Louis Butler: Flat-Out Lying About His Judicial Philosophy

This, of course is not news.

But it was brought home to us (literally) when we received a mailer from liberal Justice Louis Butler, who is running for election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Here is the flyer.

The most absurd, and most dishonest, passage is this:

His judicial philosophy is simple -- uphold the Constitution and hold wrongdoers accountable. That means not substituting his judgment for the Constitution or state statutes, and not forming an opinion about how he’ll rule until he has heard all of the facts.

In other words, it’s promising to be a judge radically different from the Louis Butler who is now serving on the court.

As Jessica McBride has shown, Butler has been vastly more likely to side with a criminal defendant that the conservative members of the Court. Jessica McBride’s analysis shows this, and while liberals have tried to knock down McBrides numbers -- claiming that Butler sided with the defendant less than the 57% of the time that McBride shows. It’s possible, of course, to debate these numbers endlessly. In fact, you can see them debated endlessly on Rick Esenberg’s blog.

But the bottom line is this: McBride’s numbers are the most plausible around, and any set of numbers you use shows that Butler is firmly among the Court’s liberal majority with its usual sympathy for criminals.

On other issues, see excellent analysis here, and here and here. Butler has not hesitated to substitute his policy preferences for established Constitutional doctrine or for the judgment of the legislature.

It’s terribly revealing that he does this. Americans simply don’t like activist judges, and thus Butler and other supporters of judicial activism have to dissemble.

“Human Rights” Speaker a Supporter of Terrorism?

Our colleague Rich Friman has arranged for a woman named Mary Robinson to give a speech on campus.

The description of her background, as officially released by Marquette University, is bland enough. She is identified as:

The first female president of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. President Robinson is chair of the Council of World Women Leaders and president of Realizing Rights: the Ethical Globalization Initiative.

In reality, there is a lot more too it.

Anybody who knows much about the United Nations knows that “human rights” can be defined in a rather odd way there. And thus it was under Robinson. As Michael Rubin of National Review Online explains:

The trouble starts with Robinson’s tenure as president of Ireland. During the last four years of Robinson’s tenure, the European Union donated large sums of money to the Palestinian Authority. Ireland even held the presidency of the European Union for the second half of 1996. During this time, Arafat siphoned large amounts of European aid money away to pay for terror. Robinson can plead ignorance, but documents seized during the recent Israeli incursion into the West Bank revealed that the Palestinian Authority spent approximately $9 million of European Union aid money each month on the salaries of those organizing terror attacks against civilians. While European officials like Robinson looked the other way, the Palestinian Authority regularly converted millions of dollars of aid money into shekels at rates about 20 percent below normal, allowing the Palestinian chairman to divert millions of dollars worth of aid into his personal slush fund.

Remember the young boys, students, and old women killed in the rash of Palestinian bus bombings back in 1996? It’s hard to believe that European politicians are so incompetent than to notice that Palestinian violence grew in proportion to their aid money. European funds enabled Arafat to purchase $50 million worth of sophisticated Iranian weaponry for use against civilians. While the world knows the story of the Karine-A’s interception last January, few remember that the ship represented only one of many Palestinian weapons schemes (Remember the Calypso? The Santorini? The smuggling tunnels from Egypt into Gaza?) European leaders may claim ignorance, but Robinson should be the first to admit that indirect responsibility is no mitigation for war crimes. The sad fact is that aid given by Robinson helped build the organizations that now kill children at pizzerias, teenagers at discos, and pensioners at Passover seders, not to mention numerous American citizens along the way.

Robinson’s tenure at the United Nations has been little better than her record as Ireland’s president. She was the driving force behind the Orwellian “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.” At the conference, Robinson presided over little more than an intellectual pogrom against Jews and Israel. She remained largely silent as the preliminary Asian Regional Conference in Tehran (to which Israel was excluded) inserted blatantly racist statements into the conference agenda. She failed to speak out when, on the grounds of the U.N. conference itself, the Arab Lawyers Union distributed pamphlets depicting hook-nosed Jews as Nazis spearing Palestinian children. In the same tent where nongovernmental organizations depicted Israel as a “racist, apartheid state,” were distributed fliers entitled, “What if Hitler had won?” The answer: “There would be no Israel, and no Palestinian bloodshed.” While Robinson takes no responsibility for enabling the greatest single display of anti-Semitism in 50 years, she failed to lift a finger when the South African government denied visas to European anti-slavery activists critical of human rights in Islamic nations like the Sudan, where over two million people have perished in a war since the regime in Khartoum declared a jihad against non-Muslims in 1983. Either black Sudanese are less worthy of concern to the human-rights commission, or it would be inexcusably politically incorrect to actually protest human-rights violations conducted in the name of Islam.

Robinson’s post-Durban record is little better. On April 15, Robinson’s commission voted on a decision that condoned suicide bombings as a legitimate means to establish Palestinian statehood (six European Union members voted in favor including, not surprisingly, France and Belgium). The vote came after Robinson initiated a drive to become a fact finder to investigate the now-famous massacre in Jenin (also known as “the massacre that never happened”). Curiously, in the months preceding Israel’s incursion into the U.N. refugee camp in Jenin, suicide bombers launched from the camp wearing explosives likely bought with European money killed more than 100 Israeli civilians. However, for Robinson, a massacre is the deaths of seven Palestinian civilians in a war zone (47 Palestinian militants and 23 Israel soldiers also died). The deaths of more than 100 Jewish civilians by suicide bombers is worthy of little more than deafening silence interrupted by an occasional pithy statement of moral equivalence. The world still waits for Robinson to use her bully pulpit to call for an investigation of the terrorist murder of Jews (but then again, such an inquiry might lead uncomfortably close to UNRWA and European Union officials ).

Not surprisingly, she is pro-abortion, and hostile toward the Bush Administration on the issue or terrorism.

