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The connection between sexual liberation and sexual abuse
A reader writes:
I don’t know why there is all this fuss about the Penn State child molestation case. It sounds like a Glee episode to me.
LA replies:
Liberals would indignantly reject your point. It is a liberal axiom that there is zero connection between our society’s liberation of and approval of homosexuality, and the increasing homosexual abuse of boys. Of course not all homosexual abuse of boys results from homosexual liberation; such crimes have always existed. But it ought to be obvious that the more society approves and empowers perverted sexual desires, the more such desires will be harbored and expressed by more and more people, and the more such expression will spill over from the officially “approved” area of perversion, which is consensual perversion between adults (and now between teenagers, as in Glee), to the officially “disapproved” area of perversion, which is non-consensual perversion between adults and children. When moral boundaries are toppled generally, the resulting loss of self-control is going to affect not just the “nice” people who engage in consensual perversion, but everyone, including potential rapists and child molesters.
There is, in short, a continuum of sin, and therefore when you liberate and encourage sin, it’s not going to stay within the “polite” bounds that you have set for it, but will affect the totality of life. Liberals cannot grasp that this continuum of sin exists, because they don’t believe that sin exists.
But, you may ask, if liberals don’t believe in sin, what do they believe in? After all, they think that the sexual abuse of children is wrong, they think that rape is wrong. So aren’t they regarding those acts as sinful? No, they are not. Liberals believe that all consensual acts should be permitted, and that all non-consensual acts should be prohibited. The reason a non-consensual act is prohibited is not that there is some inherently wrong or sinful quality in the act itself, but that one of the parties to the act has not given his consent to it. Liberals don’t believe in morality, they believe in contracts—contracts founded on nothing but the will, desire, and mutual consent of the parties.
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Brandon F. writes:
Spot on! Great post.
Hannon writes:
You wrote
The reason a non-consensual act is prohibited is not that there is some inherently wrong or sinful quality in the act itself, but that one of the parties to the act has not given his consent to it. Liberals don’t believe in morality, they believe in contracts—contracts founded on nothing but the will, desire, and mutual consent of the parties.
I will endeavor to memorize and use that last sentence. It is devastating. Thank you.
Jim Kalb writes:
It’s not simply a matter of contract. There’s a certain hysteria about discussions of rape, sexual harassment, and so on that shows that on some level liberals know—they’re human beings so they can’t help but know—that sex has intrinsic importance and is not just a matter of consent. They can’t deal with the issues rationally because they have no categories for thinking about it, and it’s an emotionally-charged setting, so they go bonkers.
The problem comes through with the tendency to expand the definition of those offences. If a guy says something flirtacious and she’s not interested, or a guy sleeps with a girl and the morning after she decides it wasn’t what she really wanted, then that’s harassment or rape.
People try to make do with whatever rules are available and if the only rule available (consent) doesn’t really deal with the issues it’s going to get applied in odd ways.
LA replies:
You’re right, it’s about much more than contract, and, of course, even when it is about contract, it doesn’t and can’t remain that. I was trying to touch on the thing which is the liberal alternative to morality, without getting into the exceptions.
Jim Kalb replies:
Agreed on the conceptual basis of liberal morality. It’s all will.
Another example of how that gets stretched because it’s obviously insufficient is the whole area of sexual contact with young people.
What ever happened to kids’ rights? What is it about sex that makes full knowing mature consent so important in that area? And if we know sex is special to that extent why can’t we know other special things about it that make it good or bad in this or that situation?
Steve H. writes:
Last Wednesday I responded to an article at American Thinker about the rapes and sexual molestation charges coming out of Penn State. It seems that I offended the politically correct sensibilities of the website by contemplating the idea that these crimes are perhaps an offshoot of America’s embrace and even celebration of homosexuality. So they censored my comments.
On left wing radio sports stations they are expressing shock and outrage, but when you celebrate homosexuality, what do you expect? I stated that although this type of behavior certainly was always among us, the fact that other perversions are considered to be normal and acceptable behavior, wouldn’t a reasonable person expect to see this evolve into a new cult of homosexuality with boys. The reason I made this observation is that male homosexuals, I believe, for the most part do not seek partnership or love but highly erotic perverted sex. The trophy sex object is a young male in many of their fantasies. Mainstream “conservatism” considers this debate to be off bounds. I don’t.
