"… remarks the President made this week while announcing a task force aimed at protecting students on college campuses from sexual assault. "Sexual assault is an affront to our basic decency and humanity. And it's about all of us – the safety of those we love most: our moms, our wives, our daughters and our sons,” Obama said. Obama cited a report from a White House-convened council that shows nearly one in five women, totaling 22 million, have been raped in their lifetime – and that women in college settings were at particularly high risk for sexual assault." politicalticker
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Here as in the "crusade" against "sexual assault" in the US military we see Obama in his true capacity as social engineer. In his first term he was more careful about revealing the extent of his ambitions for revolutionary social and human psychological change in the United States.
Very few US presidents would have assumed that it was their responsibility to "reform"the American people in some manner affecting criminal behavior already puishable by law. That is not true of Obama, he clearly finds us to be defective social animals, creatures to be "raised up" by the beauty and justice of his scheme of things.
He faces a mighty obstacle to his ambitions for us in the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a continuing conservative majority in SCOTUS. In the face of that, he says that he intends to govern by Executive Power to the extent that he can manage it. In trying to do that he will walk a fine line, a very fine line. There will be many people watching, people who do not think he has history and indeed biology, on his side. pl
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/01/25/obama-calls-sexual-assaults-affront-to-society/
All while his racialized DoJ demands that schools stop disciplining students because its “rayciss”.
I’d love to see some metrics for his numbers – I imagine they’re on the same line as that debunked “1 out of every 3 women will be raped in her lifetime” scare study.
Tyler,
Here is the study cited:
http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/nisvs/
Here is the report from the White House Council on Women and Girls that cites the nisvs 2010:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/sexual_assault_report_1-21-14.pdf
Colonel,
Very well put.
Have college students changed that much in 50 years?
Yes, binge drinking places all at risk. Also, commercialized sex is all over the media.
But, this is a diversion from the real issue. College graduates are in debt an average of $26,000. They can’t find good jobs and their plight is completely ignored by this Administration.
I seem to remember similar words from Rudy Guliani a quarter of a century ago when he took over as Mayor of New York. He was successful in changing the culture of New York and the behavior of New Yorkers. My annual visits are much more pleasant now.
r Whitman
My God! I am glad I was elsewhere in the bad old days in NYC. I have no doubt that “the authorities” can change culture and behavior. I saw that in the two military colleges I was associated with at West Point and VMI. It is true as well the LBJ changed American culture. But, do we want to be changed and does “The Great Father” in Washington have any right to change us? pl
Dear Colonel,
I tend to think it is simply pontification from a man (human like all) who looks down from his olympian heights and feels a need to inform everyone how they should live and how they are inferior. Fits in with the self-adsorbed narcisstic personality with no sense of humility. Is it more common on the left? I don’t know, but it certainly was a feature of the kings and emperors of europe in an age thankfully bygone.
Re: The numbers, I suppose it depends on the definition of “have been.”
Table 2 .1, Lifetime Weighted %
12.3 Completed forced penetration
5.2 Attempted forced penetration
8.0 Completed alcohol/drug facilitated penetration
http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a.pdf
If you have a critique of these data, let’s hear it.
While the plural of anecdote is not data, it does maybe rhyme. The reported lifetime number (18%) is roughly in line with my expectations.
WCW
Statistics are crap. You can make them say whatever you like.. Obama wanted a study that said this and he got it. You don’t know that? What is it that you want, castration for “sex offenders” who fit these categories? Forced feminization of boys to make them less threatening? What do you want? pl
Are leaders neutrals or do they set tone? If the tone is wrong, turf-em at the polls. Can’t fault him for putting his beliefs “out-there” can we? If they are suitable or desired, they will gain enough traction to drift the American socio-cultural iceburg a ways in that direction. If not, it will spin along in its due course anyways and he will be knighted amongst the other footnotes of our political past.
505th PIR
You can fault him if he wants to make his “tone” into law. pl
The 2007 government-sponsored survey that Obama referred to used the same faulted methods as were used to falsely conclude, and widely reported recently, that there were “26,000 Sexual Assault In the Military Last Year.”
