The Washington Post Adopts Slate's Outrage-Trolling Business Model: Hey, Maybe Teachers Should Rape Their Underage Students

Twitchy goofed on this yesterday.

The Washington Post announces a new Common Core centered on the 3 R's: readin', writin', and rape.

As protesters decry the leniency of Rambold’s sentence — he will spend 30 days in prison after pleading guilty to raping 14-year-old Cherice Morales, who committed suicide at age 16 — I find myself troubled for the opposite reason. I don’t believe that all sexual conduct between underage students and teachers should necessarily be classified as rape, and I believe that absent extenuating circumstances, consensual sexual activity between teachers and students should not be criminalized....

I do think that teachers who engage in sex with students, no matter how consensual, should be removed from their jobs and barred from teaching unless they prove that they have completed rehabilitation.

Wow, rehabilitation. Throw the book at 'em, huh?

But the utter hysteria with which society responds to these situations...

Just let that sink in.

This wasn't a spontaneous comment; she chose those words, edited those words, resolved upon those words for her final draft.

...does less to protect children than to assuage society’s need to feel that we are protecting them.

You know what would protect them? Making teachers who have sex with their minor students go to "rehabilitation," Filner style.

I don’t know what triggered Morales’s suicide...

Her family has some thoughts on the matter. You might want to peruse them.

..but I find it tragic and deeply troubling that this occurred as the case against Rambold wound its way through the criminal justice system. One has to wonder whether the extreme pressure she must have felt from those circumstances played a role.

One might also wonder if the statutory rape of a minor had something to do with it, but only an uptight grumpus would think that.

I’ve been a 14-year-old girl, and so have all of my female friends.

All my current friends are 14-year-old girls. We have pool parties and sometimes we massage each other.

God bless you for your work, Madame. Me and my 14-year-old jailbait posse are sick of society looking askance at our Forbidden Love.

When it comes to having sex on the brain, teenage boys got nothin’ on us. When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, the sexual boundaries between teachers and students were much fuzzier.

Yet another Aged Bent Hippie here to tell us all dirty stories about the dawn of Free Love and the Steam Engine.

Throughout high school, college and law school, I knew students who had sexual relations with teachers.

Sidenote: It has always been legal to have sex with college students and law school students, unless it's a Doogie Howser situation.

Note how cavalierly she merges "sex with adults" with "sex with children."

To the best of my knowledge, these situations were all consensual in every honest meaning of the word, even if society would like to embrace the fantasy that a high school student can’t consent to sex. Although some feelings probably got bruised, no one I knew was horribly damaged and certainly no one died.

No one died?

You know what else no one typically dies from? Rape. Maybe we should take a second look at rape generally.

On the other hand, awareness of sexual harassment was also much lower. Pretty much every woman I know has been sexually harassed in at least one, and usually many, of her jobs and/or academic settings.

Let's stop talking about this stupid Criminal Sexual Abuse of a Child Issue you're all on about and talk about what really matters, the sexual harassment I experienced in my pre-menopausal years.

Incidentally, you know what else no one typically dies from? Sexual harassment.

I was fired from a waitressing job in Boston in 1979, during my first year of law school, after I refused to sit in the manager’s lap like the other girls. I would have much rather seen that sleazebag dragged through the legal system than certain teachers I considered friends despite their sexual relations with students that today would land them in jail.

Yes he should go to jail for the rude and bad behavior of asking you to sit on his lap and then firing you from a shitty job that you didn't want, but child rape? Eh, no one dies.

The point is that there is a vast and extremely nuanced continuum of sexual interactions involving teachers and students, ranging from flirtation to mutual lust to harassment to predatory behavior. Painting all of these behaviors with the same brush sends a damaging message to students and sets the stage for hypocrisy and distortion of the truth.

NAMBLA just emailed me: "She gets it! It's all about protecting the Children from damaging messages about repressing their desires to have sex with adults and society's hypocrisy!

This is what we've been trying to say!

Finally! Someone has the guts to say it!"

Many teenagers are, biologically speaking, sexually mature.

And hot. Don't forget hot.

And also unspoiled and unschooled in the ways of love. Easily manipulated and shaped into one's preferred sexual forms.

Which, let's face it, are just other words for "hot."

Pretending that this kind of thing won’t happen if we simply punish it severely enough is delusional.

No one pretends this, idiot. No criminal law on the books pretends that if we just outlaw a thing, it will all magically stop. (Except for gun-control laws, of course.)

We know banning murder does not stop murder. But this antiquated notion of "criminalizing crimes" has several salutary functions, such as reducing the number of murders. If murder were not illegal, we'd have a shit-ton more of it, believe me, Sister.

No one has ever said the law against murder reduces the murder rate to zero. This is rather obvious, "Lawyer."

But what would the murder rate be if murder were, insanely, not a crime? Think about it.

Would the murder rate double? Not even close. As a first approximation we'd guess it would increase by a whole order of magnitude -- ten times as many murders -- and that's probably lowballing it.

People like killing each other a whole heck of a lot. And despite this idiot's assertions to the contrary, people also notice that young but sexually-mature (or close to it) girls can sometimes be rather attractive.

Without a law criminalizing either of these natural (and bad) impulses, we'd have a hell of a lot more murders, and a whole hell of a lot more sex with children.

Now sit on my lap and tell me about the days of Woodstock and "The Charleston."

...

If religious leaders and heads of state can’t keep their pants on, with all they have to lose, why does society expect that members of other professions can be coerced into meeting this standard?

By the way, this woman is a lawyer. Just pointing that out.

A more realistic approach would be to treat violations in a way that removes and rehabilitates the offender without traumatizing the victim.

NAMBLA just me an email, which says "MegaDittos-- we just don't want to traumatize the victim."

The intensity of criminal proceedings, with all the pressure they put on participants...

Again, protecting the children from the "pressure" of having their Special Love for Coach Billy exposed before the world.

...the stigma...

Oh God, now she doesn't even think sex with children should be punished with mere stigma. Even that is too great a penalty to pay for Love.

Love of Children. The Greatest Love of All.

...the community and media scrutiny, and the concurrent shame and guilt they generate, do the opposite of healing and protecting the victim.

NAMBLA just sent me a third and final email:

HEALING and PROTECTING the CHILD!

YES! YES! YES! YES!

YESSSSSSS!!!!!1111!!!!

Attached to the email was the picture of a post-orgasmic penis in its early refractory phase.

Yet another case of a media outlet putting a sad woman through the ritual cruelty of public exposure of her stupidity and delusion in order to garner some Humiliation Traffic.

They do this to women a lot.

#WarOnWomen, yo.

posted by Ace at 03:41 PM

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