November 12
Carl P. writes:
Excellent point, to which should be added that liberals are continually trying to get the legal age of consent lowered (along with the legal age for voting).
Julien B. writes:
You wrote:
The more society approves and empowers perverted sexual desires, the more such desires will be harbored and expressed by more and more people, and the more such expression will spill over from the officially “approved” area of perversion, which is consensual perversion between adults (and now between teenagers, as in Glee), to the officially “disapproved” area of perversion, which is non-consensual perversion between adults and children.
That may be true, but why is this a reason to object to homosexuality or other “perversions” as opposed to sexuality in general? A similar argument could be made against the sexual culture of America in the 1950s (1850s) and in favour of the sexual culture of the Taliban. Surely it’s not just “perverse” sexuality that will tend to become more powerful and pervasive when approved of or encouraged by society (if that’s right) but all forms of sexuality. [LA replies: I have numerous times said that there can be no end to homosexual liberation without an end to heterosexual liberation. The two are coeval. As soon as a society has sexual liberation, it has homosexual liberation as well.]
At any rate, I think it is wrong to say that liberals “don’t believe in morality” and disapprove of child molestation only because it is not consensual. They think rape (for example) is morally wrong because it’s non-consensual. They don’t deny that it’s wrong. And isn’t this the best explanation of the wrongness of rape? A concern for consensuality might not be the whole of morality, but surely it’s an important part of it—not something different and alien to morality. (Respecting people requires that we care to some extent about what they want or choose.)
LA replies:
Yes, we could say that believing that an act is wrong because it is non-consensual does reflect a type of moral thinking. But if the wrongness of the act consists only in its non-consensual, “non-contractual” character, is that morality? I’m not able at the moment to work this out fully, but here’s a crude example to get at what I mean. Morality tells us that it is inherently wrong to cut a person’s throat, chop up his dead body, and burn it as a sacrifice to Satan. But what if the person said, “I want you to cut my throat, chop up my body, and burn it as a sacrifice to Satan”? Would his consent to the act, his positive desire for the act, make the act OK? Does the wrongness of an act against a person consist only in the fact that your victim did not give you his permission for it?
Michael S. writes:
You wrote:
Liberals believe that all consensual acts should be permitted, and that all non-consensual acts should be prohibited. The reason a non-consensual act is prohibited is not that there is some inherently wrong or sinful quality in the act itself, but that one of the parties to the act has not given his consent to it. Liberals don’t believe in morality, they believe in contracts—contracts founded on nothing but the will, desire, and mutual consent of the parties.
I used to wonder why you consider libertarianism to be a form of liberalism. This statement of yours settles the matter definitively.
This insistence on human will and contract was why I was never comfortable with libertarianism. It was certainly attractive on many levels, but I never got passed a nagging suspicion that it could not provide a sound basis for society; this was before my Catholic awakening. A human society cannot be based on human will alone. It has to be built on recognition of the highest authority—and if that chosen “authority” (whether real or merely ascribed) is not stable, neither will the society be stable.
Making the will of the participants the determining factor “of morality” violates the First Commandment, because it makes man—not God—the arbiter of what is right.
Tim W. writes:
Yes, liberals have created a cultural norm in which any kind of consensual sex is good, and only becomes bad if it’s non-consensual. It also needs to be noted that they’ve also given their stamp of approval to consensual sex between minors while not (at least not yet) approving of consensual sex between adults and minors. This is something that’s often overlooked when dealing with sexual abuse of children.
Liberals believe that minors have sexual rights, meaning that they have a right to engage in sexual activity, and without their parents’ knowledge or consent. Implicit in the whole idea of liberal sex education, condom distribution, and high school “gay” clubs is the premise that these minors are sexual beings and they have a right to be sexually active. Liberals insist that they only mean sexually active with one another. They would react with indignance if you suggested they might approve of a 55 year old man having sex with a 14 year old girl. But they would also fight bitterly to guarantee that the 14 year old could get an abortion without her parents’ knowledge to cover up a pregnancy resulting from such a union. In fact, they filibustered to death a law which would have made it a crime for an adult to sneak a minor girl across a state line for a secret abortion.
