Posted on 06/07/2016 6:19:22 AM PDT by Java4Jay
Didn't Obama make it illegal to ask about felony convictions?
Witnesses came upon him raping her while she was unconscious. Certainly, “rape culture” has gone too far in some instances, with people with morning after regrets crying rape, but this is not that. He should’ve gotten years.
Her molester is a swine and a rapist.
I became closed off, angry, self-deprecating, tired, irritable, empty,” she said.
But she's slamming down hard liquor like W.C. Fields, ending up half-naked out by the dumpster.
Spare me the drool about independence, joy and steadiness.
Her victim statement was amazing. It’s hard to fathom where she got her strength from, but I admire that about her.
One goes to jail because there were witnesses to her inability to consent, and there was medical evidence to prove the case against the aggressor.
I am happy for the woman that she did not get seriously hurt or even murdered - the entire situation makes me very sad, though - that many young women have picked up the idea from our culture that getting really drunk and hanging around a sexually charged environment is ok. I get angry seeing our liberal culture glamorize no consequences sex, wild parties, and substance abuse - then hear it lamenting a criminal episode that results. But again, my apologies for the tone of my earlier posts.
He also has to register as a sex offender, so even though I think he should have a longer jail sentence, he will have life long consequences for his actions.
I read the victim’s impact statement. She was most eloquent and will live with the pain of that evening for all her life.
I also read the perp’s father’s statement. He equated his son’s rape of the woman to “20 minutes of action” and said this verdict would ruin his son’s life.
100% true. Would be great for Trump to draw this connection if asked about the Stanford case.
“One goes to jail because there were witnesses to her inability to consent, and there was medical evidence to prove the case against the aggressor.”
Medical evidence that they’d had sex. Nothing to say one way or the other that she had or had not consented (or even initiated) sex at the beginning. Was she drugged? Did he physically carry her out to where they were observed?
This is why I don’t go to drunken parties. I don’t want to wake up next to some bimbo who’s hysterical that I don’t look like Brad Pitt when she sobers up.
Thank you.
6 months implies that everyone knows it wasn’t “real rape”.
It might not change your mind about her consenting or not, but I’m hard pressed to believe that many young women, sluts or not, want to have sex on the ground behind a dumpster, amongst the pine cones and pine needles, out in the open so that anyone walking close enough by can see their private parts exposed. There may be a few weirdos who would consent to that, but not many. The debris on her body and in her hair are part of the evidence collected, along with her torn to shreds panties.
Good for you for not going to drunken parties, though. You’re ahead of the curve with that decision.
That said, it troubles me that the case is being highly politicized in the same pattern typically used by Democrats - the only thing that matters is using the situation to further the "larger cause," and everything about the case will be made to serve the secular humanist political agenda - for example, promoting the belief in "rape culture."
Last night, for instance, in an NBC Nightly News report on the case, the report and an expert, both women, with an expert, discussed how "40% of female Stanford students" report they experienced sexual assault while at the school. 40%? Then the expert said that a similar problem exists throughout college campuses. This is all despite the fact that a percentage even not that high has been debunked as untrue. But it is politically useful for such a claim to be made, without any questioning of it, on the national news.
And another case in point: leftist activists want to recall the judge, and are already working hard to do so. This from an ABA web article:
"The probation office had recommended four to six months in prison while the district attorney recommended a six-year sentence.
"Persky said he considered Turner’s character, his lack of criminal history and his remorsefulness, according to the San Jose Mercury News. He also found that there is less moral culpability attached to a defendant who is intoxicated."
I'm not saying that this woman wasn't assaulted, but whatever happened, the case itself seems to be part of the larger, ruthless efforts of the left to get a stranglehold on society. The actual case needs to be separated from the left's machinations to turn society into a mob they control and sic on people to further their aims.