According to PBS:

Robinson called Bush’s linking Bin Laden to Adolf Hitler in a speech this week an attempt to “muddy the ground to fight an election,” adding it was “sad rhetorical language.” Instead the U.S. should focus on ‘real issues,’ she said, such as the recent conflict between Lebanon and Israel. She also urged the U.S. to open up discussions with the Palestinian ruling party, Hamas.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with having Robinson speak on campus -- although a skeptic would say that she’s a female Irish Barack Obama, with a lot or rhetoric but not much in the way of real accomplishment.

But when we tote up whether Marquette is offering a balanced selection of speakers, or is in fact engaging in liberal indoctrination, we have to look for the Allis Chalmers Distinguished Lecture Series in International Affairs to provide some balance with a more conservative speaker in the near future.

School Choice in Georgia

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, an op-ed that debate on school choice is nation-wide, and that experiments (although limited) are spreading.

This one is written by Gerard Robinson who is president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options.

Among the points he makes is one particularly salient one:

Fallacy: Parents, particularly poor parents, are incapable of making good decisions in an educational marketplace.

This claim is unconvincing on two fronts. First, the same poor parent who is smart enough to use a Section 8 voucher to find a suitable place to live or is smart enough to use a food stamp voucher in a grocery store will not suddenly become stupid when it comes to shopping for his child’s education. Yes, choosing between schools is different from choosing between apples, but parents know a rotten school and a rotten apple when they see it. Parents whom I’ve met in Milwaukee and Washington, D.C. —- two cities with scholarship programs —- are savvier than voucher opponents give them credit for. In fact, the role of parents in the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Program that kicked off here last year represents one example of active parent participation in the education marketplace.

Interestingly, in pretty much any other context the notion that poor people, and especially black poor people are too dumb to make decent choices would be howlingly politically incorrect.

But the guardians of political correctness happen to be in bed with the teacher’s union, and to have a huge stake in a public school monopoly which they want to use to indoctrinate kids into their social agenda.

So if the notion “dumb poor blacks” is necessary to oppose vouchers, “dumb poor blacks” it is.

The Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Program, by the way, is yet another case of the slow, incremental but steady advance of school choice.

Adopt-a-Terrorist for Prayer?

Yep, that’s the motto of a website whose ministry is based on the idea that the struggle against radical Islam is spiritual, not material, and must be fought spiritually.

Thus people are encouraged to “adopt a terrorist” and pray for the conversion of that terrorist to Christianity.

Check out the You-Tube clip below.

The site is rather moderate in tone, warning against dehumanizing Muslims in general, but making no bones about the fact that the terrorists are wrong and that Christianity is superior to Islam.

Which means it won’t appeal to the hard-core politically correct types like Jeremiah Wright or Marquette’s own Dan Maguire, who believe that terrorists are doing God’s work chastizing evil imperialistic America. That is, if they believe in God (which is a bit questionable).

Neither will it appeal to people who want terrorists sent straight to Hell, the sooner the better.

We have no particular quarrel with the theology of the site, but would rather spend our time praying for the safety of American soldiers facing the terrorists in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Irony of Ironies

Via Stupidist.com, the ultimate irony.

A columnist for a student newspaper assigned to write a piece on plagiarism, plagarized it.

Obama’s Inflammatory Pastor, Jeremiah Wright, Stays at Ritz-Carlton

From the New York Post:

March 25, 2008 -- BARACK Obama’s inflammatory pastor knows how to relax. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright - who urged his congregation to sing “God Damn America” and opined that the US brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own “terrorism” - decided not to spend Easter Sunday with his former followers at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s South Side. Instead, the preacher, who retired from his post last month, abandoned his flock for the sunnier climes of Puerto Rico. Our spies caught him lounging in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, where rooms rates start at $399 a night. But while Wright is far from his flock, he’s not far from their minds. His successor, the Rev. Otis Moss III, used Sunday’s Easter sermons to compare media focus on Wright to the Romans’ persecution and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Moss said the church will not distance itself from Wright, and that they keep an empty chair in the pulpit in his honor.

If the sourcing on this seems somewhat shaky (“spies”), consider this from a columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times:

BY MICHAEL SNEED Sun-Times Columnist

Hmmm. Did Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose incendiary pulpit pitch sent the campaign of congregant Barack Obama into a national tailspin, spend Easter at a posh hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico?

– Was he there? When Sneed called to verify whether Wright, who was not with his flock at the Trinity United Church on Easter Sunday, was staying at the pricey Ritz-Carlton hotel, we were told “Jeremiah Wright has checked out.”

– Good timing? “He left at 5 a.m. this [Tuesday] morning,” said a hotel employee. “He only spent a few days with us . . . and then checked out this morning.”

This comes in the wake of disclosures that Wright’s congregation is building him a 10,000+ square foot house in a gated suburban community in which to live during his retirement.

All of which raises the issue: for Wright, as for Jesse Jackson, is being a militant advocate of a racial agenda simply a good cover for very traditional and venal motives? Is there simply (for some people) more money in being a racist demagogue than in an honest business enterprise?

Obama Knew of Wright’s Racist Rhetoric, and Approved

From Rich Lowry at National Review Online.

Before he ever thought he would have to deploy Clintonesque spin to try to get himself out of a campaign controversy, Barack Obama wrote (an achingly good) memoir. In the book, Obama makes it clear that Wright when he first got to know him was pretty much the same Wright we’re getting to know now (the one that Obama is at pains to say is on the verge of retirement). Wright was striking some of the same notes, saying racially venomous things and attacking the bombing of Hiroshima. Note this passage about the first sermon Obama heard from Wright, the source ultimately of the title of Obama’s second book and one of the central themes of his presidential campaign:

The title of Reverend Wright’s sermon that morning was “The Audacity of Hope.” He began with a passage from the Book of Samuel—the story of Hannah, who, barren and taunted by her rivals, had wept and shaken in prayer before her God. The story reminded him, he said, of a sermon a fellow pastor had preached at a conference some years before, in which the pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting title Hope.

“The painting depicts a harpist,” Reverend Wright explained, “a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountain. Until you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.

“It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That’s the world! On which hope sits!”

