseless POTUS, Bill Clinton? He who had no control over his libido, thought he was probably sober, as was she? That "NOW?"
Mark
This is another example of what I posted on Saturday on the thread Offended Generation, only they went straight to calls for resignation.
This seems to be the SOP Democrat tactic.Scour a candidates past statements, find a word that has an alternate meaning, then call on the candidate to apologize.
George Allen? Macaca.
John Roberts? Amigo.
Mitt Romney? Binders of women.
This tactic is based on the expectation that all Republicans cave at the first sign of pressure.
In many cases, they skip the "apology demand" and go straight to the "resignation demand."
What is sweeping the nation is that conservatives are pushing back on the double-standard.It really, very publicly began when liberals saw the opportunity to attack Trent Lott over his throw-away comment to Strom Thurmond on his 100th birthday that he would have made a good president.
The Left seized on this to claim that Lott was supporting segregation, and demanded that Lott apologize. Lott did, many times, and was still excoriated for it by the Left.
Seeing a new weapon for their arsenal, the "apology demand" became a popular tool for liberals, and organizations like Media Matters popped up to monitor conservative airwaves for any statement that could be twisted to construe a minority slight, and then calls for apologies would ensue.
What is happening now is that liberals are gettig caught in their own trap. For years, they felt emboldened by the lack of opposition, and they became more and more strident in the things they said. They finally reached a tipping point, and are being called out on it.
The double-standard was getting to be much too obvious.The crack in the armor came when Martin Bashir was forced out at MSNBC over comments that were much worse than anything that Don Imus ever said. For a while, it seemed that Bashir would get a pass, but the contrast to Imus' firing was just too much.
The dam being breached, the flood of liberal apologies is now flowing.
Liberals do this because they fully expect Republicans to eventually cave in to pressure. It's not about Taranto, it's about establishing the environment that surrounds conservatives and Republicans when they speak. By targeting Taranto, their goal is to silence the Congressman before he speaks at all.
And it will work because the Republicans have been weakened in spirit, beaten down by the steady Democrat-machine onslaught over everything (lie this), and become feckless and afraid to act.
-PJ
Male students surrender their constitutional rights when they walk on campus.
If you are picking up drunk people in bars as a method of getting laid, an accusation of rape might be the least of your worries. AIDS/VD and psycho ex’s make it pretty hard to have much sympathy for someone going this route.
I agree 100%. Doesn’t change the fact that it appears to be a very common practice. A very dangerous one, IMO.
You don’t ‘catch’ AIDs. AIDs is a syndrome, not a virus. You might come in contact with a harmless, ubiquitous retrovirus named HIV, but as long as you’re not mainlining, sharing needles, using ‘poppers’, a male homosexual, already suppressing your immune system with massive doses of antibiotics, antivirals and and antifungals, or popping hard core narcotics, you’ll be fine.
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