What's happening to the English language? Are we becoming so undereducated that we don't know the difference between words?
The recent news story about the Stanford rapist generated many conversations, to be sure, but one I had led me to wonder why we can't do a better job expressing ourselves.
Of course the guy was guilty of rape. I never questioned that. However, if we, as a society, want to learn from incidents like this, we need to be able to analyze why they happen. And in the process, we have to be able to draw the distinction between "reasons" and "excuses."
In other words, there's always a reason "why" something happens but the judgment of guilt or innocence comes based on whether or not someone's actions are justified based on those reasons.
For example, breaking the windows on a locked car isn't justified if you're doing it to steal something our of the car. However, if it's a hot, sunny day and the driver left a baby in the backseat, it is.
In my conversation, I was breaking down the reasons this rape happened. One of them is the guy's character being accentuated by his impaired judgment. However, another is the girl's availability coming as a result of a lack of consciousness.
We should be able to say as much without assigning guilt to either party. Maybe it's because I have an engineering type of mindset but I'd like to think it's also simple common sense; there's a mechanical failure, you find the cause, you fix it, then you let the court decide if anyone is liable.
It should be the same here; the incident happened because... Then let judgment dictate whether or not it's rape. Has political correctness gotten so bad that we can't follow that simple process?
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