And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House. As the sermon unfolded, though, the stories of strife became more prosaic, the pain more immediate. The reverend spoke of the hardship that the congregation would face tomorrow, the pain of those far from the mountaintop, worrying about paying the light bill. . . . [emphasis added]

The problem, as we see it, is not that Obama is a virulently anti-white racist.

The problem is that, like liberals and leftists generally, he doesn’t really mind virulent anti-white racism.

Two Views of the War on Terror

The Law School continues to host a balanced (and interesting) slate of speakers. Coming up next week: the War on Terror.

You are invited to attend Marquette University’s Annual McGee Lecture

“Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror”

by Georgetown Law Professor David Cole

Monday, April 7, 2008
5:00 to 6:00 p.m.
Alumni Memorial Union, 3rd floor - Marquette Campus
No charge

Please reserve your spot by April 2.

This event is sponsored by the Marquette University Department of Social and Cultural Sciences, the Milwaukee Lawyer Chapter of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, and Marquette Law School.

Parking is available for $5 in Parking Structure 1 on 16th Street between Wisconsin Avenue and Wells Street.

Questions?
Christine Wilczynski-Vogel
Assistant Dean for External Relations
(414) 288-3167

It might seem that Cole is just another leftist professor. And in fact, he really is just another leftist professor.

But then there is this:

Top military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay visits Law School

Col. Lawrence Morris, Law ‘82, the chief prosecutor of the Guantanamo military commissions, will be the next guest for the “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” series at Marquette University Law School, Wednesday, April 2, at noon in Eisenberg Hall, third floor of Sensenbrenner Hall. Morris will discuss his role at Guantanamo and offer a perspective on the upcoming trials of six suspected al Qaeda conspirators.

Morris, who will be prosecuting the alleged planners of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, was commissioned into the United States Army as a military intelligence officer. He has also has served as chief of the Army’s Trial Defense Service and was the chief lawyer at West Point Military Academy.

Morris is a Marquette Law School grad.

Of course, the primary sponsor of the Cole speech is the hard-left Sociology Department (aka Social and Cultural Sciences), while the Law School itself is doing the Morris speech. But the net result is that people who want can hear both sides of the issue.

How Goes English as a Discipline?

From The Nation, an article on trends in the nation’s English Departments.

There’s no better way to take the profession’s temperature, it seems to me, than by scanning the Modern Language Association Job Information List, the quarterly catalog of faculty openings in American English departments. If you want to know where an institution is at, take a look at what it wants. The most striking fact about this year’s list is that the lion’s share of positions is in rhetoric and composition. That is, not in a field of literature at all but in the teaching of expository writing, the “service” component of an English department’s role within the university. Add communications and professional and technical writing, and you’ve got more than a third of the list. Another large fraction of openings, perhaps 15 percent, is in creative writing. Apparently, kids may not want to read anymore, but they all want to write. And watch. Forward-thinking English departments long ago decided to grab film studies before it got away, and the list continues to reflect that bit of subterfuge.

That’s more than half the list, and we still haven’t gotten to any, well, literature. When we do, we find that the largest share of what’s left, nearly a third, is in American literature. Even more significant is the number of positions, again about a third, that call for particular expertise in literature of one or another identity group. “Subfields might include transnational, hemispheric, ethnic and queer literatures.” “Postcolonial emphasis” is “required.” “Additional expertise in African-American and/or ethnic American literature highly desirable.”

To be fair, the list reflects not so much the overall composition of English departments as the ways they’re trying to up-armor themselves to cover perceived gaps. More revealing in this connection than the familiar identity-groups laundry list, which at least has intellectual coherence, is the whatever-works grab bag: “Asian American literature, cultural theory, or visual/performance studies”; “literature of the immigrant experience, environmental writing/ecocriticism, literature and technology, and material culture”; “visual culture; cultural studies and theory; writing and writing across the curriculum; ethnicity, gender and sexuality studies.” The items on these lists are not just different things--apples and oranges--they’re different kinds of things, incommensurate categories flailing about in unrelated directions--apples, machine parts, sadness, the square root of two. There have always been trends in literary criticism, but the major trend now is trendiness itself, trendism, the desperate search for anything sexy. Contemporary lit, global lit, ethnic American lit; creative writing, film, ecocriticism--whatever. There are postings here for positions in science fiction, in fantasy literature, in children’s literature, even in something called “digital humanities.”

All this, of course, is happening in the context of declining enrollments.

Student priorities are shifting to more “practical” majors like economics; university priorities are shifting to the sciences, which bring in a lot more money. In our new consumer-oriented model of higher education, schools compete for students, but so do departments within schools. The bleaker it looks for English departments, the more desperate they become to attract attention.

In other words, the profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers.

But which, we have to ask, is worse: having the agenda set by teenagers, or having it set by leftist, fadish professors? Our answer to that is pretty obvious.

Obama Walks on Water

Feminist Discussion of Women in Politics Tonight

It has not been well publicized, but (although we are likely to disagree with a lot that is said) this looks to be an interesting discussion:

Women and Politics Panel!

Where: AMU 157

When: Wednesday, March 26, 7:00-8:00 p.m.

Come hear JoAnne Anton, Janet Boles, and Lauren Demshar discuss women in politics from a variety of perspectives and join in the talk-back session!

Note that Lauren Demshar has been substituted for Jackie Boynton, who had to cancel.

Expect the program to start with a Powerpoint discussion of the supposed “double-standard that women in power face.” Then Boles and Anton will speak very briefly (five to eight minutes), followed by discussion. The entire program is intended to go on for an hour or so.

We are tied up tonight, or we would be inclined to go and throw a stink bomb into the proceedings by asking a critical question or two, as we did in an earlier discussion of rape.

Maybe somebody else will do that, but regardless, it’s doubtless going to be interesting for anybody interested in Wisconsin politics.

[Correction]

JoAnne Anton, and not Jackie Boynton, had to cancel. We regret the error.

It’s Easter

Christian Acappella Music

A recent project of ours is an Internet radio station playing contemporary Christian acappella music.

