Megan McArdle: "Man kann nicht einfach Leute der Vergewaltigung beschuldigen"

Auch auf die Gefahr hin, euch zu langweilen, weil ich immer noch am selben Thema bin – der Fall Rolling Stone scheint bei immer mehr Journalisten ein Bewusstsein dafür auszulösen, nicht weiter allem, was die feministische Fraktion behauptet, blind zu vertrauen und zuzustimmen. So schreibt heute Megan McArdle in der Chicago Tribune als Antwort auf einen Propagandatext der Netzfeministin Zerlina Maxwell:

I have never come across a case of a feminist actually saying "Women don't lie about rape," but in the media storm surrounding the Duke University lacrosse case, I heard claims nearly that strong. After the case blew up, people became somewhat more cautious, but there is still a presumption that this is so rare that people who question the stories of rape victims are on some sort of misogynist unicorn hunt.

Witness the way people who raised very legitimate questions about Jackie's story at the University of Virginia were called "rape truthers," "rape denialists," and so forth, as if suggesting that this particular rape might not have happened was morally and logically equivalent to saying that rape never happens at all.

Activists fighting rape are fighting for two things that actually work against each other. On the one hand, they want the harshest possible moral, social, legal and administrative sanctions for sexual assault — as they should, because this is a crime second only to murder in its brutality. On the other hand, they want the broadest possible standards for deciding that a rape has occurred, weighted very, very heavily toward including true assaults, rather than excluding false, ambiguous or hard-to-prove accusations.

This is not a bargain that a liberal society will strike. You can have drastic punishment of offenses, or you can have a low threshold of evidence for imposing punishments; you cannot have both. If you broaden your criteria to include lesser offenses like "non-consensual kissing," or more cases where there's a higher possibility that the accused was innocent, then you will encounter resistance to heavy punishment. The jury of public opinion will nullify.

Es gibt mehrere weitere Artikel dieser Art – nicht nur auf ohnehin schon feminismuskritischen Plattformen wie Spiked. Inzwischen steht auch eine Petition online, die Rektorin der University of Virginia zu feuern, weil sie ohne belastbare Hinweise Sanktionen gegen die beschuldigte Burschenschaft ausübte. Natürlich wird diese Petition keinen direkten erfolg haben, aber sie ist ein Teil des umschlagenden Meinungsklimas in den USA.