An interesting proposition at the New Republic
This August, Columbia University released a new policy for handling “gender-based†misconduct among students. Since April, universities around the country have been rewriting their guidelines after a White House task force urged them to do more to fight sexual assault. I was curious to know what a lawyer outside the university system would make of one of these codes. So I sent the document to Robin Steinberg, a public defender and a feminist.
A few hours later, Steinberg wrote back in alarm. She had read the document with colleagues at the Bronx legal-aid center she runs. They were horrified, she said—not because Columbia still hadn’t sufficiently protected survivors of assault, as some critics charge, but because its procedures revealed a cavalier disregard for the civil rights of people accused of rape, assault, and other gender-based crimes. “We are never sending our boys to college,†she wrote.
Anyhow, go ahead and read the rest, but it brings up some interesting points, including how the accused have little rights. This is all something I mentioned in a post, as did GC at Raised On Hoecakes.
Let’s think of this along a slightly different track: what is the left trying to accomplish here? As Jammie Wearing Fool noted
Left unsaid: All the folks listed above have failed over the course of five years to do anything about this so-called epidemic. Meanwhile, they never mention the epidemic of abortion. Hundreds of thousands will fight the cold weather to march against that epidemic today, but apparently that isn’t newsworthy.
This is not to say that there aren’t sexual assaults on campus, just like out in the Real World. There are. Are they as bad as some say? I’ll let others discuss that. One does have to wonder what is really going on. While some hard core feminists have been pushing that virtually anything a man does is rape (and want all women to be lesbians, and so on. See the Other McCain for so much), it wasn’t till recent, with the last year or so, that liberals suddenly became Very Interested in the subject. And what you got was a knee-jerk reaction, heavy handed on accusation and presuming guilt over innocence. Quite frankly, this has been a textbook operation right out of the Leftist playbook. The objective seems less to solve the problem and more to gin up an issue which leftists can rally behind, as well as empowering more authority to those in charge.
They aren’t trying to fix the problems. Unfortunately, there will always be sexual assaults. Such is life. But, the goals, again, seem to be political.
If they were truly interested, they might push notions like getting prosecutions out of the hands of colleges and into the hands of law enforcement, where it belongs. Except, in many cases, law enforcement/prosecutors have declined to charge. Yet, the schools still go after the accused.
They might recommend protective weapons other than rape whistles and to piss on yourself. Tougher jail terms.
Instead, the pass laws that heavily intrude into bedrooms, and create a situation that is a boon to lawyers. They want re-education and all sorts of squishy training. It’s all pushing Leftism, not solutions.
And if you’re against any part of their agenda, it means you hate women and are pro-sexual assault. And they’ll demonize you.
