A lot of the outrage over this case has come from what the man's father said--that the sentence that the prosecution was seeking was a steep price to pay for his actions in 20 minutes of his life, after 20 years of otherwise good behavior. That is a despicable argument. Remember the Newtown shooter (who I won't even dignify by stating his name)? Five minutes of his life defined him, despite 20 years of not having a criminal record. If you rape or murder someone, you are a rapist or a murderer. Yes, that defines you, and it should. You are not the victim. If someone raped or killed a member of this father's family, I cannot imagine he would have written a letter to the judge saying that the penalty that the prosecution was seeking was too steep. Not a chance. But I don't blame the father nearly as much as I blame the judge for what happened with the sentencing. Of course the father is going to go to bat for his son. The judge should not have taken pity on a person who raped an unconscious woman. Whatever impact years of prison would have on his life would have been deserved.
The rapist blamed his decisions that night on alcohol. Alcohol does not turn you into a rapist. If I drink alcohol and become drunk, nowhere in my mind will I think it's acceptable to rape an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. Alcohol can lead to poor decisions, and alcohol can make you more apt to do things that you want to do anyway but were holding back on doing while you were sober, but alcohol does not turn you into a rapist. That is not an excuse. It actually makes less sense than getting caught for drunk driving and blaming it on alcohol. At least alcohol is the cause of drunk driving. It is not the cause of someone being a rapist. Now, the victim here was unconscious because she drank too much alcohol, thus became unconscious and could not give consent. She was inebriated from ingesting an unsafe and dangerous amount of alcohol. This was not a case of two conscious young people hooking up after drinking alcohol. That's not rape, even if one or both regret it the next day. This was a case of one conscious young person raping one unconscious young person after they both drank alcohol. That's rape. That deserves a lot more than 3-6 months in prison.
Now that we've defined what this is, let's talk a bit about what it's not. This is not about race. I've seen some articles and plenty of posts on social media comparing this white student athlete's lenient sentence with a heftier sentence for a black man who was sentenced to prison for a rape that he did not commit. Both cases are miscarriages of justice, but that's about all they have in common. Not everything is about race, despite what the race baiters would have you think. There is no indication that the judge is racist or that this would have gone any differently if the rapist were a black student athlete. It doesn't matter whether he was white, black, purple, or striped. If we turn this into a racial issue, we've really lost sight of the key problems with what went on here.
This also is not about making a point that we should all beware of white student athletes because they are rapists, as I've seen in a few misguided social media posts. Yes, anyone may be a rapist, despite how they look, how nice they seem, or how much money they have. Most of us never expected that the rich, mild-mannered, fatherly Bill Cosby would have turned out to be a serial rapist, giving women pills and raping them while they were unconscious for several decades. But rapists are not always black men, or white men, or men in general. And rape victims are not always women either. I know men and boys who were raped by men. I know men who were raped by women. Men are not very apt to report rapes either, often because they are ashamed or because of the presumed reaction they would get, with folks not taking them seriously or asking how that could happen to a man.
There is a double standard at work here. Look no further than the cases of teachers having sex with underage students if you don't believe me. If the teacher is an attractive woman and the victim is male, most males in our society want to congratulate the boy on his conquest. It's every boy's dream after all, right? But if the teacher is a man and the victim is female, we don't want to congratulate the girl on her conquest. We want to throw that man in prison for a long time. The idea that men are always the rapists and women are always the rape victims does not help create a healthy culture. It's also not healthy to unquestionably believe someone who says he or she was raped, because that mindset allows things like the Duke Lacrosse incident to occur, where a woman falsely accused multiple men of rape, the general public believed her and judged those athletes from the media stories before the facts came out, and the lives of the student athletes in this situation were turned upside-down.
Unfortunately, most of the time when a rape is reported, it actually occurred (and there are many more that are never reported at all). We have a very serious problem with rape in this country. I think it's in part because young people think they are entitled to what they want and are not used to not getting their way. Moral relativism and the defense of religions and cultures where the rape of women is permissible makes the problem worse. It is not acceptable to rape, even if you are a Muslim and the Quran says it is in certain situations (it's also not acceptable for a U.S. soldier to be dishonorably discharged for stopping the rape of young boys). It is not acceptable to rape, even if your Christian church tells women what to wear, because if they wear something too revealing, men will lust after them and not be able to control themselves. Victim blaming is NOT acceptable. Remember that passage in the Bible where King David saw Bathsheba, who was married to Uriah, bathing naked, and then committed adultery with her and had her husband killed? Remember how God said it was all Bathsheba's fault because she should have put on some clothes? Me neither. Because He never said that. He blamed and punished David. While no rape occurred here, the point is that it is never acceptable to blame anything that occurs on what a woman is or isn't wearing.
There is no excuse whatsoever for raping an unconscious person, male or female. There is no excuse whatsoever for a judge to give only a 3-6 month sentence. There is no justification of the idea that the punishment for the crime would make a rapist into a victim, or that a few minutes of bad judgment should be outweighed by a life otherwise free of a criminal record. Can you imagine a judge sentencing a murderer to 6 months in prison for murdering people, because it was a few minutes of bad judgment and there was no prior criminal history? Me neither. But maybe we're not far from that, because what happened here is pretty unimaginable too.
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