The phrase “sexual assault” long substituted as a euphemism for the harsher term “rape.” So, its use as a descriptive for an unwanted pass commits an act of violence upon language. Do we really wish to use the same phrase for a drunken, fishing-expedition kiss as we use to describe gang rape? It seems rather dishonest.
The headlines read: “Huma Abedin writes in new book she was sexually assaulted by US senator” (The Hill), “Huma Abedin: Clinton aide details sex assault by US senator” (BBC), and “Huma Abedin Says Senator Sexually Assaulted Her After D.C. Dinner” (Daily Beast).
Her book portrays something other than a sexual assault. Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide writes that after a D.C. dinner a senator invited the twentysomething version of herself back to his apartment, where she sat on his couch. “He plopped down to my right,” she explains, “put his left arm around my shoulder, and kissed me, pushing his tongue into my mouth, pressing me back on the sofa.”
A cad? A wencher? A lech? Definitely, maybe, and probably. A rapist? Not unless the word applies to behavior (i.e., a kiss delivered with neither announcement nor permission slip) engaged in by most males and welcomed by most females on at least a few occasions throughout life. The same women who embraced a pass in certain instances surely felt repulsed by a pass in others. That Gary Cooper caused fireworks but Marty Feldman induced vomit should not serve as grounds for an arrest warrant for the latter and a marriage proposal for the former. The act, not the attractiveness of the actor, determines the legality.
And sexual assault remains a legal term that, despite billions of surprise kisses bestowed upon others annually, does not yet put practitioners of the smoochy advance into a cage. “Yet” seems the operative word. If normal people allow the abnormal to redefine terms, then normal behavior soon becomes criminal behavior. And romance becomes a bureaucratized series of contracts and forms laughed at by Don Juan, Romeo, Lothario, and all who know the consequences of bringing one’s lawyer into the bedroom. Antioch College no longer exists. But its laughingstock “May I kiss you here? May I touch you there?” consent guideline surely thrives.
Atop all the penalties already imposed upon unattractive people, does justice really demand we label them sex offenders for behavior not just welcomed but fantasized about when undertaken by beautiful people? Vibes guide the kisses of normal people, and determining the truth of vibes — even, unfortunately, when dastards discard vibes for imposing their kisses in hail-mary fashion — strikes as a fool’s errand.
Abedin does not tell us the party of the predacious senator, which tells us the party of the predacious senator. She also does not mention whether the randy solon fell into the cisgender or transgender category (words most people remained blissfully ignorant of at the time), which seems to really, really matter to Democrats in adjudicating she-said/they-said disputes.
Take the much-publicized, and much distorted, case in Loudoun County, Virginia, in which a gender-fluid male teenager wearing a skirt raped a fellow student in the girls’ restroom. Though initially charged with “two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio,” the student’s crimes did not merit acknowledgment from a schoolboard that ultimately forced instructors to use the preferred pronouns of pupils (grammar rules now the purview of students rather than teachers) and pried open locker rooms and bathrooms for all comers.
“The predator transgender student or person simply does not exist,” Scott Zeigler, the superintendent of schools, assured parents. “We don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.” This prompted the victim’s father to speak, which resulted in heated heckling from proponents of open bathrooms, critics lamely claiming that Smith failed to “register” in advance to speak at the meeting, and cops tackling the aggrieved father to the ground and arresting him for the crime of appearing agitated and animated in a situation in which it is a crime to not be agitated and animated. To add further insult to very real injury, Democrats made Smith the posterchild for their bizarre campaign to paint concerned parents as terrorists.
The National School Boards Association (NSBA), for instance, used the example to buttress their claim of a “growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation” against school boards in a letter to the Justice Department. The NSBA subsequently withdrew the letter, but, well, damage done. Attorney General Merrick Garland parroted the NSBA’s language in instructing the Justice Department to prosecute people who threaten, harass, and intimidate, which presumably includes fathers angry about their daughter’s in-school rapes, school board members.
In the upside-down world of progressives, Huma Abedin endured a “sexual assault” but no such thing happened to this poor 15-year-old girl in a bathroom occupied by a sexually-disturbed young male allowed in by a warped policy instituted by ideologues blind to human behavior. If they took it seriously, why would leftists heckle the rape victim’s father, shuffle the rapist to another school, and deny that a rape even happened?
We are all rapists now. They are rapists never.
And that goes for thems, too.