What they do in their surveys is to define sexual assault to include ‘unwanted sexual contact’ and ‘unwanted sexual touching.’ This is why one is no longer permitted to touch a member of the opposite sex. A friendly hug? Forget it.
Student Sam McNair, Georgia Teen, Suspended For Sexual Harassment After Hugging Teacher
references:
RAPE AND SEXUAL ASSAULT: A RENEWED CALL TO ACTION
The White House Council on Women and Girls
January 2014 (pdf) footnote to–>
Document Title: The Campus Sexual Assault (CSA) Study
Author(s): Christopher P. Krebs, Ph.D. ; Christine H. Lindquist, Ph.D. ; Tara D. Warner, M.A. ; Bonnie S. Fisher, Ph.D. ; Sandra L. Martin, Ph.D.
Document No.: 221153
Date Received: December 2007 (pdf)
The important thing is the definitions:
http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/sexualviolence/definitions.html
I should take a copy of this down to HR, maybe they can finally understand that the proper way to explain to female employees what their male counterparts mean when they ask them to stop touching them.
Tyler,
It is telling that the Democrats are silent on just how many perpetrators there are and what sex (and sexual orientation). It also speaks volumes about the values Democrats have instilled in their children since the sexual revolution of the sixties. Men are not to be trusted. Men, what have they been taught by those same parents?
What is even worse is that half the students in colleges shouldn’t even be there. The average college student in US cannot write coherently, is unable to do 8th grade level math (algebra), and not able to think through a problem logically unless they were handed down an answer somewhere…and heaven forbid if you start throwing out misleading answers deliberately to see if they can figure things out (learned the hard way from personal experience–apparently, you are only supposed to tell them the “right” answers which they are supposed to repeat word for word like a parrot.) And, yes, most of these students are incurring sizable debts and still have trouble paying for even their daily living expenses (there are students who demand that they have the right to get decent grades even if they can’t show up for lectures because they are working so hard–in fact, their jobs are keeping them from showing up for lectures. All the while college bureaucrats and student loan lenders are making out like bandits (all the while, ironically, college faculty are replaced by part time adjuncts–up to 50-60% or more in many state universities). The situation with the higher education is the same as with the health care industry–replace the patients with students, hospital administrators with university administrators, and the doctors with faculty. And it looks as if the administration is trying out the same “solutions” to education as it did with the healthcare…bumbling “cures” that may or may not be better than the disease, if at all relevant to the rot on hand…citing only how rotten the current situation is as the justification.
The guy is prejudiced since he has two young daughters who will be heading out to college in a few years and I probably would try to do the same if I thought it would help ease their potential trauma.
Bobo
It is not the business of the president to act as father to the country. Let him deal with his family and leave the rest of us alone. pl
I think this is a calculated political move by the Democratic party to take advantage of several recent Republican statements that can only be described as blatantly misogynistic. The Democrats are positioning themselves as the defenders of women and women’s rights and attempting to paint the Republicans as the party that hates and fears women.
TTG
“the party that hates and fears women” Does that include their mothers? pl
General comment:
So much of what US politicians do appears to me to be more about “getting out the(ir) vote”. These fringe and wedge issues are believed to work, for whatever reason. Maybe they do. Pogo strikes again!
If Walrus reads this, I would ask him to opine on if Australia’s mandatory (well…small-fine “mandatory”, anyway) voting affects Aussie politics. I worry that the constant harping on wedge/social issues results in politicians actually believing that is what the US government was intended to accomplish. Vonnegut’s “We become what we pretend to be, so we must be careful..”.
PL,
Ah, yes. It’s a puzzlement! It sure doesn’t square with the notion of God, mother and apple pie. The Democrats will overreach on this issue just as surely as the Republicans will continue to say more stupid things.
Col.,
This issue has been around for a while, not just during BHO’s tenure. I believe the Clery act of 1990 was the initial piece of legislation. It’s been amended and strengthened a number of times by various administrations including the creation of the Campus Sex Crimes Prevention act of 2002.