I've also read the woman's statement to the court, as I said, and while I do have sympathy for her, it seemed to me that what she wrote was to a considerable extent a product of what her background - apparently a feminist/woman at Stanford or a similar university - has primed her to be like. Unlike apparently many other people, I didn't care for its tone or approach, and at least at this point, the language and ideas she used sounded like those of left-wing, feminist, secular humanist extremists. Perhaps that's just the training she's received, as I said, and I'm willing to consider that perhaps it was just me not connecting with it as I should (perhaps being too critical of her) - but right now I know reading her account made me less sympathetic towards her, to say the least.
I'm not going to go over her entire statement in detail because I haven't thoroughly researched the case yet (I am aware of the basic details), but I will add about its tone and approach that I don't see it as shared by so many people who have been sexually victimized. In my family as I grew up there was some sexual abuse that I generally refer to as "mild." The person who did these things was my father, and let me also add that I'm female. "Mild" doesn't mean it didn't matter and didn't cause harm - it did, and with the passing of time I came to realize that it was meant to - just that in a relative sense, truly far worse things are done to people (and happen to people) including children of the youngest ages.
Now some of this abuse was directed at me, and there was also an incident with someone outside the family. I was at a public event and my father left to get our car while I waited in a line of children to get a toy that a man who worked for the event was giving out to children. The man deliberately kept reaching past me to give toys to the other children, so that I ended up suddenly alone with him. He then touched me inappropriately. It was also "mild" considering all that he might have done, but on the other hand certainly illegal and very serious. I then went to our car, and told my father. I was in middle school at the time. My father brushed aside what I told him and never mentioned it again. And that was because of the things he had done, of course, and he also did at least one thing, also "mild," after this incident. Now again, I describe all these things he did as relatively "mild," but they were done by a parent, and even what happened with the man at the public event I consider to be one of the wrong things my father did. Eventually I realized his response to it bothered me much more than what the stranger did.
So on what she wrote, as I said, I find its tone and approach troubling, at least at this time. Maybe it's me and I'll go back and read her account again at some point and see it very differently, but this is just a caution against accepting it uncritically.
Just as two things to think about, consider that it's evident from her statement she holds the opinion that rigorous questioning - and maybe any questioning at all - of a woman in a rape case is an unwarranted violation of an alleged victim, despite the legal need to protect the rights of an accused rapist.
And also consider what she wrote about the fraternity party and her own actions:
"On January 17th, 2015, it was a quiet Saturday night at home. My dad made some dinner and I sat at the table with my younger sister who was visiting for the weekend. I was working full time and it was approaching my bed time. I planned to stay at home by myself, watch some TV and read, while she went to a party with her friends. Then, I decided it was my only night with her, I had nothing better to do, so why not, there’s a dumb party ten minutes from my house, I would go, dance like a fool, and embarrass my younger sister. On the way there, I joked that undergrad guys would have braces. My sister teased me for wearing a beige cardigan to a frat party like a librarian. I called myself “big mama”, because I knew I’d be the oldest one there. I made silly faces, let my guard down, and drank liquor too fast not factoring in that my tolerance had significantly lowered since college.
"The next thing I remember I was in a gurney in a hallway..."
I can't help but find her description not on the level and an attempt to minimize her own lapses in judgment. She writes as if she has matured and "gotten old" so that by that time she preferred a quiet evening and going to bed early over anything else, but just decided to sacrifice her own plans to spend time with her sister, putting aside what she really wanted to do to go to a children's party - and one where she most likely knew that she'd be of legal drinking age, while there would be underage drinking going on.
I'm not saying she wouldn't have felt older and that she was "stooping" a bit in that she was out of college and she might have felt like a high school senior with freshman - every year seems to make a big difference then - but on the other hand she was also just 22 and not long out of college. And it certainly wasn't in any way an unusual age gap in college social settings. But then while talking about how she was being silly with people younger than she, she slips in how she misjudged her drinking. That is very hard to accept, though. It is reported her blood alcohol level was later measured to be more than three times the legal limit.
"But the woman did not wake for at least three hours and had a blood-alcohol level more than three times the legal limit. Turner acknowledged on the stand that she was "very drunk" but testified she was "no more drunk than anybody else" at the party....Turner's blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit, but he testified he could walk and talk normally."
