It’s been an eventful here on TheRalphRetort.com lately, as it almost always is. I will address what’s going on over at KotakuInAction sometime today, but I figured I ought to write up a short hit on this Bernie Sanders thing and then take it from there. The goings on are pretty lulzy, though, so I’ll be talking about it here in a bit. But first, let’s talk about Bernie and the way some quarters of the left are turning on him over his statements on campus assault.
I read this shit on stream last night and Mike Ma was a little taken aback by it. He said it was the same old pandering bullshit that you usually hear from the authoritarian types. But on closer examination, there is something in there that Senator Sanders and I agree on…the right of an accused student to have his (or her, for that matter) day in court. Here’s his response from the other day…
Rape and assault is rape and assault. Whether it takes place on campus or on a dark street. And if a student rapes a fellow student, that has got to be understood to be a very serious crime. It has got to get outside of the school and have a police investigation. And that has to take place. Too many schools are seeing this as ‘well it’s a student issue, let’s deal with it.’ I disagree with that. It is a crime and it has to be treated as a serious crime. And you are seeing now the real horror of many women who have been assaulted or raped, sitting in a classroom alongside somebody who raped them. Rape is a very, very serious crime and it has to be prosecuted. It has to be dealt with.
Had he just stuck to his rape is a epidemic line, like he did before he went into this spiel, he would have been OK. Instead, he’s getting savaged for having the temerity to stand up and say, “Ya know, these accused rapists should probably have their day in court, with all the evidentiary burdens that entails.” The only people who would lose their minds over such a thing are people who don’t give a shit about the rule of law. Honestly, his statement here has been a good exercise in exposing these fucks even further.
“Advocating for requiring survivors to go to the police shows his lack of understanding of what constitutes equity on campus,” said Andrea Pino, a survivor and co-founder of the activist group End Rape On Campus, “and also demonstrates an ignorance of the current lack of police preparedness on this issue.”
If you’re accused of rape, you deserve a lawyer and the “beyond a reasonable doubt” burden of proof that is required in a court of law. The way college kangaroo courts are taking the place of the criminal justice system nationwide is a travesty. At least Bernie Sanders seems to realize that, to some degree. Even though he’s still using the same buzzwords and politicized terms like “war on women,” advocating for fairness is simply too much for these ideologues to bear. This is one more reason (among many) he’s likely to lose to Hillary Clinton, at the end of the day.
By the way, check out the stream I mentioned last night. We had Mike Ma, Breitbart’s Jack Hadfield & Charlie Nash, as well as the incomparable Margaret MacLennan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyECVI3JLc0
