the rest of this post is behind the cut...
As much as I hate to give the little troll a moment of attention, I feel that as an American University student, I should set the record straight. American university's unofficial official paper, The Eagle, recently published an
indefensible column advocating date rape. Remember, this is a paper or whose primary readership is college students (college women are four times more likely to suffer this heinous crime than women in general*).
First, the editorship
tried to claim that they had to publish the column or they would be infringing Knepper's First Amendment
rights.
The Washington Post then explained to them
that editorial discretion exists. The Washington Post probably knew this because their circulation is big enough that they absolutely do not have room on their editorial page for every idiotic, half-baked brainwave that hits their inbox, and that they therefore have to decide what is worth including, and what is not. Columns making demonstrably false statements (e.g. the claim that something considered a violent crime by all applicable jurisdictions is really not a crime), would not make the cut on those grounds alone.
They then published a
non-apology apology, saying that they should have known that they had a right to change the tone of the column, because it bothered people. They still refuse to take a firmly anti-rape stance, choosing instead to say that the problem with the column was the "tone," and that when they failed to understand that they have editorial discretion at all, it would have been okay for them to something advocating a violent hate crime (because rape is always a hate crime) to members of a community where that violent crime happens extremely frequently--if it had only been more politely phrased.
No, it would not. They seem to think that the problem was that they hurt people's feelings. That was a problem. The fact that the next time a female student gets drunk and staggers, intentionally or unintentionally, into a male student's room, he will think of that column and say "hey! That must mean she wants to have sex with me," is a much bigger problem.
I believe in the First Amendment pretty strongly, so I certainly feel that it would be a bad precedent to hold The Eagle and pro-rape scumbag Alex Knepper, or the idiot newbie student editors criminally responsible, survivors of any subsequent acquaintance rape on any college campus in the United States still have a right to, and to my mind should, hold them civilly liable for publishing a column advocating something that is a crime in DC, a crime in the United States, and a crime against humanity.
The university's statement on the subject was just as bad. Because I don't read the eagle (in large part because their editorial staff has such a visible judgment, as well as grammar and spelling that fills me with a powerful desire to redline a copy and drop it on their doorstep), I learned about the incident from a posted description of the "alleged" incident, stating that a student "claims that she was drugged and assaulted." The administration's official statement went on to say that "while sexual assault is never the survivor's fault..." and then proceeded to say that women should never go to parties or drink, or wear short skirts, and that while of course, rape is wrong, women who do any of those things, you know, put themselves, in danger of what is, of course, a crime, are, you know, risktakers.
American University sent a very strong message that not being brutally violated is a privilege that women must earn and, by doing so, established an unbelievably hostile climate for all women on campus. I really hope that there is a class-action lawsuit.
I will post a list of the offending paper's advertisers (this, for all the wing nuts out there, is also not censorship. I am not Congress either) the next time I am on campus.
*Source:
http://www.rainn.org/statistics. Incidentally, that page includes statistics on men and this post is about specifically an article advocating the commission of this crime against women, so any posts by men's movement drives trying to derail the conversation will be summarily deleted.