Cross-posted from Mike Malloy
Has it finally come to this? That a conservative columnist for the Washington Post -- one who is seen in the media establishment as a pillar of propriety and libertarian values -- has written that America's college campuses are damned because rape survivors who attend those colleges lie about being raped just to have in his words, "coveted status with privileges?"
Yes. It has.
The anti-woman fear and contempt that is the basis of all three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) has now found its media champion -- Post columnist George Will -- he of the bow tie and the perpetually constipated facial expression.
In a published screed that reads as though it came from a character in a Margaret Atwood novel, Will insists that campus rape is an "alleged" act (he doesn't even mention the associated violence) -- and that these crimes against young women confer so much "status" that women seek the title "victim."
This sort of crazed scribblings by a man who fancies himself in the forefront of American intellectualism, leaves the insane comments of half-witted Republican candidates for the US Senate Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock so far back in the crowd of women-hating Conservatives as to render them nearly meaningless. This was George By God Will writing in the By God Washington Post.
Which raises this question: What does it take to convince Americans that a corrupted religious fundamentalism has now taken firm control of our dying electoral system?
Further, within 48 hours of George Will denigrating victims of sexual violence, the Washington Post doubled down on the madness by publishing an op-ed saying the best way for women to avoid violence against them was to get married, ignoring the fact of thousands of dead women each year as the result of domestic violence perpetrated by their husbands.
Since the editors of one of this country's so-called "newspapers of record" don't seem to understand what they have done, will someone tell them they might consider not publishing future op-ed pieces written by rape apologists? And that violence against women is not negated by marriage?
Would the Post not better serve its readers -- and women in general -- by devoting a few hundred words to the effect that young men on campus, boys really, who believe forcible sex is a way of demonstrating their manhood is in fact a concept of terrible violence.
Or has the Post -- as has so many American institutions -- become so inured to violence that it is no longer seen as an aberration? At the beginning of the Bush Cheney reign of terror, committing what the Nuremberg Trials determined was the ultimate war crime, was reduced to nothing more than a policy decision. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Iraq's citizens were murdered -- a slaughter that continues unabated today.
At the same time, this country's premier terrorist organization, the National Rifle Association, continues its propaganda campaign to convince Americans that the best way to end gun violence is with more guns.
This is madness taken to a degree that is almost incomprehensible in a society that still -- ironically -- describes itself as "the land of the free and the home of the brave."
Violence against women in the US -- and the status of those who advocate it -- is a continuing and horrific example of a country aptly described by Greg Palast as an "Armed Madhouse."
2
2
1