So the fact that they haven’t yet dared to tamper with statutory rape laws doesn’t mean they aren’t trying to undercut those laws. They are. It’s absurd for liberals to produce gutter trash TV shows such as Glee, showing minors engaging in every sort of sexuality with one another, and then to expect adults to keep their hands off of them. How can minors have the right to have sex unless they’re mature enough to handle it? And if they’re mature, they’re adults, so why limit minor sexuality to activity with other minors?
This is looking like another of those liberal policies where they create a problem, then assure us that it’s no big deal and that only “extremists” on the right are worried about it. Then, when the problem gets too big to control, they tell us all we can do is legalize the activity in question, which will be the point where the left openly attempts to get rid of statutory rape laws.
LA replies:
I believe you are touching on a point of ultimate liberal vulnerability, where the entire liberal edifice can come crashing down. There will be more to say about this later.
Beth M. writes:
I watched the Jerry Springer Show a few times years ago, and was surprised by what went on. Promiscuous young people who were “living in sin” or who were single and had promiscuous sex with an endless series of partners would appear to be GENUINELY upset when they found that their “partner” had fathered a child with another woman, or that their “fiancee” had given birth to a child that was not their own. In numerous cases, no biological father could be successfully identified OR several possible men had to be tested to find the actual father.
All of the people involved would have been enraged if anyone had suggested to them that their lifestyle was immoral, and yet they became completely unglued when they felt that someone had “cheated” on them. But if you think that Biblical morality is nonsense, where do you get your concept of “cheating?” They don’t want to be hemmed in by any commitments, and they think that anyone who believes in “sky-fairies” is a simpleton, but they expect loyalty, decency and respect from others.
November 13
Tim W. writes:
This is a column from Breitbart’s Big Hollywood site on the Glee episode where the two homosexual boys had sex. Note the accompanying publicity photo of the two boys. The column is written by a right-liberal who can’t bring herself to oppose homosexuality, though she does manage to critique Glee’s practice of treating teen sex as routine and acceptable.
Some of the people in the comment section following the article show more common sense.
M. Jose writes:
You write that sexual abuse is an inevitable consequence of sexual liberation.
That reminds me of a blog post I wrote a while back a while back, “Rape Is About Sex! Duh!”
The relevant point of the post is that the claim that “Rape is about power, not about sex” is largely tied to the need to consider rape a heinous crime while also considering sex a casual experience; you can’t take sex casually without taking rape casually as well unless you downplay the sexual aspect of rape and invent another reason for rape to be heinous.
I think that this is a good example of the left attempting to separate sexual liberation from sexual abuse by trying to redefine terminology.
Ken Hechtman writes:
You’re all missing something important about how liberals think. Yes, liberals care about individual rights and consent. You got that part. But liberals also care about power and inequalities of power and that’s the part you’re missing. This is why liberals generally don’t have a problem with sex between two teenage high school boys but generally do have a problem with a company president making a one-time-only, willing-to-take-no-for-an-answer pass at an employee.
Even if the employee is a grown woman, she doesn’t have anywhere near equal power in the exchange. When the president of a company expresses a wish, it doesn’t matter whether he’s talking about a billion dollar investment, a cup of coffee or an adulterous affair—the assumption has to be that it’s not a request.
I think it’s very unlikely that the age of consent laws are going to be repealed outright. You might get what passed recently in Canada (which the left supported, incidentally). The age of consent was raised from 14 to 16 but there now has to be a five year age difference to make it a crime. The Canadian government is interested in sending grown men to jail for preying on girls in their mid-teens. It is not interested in sending high school kids to jail for having sex with each other. [LA replies: The sheer arbitrariness of your concepts screams out. If a 19 year old male has sex (actually sodomy) with a 14 and a half year old male, he is just expressing his wonderful sexual rights and individual freedom; but if a 19 year old male has sex with a girl who has just turned 14, then he was “preying” on her.] You might also see the definition of statutory rape broadened to include grown women in certain categories. The same way a child isn’t considered legally capable of consenting to sex with a grown man even if she says she did, a grown woman might not be considered capable either if she’s on the wrong side of a power imbalance—doctor/patient, professor/student, president of the United States/White House intern, that kind of thing.
LA replies:
If liberal society makes such a clear distinction between consensual sex between equals (good), and non-consensual sex between non-equals (bad), then why didn’t graduate assistant coach Mike McQueary stop Jerry Sandusky’s rape of the boy in the locker room? Well, why should he? He is a member of a culture that has programmed everyone with the injunction: do not judge. Everyone born in our society after about 1968 has been trained from childhood to be non-judgmental. Do liberals imagine that this by-now deeply embedded habit of non-judgmentalness will apply only to consensual acts, and not to non-consensual acts as well?
