If You're For Equal Rights, You Stand Up For Due Process For All -- Including Men
As I tweeted back to @CORYROZAY (bottom tweet just below), "Number one, you have no idea whether I've been sexually assaulted -- I have. Two, we all deserve due process," innocent until proven guilty -- under the law, not under campus kangaroo courts with diminished standards of evidence.
The top bit of my statement -- through "due process" -- was all I could fit in a tweet back to the first person, @CORYROZAY, responding to this story I tweeted, about Ed Sec Betsy DeVos repealing the terrible Obama era "Dear Colleague" Title IX letter, that effectively removed due process from (primarily) men on campus accused of sexual assault.
Disgustingly, a number of cockroaches are crawling out of the woodwork on Twitter and elsewhere, arguing against due process for men who are accused of sexual assault. Ironically, a number of them are from gay/lesbian or feminist rights groups -- and appear to be utterly ignorant about how constitutional rights and protections have enabled them to live freely as who they are.
This country isn't perfect and there are miscarriages of justice all the time. However, some of these nitwits on Twitter were arguing, effectively, "Well, because women sometimes are denied justice, let's deny due process to any man who's accused of a crime."
No-ho. Not in the America I live in or want to live in.
But it's been awful on campuses for a number of years -- mostly for men, and, as Robby Soave pointed out in a tweet, especially for men "of color."
Check out the terrible injustice done to the guy Emily Yoffe starts out her Atlantic piece with:
In the early hours of Saturday, November 1, 2014, Bonsu, then a junior, was at the house where many of his fraternity brothers lived. There he ran into another junior, whom I'll call R.M., a white, female marketing student. According to a written account by R.M., who declined to be interviewed for this story, the two started talking and smoking marijuana; eventually they kissed. As she wrote, "It got more intense until finally I shifted so that I was straddling him." She told him she wasn't interested in intercourse and he said he was fine with that.Then, she wrote, "I started to move my hand down his chest and into his pants." R.M. interrupted this to take a phone call from a female friend who was also at the house and trying to find her. The call ended and then, R.M. wrote, "I got on my knees and started to give him a blow job." After a short time, "I removed my mouth but kept going with my hand and realized just how high I was." She wrote that she felt conflicted because she wanted to stop--she said she told him she was feeling uncomfortable and thought she needed to leave--but that she also felt bad about "working him up and then backing out." (In Bonsu's written account, he stated that R.M. said she needed to leave because she was concerned her friend might "barge in" on them.) The encounter continued for a few more minutes, during which, she wrote, he cajoled her to stay--"playfully" grabbing her arm at one point, and drawing her in to kiss--then ended with an exchange of phone numbers. R.M. had not removed any clothing.
R.M. then went down to the kitchen to find her friend. As she explained in her statement, "[My friend] knows I was with Kojo. She probably told all the brothers in the room, and they're gonna hate me when they find out"--she didn't explain why. "I can never come back here." Her friend started teasing her, asking how it had gone. R.M. was a resident adviser in her dormitory--someone tasked with counseling other students--and at that moment, she wrote, "as my RA training kicked in, I realized I'd been sexually assaulted." She wrote that while in retrospect she should have left if she didn't want to continue the encounter, she hadn't wanted to be a bad sport--"that UMass Student Culture dictates that when women become sexually involved with men they owe it to them to follow through." She added, "I want to fully own my participation in what happened, but at the same time recognize that I felt violated and that I owe it to myself and others to hold him accountable for something I felt in my bones wasn't right."
As she talked with her friend, R.M. wrote, she became distraught. She contacted the RAs on duty and reported that she had been sexually assaulted. The RAs called the campus police, who notified the Amherst police. R.M. gave her clothes to a police officer for evidence, although she said she was not ready to file charges. Then she went to the hospital, where she was given a battery of medications for possible STDs.
Just before Thanksgiving, according to a federal lawsuit filed against the university by Bonsu's attorney, Brett Lampiasi, R.M. went to the dean of students and filed a complaint against Bonsu. She also reported him to the Amherst police. The police investigated and closed the case with no charges filed. On January 12, 2015, Bonsu got an email from a school administrator informing him that a "very serious" allegation had been lodged against him and that until a hearing was held, he was subject to "interim restrictions": He could not contact R.M., he could visit no dormitories other than his own, he was limited to eating at a single dining hall, and he was forbidden from entering the student union.
It gets far, far worse for him.
I am the antithesis of a Trump fan, but Betsy DeVos is doing a very important and very good -- and righteous -- thing in rolling back the Obama Title IX "Dear Colleague" provisions, and she's to be commended for it.
Apparently the bureaucratic support for this is already entrenched.
Glad to be too old to go to college for the sex.
Crid at September 8, 2017 5:16 AM
Of course it is entrenched. Where else are the _____ Studies majors going to get jobs that they can afford to pay off their student loans?
I R A Darth Aggie at September 8, 2017 6:22 AM
One of the first rules in the Dictator's Handbook is that, to maintain a dictatorship, you have to cut off access to education and keep the people ignorant. The Left realized long ago that doing that literally in America would be impossible; unlike Europe, there is no tradition in America of the government being able to decide who does and doesn't get an education, and the people would revolt if the government tried to impose such. So they pursued the indirect approach: corrupt the institutions so that people aren't really getting an education, even though they think they are. This project has been, for the Left, a spectacular success. We've seen many examples of high-school exams from the past that most college-educated people would not be able to pass today. Further, the Left realized that the operational institutions could have their purpose diverted to indoctrinate and radicalize, thus building their base of support. In effect, almost every student in America today is willingly attending a re-education camp, while telling themselves that they are becoming knowledgeable and wise.
Cousin Dave at September 8, 2017 6:57 AM
Not only are these fake courts a good way for college administrators to keep expanding their departments, they're also a good way to make sure that college students only deal with their own kind. Why force students to have to submit to the vulgar questioning of working class male police officers who can't possibly understand every nuance of the campus elite? better that the "right sort" of people take care of their own.
KateC at September 8, 2017 9:28 AM
To build on what KatieC said, it's also a good way to make sure the college's student body is made up of the right kind of people; which will influence society as a whole once these folks graduate and move into corporate America and the body politic.
If you're accused of sexual assault in college, you must not be woke, therefore who cares what such accusations do to your future. We don't want you in a college-credential-level position anyway.
Conan the Grammarian at September 8, 2017 11:02 AM
That 'Korean Jesus' is pretty much the definition of a Twitter troll.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at September 12, 2017 1:27 PM
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