Christian music is in a “Golden Age.” While older genres continue to thrive, contemporary “praise & worship” music makes church services come alive. The acappella versions of this music are the bread and butter my new station, but with a bit of variety -- contemporary versions of old standards, classics by bluegrass legends, Christian music by virtuoso groups (Rescue, Acappella), and even a hip-hop flavored version of “Dust in the Wind.” All of that is here.

So check out Hot Christian Acappella over this Easter weekend!

Obama and Wright and Wrong

From Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe:

I have known my rabbi for more than 20 years. The synagogue he serves as spiritual leader is one I have attended for a quarter-century. He officiated at my wedding and was present for the circumcision of each of my sons. Over the years, I have sought his advice on matters private and public, religious and secular. I have heard him speak from the pulpit more times than I can remember.

My relationship with my rabbi, in other words, is similar in many respects to Barack Obama’s relationship with his longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. But if my rabbi began delivering sermons as toxic, hate-filled, and anti-American as the diatribes Wright has preached at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, I wouldn’t hesitate to demand that he be dismissed.

Were my rabbi to gloat that America got its just desserts on 9/11, or to claim that the US government invented AIDS as an instrument of genocide, or to urge his congregants to sing “God Damn America” instead of “God Bless America,” I would know about it straightaway, even if I hadn’t actually been in the sanctuary when he spoke. The news would spread rapidly through the congregation, and in short order one of two things would happen: Either the rabbi would be gone, or I and scores of others would walk out, unwilling to remain in a house of worship that tolerated such poisonous teachings. I have no doubt that the same would be true for millions of worshipers in countless houses of worship nationwide.

But it wasn’t true for Obama, whose long and admiring relationship with Wright, a man he describes as his “mentor,” remained intact for more than 20 years, notwithstanding the incendiary and bigoted messages the minister used his pulpit to promote.

In Philadelphia . . . Obama gave a graceful speech on the theme of race and unity in American life. Much of what he said was eloquent and stirring, not least his opening paean to the Founders and the Constitution -- a document “stained by the nation’s original sin of slavery,” as he said, yet also one “that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.” There was an echo there of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who in his great “I Have a Dream” speech extolled “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence” as “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”

The problem for Obama is that Wright, the spiritual leader he has so long embraced, is a devotee not of King -- who in that same speech warned against “drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred” -- but of the poisonous hatemonger Louis Farrakhan, whom the church’s magazine honored with a lifetime achievement award. The problem for Obama, who campaigns on a message of racial reconciliation, is that the “mentor” whose church he joined and has generously supported with tens of thousands of dollars in donations is a disciple not of King but of James Cone, the expounder of a “black liberation” theology that teaches its adherents to “accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy.”

Above all, the problem for Obama is that for two decades his spiritual home has been a church in which the minister damns America to the enthusiastic approval of the congregation, and not until it threatened to scuttle his political ambitions did Obama finally find the mettle to condemn the minister’s odium.

When Don Imus uttered his infamous slur on the radio last year, Obama cut him no slack. Imus should be fired, he said. “There’s nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group.”

When it came to Wright, however, he wasn’t nearly so categorical. Oh, he’s “like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with,” Obama indulgently explained to one interviewer. He’s just “trying to be provocative,” he told another. “I don’t think my church is actually particularly controversial,” he said. Far from severing his ties to Wright, Obama made him a member of his Religious Leadership Committee -- a tie he finally cut only four days ago.

Such a clanging double standard raises doubts about Obama’s character and judgment, and about his fitness for the role of race-transcending healer. Yesterday’s speech was finely crafted, but it leaves some serious and troubling questions unanswered.

Make Up Your Mind

Speakers Series at Law School Continues

The outstanding speakers series at Marquette’s Law School continues.

Tuesday, March 25—Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker and State Senator Lena Taylor—One week before election day, the two candidates for Milwaukee County Executive will debate the issues during an evening appearance at the Law School. What are their respective visions for Milwaukee County? This event is co-sponsored by the Law School, Marquette University’s Aspin Center, and the political website Wispolitics.com, and will be broadcast by Milwaukee Public Television. 7 p.m., Marquette Law School, Eisenberg Memorial Hall, 3rd Floor

Wednesday, April 2—Colonel Lawrence Morris, Chief Prosecutor of the Guantanamo military commissions—This is a rare opportunity to hear from the man who will be prosecuting the alleged planners of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. Col. Morris is a 1982 Marquette University Law School graduate who was commissioned into the United States Army as a military intelligence officer. Col. Morris also has served as chief of the Army’s Trial Defense Service and was the chief lawyer at West Point Military Academy. Col. Morris will discuss his role at Guantanamo and offer a perspective on the upcoming trials of six suspected al Qaeda conspirators. Noon to 1 p.m., Marquette Law School, Eisenberg Memorial Hall, 3rd Floor

Thursday, April 10—Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos— Are the city’s schools headed in the right direction? How do we improve academic performance and raise graduation rates in Milwaukee? MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos will share his vision for the state’s largest school district on April 10, 12:15 to 1:15 p.m., Sensenbrenner Hall, Room 325.

Wednesday, April 16—Federal Judges Diane Sykes and Terence Evans—She used to be his law clerk. Now, they serve together on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Judge Sykes and Judge Evans will discuss their careers, their decisions to pursue public service, and their friendship on April 16, Noon to 1 p.m., Sensenbrenner Hall, Room 325.

What is so significant about all this is that, as is seldom the case at Marquette (or any university, for that matter) the series is ideologically balanced, with both conservative and liberal speakers.

A Sign at Obama’s Church

From Daily Takes, you don’t want to miss this.

Guest Column: Obama Double-Speak

Double-Speak We Shouldn’t Believe In

Andrew Genz
Sophomore, Marquette Universiy College of Engineering

To the editor:

Fans fainting. Crowds screaming. Girls crying. Sounds like a Hannah Montana concert, right? One would think so until Barack “Hope and Change” Obama steps on stage. Never in the history of American politics has a presidential candidate attracted so much appeal in so little time. How can a man with less than two years in the United States Senate (if you factor in all of the votes he’s missed) be the presidential frontrunner and not be scrutinized by citizens, the media, and his fans? (Obama doesn’t have supporters, he has fans. Similar to those you would find at a Hannah Montana concert.)