I’m not sure what makes Obama’s course of action any different from what has been done in the past. Additionally, all he did was appoint a task force. Isn’t that what you do when you want to address a problem, but not be bound to any actual action?
The president does what his pollsters tell him to do. He was at 42%, now up to 46%, and so the pollsters say: Do the anti-sex assault in college thing. You get the females and the young. What’s not to like?
So Obama takes the bogus survey/study results, which nobody would question (he thinks), based on “sexual touching,” and pushes his phony agenda of “basic decency and humanity.”
Hey, it worked for the Pentagon, so why not. “General Dempsey and I consider this a serious problem that needs to be addressed,” Panetta said. “It violates everything the U.S. military stands for.” (in 2012)
SST, Colonel Lang,
To many it is quite clear that there is an assault on men and masculinity. I strongly recommend the Camille Paglia interview in Wall Street Journal from Dec. 2013: “A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues; why ignoring the biological differences between men and women risks undermining Western civilization”. Here is a quote: “Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America’s brawny industrial base, leaves many men with “no models of manhood,” she says. “Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There’s nothing left. There’s no room for anything manly right now.” The only
place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an
avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm “inspires me as a writer,” she says, adding: “If we had to go to
war,” the callers “are the men that would save the nation.”.
Here is another: ” ” Michelle Obama’s going on: ‘Everybody must have college.’ Why? Why? What is the reason why everyone has to go to college? Especially when college is so utterly meaningless right now, it has no core curriculum” and “people end up saddled with huge debts…”
Another issue is the feminization of higher education:
https://www1.oecd.org/edu/ceri/41939699.pdf
This is a full chapter from 2008 and a long slog. To some of you it will be worth it. Even though the fellow who wrote it is trying so hard to put the matter into the best possible light, in the end he has to say: “The reversal of gender inequalities now seems to be well established in OECD member
countries. More women than men enter higher education, irrespective of age or type of higher education. It is only at the doctoral level that women have not yet caught up with
men, although current trends suggest that this will happen within a few years. All fields of study have therefore become feminised, even though gender segregation along subject lines still remains very pronounced”. What he predicted has already happened at the PhD and professional degrees level as well. In the USA there will be 2 girls to every guy in college at all levels in a decade or so. This should make life interesting.
The affirmative-action babies that run the nation think that nature can be controlled by legislation. I think they are in for a surprise. Unfortunately all of us, all over the world, might have to pay for their hubris.
Pax.
Ishmael Zechariah
@ kao hsien chih
“What is even worse is that half the students in colleges shouldn’t even be there.The average college student in US cannot write coherently, is unable to do 8th grade level math (algebra), and not able to think through a problem logically unless they were handed down an answer somewhere”
I taught at both a community college and a four year college and found very little evidence for your statements.
“Some”, yes. “Half”, nowhere close.
He is refusing to wrestle with the economy and jobs. That’s been the #1 thing people have wanted done since he started. That is also what people have wanted Congress and the rest of our best minds in business, academia and other areas.
I do not want any president’s “power of pen” to be signficantly increased or enhanced. Our presidents should be discouraging that kind of talk, not indulging in it and claiming it is right or effective.
There was a recent Gallup poll that said about 31% of Americasn identify as Democrats and 25% as Republicans. And besides the over 40% classified ad independents, I would thing there are many shaky Republicans and Democrats.
We have big problems but no leadership. What next? The current situation of great unhappiness without much action being taken by a very disgusted public cannot continue. I think people don’t know what to do and that’s been keeping them passive. The day will come when they won’t care what the right or effective action is, they will do something because they can’t stand not to anymore.
We are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the lies of false prophet who would sweep us up in some kind of idealogy or movement. People want hope, they want answers, they are so afraid of losing what they have.
What Fred said.
Rape is not “I had sex with someone and I regretted it in the morning” nor is sexual assault “oh wow this guy makes me feel awkward”.
You didn’t expect the Left to admit that people are different, did you?
