Friday, April 26, 2019

When rape matters, and when it doesn't: Column

When rape matters, and when it doesn't: Column:
  • In the eyes of the media, all rapes are equal. But some rapes are more equal than others.
"Rape is a terrible crime and deserves the harshest punishment and condemnation. 
Yet, in the public sphere, all rapes are not created equal. 
There are rapes that support the preferred narrative, and there are rapes that do not. 
The former tend to be much more publicized in the press than the latter, as a few recent examples illustrate.
At the top of the list of publicized rapes is Rolling Stone's reported gang rape in a University of Virginia fraternity house on Sept. 28, 2012. 
See the source image...The story was quickly picked up nationally. 
...Then, of course, the story fell apart. 
...Meanwhile, two other recent rape cases, despite far more factual foundation, have gotten almost no traction in the national press. 

  • In Oregon, a top Obama fund-raiser, Terry Bean, was arrested on child rape charges. Bean, a longtime gay rights activist and bundler, who raised over half a million dollars for President Obama's 2012 campaign, would seem to be a newsworthy figure. An alleged child rapist who has traveled on Air Force One isn't something that happens every day. But the story got almost no national attention.
  • Likewise, Donny Ray Williams pled guilty to sexually assaulting two women while serving as a staff director for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee. In one case, Williams is charged with drugging a woman and raping her while she was unconscious. In a rather generous plea bargain deal, he somehow avoided any jail time. Yet The Washington Post treated this as a local crime story, and it, too, got almost no national attention.
What's the difference? 
A cynic — and I've become pretty cynical lately as I observe these things — might conclude that the U.Va. rape story was hyped because it fit a preferred narrative: Evil white patriarchal privilege and the war on women. (It even fit in with a White House campaign on campus sexual assault that had U.Va. connections, extending directly to "Jackie," the Rolling Stone's victim/subject.)
The Bean and Williams rape cases, on the other hand, merely reflected badly on Democrats..."
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