Most of you have heard about the case of Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison, two middle-schoolers in Oregon who were arrested for slapping the behinds of several of their female classmates. Now, I tend to agree with Tracy Clark-Flory that some of the consequences Mashburn and Cornelison are facing -- most notably lifetime registration as sex offenders -- are excessive for the crime. But that has to do with my objections to the sex offender registry laws in general, which tend to be extremely punitive and cast too wide a net in affixing scarlet letters, while not actually helping prevent diddly squat.
But while I think that's perhaps over-the-top, the level of minimization of this crime -- and it is a crime, after all -- on right-wing blogs is amazing. Alphecca complains:
Folks, sometimes I actually think it would be a good thing if some giant comet hit the Earth and wiped out all humans. It would be the kindest thing we could do to put the Universe out of it’s misery and stop liberalism from spreading out past the solar system to contaminate the rest of the cosmos.Prometheus 6 adds:
I guess nine out of ten guys I knew in junior high school was [sic] a sexual deviant.Karl at Learning Straight Up says this is a reason to homeschool -- not the slapping, but the charges:
Apparently what most of us could not see was as they slapped the rear ends, in some super speed harassment they also attempted rape or something.And CLS at Classically Liberal opines:
I keep asking this question and I will continue to ask it: What the hell is wrong with people? When did we lose common sense to political correctness?
This is not rape, this is not sex abuse. Was it appropriate? No. It was juvenile and immature.
But it was not a damn sex crime.
This uniformed member of the Sex Gestapo put the boys in handcuffs and carted them off to jail. For five days the boys sat in jail. Why? Because some moron named Bradley Berry, the district attorney, has bought into the agenda of the radical feminists, who share a hatred of human sexuality on par with that of the most rabid fundamentalist. If you don’t believe me read the garbage from Andrea Dworkin or Catherine McKinnon sometime.Now, I find all this opprobrium fascinating for a variety of reasons, but the main one is how it keeps hammering on the same theme: "What's a little fondling between friends, huh? Boys will be boys, after all. Some of the girls might have liked it -- heck, one girl even said girls slap butts too!"
Well, fine and dandy. But that doesn't make the behavior appropriate or right. What the boys did was sexual assault, under the most basic definition. I doubt they thought of it that way before they did it, but that's what it was.
Does that mean the boys deserve ten years in jail? Probably not. A heavy suspension probably would have been a more fitting punishment. But certainly, if I ran through my office slapping the behinds of female co-workers, I'd keep my job for about thirty seconds after I did so, and I'd probably face similar charges. While this may be an overreaction, it isn't so wildly outside the realm of reality as the conservatives would claim.
In short, while boys may be boys, that's no excuse for boys to be stupid. You're taught to keep your hands to yourself in kindergarten. These guys knew enough not to do this. They deserve to get punished.
More than that, this case has the feel of a rape case writ small, from the contention that the girls knew of the behavior and liked it, to the idea that the boys just couldn't help themselves, to the thought that this is somehow criminalizing normal behavior.
It isn't. Swatting members of the opposite sex on the behind (and in one case, the breast) is not acceptable behavior in society, and we shouldn't teach our kids that we hold them to a lesser standard of behavior. We can argue what the punishment should be in this case; we should not argue about whether a punishment is warranted at all.