Look at the sudden rise in man on man sexual assaults that got memory holed!
If he didn’t want to be president for another four years, he shouldn’t have run for reelection. There’s been a lot of obstruction and do-nothingness on all sides. But President Obama knew the second term would not be different from the first.
Prsidency by signature is giving up.
Let him resign if that’s how he feels.
I don’t know about you guys, but I sure am glad the IRS is going after Friends of Abe, a small group of Hollywood conservatives, and making sure D’Souza is under indictment!
Let’s talk about a bridge in New Jersey some more while ignoring Hillary and Bengazi. Or Holder and Fast and Furious, shipping arms to the Sinaloan Cartel. Or any of the other outrageous acts that occurred on this President’s watch.
“B-b-b-b-but Bush!” I hated Bush, and if you think there’s any daylight between Bush and Obama, you’re sadly delusional.
“Very few US presidents would have assumed that it was their responsibility to “reform”the American people in some manner affecting criminal behavior already puishable by law. ”
The “war on drugs” comes to mind …
That still puts a lot of people into jail for very minor misbehavior.
Oh, and it was a Republican who started that social behavior engineering.
The idea that speaking out against college rapists is somehow revolutionary social engineering strikes me as mistaking a minnow for a whale. The idea that college rapes are already punishable by law, while true in a factual sense, is mostly wrong in terms of actual results.
As a matter of policy, colleges highly discourage reporting rapes to the local police; and instead try to resolve them through academic procedures. (Those who have been assaulted and have the temerity to report a rapist often find that the school will hinder the legal process.) The failure to punish effectively via academic process and the hindrance of the official legal process stems from the desire to protect the image of the school at all costs, rather than providing any justice.
As for Obama’s grandstanding on this issue, I suspect absolutely nothing will come of it.
Is it just me or do a significant percentage of movies and TV shows involve violence against women and children?
This campaign is based on pretty dodgy math. Feminists like to use the ‘one in four’ statistic which makes the bold claim that a quarter of college women are either raped or survive an attempted rape. Fortunately, for women across America, that figure is fraudulent.
http://brown-spectator.com/2013/04/lies-damn-lies-and-rape-statistics/
This article from the Brown student newspaper addresses the issue.
Bingo. You’ve probably hit the nail on the head, TTG. Puts the GOP in the position of having to object to a national effort to reduce rapes on college campuses. The media would not understand Col Lang’s careful parsing of the effort and neither will a lot of parents.
EA
The GOP will not oppose The Great Father’s campaign against rape. Why would they? You don’t actually believe the propaganda meme about the “War Against Women,” do you? pl
WRC Women and children are over half the population. Why would there not be violence against women in the movies? pl
@ The Twisted Genius
I agree with you to the extent that this move by Obama is more political public relations than anything else.
If I had the time, I would be interested in the number and goal of presidential task forces created in the past 30 years or so, and if any went much further than the press release.
Obama’s appointment of an NSA/surveillance task force whose recommendations were generally ignored comes to mind as a recent example.
Marco Naccio–
“As for Obama’s grandstanding on this issue, I suspect absolutely nothing will come of it.”
Agreed.
Marco Naccio
You are right, the campaign against rape is just political demagoguery and nothing will come of it. As a side issue, from what I have seen of young women today I fail to understand why rape would be necessary. Girls were not that hard to seduce in the long ago, but today any sort of sexual morality seems to have largely disappeared from the culture. pl
b
You do not seem to understand me. I said that FEW American presidents attempted to change public thinking. pl
tyler
Yes, the awkward factoid that you mention about man on man is ignored by the lefty media. pl
Tyler, Fred,
I only offered the info, I did not write it. It was presented without comment.
@WRC. You mean compared to the violence involved against men, which is usually presented as hilarious?
Edward,
That’s partly correct, however the Democrats aren’t explaining who is doing all the sexual assualting and just who taught all those men it was okay. Apparently those assailants just show up on college campuses at age 18 thinking anything goes. Some family values there. Where did all those men get those values? Schools – with all those union teachers – or home? What does that say about the parents?