Again, consider the fact that for the last several decades, many people believe that there’s no way to say that an act—any act—is wrong. What is the credo of all good liberals? “I have my own standards, but I can’t impose my standards on others.” Meaning that there are no generally applicable moral norms. Years ago a young man in my church told me that if vandals came in and trashed the building (which happens to be one of the most beautiful churches in New York City), that would be their choice, he couldn’t judge it. Carol Iannone has written about how when she asked her college students if what Hitler did to the Jews was bad, they replied: “If you were Jewish.”
I summed up the problem in my 2001 NewsMax article, “The Revelation of Nihilism”:
We should be grateful to a sullen-faced Colorado high school girl for demonstrating—with absolute and final clarity—what America has become in the age of Clinton.
Her story, broadcast on a recent edition of ABC’s 20/20, concerned yet another threatened school slaughter in Middle America.
When a male friend confided to her that he was thinking of shooting some of their classmates, she told no one about it. It was only after he began to talk about killing her along with others that she informed on him, which led to his arrest and judicial confinement at his parents’ home. Asked by 20/20’s Connie Chung why she had initially remained silent about a possible massacre of her fellow students, she replied: “I didn’t like them. I didn’t care if he killed them.”
Her matter-of-fact tone and expressionless eyes, as much as her chilling words, said it all: It wasn’t that she hated her friend’s prospective victims or had some special urge to see them killed; it was that she didn’t care if they were killed, and she wasn’t embarrassed to let the world know it.
This came as something of a shock. Even as we have witnessed the overturning of so many ethical norms that once constituted our society, most of us probably still assumed that there was at least one rock-bottom value that no one in America would deny, at least in public: that murder—especially the wanton murder of one’s neighbors—is wrong. When an ordinary young American flatly rejects that belief, we are forced to acknowledge that we really are no longer living in the world we once knew.
[end of excerpt]
We are living in a culture that has been morally deadened by the systematic trashing of moral norms and the teaching that we must be non-judgmental.
Given that background, is it a big surprise that Mike McQueary did not immediately intervene in the rape he saw happening and stop it?
The liberal teaching of non-judgmentalness blows the moral pretensions of liberalism out of the water. The moral legitimacy of liberalism rests on the idea that equal freedom applies only to consensual acts, not to non-consensual acts or to acts between non-equals. But this is false. The complete freedom and non-judgmentalness that are applied to consensual acts will inevitably be transferred to non-consensual acts as well. You can’t destroy people’s capacity and will to make moral judgments, and think that they will continue to make moral judgments about non-consensual acts. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, you can’t geld a man, and then expect him to be fruitful and multiply.
Now, Mr. Hechtman believes that the liberal substitute for morality, which is opposition to inequality, will hold the line at non-consensual sexual acts or sexual acts between people with unequal power. But, again, as a practical, human matter, why should it? Once you destroy people’s ability to judge and react against evil, you destroy it across the board.
However, the problem for liberalism is even worse than what I’ve said so far. Mr. Hechtman, his fellow left-liberals, and right-liberal conservatives all support the massive immigration of Muslims into the West—Muslims who are taught by their religion that it’s good to rape non-Muslim women and who practice that teaching. For example, as Diana West reminds us, virtually all the rapes in Oslo in recent years have been committed by Muslim men against white Norwegian women. Will we see Mr. Hechtman and other liberals raising the roof about this targeting of white women by Muslim men? No. Why? Because to liberals, as Mr. Hechtman has made clear, a sexual act is only objectionable if it’s done by a “more powerful” person to a “less powerful” person. If the rapist belongs to an “oppressed” class, such as Muslim immigrants, and his victim belongs to an “oppressor class,” such as white Europeans, the liberals have no particular problem with it and they will continue to support the Islamization of the West leading to the ever increasing sexual terrorization of white Western women. So not only is the liberal doctrine of anti-inequality no substitute for morality, it licenses and opens the gates to mass sexual crime.
A reader writes:
In reply to Ken Hechtman:
Liberalism’s supposed concern for abuse of powers is plainly one-sided. It makes certain fixed assumptions about power in these relationships that simply do not correspond to reality. The female employee is presumed powerless when in fact the attractive, young female employee may be powerful.
