More on Stanford

Now let me take a swing at this from the other side of the plate.

In my last post, I bemoaned being chastised for pointing out that the girl being too drunk was one of the reasons the Stanford rape happened. It turns out that to the other party, me saying so implies that the guy's actions were justified.

I made no such claim but as I pointed out in that post, many of us are confusing "reasons" and "excuses."

There's a big problem if we let that confusion continue. We actually enable the rapist. You see, that was his legal defense. His lawyer laid out the reasons why this incident happened and then tried to argue that it wasn't rape as a result. Perhaps this lawyer is also clouding the distinction between "reason" and "excuse" or perhaps he's aware of the differences but he knows the jury isn't and he's playing to that.

Either way, that's a dangerous place to go. As I said in the last post, there's always a reason something happens. Good or bad, right or wrong, if you have enough information, everything can be explained. In fact, if you want to exercise proper judgment in determining guilt or innocence, it's critically important to ascertain the reason why it happened. Only then can you properly determine fault, if any.

In this age of political correctness and even more so with the rise of an anti-PC presidential candidate like Donald Trump, it's important that we don't lose our ability to communicate with each other. Expressing ourselves is so much more that what clothes we wear or what bathroom we use. We have to be able to have discourse with one another without fear of being misrepresented.

Otherwise, we're in for an arduous and painful descent into idiocracy.