@ Steve. I can only attest to my experience.
Tyler,
I know, those fine female ‘ there’s a war on women’ Senators did not say a damn thing about the men raped while on active duty, it sure wasn’t their sons and it wouldn’t get them any pac money.
Just wait until later in the campaign cycle when some PAC figures out that they can put Candidate X down in the polls by simply stating “learn safe anal sex – the Candidate X way – he’s even promoting it in your local school”. Watch the public go balistic and the media go silent.
VV,
I would say that yes college students are different than they were 50 years ago. Womens sexuality (and mens) has certainly changed as has the idea of one having an obligation to our society.
This kind of nonsense is in lieu of policy, not additive to it. He intends to do nothing. Thats why the handwringing is necessary. Its the same thing Pontius Pilate did when faced with Jesus. He knows that something is wrong he just doesnt want to do something hard to right it.
Hard to imagine such a militarized response to rape, upon which I am loathe to comment here, aside from not recalling “choosing” to be a shameless heterosexual – my boner a divining rod all of its own mind – but do recall cultivating my bleeding heart by acculturation. The latter considerably bled here by the same process.
The war on drugs though is certainly the thin end of the wedge of the bend over and spread ’em authoritarian culture fixated on sobriety and morality whilst uncaring of the physical integrity of one’s ass – or intelligence, assaulted daily, for that matter – with anywhere near the same fervour.
Fred
Not a subject I’m overly familiar with, but believe most of the blame for normalizing rape usually goes to the media and popular culture, not parents and teachers.
I’m not interested in going down this road. Just thought it was a smart (and probably cynical) political move by the Dems.
Probably because honourable men do not need to rough up the wimmenfolk for any moral reason,not in real life; up on the celluloid it is whatever puts the asses in the seats and sells the jumbo popcorn.
Bring on the chainsaws and the S&M accoutrements.
Col Lang
If you’re asking, do I think that the hard right is trying to force their social views on women via legislation, my answer is “hell yes.”
EA
Women have an absolute right to do whatever they want? They can abort children on a whim? They can do sex selection for abortion? At what point in a pregnancy should their right to abort be limited? How about during delivery? Men have no rights in the reproductive process? If so, why marry these women? Why marry the cow when the milk is so easily available? The “hard right” views on this are moral views not social views. pl
Seriously, are you saying that Republican parents instill different virtues…perhaps that heterosexual rape is okay but homosexual rape is wrong?
Please clarify…last time I check heterosexual men (not Dem or Rep) rape women. I assume men live in fear of homosexual rape? As a woman, I gotta say not so much but there sure are a lot of heterosexual rapists out there—of all ages and all political persuasions. So…what have GOP parents taught their rapist sons and their daughters who say no but are disregarded? Is there another world I don’t know about?
From a woman’s viewpoint, men AREN’T to be trusted…they are the ones who rape women. Fact.
So the ‘hard right’ has the right to impose their ‘moral’ views on everyone? Wasn’t this thread started because Obama was apparently, according to some, attempting to do the same thing but in a different direction?
Col Lang
We disagree. I’m with Barry Goldwater regarding abortion: “I think the average woman feels my God, that’s my business and that’s the way we should keep it.”
But it’s not just women’s access to abortion that the hard right wants to cut off.
See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/birth-control-exemption-bill-the-blunt-amendment-killed-in-senate/2012/03
and
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/02/09/gop-spending-plan-x-ing-out-title-x-family-planning-funds//01/gIQA4tXjkR_story.html
EA
Abortion is murder. Thanks for identifying yourself. pl
GCP
Yes. You and he and I are opponents. pl
Laura Wilson,
I am saying that parents are responsible for instilling societies values in their children.
Yes, going down the road of parents and teachers instilling moral values – and living up to them themselves -is a life long obligation. I agree that media and ‘popular culture’ are very influential. So are the economic choices families make in which media and pop culture to consume.
Col.
I read the caption of photo you attached to this post. I have read very little of Rousseau but if this is indicative of his thought then I understand your point about why his views are so detrimental to civilization.