November 14
Tim W. writes:
The biggest sex scandals of modern political history were Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades as governor and later as president. These involved clear power differentials between a powerful white male and lowly female interns and job seekers. The left universally defended Clinton’s behavior even after it was proven he had engaged in it and lied about it. Clinton is today treated as a great statesman.
Gerry Studds may be a largely forgotten name, but a couple of decades or so ago he was a congressman of around fifty years of age (if I recall). He had sex with a minor congressional page, a male to be exact. The Democrats refused to expel him from Congress and only reluctantly agreed to slap him on the wrist with a censure.
Currently Democrats are fighting tooth and nail to stop a House investigation into Planned Parenthood, which has been accused of sex trafficking and covering up sexual abuse of minors.
So the left seems quite willing to permit the powerful to sexually exploit the downtrodden when politically convenient.
The idea of introducing the liberal concept of inequality between groups into the realm of sex is absurd. It would make it impossible for straight white males to so much as ask a girl for a date without risking being accused of exploiting their heterosexist male privilege.
LA replies:
I didn’t get into the Clinton thing in my reply and I’m glad you did. Of course, after having defended Clinton, after having dismissed the importance of the sexual exploitation and intimidation of powerless females by a powerful man when the powerful man was a Democrat, liberals/feminists have ZERO standing to talk about their concern about sexual harassment, and we must never allow them to forget that fact.
Mark P. writes:
Ken Hechtman wrote:
“While liberals have no problem with homosexual sex between teenage boys, he writes, they oppose sex between unequals, such as between a boss and his employee, or between an adult man and a teenage girl, or between a football coach and a ten year old boy.”
Unfortunately, Ken’s examples detailing this incident do not hold water when he gives the example of the grown woman being unequal to a company president. The unequal power-relation in this example would only matter if the woman did not like the advance. The advance invokes the power-relation problem only if the advance is unwanted and, therefore, non-consensual. Even objectively unequal power is still subject to the consensual-nonconsensual dynamic.
Incidentally, I also like what Michael S. wrote:
“A human society cannot be based on human will alone. It has to be built on recognition of the highest authority—and if that chosen “authority” (whether real or merely ascribed) is not stable, neither will the society be stable.”
This reminds me of one of your articles, where you state that liberalism can only survive within a cultural order that is not itself liberal.
LA replies:
Here are articles of mine that reference that idea.
November 14
Ken Hechtman replies:
You wrote:
The sheer arbitrariness of your concepts screams out. If a 19 year old male has sex (actually sodomy) with a 14 and a half year old male, he is just expressing his wonderful sexual rights and individual freedom; but if a 19 year old male has sex with a girl who has just turned 14, then he was “preying” on her.
Criminal law, which is where my example comes from, deals in sharp and arbitrary distinctions. Not so well with undifferentiated continuums. It has to draw the line somewhere and it’s always going to look arbitrary at the boundary. A single day under the limit is worth a one and a half to ten year jail term. A single day over is perfectly legal and that’s always going to be true no matter where the limit is. [LA replies: Of course. When it comes to drawing a line at age of consent, and thus where a consensual act turns into an act of rape that can land a man in prison, there is a certain arbitrariness in that. I’m not arguing with that. What I was objecting to was your own sudden shift from, “Hey, man, homosexual sex between teenagers is fine,” to, “A man who asks out a woman who works under him is preying on her.” You weren’t just making a legal distinction, you were making a very strong moral distinction, and the distinction revolves around nothing but an arbitrary age set by the law or by the fact that the man who asks out the woman is arguably “more powerful” than she is.]
Maybe I need to say this, but just because something’s perfectly legal doesn’t mean you or anybody else has to celebrate it or like it or even approve of it. Go ahead and disapprove of both 19 year old males in your hypothetical example if you want. Nobody says you can’t. All you can’t do (in Canada anyway) is get the first one thrown in jail.
You wrote:
why didn’t graduate assistant coach Mike McQueary stop Jerry Sandusky’s rape of the boy in the locker room? Well, why should he? He is a member of a culture that has programmed everyone with the injunction: do not judge. Everyone born in our society after about 1968 has been trained from childhood to be non-judgmental. Do liberals imagine that this by-now deeply embedded habit of non-judgmentalness will apply only to consensual acts, and not to non-consensual acts as well?
