Quote of the Day: Andrew Sullivan on Apparent UVA Rape Hoax

At a family gathering yesterday - my granddaughter's birthday - with a number of UVA alumni in attendance, not surprisingly the Rolling Stone hit piece on UVA came up.  Equally unsurprising was the anger at Rolling Stone's irresponsible (and apparently false) story and horrific journalism - if one can even call the piece journalism.  The question was how did such a terribly wrong story get published.  Andrew Sullivan perhaps sums it up:

So why did an inflammatory, lurid, and apparently fallacious story get into print – with only one source and no corroboration – breaking most basic journalistic rules in a serious publication? Rich Bradley is surely right: it was a too-good-to-check story that echoed what many truly wanted to hear. It managed to suggest that the “rape culture” we are now told is endemic is even worse than you could possibly imagine, and ignored in plain sight. It implicated individuals in various stigmatized groups (among many journalists and activists) – i.e. the dreaded evil trifecta of “white”, “men” and “Southern”. Its details – from the shattered glass and the beer bottle sodomy – had an irresistible allure. Questioning it was like questioning whether Saddam Hussein actually did have WMDs – it seems as if you are excusing an evil figure, or being terminally naïve, or minimizing the danger. We believe what we want to believe – and, in our public debates, we also keep searching for the perfect anecdote or fact or story to refute our opponents for good and all.

Rolling Stone vs. UVA

The seemingly much deserved trashing of Rolling Stone continues after its story of an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity began to unravel and headed toward being categorized as either a fabricate lie or the fantasy of a emotionally disturbed young woman who has admitted that she never wanted to attend UVA.  Now, Politico joins the fray and beings its piece by calling the Rolling Stone story "journalistic malpractice."  Meanwhile, as noted before, the would be heroines of women's rights have done huge harm to the cause they claim to support.  The lesson is that just because you'd like a story to be true because it furthers one's agenda, doesn't mean you don't still have to diligently fact check it.  Here are excerpts from Politico:

The Rolling Stone story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia has, in the eyes of many in the media, gone from bombshell reporting to journalistic malpractice in the bat of an eye.

The details of this crime are practically unspeakable. The shock of it led many people to recoil in horror upon the article’s release and ask, “How could this have happened at such a respectable school?” Upon further reflection, and after a skeptical blog post by Worth Editor Richard Bradley, people began to ask, “Could this really have happened?”

First, there’s the scale of the crime. No one doubts the existence of sociopaths on campus, but nine of them conspiring together at one fraternity in an act so depraved it could be something out of a West African civil war?

Then, there are the details. If the gang rape was premeditated, why did the fraternity brothers leave a glass table in the room, which Jackie was smashed through in the initial attack, with the subsequent assaults taking place on the shards?

Would Jackie’s friends, seeing her bruised, cut and traumatized, really have stood around debating how it would affect their social status if she dared report the crime?

In fact, even the writer of the article doesn’t seem to know if the story is true.  Sabrina Rubin Erdely has said she found Jackie credible. But she didn’t talk to the accused students. She explained in a Slate podcast that she couldn’t get in touch with the alleged perpetrators “because [the fraternity’s] contact page was pretty outdated.” She wouldn’t tell the Washington Post whether she even knew their names, and retreated to the argument that the real point of the story wasn’t the violent incident itself, but the culture of UVA.

Almost as shocking as the original incident is the fact that Jackie never reported it to the police. If Rolling Stone is to be believed, the UVA administration didn’t really encourage her to do so, and even as she was talking to the magazine for a report that would make national waves, she still hadn’t reported her tormentors to law enforcement.

Even considering her trauma and fragile psychological state, this is an extraordinary lapse. By her account, Phi Kappa Psi isn’t a fraternity so much as a criminal gang committed to sexual violence.

Bizarrely, prosecution of rapists isn’t particularly high on the list of priorities of many of the same feminists who reflexively credit the UVA story. The feminist agenda on campus rape has two elements. It aims to define ambiguous sexual encounters as rape at the same time it seeks to empower college administrations, instead of the criminal justice system, to handle sexual assault allegations.

In a compelling piece for the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School explained why both ends of this equation are wrong. The new standard for sexual consent — spelled out in elaborate campus rules governing every step of a sexual encounter — “encourages people to think of themselves as sexual assault victims when there was no assault.”

Schools should be encouraging victims to go to the police, as befits any other crime. No one would ever think to handle an armed robbery with a campus hearing and a disciplinary slap on the wrist. Rapists are violent criminals, and if victims are understandably reluctant to report them to the police, colleges and local police forces should be doing everything they reasonably can to make it easier for them to do so.

The other campus imperative should be better controlling the alcohol-fueled party scene that has become an entitlement of young adulthood in America. Much of what feminists call rape culture is what Heather Mac Donald, in a characteristically brilliant essay for The Weekly Standard, deems “a squalid hook-up scene, the result of jettisoning all normative checks on promiscuous behavior.”

At UVA, the priority should be getting to the truth of Jackie’s story, and either holding accountable the guilty parties, or debunking a calumny.

For the record and in the interest of full disclosure, I was in a fraternity at UVA (pictured below) and had many friends at the nearby Kappa Sigma house.

My former fraternity at UVA - across Rugby Road from Phi Kappa Psi

Selective Feminism

The Washington Post has an op-ed column today that looks at a less than pretty side to feminism - the unequal support that black women seemed to receive from otherwise militant (or at least dedicated) feminists. What prompted the column is the silence of many feminists as Michelle Obama is finding herself subject to all kinds of bashing by minions of the far right who, truth be told, are anti-black as well as anti-anyone else who doesn't look just like them. Were Michelle Obama white, I suspect would have many main stream feminist up in arms and sceaming foul. Sadly, it is one more testament to the distance this nation still needs to cover before we have a society that is colorblind. Here are some highlights:

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Michelle Obama has become an issue in the presidential campaign even though she isn't running for anything. An educated, successful lawyer, devoted wife and caring mother has been labeled "angry" and unpatriotic and snidely referred to as Barack Obama's "baby mama." Democrats, Republicans, independents, everyone should be offended. And this black woman is wondering: Where are Obama's feminist defenders?

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What does Gloria Steinem think? She was out front with her support of Clinton, promoting the importance of a female president. She has even endorsed Barack Obama. What's her reaction now that the knives are out for another strong woman? How about Geraldine Ferraro, the former vice presidential nominee whose racially tinged denunciations of Barack Obama sparked a media firestorm? Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, has said: "We're going to keep watching because we think Michelle Obama will be the recipient of the same kind of attacks that Hillary was." A feminist ray of hope.

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I've long been frustrated, as a black woman and a feminist, with our national conversation. I didn't hear the cause speaking up for women of color or for women who have always worked in blue-collar or service jobs. Choice was not their issue. The woman who employed my educated mother to clean her house never quite saw her as a sister in the struggle for equality.

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But in America, there's seldom a cost for disrespecting black women. I'm waiting for feminists who speak of second-class citizenship and being pushed to the back of the bus to remember the civil rights movement that gave birth to those words. After all, it was a black woman, Rosa Parks, who took her seat up front and pulled others there, too.