Obama.
Fake (jobless) recovery, destruction of 1/6 of US economy, gross ineptness in foreign affairs, persistent blatant dishonesty and on and on.
And yet……..majority of voters reelected him.
And now, they’re acting surprised!!
Life’s tough.
It’s tougher if you’re stupid.
Are you insane? The most common rape is male on male prison rape, which is served up as HILARITY by the media.
As opposed to the hard left, forcing their social views on everyone via judicial fiat.
Considering those moral views coexist with that backbone of Western Civilization, Christianity, I don’t see the problem versus the moral relativism and do “what feels good” ‘morality’ of the hard left that’s currently being imposed on America by an unelected federal judiciary and Washington DC mandarins.
You’re trying to wrap yourself in morality while you come down on the side of KILLING BABIES.
Are you high? Serious question.
Fred, a couple of quotes from Senator Gillibrand:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/04/sen-kirsten-gillibrand-military-rape-about-sexual-predators-not-hormones-or-hook-up-culture/
“Rape and sexual assault are crimes of violence, crimes of dominance,” she continued. “More than half of the victims are men.”
“What we’re trying to do is root out this criminal element because men and women serving in our military should not be subject to attacks by their colleagues.”
The point you raise about “everyone needing to go to college” is exactly the point that I had raised above.
Whatever experience the others in my field of work (I do teach at a state university, if anyone cares to know) might have had, my experience is that the average student I run into is going to college not because they want to learn, but because they want to get a degree. In a lot of cases (and the standards seem to have been really collapsing in the last few years), they come with inadequate backgrounds in basic skills (writing, simple math, etc) from their high schools and are offered little or no opportunity to acquire these skills in college. Because they are short on money, they do wind up spending much time on jobs (and not study while they do) even as they accumulate sizable to massive debts. In the end, however, because there are so many college grads and so many of them are inadequately prepared, they get rather little out of their college education, except for those who went into competitive fields (by which I mean engineering–not even STEM is a sure pathway to a good job these days, administration’s hectoring notwithstanding.) University administration is happy to their money (their own or borrowed), but is unwilling to do much about it. I don’t know if I could really fault them for their inaction, though: it isn’t, in the end, their job to fix the entire education infrastructure of the country. I too am a contributor to the problem, since I am not doing much to address the students’ shortfall in basic writing and math skills, for exactly the same reason. (The “best” advice I ever got about teaching was to just assign students a textbook and just teach out of that. I thought and still think that that is unconscionable, if only because it discourages thinking, but I have to concede that being able to say “X is the right answer because the good (text)book says so” is a wonderful copout for everyone involved.) Those who claim to be interested in “better teaching” are often weasels (although those who claim that they teach with standards are often no better–again, I’ve seen how it’s easy to use “standards” as a crutch when you’re not being sufficiently creative or empathetic) as per an infamous op ed by a CUNY professor who is supposedly an advocate of “good teaching” call for dropping algebra from curriculum for no more reason than students hating it.
I’d seen something like this before, on a public radio talk show, during the height of the war in Iraq: some neocon guy listed a long list of grandiose but irresponsible reasons for how everything needs to change because they are “good” and “great.” When another guest said “do you realize we don’t have the resources to do all that you say,” the neocon guy simply said, “oh, then we need more of those too.” I don’t think it is necessarily a bad idea that more people should get college education, but we need to change a lot of the way American society operates (the K-12 education, the mechanism via which colleges are funded, the hiring process post college graduation, immigration policy for educated workforce, etc.) before it makes sense to just send everyone to college, just because it is “great” and “good.”
Shame the narrative was YOUR DAUGHTERS ARE GETTING RAPED IN THE MILITARY blared from every media mouthpiece.
An off hand comment in one sentence is not the same as the “war on wimmen” narrative that the Dems are trying to get mileage with.
Post Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, and Bush 2, there’s not much “hard left” left in the federal judiciary, Tyler. Please see: http://www.amazon.com/Right-Wing-Justice-Conservative-Campaign/dp/1560255668
Not a serious question.