I don’t know what was in his head in 2002. Either he never talked about it or he did and I missed it. But if you can guess based on your politics, I can guess based on mine. Maybe he was afraid to cross Sandusky. Maybe he knew that Sandusky was a very powerful guy within a very powerful institution, more than capable of getting the city police to drop a simple rape charge, and then firing him and blacklisting him in his field in retaliation. This is consistent with the way McQueary eventually did report the rape to Sandusky’s boss but not to anyone outside the institution.
LA replies:
I don’t know and don’t claim to know what was in McQeary’s head. It was a horrible situation for a person to find himself in, from multiple angles. However, given the nature of the society we now live in, it is a reasonable and plausible assumption that his non-response in the immediate situation had something to do with the factors I described.
When a friend asked me the other day what I would have done in McQueary’s situation, I took one moment to visualize the situation, and then I said: “I would have instantly bellowed at the top of my voice, ‘WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?’” This reaction would have been instinctive and immediate. A crime, a sexual crime, was going on in front of me, not in some place where crime might be expected, but in the locker room of my university’s football team. There’s no way I would allow that to continue.
But McQueary did not have this reaction. He saw the rape of a child going on, and did nothing to stop it. Yes, it may have been fear of harming his position at the university which prevented him from reacting. But I don’t think that fear would have been enough, without the added element of moral acceptance and non-judgmentalism—especially regarding sexual and homosexual matters—which liberalism has implanted in every member of our society.
Timothy A. writes:
It seems obvious that the ridiculous liberal position that sexual relations between two persons of unequal “power” are the only illicit sexual relations must allow for unprincipled exceptions. A strict enforcement, coupled with the innate difference in physical strength between men and women (feminists would add the inequality in social position as well), leads to the feminist position that all (heterosexual) sex is rape. Perhaps this explains the giddy liberal promotion of homosexualism. In the end, this theory is either a useful cudgel, to be dragged out in order to pummel class enemies when convenient, or a means to assuage the residual Christian sexual morality of unbelieving liberals.
Sage McLaughlin writes:
obviously there are going to be power differentials even between two teenage boys that may not express themselves in formal terms. As for the woman who has a pass made at her by her boss, again, there are all sorts of ways in which she might be the more powerful of the two in real terms. Certainly the existing liberal regime, because it uses the blunt instrument of the law to try to “fix” these inevitable situations (made inevitable by liberal policy, I should add), has created a new situation in which it would be absurd to suggest that women are somehow living in fear of the men they work for, rather than the other way round.
Again, I’d have to think about it, but my initial reaction is that liberals always insist on seeing what is formal, obvious, and on the surface, to the detriment of other things that lie beyond them. So it is of course simply to be assumed that a 14 and a 16 year old boy have no differences of power that lie between them, and of course a “boss” is always an evilly cackling master of all he surveys, especially his female employees.
Tim W. writes:
The biggest sex scandals of modern political history were Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades as governor and later as president. These involved clear power differentials between a powerful white male and lowly female interns and job seekers. The left universally defended Clinton’s behavior even after it was proven he had engaged in it and lied about it. Clinton is today treated as a great statesman.
Gerry Studds may be a largely forgotten name, but a couple of decades or so ago he was a congressman of around fifty years of age (if I recall). He had sex with a minor congressional page, a male to be exact. The Democrats refused to expel him from Congress and only reluctantly agreed to slap him on the wrist with a censure.
Currently Democrats are fighting tooth and nail to stop a House investigation into Planned Parenthood, which has been accused of sex trafficking and covering up sexual abuse of minors.
So the left seems quite willing to permit the powerful to sexually exploit the downtrodden when politically convenient.
The idea of introducing liberal concepts inequality between groups into the realm of sex is absurd. It would make it impossible for straight white males to so much as ask a girl for a date without risking being accused of exploiting their heterosexist male privilege.
LA replies:
We must never forget that the liberals and feminists threw away any standing to be outraged by sexual harassment when they gave Clinton a pass on his multiple abuses of women in his position as governor and president. When they did that, they showed that they don’t oppose sexual harassment, they don’t oppose powerful men lording it over powerless women. They only oppose these things if it serves their partisan political purposes. They gave up any right to be taken seriously on the issue of sexual harassment, and we must NEVER allow them to forget this.