Now on that I will just say that having read her entire statement, she is very educated, intelligent, resourceful and skilled - and if not a graduate of Stanford, then of some similar top university. She is almost like victim and prosecutor (or news reporter, or feminist scholar) in it. So I can't believe she just "accidentally" got extremely intoxicated without intending to, and didn't have the ability or experience to assess beforehand the dangers of getting that way at a fraternity party. (And consider this: what if all this had happened inside, even in private, and there had been no sober observers to intervene?)
This is from her statement (it's a question she says was asked of her by investigators): "Did you drink in college? You said you were a party animal? How many times did you black out?"
Also consider this from her statement:
"The night after it happened, he said he didn’t know my name, said he wouldn’t be able to identify my face in a lineup, didn’t mention any dialogue between us, no words, only dancing and kissing. Dancing is a cute term; was it snapping fingers and twirling dancing, or just bodies grinding up against each other in a crowded room? I wonder if kissing was just faces sloppily pressed up against each other?"
This is also another troubling part of how she wrote her statement - that she accuses him of twisting words, in effect, and that means out of their commonly understood meanings. (Actually, I was acquainted with a man who seemed to have an unhealthy interest in children, and he had a personal definition of an everyday, safe-for-children word which was truly sick, and one people just would never have guessed if he didn't outright say what it was.) This seems like a straw man to me - doesn't "dancing" by very intoxicated people in a bar or fraternity party commonly mean just that, and it's meant to these days?
And this is something the woman addressed to the man:
"You were about to enter four years of access to drunk girls and parties, and if this is the foot you started off on, then it is right you did not continue [i.e., left Stanford]."
I think it hardly needs to be said that this is how secular humanists appeal to young people, and suggest this is the immediate payoff while someone is being indoctrinated in college. The following is from an article written by another woman (TAKE NOTE OF THAT: this ISN'T written by the woman in this rape case) -- Tracy Chabala, a writer for Salon. From Chabala's "The orgy prude: How I finally admitted I don’t like meaningless, porn-star sex" (March 22, 2015):
"I used to party hard. I was often so wasted I could have all sorts of sexual liaisons with no emotional entanglements, like when I woke up one morning to discover I’d just had a threesome with my ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend and her current boyfriend, and someone was getting strangled up in the mix. It was really easy to brush it off because I was only half-there at the time, if present at all. Plus, I could get drunk again, blurring both my memory and consciousness one more time for the next encounter. None of it hurt.
"This kind of blasé sexual conduct seemed to be normal, expected even. As a fine arts student in college, everyone was having sex with everyone. These were moneyed kids at a prestigious university who prided themselves on their orgies and drugs and STDs. A friend in my photography class took portraits of all the random guys she slept with, something like 27, while another girl took a video of herself f---ing 100 guys in an hour. This was art. This was empowerment. This was feminist, or so they said. And I adopted that perspective as my own, without any serious critical inquiry.
"Then I quit drinking. By 2007 I had run my life into the ground, thanks to the steady flow of vodka and Adderall running through my veins. Unable to work, and barely able to finish grad school, I realized I had to get sober. But it never dawned on me that when I kicked booze to the curb I’d have to rediscover what was OK for me sexually, because my entire sexual identity developed when I was wasted in my early 20s, and when I was wasted, nothing mattered."
Exactly: "This kind of blasé sexual conduct seemed to be normal, expected even. As a fine arts student in college, everyone was having sex with everyone. These were moneyed kids at a prestigious university who prided themselves on their orgies and drugs and STDs." Chabala nonchalantly describes her sexual experience with a man and another women, and her nonchalance - not being horrified or mortified by it, but unshaken by it - is part of the liberal elite mind frame. And this is Chabala's concluding remarks:
"And at 36 I can also admit that I can’t do casual sex. If I sleep with someone, I start feeling an emotional bond, even though some sex workers and sex writers tell me that attachment is a myth propagated by the patriarchy to keep me sexually disempowered. It doesn’t matter — I can’t do it. Maybe that makes me uncool, unhip and undesirable, but I just don’t care anymore. Do I have to be emotionally attached to sleep with someone? Hell no — if a guy’s got charm and brains and that indefinable sex appeal I’ll want to rip my clothes off. But today, I have to use discretion. Today, I have to be honest with myself, and if I think the guy’s going to bounce the second he gets in my pants, I have to turn him down."