Recently, news broke out that Obama’s senior economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, had a meeting with the consul general of Canada. In the meeting Goolsbee told Georges Rioux that Obama’s speak on NAFTA “should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.” As evident in the March 4 primaries, this “NAFTA-gate” incident hurt Obama and proved that, despite popular belief, Obama is human. But Obama fans reply, “This was a one time thing. He won’t do it again.” Wrong. Obama’s double-speak has occurred again, but this time nobody is covering it. Samantha Power, the Obama advisor who recently called Clinton a “monster,” had other comments in her BBC interview that has the potential to be even more damaging than “NAFTA-gate.” The interviewer, Stephen Sackur, asked Power, “So what the American public thinks is a commitment to get combat forces out [of Iraq] in 16 months isn’t a commitment isn’t it?” She responded that pulling out one to two brigades a month, Obama’s 16-month plan, was a “best case scenario” implying that Obama’s strategy to pull out of Iraq would probably be longer than what he preaches to his supporters. When it comes to Iraq, Democrats tend to like Obama’s position a little better than Clinton’s because Obama has claimed to have a set deadline. According to Power, he doesn’t have a “set” deadline and is no better than Clinton on the issue.

As a college student, it seems like I’m expected to support Obama. However, before being a student, I am an American citizen and as a good citizen I’m going to scrutinize and question all of the candidate’s positions. Obama prides himself on change. But from what I’ve seen so far, he’s no different than any other double-speaking, rhetoric spewing politician.

Gender Political Correctness in Crime Reporting?

When five black males robbed a Marquette student, Marquette and the local media didn’t report the race of the robbers.

As we have discussed, this is perhaps justified, since by the time the report came out the robbers were in custody.

This is not the kind of outrage that happened at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where the race of the suspects was concealed, in spite of the fact that they were still at large. In short, members of the UWM community were told to on the lookout for suspects, but not the race of the suspects they were supposed to be looking for! (They probably assumed the suspects were black anyway -- a stereotype that is reinforced when racial information is omitted.)

We happily posted the fact that the five Marquette robbers were black, since that was relevant to our post about the problems that follow from being near the inner city.

But there is another piece of political correctness in the reports.

The sex of the robbers is not reported!

The e-mail put out by Marquette said simply said “five suspects.” The Milaukee Journal-Sentinel described the robbery as follows:

Marquette University Public Safety officers captured five people suspected of robbing a student at gunpoint early Friday.

Milwaukee police said the robbery occurred in the 2000 block of W. Wisconsin Ave. about 12:30 a.m. when the victim, 22, was walking alone.

He was approached by five people. One pointed a gun and demanded property. The victim was not injured, and the five ran away.

Public safety officers saw five people running through the area and were monitoring them when they were alerted by a radio call that a robbery had occurred.

We suppose that, if you are going to conceal the race of suspects, it makes equal sense to conceal the sex of suspects.

But does anybody think that gangs of teen girls and young women are roaming around the Marquette campus, robbing people?

Lena Taylor: Anti-American

Great bit of investigation from Daniel Suhr at GOP3.COM.

It seems that Taylor’s Myspace page has (or at least had) a cartoon lampooning Americans for being (supposedly) so terribly provincial.

Here is the cartoon. If you click on it, you can see a larger version, which will be more readable.



Lena Taylor, it seems you are rather like Jeremiah Wright.

We checked the site, and apparently it has been sanitized. We could not find the cartoon in question.

But we did find an interesting motto that Taylor has.

“If nothing changes, then nothing will change!”

Lena Taylor, meet the concept “tautology.”

Obama Distances Himself From Racist Pastor: Too Late

Although the mainstream media has tried to suppress the story, the conservative blogosphere, Fox News and talk radio have been abuzz with the the fiery racist rhetoric of Barack Obama’s pastor, one Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

We have posted two video clips, one here and the other here.

What kind of statements has Wright made?

In a fiery sermon recorded and available on DVD, Wright can be seen and heard saying three times: “God damn America.”

In his recorded sermons, he also questions America’s role in the spread of the AIDS virus and suggests that the United States bore some responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

“We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki. And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye,” Wright said.

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because of stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own backyard. America is chickens coming home to roost.”

The pastor also said: “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Wright’s supporters say his sermons accurately portray black America, and they contend his sermons are widely studied by theologians.

Wright most certainly does not “portray black America.” He does represent a whole class of politically correct black race hustlers. The same sort of people who are constantly aggrieved.

Obama has finally distanced himself from those comments.

The problem, of course, is that it’s too late.

He had no problem with the church until he got into a presidential race and people started asking him questions. As long as nobody much was paying attention, he was fine with Wright.

Which is terribly revealing. Obama may not hate whites and hate America the way Wright does, but he somehow doesn’t terribly mind that kind of bigotry.

But, and this is even worse, white liberals and leftists don’t terribly mind it either.

[Update]

We just saw a video clip in which Wright said that the U.S. government knew about Pearl Harbor before it happened. If we can find that clip online, we’ll post it.

Obama’s Raving Racist Pastor

Obama’s Pastor: Raving Racist

Yet Another Armed Robbery at Marquette

From an e-mail sent to everyone in the Marquette community.

Public Safety Update

The Department of Public Safety apprehended five suspects within minutes of an armed robbery that occurred early Friday morning in the 2000 block of W. Wisconsin Avenue. The victim, a Marquette student, was approached by the suspects while walking alone and shown a weapon. The suspects took the victim’s personal possessions and fled on foot. The victim was not physically injured and immediately entered a nearby building to call Public Safety. Public Safety officers immediately responded and were able to catch the suspects. All five suspects are now in police custody. Milwaukee Police do not believe that this incident is related to any previous incident involving Marquette students.

Public Safety reports that the surveillance cameras in place in the area were key in locating the suspects quickly. More than 300 cameras located on- and off-campus provide constant surveillance footage to the Command Information Center located in the Public Safety headquarters.