I voted for him and I don’t consider myself stupid. Exactly who else could I have voted for
Mitt Romney? Now that would have been stupid.
I am not pro abortion however I am pro choice. I think most women feel it is an issue between a woman, her husband or partner and her Dr. I resent men telling women what they should or shouldn’t do with their bodies.
I too resent other people deciding I should give them my tax money so they can engage in hypergamy.
You’ve convinced me, Nancy. Let’s end funding of Planned Parenthood now. We’ll get those men out of this once and for all!
Pretty serious, considering the alternatives to someone thinking he’s being moral by defending the murder of an infant.
The Ninth Circus, the Fifth Circus, the tortured ruling of Obamacare as “not a tax, but now it is!” by the Supreme Court are full throated screams against your whimpering that because the jurists haven’t created a right to homosexual marriage and abortion at demand no matter what, its not ‘hard left’.
Its also pretty telling that if you have to link to a book on amazon (ha!) to make an argument, you have no argument.
Stephanie, My, my Senator Gillibrand made a comment. Which General officers did she demand be removed by our “commander in chief”? Not a one; and that comment was not about the report itself but a retort to another career politician in the opposing politica party. The article you link to also points out that the Senator is calling for all accusations of sexual assult to be handled by third parties. As the host of the blog pointedly called such – ‘political commissars’.
Not interested in having a discussion about this in the first place. But discussions with you are not really discussions. Especially when you use loaded expressions IN ALL CAPS intended to provoke an emotional response.
There are many things I don’t really want my tax money going to such as Viagra but I realize that I don’t get to pick and choose where my tax dollars go. Maybe we should be able to designate than you could stop money to planned parenthood.
There would probably be many men who were unhappy with paying child support payments if all abortions and birth control were outlawed.
Maybe men would have to show some self responsibility if that was the case.
Or maybe women would have to be more discerning in their partners instead of knowing they could go after someone for child support.
Again, you’ve convinced me. I’m fully behind your self responsibility initiative, Nancy! We’re going to get government OUT of our lives once and for all. Great idea!
That is what you are advocating – anything less is moral relativism. If KILLING BABIES is not provoking an emotional response than you’ve got issues.
Fred, I was just responding to your comment regarding the alleged insensitivity of those female senators to male-on-male rape and drawing your attention to a bit of evidence pointing to the contrary. I think it’s quite possible to disagree with Senator Gillibrand on her proposed remedies but she plainly cares a great deal about the issue as it applies to both sexes, enough to get pushy with colleagues of both parties on the subject.
I’m not opposed to getting government out of our lives however many of our lives, mine included have been paid for by taxpayers. I was a nurse working for the county, my husband a professor. We have friends and family in the military, teachers, police, and prison guards. All of these occupations are examples of government involvement.
Many in the tea party would want to privatize these occupations, not so sure I think it a good idea. However that aside maybe our taxes should be like a menu and we designate what we want our money to go for.
I also agree with you completely that men need to show some responsibility and women should be more discerning in their partners.
You’re right.
No one was ever a police officer, a teacher, a prison guard, or in a military occupation before ‘government’.
Stephanie,
You did not understand my comment then. Those fine Senators are crafting legislation (and busy raising funds) based on a report that lists as statistically equal the act of having an object, to include a penis, penetrating one’s anus and the act pf being shown a pornographic photograph. Those fine Senators use the phrase “War on Women”. They don’t call it a war on men. They make virtual no mention to assualts against men. They make a passing reference to some other jack ass in the Senate? Congratulations Senator Gildebrand.
Perhaps she could explain why being shown a photograph that one finds offensive is legally defined as sexual assault, as is having something shoved up you’re a*#? I can guarantee you that if you were sexually assaulted and while defending yourself you killed your assailant a jury would find you not guilty – provided the assailant did not assault you by showing you a photograph you found offensive. Perhaps we should change the jury system so you can kill people for that now, since it is the same statistically equal ‘sexual assault’ as defined by the CDC in the reports linked to in the above comment thread.