"The orgy prude: How I finally admitted I don’t like meaningless, porn-star sex," Tracy Chabala, Salon, 3/22/15
Note that Chabala takes as authority "sex workers and sex writers" who reduce sex to an animal act. And she never really concludes, either, that casual sexual relations aren't all right. She just raises her standards a little, but only maybe. She says she won't just be with a man anymore, but then again, if he's attractive enough to her, she will - she needs emotional attachment now in order to be with a man, but then again, she doesn't.
So while I'm certainly not saying that people being drunk provides an excuse for them to be sexually assaulted, it does create a significant risk of assault, or even more likely, of having sexual relations which wouldn't happen under sober circumstances. And I have to say that in these days, the second scenario is starting to be treated at times like the first. Therefore the idea has come along that a woman is being raped if a man doesn't ask and receive permission for every sexual action he initiates toward a woman.
Altogether, this means that feminism/liberalism is teaching contradictory messages - women are every bit as after sex as men are believed to be, at a purely physical level just like an animal, but at the same time, they should be assumed to be entirely against sex with a stranger, or even a boyfriend, unless they expressly, even verbally, indicate otherwise, and distinguishing between the two is entirely up to a man, to the point that if he misinterprets what she wants, he should be charged with rape. What's more, women can extremely intoxicated and their judgment and actions can't be questioned, but men are socially expected to become just as intoxicated while somehow keeping good judgment.
Again, I'm not saying this woman wasn't sexually assaulted, and the man didn't rape her. But I do think both the incident and the outrage over it have to be examined very, very carefully.
But Turner said the woman had agreed to accompany him to his dorm room, a mere 10 minutes or so after the two began dancing together and kissing at the fraternity party. As they walked outside holding hands, he said, she slipped and they fell, then started kissing on the ground near an outdoor trash bin. He testified that she said "yes" when he asked her if he could touch her genitals and that he did for a minute. He said he asked her if she liked it and that she replied "uh huh." He told the jury he then began to feel sick from the seven beers and two sips of whiskey he'd drunk, so he stumbled away. Suddenly, one of the bicyclists came at him for no reason, he said, and he decided to run in fear.
So this young man didn't come upon a passed out women laying by a dumpster. They both left the party together and walked outside together, plastered. He thinks she is consenting to have sex. She claims she doesn't remember anything. Perhaps she was still conscience when they started to have sex and then she passed out and he was too drunk to notice or care.
It's not all black and white to me.
I agree that what happened might not be certain, and perhaps what he says is closer to what happened than what’s been determined.
A jury did find him guilty on several charges. I will take it, at this time, that they looked at all the evidence and reached the proper conclusions and verdicts.
The outrage coming now has been about sentence.
That said, given today’s climate which has been created by the left, that they will essentially impose what they consider to be right, vigilante style, and twist and ignore whatever facts need be in the process, then I do want to review the whole case as much as possible. Especially as this did happen at Stanford in California.
One thing the left is downplaying is, again, her level of intoxication. As she was reportedly more than three times the legal limit for driving, that would put her at at least 0.25. That means that she was severely impaired, and possibly dangerously so in a physical manner. While I won’t say she wasn’t victimized by this man, as I don’t know that, she also victimized herself.
And as I also said, she was no 14 year-old, or even a freshman arriving at a “party college” who is just hoping to get through college and come out with a degree. But even such a freshman would be expected to know and look at the effects of drinking, and weigh the risks. It’s not believable that this woman, no doubt from what she wrote an exceptional student, wouldn’t do what any adult ordinarily does - give some thought to possible negative consequences, and some consideration to how much they’re drinking. And she is actually post-college, yet she disregarded the fact that if you drink so excessively, you are most certainly putting yourself at risk.
