Posted on 08/02/2002 7:32:42 AM PDT by TopQuark
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:00:57 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
'He was hunting for a place to kill them and bury them'
Authorities remove the body of Roy Ratliff near Lake Isabella, California, on Thursday.
LANCASTER, California (CNN) -- The man who abducted two teenage girls at gunpoint early Thursday was "hunting for a place to kill them" in a remote desert spot about 100 miles away when two deputies located him and fatally shot him, authorities said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Are you into [pro]secuting those who don't raise their kids as you think they should? No, I am into enforcement of fiduciary duty, which parents have with respect to their children.
It is not I but the moral and legal code of most countries that recognizes that. You have seen many examples of that, I am sure: when a child is malnourished as a result of parental negligence, the parent is charged accordingly. In fact, this much protection even pets are afforded.
I am not talking, therefore, about grey areas or matters of opinion on childrearing: I am talking about endangering the child or someone else as a result of that child's behavior (the example of the latter is when a child has an ammunition depot in his bedroom that is somehow not detected by the parents and which he subsequently uses to shoot his schoolmates at Columbine).
What a brilliant analysis! (I was thinking something along those very lines myself yesterday). :-)
"If you're watching this, honey, I love you, I can't wait for you to get home," said the father of the older girl.
The father of the younger girl said: "It's going to take her a while, but I think she'll recover from this."
Now, while this story says the girls were 16 & 17, nowhere in the story does it say which is which. I recognize that they are now not stating the names of the girls because they are rape victims, even though their names were given yesterday because it was necessary to find them. However, apparently it is politically incorrect to refer to them in the most easily differentiating way of referring to one as white and one as black.
I am going to apologise ahead of time for being very very hard on you and your fellow travelers who have gone down the path of "what were those girls doing in that place at that time." This statement and this thinking are dangerous and very ammoral, if not immoral, and to lapse into this feel good puritanism shows how out of focus your own moral sensibilities have become.
What poor judgment? Predators attack those at the edge of the heard, animal or human, but the kill did not happen because the victim could not stay in the center of the heard. We cannot all be at the center of the heard, and someone is going to be the victim. There is no codependency between victim and perpetrator in this case, but you have created one. Predators take victims. That is why they are called predators.
You and your fellow travelers, with this kind of statement, cause harm in at least three ways.
1. You continue the attitude of the Taliban by stigmatizing the victim. You make the psychological recovery of these women impossible - and that you most certainly and shamelessly did with your abominable statement - because you perpetuate the feelings of guilt and enable society to treat victims as somehow less worthy or somehow deserving of their fate. This is dead wrong.
2. You send a signal that juries can let these predators off because the victim bears part of the responsibility. We see this in Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. It is the "if the girl did not want to be raped what was she doing in that place at that time dressed in that manner" asking to be raped attitude.
3. You help fuzz the line that modern society continues to fuzz between what is criminal and what is merely immoral or contributes to the general harm and disorder of society. There used to be a very bright line. Doing bodily harm to another person to provide yourself some benefit is about the most criminal thing one can do besides commit murder. The line here should be clear and bright. Girls should be able to sleep in lovers' lane every night without having to face kidnap, rape, and murder. This isn't Monica Lewinsky flashing her thong at Bill Clinton. This is another order of things entirely.
We all know what those girls and boys were doing there. You and a few others here aside, most of us have been there. There is a long, long distance between making out in a car and asking for kidnap, rape and murder by a stranger with a gun.
You have immediately leaped to the conclusion that these are bad kids and/or their parents are bad parents. You have condemned them, without trial to a living hell that society should be helping them to climb out of. So long as they don't ruin lives with unwanted pregnancies or driving drunk, having a good time on a summer vacation is just fine in my book. We try, emphasis on try, to control teenagers because too many adults believe that teenagers lack the judgment to keep bad consequences from happening from their deliberate or negligent acts. But you have no evidence that they did anything that would result in, not hypothetical, but actual harm to themselves. Perhaps date rape, however cloudy a concept that can be is in some cases a consequence of bad judgement, but getting kidnapped and raped at gunpoint is not a normal societal consequence of bad judgment. It is the consequence that there is a criminal on the loose. I hope these girls will be able to have more good times, when and how they wish.
No, you and your kind are wrong, not just mistaken but morally wrong, and when people like you who surely know better, lose their moral focus and openly sneer at the victim, society is damned. God gave us the choice of good or evil as deliberate rational choices. If evil is the consequence of random acts then morality disappears.
In Tosca you have taken the side of Scarpia, and you believe that these girls should hurl themselves to their death off the castle wall. I really don't know how to state my abhorrance of your position more strongly than that.
In the contest for who can make the most idiotic comment on this thread, this one is a leading contender. Some merely want to blame the victims or their parents. You want to indict a bystander as a co-conspirator. I will remember your name.
No you are not nasty. You are sick. There is no parallel at all to letting children play in a freeway and having a daughter raped by a sexual predator at gunpoint.
I just love the Holywood bravado on this thread - the arm chair heroes that were not there. Just for the record, for those who complain about whimps - my karate masters, one a well-known welter weight champion, the other ex-secret service - trained troops in Desert Storm etc. tells us don't argue with a gun - you will lose.
Nope. Guess again.
To which I will add that those girls would have paid for years and years for their poor judgment --whether or not they had been kidnapped and raped.
And were you there--in the 1950's, I mean?
my karate masters, one a well-known welter weight champion, the other ex-secret service - trained troops in Desert Storm etc.
Were they true masters, they would have taught you to be silent about such matters.
tells us don't argue with a gun - you will lose.
Perhaps--So?
I will answer for you: Unlike the 1950's, young people today have been inculcated with the impression that men and women are equal.
Young "men" today, would think it odd to sacrifice themselves for a woman's honor.
I am reminded of the impression today's teenager's have of Romeo and Juliet--they find it laughable that Juliet killed herself because Romeo had died.
In today's world of casual sex, that would be like killing yourself because your golf buddy had died.
My 17 year-olds acted very responsibly. Don't assume every 17 year-old acts or acted like you did.
Were they true masters, they would have taught you to be silent about such matters. What, be silent about calling you an evil #(*%_! when you are one. No, they never taught me that. In fact, just the oposite.
were you there--in the 1950's [when men were men]
My god man are you a self-righteous ignorant prig. Yes I was alive in the 1950's, and unlike you I don't see the past through an Elvis Presley inspired fog, like somehow there has been a genetic mutation in the human race and all of a sudden we are all different. In the 1950's women dared not even discuss rape because of the social stigma that came from being a victim a stigma that is perpetuated by people like you and the Taliban.
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