Laura G. writes:
This event has also given us the opportunity to see the response of the student body of the college which is now known by all to have harbored for years a sports system with a coach who brutalized, sodomized, and sexually abused young boys. And what was the response of the students to this public awareness of the depravity which had involved their own school? It was to riot in protest of the firing of a coach who had known of the criminal acts that were occurring and had failed in his duty to protect endangered children. It takes my breath away. It is stunningly perverse that that student body could mount a major riot on behalf of someone who, at very least, stood aside and allowed continued sexual assaults on children. Those riots provide devastating and egregious proof of the extent of the degradation of our society. How is it possible that those students turn their sympathy not to the child victims but to the fired coach, and do so in an act of violent riot? Can I possibly be correct in understanding that they believe that the coach should remain in place and that the firing was undeserved? Truly and deeply, we are so, so, so much worse off spiritually, mentally, and emotionally than I had realized, and in general I had believed that I had “heard it all” and had been fully aware of the darkest sides of our society. Not so, apparently. You are hearing this from a physician whose practice specializes in the medical evaluation of children for abuse and neglect.
In desperate fear for the future of our nation, Laura G.
Jim C. writes:
I would have had a similar reaction as you to the rape, but I also would have called the police immediately, then Paterno.
I don’t believe you have any idea how powerful Paterno was, or the politics of a football powerhouse like Penn State. (Full disclosure: Paterno graduated from my high school, and he is the subject of blistering debate among my classmates.) I maintain that McQueary’s abrogation of responsibility to intervene had NOTHING to do with liberalism. McQueary wanted to advance in the Penn State football program, so I don’t think he wanted to intervene directly for fear of offending Paterno, who was, and probably still is, Sandusky’s good friend. So it was moral and professional cowardice that motivated McQueary, not liberalism—and if it were “liberalism,” then why did McQueary end up reporting it to Paterno? I believe he knew full well that what he witnessed was an abomination, and not some gay rights display.
John Dempsey writes:
My reaction of abhorrence was quite similar to that of Laura G.’s in response to the Penn State students rioting in protest of the firing of Joe Paterno. I do however, feel better now that I have read this article that explains the students’ behavior. Let not your heart be troubled, Laura. The whole matter can be resolved with a simple understanding of … evolution!
LA replies:
Yes, and Darwinian evolution also explains why Sandusky raped boys, and also explains why McQueary didn’t stop the rape that he saw, and also explains why McQueary did report the rape later, and also explains why Paterno resisted for years recruiting academically unqualified and criminally-oriented blacks for the football team, and also explains why Paterno changed his mind in the early Oughts and began recruiting academically unqualified and criminally-oriented blacks for the football team, and also explains …
Darwinian evolution is the greatest thing ever. It explains everything.
Philip M. writes from England:
The many cases you have highlighted of white women who have felt compelled to give in to a black man’s sexual advances notwithstanding the danger this put them in is surely an excellent example of men abusing a particular type of power—in this case a modern racial one—in order to gain sex.
Do you think liberals lay awake at night worrying about this? Do you think they will ever get round to addressing this?
Me neither.
November 15
Steve R. writes:
As usual I’m late to the party. A long time to articulate my thoughts.
Larry asserted that liberal non-judgment was a factor in McQueary’s failure to thwart Sandusky’s violently criminal act. Ann Barnhardt has pointed out that, before the modern era, judgment was visited so swiftly on a Sandusky-type act that rarely would someone like him even make it to prison. Ken Hechtman was not inclined to see McQueary’s behavior as symptomatic of liberalism’s non-judgment. In keeping with his politics, he would rather guess that McQueary just didn’t want to “cross Sandusky” because doing so might negatively affect his career and not materially affect Sandusky.
Obviously it takes a lot to be moved to cross someone who has power over you.
But what if Sandusky’s victim was the child of an acquaintance of McQueary, or his good friend, or his relative, or his own child? I presume Mr. Hechtman would predict that at some point along that continuum McQueary would have set aside his own interests and tried to thwart the attack.
That being the case, if Mr. Hechtman’s politics haven’t made this society more non-judgmental, then, at the least, they have made us indifferent to the suffering of anyone to whom we are not strongly connected—quite the opposite of what his ”ism” purports to be about.
LA replies:
This is exactly the reasoning that was needed.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 11, 2011 03:33 PM | Send
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