So what’s being unleft unsaid here is that she engaged in binge drinking. She might be a problem drinker, which even a single episode like that suggests.
From Be Responsible About Drinking (BRAD):
0.13-0.15 BAC: Gross motor impairment and lack of physical control. Blurred vision and major loss of balance. Euphoria is reduced and dysphoria (anxiety, restlessness) is beginning to appear. Judgment and perception are severely impaired.
* * *
0.20 BAC: Felling dazed, confused or otherwise disoriented. May need help to stand or walk. If you injure yourself you may not feel the pain. Some people experience nausea and vomiting at this level. The gag reflex is impaired and you can choke if you do vomit. Blackouts are likely at this level so you may not remember what has happened.
* * *
0.25 BAC: All mental, physical and sensory functions are severely impaired. Increased risk of asphyxiation from choking on vomit and of seriously injuring yourself by falls or other accidents.
0.30 BAC: STUPOR. You have little comprehension of where you are. You may pass out suddenly and be difficult to awaken.
0.35 BAC: Coma is possible. This is the level of surgical anesthesia.
0.40 BAC and up: Onset of coma, and possible death due to
respiratory arrest.
http://www.brad21.org/effects_at_specific_bac.html
I have to wonder, as I said, what would have happened if this had simply happened inside - at the party or elsewhere. She didn’t go to authorities in this case, it should be noted. They got involved because of the intervention of sober individuals, which resulted in her being taken the hospital as much for her alcohol-induced state (unconsciousness - he didn’t do that to her) as for her being apparently assaulted by him.
I really appreciate your thoughtful response. And, most of us have done a similar thing. Have a good night.
As I’ve written here in this thread, I’m not saying that the woman was assaulted, it appears she was, but consider that the left so often projects what it wants to on any and every situation, in order to further its agendas.
And just consider the following excerpt from a Salon article about a 2015 movie. Note the attitude it has about both women and sex, and then also consider that the character being discussed here, Minnie, isn’t an adult, but a 15 year-old!
And if that isn’t enough, also consider that the plot of the movie concerns this 15 year-old girl “having a sexual relationship” with a 40 year-old man! The liberal sites like Salon, as well as “respectable” outlets like the New York Times, just love this movie, and play coyly about the relationship actually being statutory rape:
“But in “Diary,” director Marielle Heller’s debut feature film, Minnie Goetze gets what she wants, when she wants it, a refreshingly frequent amount of time. For most of the film what she wants to get is sex — something the film approaches with a rare respect for the exigency of female desire, perhaps specifically the desire to be desired. Played by British actor Bel Powley, Minnie “gets to get” in a pool shed, hotel room, the belly of a sailboat, the back of a car. The perspective offered is patently female; Minnie is less objectified gamine than woman on the prowl for a good lay. Even the way she sees herself (as revealed in the film’s opening shot) is as a moving sexual agent: the lens looks up at her trousered booty as she strides surely forward. Given Minnie’s small stature, we know that this shot is how she imagines her body and sexuality as towering and powerful. I can think of few shots of a young woman’s caboose that carry such surprisingly positive connotations.
“Surprise” seems to be the operative term that many critics take. HuffPost’s Leora Tanenbaum asserts that “[t]he surprise of this movie … is that it portrays Minnie as someone in control of her body and her life — even when her surrounding circumstances may lead us to conclude otherwise.” That a female sexual coming-of-age can happen sans victimization might indeed prove a surprise to any fan of the genre; typically a girl becomes a “f-—ing woman” not through, well, f-—ing from a standpoint of desire, but through enduring any number of bad things that assault her body — having her period, suffering cramps (or cliques) or submitting to a painful, violent, or at least awkward loss of virginity. So Minnie as lusty protagonist comes as a welcome “surprise,” though it’s sad to admit that’s the case 39 years after 1976, when the film is set, a time when the FDA has finally approved a version of “female Viagra” for women with flagging libidos.