All members of the Marquette community are reminded to make use of the university’s numerous safety resources and not to walk alone after dark. These services include door-to-door LIMO service, the LIMO Express shuttle, or Public Safety foot patrols. More than 200 blue light phones around campus are also available to call for an escort or to report suspicious activity at any time.

In addition, students leaving town for Spring Break are encouraged to take advantage of Public Safety’s Vacant House Watch program so that their residence can be monitored while they are away. Call Public Safety at 288-6800 for more information.

This is just the most recent in a spate of robberies around Marquette.

Indeed, although Marquette officials refuse to use the word, kidnapping was involved in the previous ones.

Brian Collar at GOP3 has been keeping track of this issue.

Back in the early 1990s, then Marquette President Albert DiUlio felt the need to deal with the perception that Marquette was a dangerous place, and did so by dumping millions of Marquette’s money into a program called “Campus Circle” -- a redevelopment plan that made the area adjacent to Marquette more attractive at horrendous cost.

It seemed to “work,” or at least the bad publicity died down.

But in reality a campus near a dangerous area of a dangerous city is never going to be as safe as a campus in some bucolic rural area.

But the situation in Milwaukee is made worse by the rather lax attitude civic elites have toward law enforcement.

We wonder whether the “social justice” crowd at Marquette will decide that muggers, robbers and kidnappers ought to be punished, or whether they will continue to wring their hands when punishment disproportionately falls on black criminals.

In fact, all five suspects in this particular case were black males. The e-mail doesn’t say that -- something that might be justified given that none of them were still at large. But it’s relevant if we want to understand the crime problem at Marquette. Being located near the inner city is no fun.

This situation should test the old saying that “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.”

Well, “social justice” advocates, what will it be?

The Daily Show Does Berkeley

Students Collect Soccer Balls For Iraqi Kids

From an e-mail sent to all Arts & Sciences faculty:

The College of Arts and Sciences Student Council is collecting used soccer balls in support of the “Kick For Nick” project. The balls collected will be sent to the children of Iraq in honor of Pfc. Nick Madaras, a soldier who was killed while serving there. While alive, Nick realized what a travesty it was that children in Iraq were literally playing soccer with bags of rocks, so he started a drive to collect soccer balls for the Iraq children in his hometown. Although he is now gone, the drive continues to go on, and, to date, thousands of balls have been sent to Iraq in his name.

The soccer balls will be collected in the College of Arts and Sciences office after spring break from March 25 - April 4th. For more information, please contact muartsandsciencescouncil@gmail.com, or check out http://www.kickfornick.com/.

Somebody might tend to denigrate this effort as small potatoes. After all, groups of Marquette students have been trying to bring socialized medicine to America, or close down the School of the Americas, or fight the evils of rape, racism and coffee that is not “fair traded.”

We, on the other hand, are impressed.

A good motto for students who want to make the world better might be “do something small, but do something that unequivocally will make the world better, even if just a little bit.”

The “social justice” crowd at Marquette, in contrast, is likely to do things that either will have no effect (because the lack the political power to get what they want) or make the world worse (because they are promoting things they don’t understand, but which make them feel good).

Is this campaign an endorsement of the Iraq War? Logically no, one can try to improve the lot of Iraqi kids while still wanting U.S. troops out of that country.

But honoring a fallen American soldier puts a huge distance between these students and the leftists who want ROTC off the Marquette campus. Moral clarity on issues like this must start with an appreciation of the honor and patriotism of the troops.

Still More Gay Fascism in Academia

From World Net Daily.

It’s about Ohio State University-Mansfield, which put together a list of required reading for freshmen, which had the usual leftist bias.

But they asked a conservative Christian librarian to also suggest a book, and he suggested a conservative book called The Marketing of Evil, one chapter of which deals with how the gay lobby markets homosexuality.

He had to endure relentless harassment, and eventually resigned -- after the university cleared him of any misconduct.

Welcome to academic freedom as it exists in the modern university.

By all means, read the whole thing.

I’ll Come Out in a Few Months

Illegal Aliens: Why “Deported” Should Mean “Deported”

From Front Page Milwaukee, student paper at UWM, a dandy piece of investigative reporting.

One hundred eighty eight previously deported felons identified as illegal immigrants by federal and local officials were booked into the Milwaukee County Jail on new criminal charges, municipal violations, and other violations in the past four years, a three-month Frontpage Milwaukee investigation found.

Many of the previously deported felons have a long history of police contact. For instance, Osvaldo “Shootout” Lares had at least 19 interactions with law enforcement officials for crimes involving drug possession, weapon charges, murder, and traffic violations. Some on the list are gang members.

On Nov. 11, 2004, when the Milwaukee police came to arrest Lares on the charge of Attempted Homicide, they found $1,465 and marijuana in a shoebox. The criminal complaint also reports that marijuana was found in a plastic baggie hidden within a white sneaker. Lares was subsequently found guilty and sentenced to the House of Correction for 9 months. In a criminal complaint filed Nov. 5, 2004, Lares told police that he was a former member of the Mexican Posse gang, which represents Southern Mexico on the south side of Milwaukee.

In total, the felons had at least approximately 388 contacts with police and have been charged with at least 497 offenses dating back in some cases to 1986. The number of past law enforcement contacts is almost surely higher since the tallies only include those that resulted in criminal charges or non-municipal issued traffic offenses.

In addition, about nine previously deported felons have reoffended yet again after the federal detain holds were placed on them by the Milwaukee County jail, the Frontpage Milwaukee student journalists found.

Alfredo Rebollo is one example. Having already racked up 11 contacts with police for traffic violations, driving while his license was suspended, and reckless driving, a federal detain order was placed on him in 2005 for soliciting a prostitute. The criminal complaint states that Rebollo offered to pay a female $20 for oral sex. Though the detain order was placed on him in 2005, in October 2007, he was arrested for parking or standing in a prohibited area and his third offense of driving with a suspended license. He was fined. It is not clear if he was deported in 2005 and reentered the United States, or if he never left Wisconsin.