(snip)
“Flash forward and today seems prudish, even downright hostile to sexually adventurous young women. As pointed out last week by Amanda Hess in Slate, “the underlying sexual and technological panic” streaming from recent anti-Tinder-heads “looks remarkably similar to the Victorian version” over a hundred years ago. But staged against the enviably libertine seventies, the central controversy of “Diary” — Minnie’s affair with Monroe, her mother’s boyfriend, 25 years her senior — somehow seems a lot less reprehensible, less like statutory rape and more like just another break from taboo.”
“But staged against the enviably libertine seventies, the central controversy of “Diary” — Minnie’s affair with Monroe, her mother’s boyfriend, 25 years her senior — somehow seems a lot LESS REPREHENSIBLE, LESS LIKE STATUTORY RAPE and more like just another break from taboo.””
Here are some quotes from a couple of reviewers. The New York Times:
“What you call Monroe, other than an expletive, depends on what you call a man having sex with a 15-year-old girl. “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” takes place in 1976, when the age of consent in California was 18 (it still is), but it unfolds in an anything-goes milieu in which Monroe might be branded more of an opportunist than a creep...
“It would be easy to call Minnie a victim, and Monroe the villain, even if that’s not at all how it plays out in the movie. Monroe may not be exactly the light of Minnie’s life, but for much of the story, he is the fire of her loins, to borrow and bend some opening words from Nabokov’s “Lolita”... The novel is life-specific, but what makes Minnie — on the page and now on the screen — greater than any one girl is how she tells her own story in her own soaringly alive voice.”
And Time Magazine:
“...And what makes this movie stand out from the admittedly underdeveloped subgenre of films dealing with young female sexuality is its refreshing candor in relaying that tension. It is presented without judgment, with full agency in the hands of its protagonist and with a nuance rarely achieved among its predecessors.
“When coverage of the Patty Hearst trial comes on the local news in the Goetz home, it is more than a subtle nod to the time (1976) and place (San Francisco). The family’s debate about whether Hearst was a victim or a willing participant in her own ordeal could just as easily have been about Minnie’s budding sexuality: Is she a victim of what she may someday perceive as trauma? Is she being controlled or is she in control?”
http://time.com/3984455/the-diary-of-a-teenage-girl-empowerment/
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/3334514/posts
The New York Times also thought the filmmaker was to be pitied, as though it wasn’t her choice to make such a film, putting herself in a position to have to answer for it:
“The question that the women behind “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” had been dreading came during a Q. and A. session at a screening in a Park City, Utah, mall two days after the film’s triumphant premiere at Sundance.
“What was your ulterior motive?” a man in the audience asked the director, Marielle Heller. “Were you trying to condemn pedophilia or glorify it?”
“Ms. Heller barely let a second flicker by.
“Neither,” she replied. “I had one intention, which was to tell an honest story about a teenage girl and what it feels like to be a teenage girl.”
Overall, from the awards and accolades heaped on this film, it’s clear that the left just can’t say that a 15 year-old “in a relationship” with a 40 year-old is a victim of statutory rape. They can’t decide there’s a victim there, and a rapist too.
That moral confusion is bound up in the “public outrage” over this case, which seems to be most about the left exercising their power in order to increase it. The university intellectuals, the media and the rank-and-file activists/social media mobs simply agitate until they achieve a goal, which makes people and organizations reluctant to do anything they don’t approve of and ready to surrender to them.
???????
I had two windows and mistakenly posted a version of my comment that wasn’t finished.
This was my comment that had to do more with the issues of the case:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3437663/posts?page=53#53
But in the other comment which I pinged you to, I wrote about how the left is attempting to capitalize on this situation, even as the same people will approve of a movie that shows a 40 year-old man sexually involved with a 15 year-old girl and treats it as normal, and not statutory rape. They will dance around the subject as if it’s trivial, and even declare the movie is refreshing and delightful.
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