Of the cases involving deported felons who landed back in jail:

• The criminals were in contact with the police at least 388 times prior to their federal detain holds
• The criminals were charged with 59 violent crimes, and six were sex offenders
• At least 52 were granted bail, 19 received work release in their sentencing, 23 were ordered to obtain work, 13 were told not to vote, 25 had their driver’s licenses suspended, 22 were ordered not to possess firearms or weapons, and three were ordered to have the Ignition Interlock system installed in their cars
• 14 used state taxpayer-funded public defenders, and 61 used translators

None of this is to suggest that Mexican immigrants -- or even illegal immigrants -- are criminals. The data simply don’t support that.

But when people violate U.S. laws, in addition to violating the immigration laws, they should be deported.

And they should stay deported.

Which is why the very first step toward reforming immigration policy is to control the border. When that is done, other problems tend to fall into line. For example, in five or seven or nine years, when all the illegal immigrants in the country have been here for that many years-- mostly working and obeying the law-- a humane “path to citizenship” will be politically possible.

But failure to control the border will undermine anything and everything else about immigration policy.

The Ad the Marquette Tribune Rejected

Newspapers always have the right to reject ads. They may reject them for reasons of taste, or (being private sector businesses) for taking a political position with which the editors disagree.

But why in the world did the Marquette Tribune reject this ad?

It basically encourages young women, going on spring break, not to put themselves into the position of having to use the “morning after pill.”

We talked to a member of the Tribune advertising department who said in effect that it was rejected for being “too harsh.”

Huh?

We also talked to Kimberly Zawada, Faculty Advisor to the business side of the Tribune. She obviously is being highly risk averse, pointing out to us that a Tribune ad showing the bare midriff of a young women -- in a rather innocent context -- generated objections. “You never know what your readers will think,” she observed.

The “harshness” of the ad supposedly centered around the phrase “chemical abortion,” and “blood clots” as something caused by the “morning after pill.”

The Tribune has run ads for abortion counseling services -- ones that encourage young women not to have an abortion -- in the past, according to Zawada. She added “if you present pro-life, you have the pro-choice people coming at you.” She added that the Tribune would not run a “pro-choice” ad.

The irony, of course, is that even Planned Parenthood, which strongly favors all kinds of abortion and contraception, could hardly object to the message to young women: don’t put yourself into a position where you feel the need for “emergency contraception.”

The issue is hardly resolved. It is being taken up by the Student Media Board, and by Dean John Pauly. The ad might still run. In fact, acording to Zawada space has been set aside to run it.

Hat Tip: Brian Collar

Sweeney’s To Stay Close to Campus: Moving to China Garden Location

We can now confirm that Sweeney’s College Books, which is being forced out of a building that Marquette recently bought at the corner of 17th Street and Wisconsin Avenue, will be moving to the former China Garden location on Wells Street across from the Alumni Memorial Union.

The new location is slightly smaller, having about 600 square feet less floor space. However, owner Ed Sweeney expects to have more usable shelf space due to the lack of the pillars that complicated the layout of the store at the old location.

Sweeney’s will be in the old location during the Summer of 2008, and during the August-September rush in 2008, but then will move to the new location at the end of September, 2008. The current lease expires at the end of September.

You’ll Be Missed

Stuff White People Like

Via Berry Laker, a blog called Stuff White People Like.

We frankly aren’t sure what the perspective is. Is this a black person enough in touch with white Yuppie culture to parody it, or a conservative white parodying elite liberals.

At any rate, it’s fun. A sample:

In addition to accumulating sexual partners, binge drinking, drug use and learning, white people consider studying abroad to be one of the most important parts of a well rounded college education.

And then . . .

White people spend a lot of time of worrying about poor people. It takes up a pretty significant portion of their day.

They feel guilty and sad that poor people shop at Wal*Mart instead of Whole Foods, that they vote Republican instead of Democratic, that they go to Community College/get a job instead of studying art at a University.

It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.

A great way to make white people feel good is to tell them about situations where poor people changed how they were doing things because they were given the ‘whiter’ option. “Back in my old town, people used to shop at Wal*Mart and then this non-profit organization came in and set up a special farmers co-op so that we could buy more local produce, and within two weeks the Wal*Mart shut down and we elected our first Democratic representative in 40 years.”

Fickle Super Delegates

Feminist Blather About Rape

We’ve blogged about how politically correct types at Marquette discuss rape in their dissent-free “critical thinking forbidden” events.

Theresa Tobin, for example, proclaimed that all men are are implicated as rapists. As we described it:

Tobin rejected the notion that rapes should be seen as “acts of morally corrupt individuals.” Yes, guys, the fact that you have never raped any women and would never rape any woman doesn’t let you off the hook. You are still part of the “deep social and political causes” of rape.

Why? Because you are part of a system that involves the “use of violence to keep systems of oppression in place.”

In fact, according to Tobin, you are part of a “protection racket.” Because of the threat of rape, a woman “needs to be protected by men against other men.”

And what is wrong with men protecting women against rape? For Tobin, the system “forces compliance with traditional norms.” And further, “the penalty for being protected is to conform.”

At that same event, R. Clifton Spargo, representing another hyper-politically correct department (English) said some equally silly things.

While he didn’t exactly accuse all men of being rapists, like Tobin he got pretty close.

He rejected the notion that rape is “merely aberrant, deviant behavior,” and told the male members of the audience “you are living in the rape culture.” Where? “On Campus. In the bars.”

Happily, not everybody in the world buys into the rape hysteria. An interesting column in the Los Angeles Times challenged some of the blather.

It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic -- but no one calls. Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No. It means, according to campus sexual-assault organizations, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering.

It is a central claim of these organizations that between a fifth and a quarter of all college women will be raped or will be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years. Harvard’s Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response uses the 20% to 25% statistic. Websites at New York University, Syracuse University, Penn State and the University of Virginia, among many other places, use the figures as well.

If the one-in-four statistic is correct, campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No felony, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20% or 25%, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in the U.S., was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants -- a rate of 2.4%.

Such a crime wave -- in which millions of young women would graduate having suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience -- would require nothing less than a state of emergency. Admissions policies, which if the numbers are true are allowing in tens of thousands of vicious criminals, would require a complete revision, perhaps banning male students entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergraduates would need to take the most stringent safety precautions.

None of this crisis response occurs, of course -- because the crisis doesn’t exist.

So where do the numbers come from? During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results -- very few women said that they had been. So Ms. magazine commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way to measure the prevalence of rape.

Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had ever experienced actions that she then classified as rape. One question, for example, asked, “Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?” -- a question that is ambiguous on several fronts, including the woman’s degree of incapacitation, the causal relation between being given a drink and having sexual intercourse, and the man’s intentions. Koss’ method produced the 25% rate, which Ms. then published.

It was a flawed study on a number of levels, but the most powerful refutation came from her own subjects: 73% of the women whom the study characterized as rape victims told the researchers that they hadn’t been raped. Further, 42% of the study’s supposed victims said they had had intercourse again with their alleged assailants -- though it is highly unlikely that a raped woman would have sex again with the fiend who attacked her.

Despite all this, the numbers have stuck. Today, John Foubert, an education professor at William and Mary College (and founder of a group called One-in-Four, which works on sexual assault issues and has chapters on 17 campuses), says, “The one-in-four statistic has been replicated in several studies for several decades. To the extent that social science can prove anything, which I believe it can, the one-in-four statistic has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt. My instincts tell me that the statistic is actually much higher.”

Yet subsequent campus rape studies keep turning up the pesky divergence between the victims’ and the researchers’ point of view.

A 2006 survey of sorority women at the University of Virginia, for example, found that only 23% of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped -- a result that the university’s director of sexual and domestic violence services calls “discouraging.” Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of those whom the researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report.”

Believing in the campus rape epidemic, it turns out, requires ignoring women’s own interpretations of their experiences.

There is a simple principle here: if a feminist political activist has to explain to you that what happened was rape, it wasn’t.

What is really behind all this campus sex, if not rape. The answer is politically incorrect.

So what reality does lie behind the rape hype? I believe that it’s the booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the ‘60s demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish, promiscuous behavior that gets cruder each year.

This culture has been written about widely. College women -- as well as men -- reportedly drink heavily before and during parties. For the women, that drinking is often goal-oriented, suggests Karin Agness, a recent University of Virginia graduate and founder of NeW, a club for conservative university women: It frees the drinker from responsibility and “provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she ordinarily wouldn’t.” Nights can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a guy whom the girl may not even know.

In all these drunken couplings, there may be some deplorable instances of forced and truly non-consensual sex. But most campus “rape” cases exist in the gray area of seeming cooperation and tacit consent, which is why they are almost never prosecuted criminally.

“Ninety-nine percent of all college rape cases would be thrown out of court in a twinkling,” observes University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Kors.

Feminists, knowing that something is wrong, but being unwilling to condemn sexual promiscuity or ever admit that women can be at fault for the bad things that happen to them, have to avoid the issue, and fuss and fume about a “culture of rape.”

“Culture of promiscuity” just isn’t politically acceptable to them.

The LA Times article was, not surprising, met with a rather hysterical response. Marquette feminist blog “Word Warrior” fumed “This just makes me livid. I am so pissed right now, that words right order in the can’t put I.”

It went on:

MacDonald’s primary argument is that women are as much of a participant in alcohol-fueled rapes as men, and that these assaults thus take place in the “gray area” of rape. First of all, there is no “gray area” of rape. Consent is consent, and lack of consent is lack of consent. If a woman is too drunk to consent, then that is rape.

Our students, when faced with this argument, are more sensible. We ask about a situation in which a guy and gal go out and drink too much. They then go back to his apartment and both voluntarily get into bed and have sex.

Feminist doctrine says he raped her.

My students ask, “why? Wasn’t it mutual? Why can’t we say that she raped him?”

The feminist answer, and this is degrading to women, is that a woman is always be assumed to be the victim. The man can be held responsible for his actions, but the woman can’t.

“Word Warrior” goes on:

Second of all, to argue that a woman is complicit in rape will merely exacerbate the rape crisis.

Of course, this begs the question of whether what happened is “rape.”

But telling women that if they get drunk and go to bed with some schlub they don’t know and don’t particularly like they will get little sympathy sounds to us like a dandy response to the “rape crisis.” But the fundamental argument from the feminists is the typical politically correct one: “if we talk honestly about this, it will hurt our political agenda.” This is the same sort of mentality that doesn’t want to talk about the fact that blacks commit more crimes than whites (which causes disproportonate incarceration) or that child abuse typically comes from a mom’s live-in boyfriend, and happens very seldom when mom is married to and living with the child’s biological father.

The Feminist Agenda

The campus blather about the “rape crisis” reflects two very important things about academic feminists.

First, it crystallizes the feminist notion that women are the victims of evil, brutal males.

But perhaps more important is that it can be used as a tool to increase the feminist infrastructure on campus.

“Word Warrior” is adamant that Marquette needs a whole office, a Women’s and/or Gender Relations Resource Center on campus.

More jobs for feminists. And a source of activism not only “against rape” but in favor of abortion, gay marriage and pretty much every other politically correct piece of the feminist agenda.

In fact, such “centers” get little business.

Needless to say, those facilities don’t appear to get a tremendous amount of use. For example, Hillary Wing-Richards, the associate director of sexual-assault prevention at James Madison University, said the school’s campus rape “help line” gets a varying number of calls, some of which are “request-for-information calls” -- where to go, who to talk to and the like.

“Some months there are 10 and others, one or two,” she said.

Referring to rape hotlines, risk management consultant Brett Sokolow laments: “The problem is, on so many of our campuses, very few people ever call. And mostly we’ve resigned ourselves to the underutilization of these resources.”

Real rape, something vastly rarer than the feminist notion of “rape,” should be dealt with as a law enforcement issue. And not by feminist bureaucrats, but rather by tough cops, who may be women, but are unlikely to be feminists.