Last Friday, John Kasich stepped on a politically correct land mine when he advised a female college student to reduce the threat of sexual assault by avoiding parties “where there’s a lot of alcohol.”
At a town-hall meeting in Watertown, N.Y., a first-year student at a local college asked, “What are you going to do in office as president to help me feel safer and more secure regarding sexual violence, harassment, and rape?” Kasich didn’t reply that her concerns might be best handled at a level of government short of the Oval Office. Instead, he detailed how as governor he had helped make Ohio campuses safer by supporting confidential reporting of crimes and programs to support victims. But then he added: “I’ll also give you one bit of advice: Don’t go to parties where there’s a lot of alcohol, okay? Don’t do that.” The audience applauded.
But what seemed like common sense quickly came under attack. Enforcers of the Left’s “rape culture” narrative quickly pounced. The Democratic National Committee claimed he was “blaming victims of sexual and domestic violence.” Steve Benen of MSNBC piled on: “It’s insane to think it’s her fault for having gone to a party where people were drinking. The solution is for men to stop committing sex crimes; encouraging women to make different choices in their social habits badly misses the point.”
Kasich quickly resorted to Twitter to make it crystal clear that “only one person is at fault in a sexual assault, and that’s the assailant.” But he didn’t retreat from his basic point, which is that personal responsibility does play a role in reducing sexual assault. After all, there’s a very strong likelihood that the first-year college student who asked Kasich that question was younger than 21, the minimum age for drinking in any state. One can argue about whether to change that law, but Kasich was merely pointing out there were good reasons not to break it.
Alcohol has clearly been shown to fuel violent tendencies.
Alcohol has clearly been shown to fuel violent tendencies. A 2007 study by the National Institute of Justice on forced rape found that 82 percent of victims reported being drunk before their victimization. “Quite honestly, alcohol is the No. 1 date rape drug,” Mike Lyttle, regional supervisor for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s Nashville crime lab, told USA Today.
I certainly agree with Democratic Missouri senator Claire McCaskill, who noted, in a December interview with Elle magazine, that “you can be a victim of a crime and not exercise good judgment.” But wouldn’t we all be better off if more of us encouraged people to exercise good judgment rather than remain silent for fear of being labeled “judgmental”?
Increasingly, people in positions of authority feel compelled to shut up and not offer sound advice to young people, even when their job is to act in loco parentis. At best, they are accused of being stuffy and acting like old-school dads. But more and more people find that articulating uncomfortable truths can put their career in jeopardy.
Take Robert Jennings, the former president of suburban Philadelphia’s Lincoln University, the nation’s first degree-granting historically black university. As I wrote at National Review Online, Jennings was fired by his board in 2014 after being falsely accused of blaming women for sexual assaults. He spoke at Lincoln’s All Women’s Convocation that fall. In his speech, he noted that during the previous semester, three women on campus had claimed they had been raped when their relationships with their partners hadn’t turned out “the way they wanted it to turn out.” He told the women that he was going to let them in on a “little secret,” saying: “Men treat you, treat women, the way women allow us to treat them. . . . We will use you up, if you allow us to use you up.” The women in the audience applauded.
But when a four-minute truncated excerpt from his speech appeared on YouTube, the PC police appeared. Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC demanded that Jennings “be held accountable for encouraging survivors to be silent, for telling them they would not be believed, that they would be subjected to your scrutiny and disrespect.”
Jennings responded with a letter to all Lincoln students in which he apologized “for my choice of words” and said he “intended to emphasize personal responsibility and mutual respect.” He told Philly.com in an interview that his message to both male and female students is the same: “I emphasize to them how serious that allegation is and that the university takes it very seriously and so does the federal government and so does the court.” He noted that he had told the male convocation of students that “no means no . . . and even if it is consensual, one should [refrain] from engaging in something that could alter their future.”
His attempts at clarification failed, and he was fired, effectively ending his distinguished career. Ironically, the decision to oust him came the same week that Rolling Stone’s University of Virginia “gang rape” story was revealed as a fraud.
He did have some defenders. Boyce Watkins, a liberal African-American scholar at Syracuse University, said that the Jennings speech was an effort to “empower women by education them to the ways of men, and also warning them on how to protect themselves from sexual assault.” He urged people to have conversations on the topic “where the other side of the dialogue isn’t automatically squashed into oblivion.”
Large swathes of the academic Left seem intent on shutting down free speech, either through intimidation, lawsuits, or the application of force to prevent reporters from covering events.
That’s not likely. Large swathes of the academic Left seem intent on shutting down free speech, either through intimidation, lawsuits, or the application of force to prevent reporters from covering events — as we saw at the University of Missouri when Professor Melissa Click called for “muscle” to prevent a student reporter from videotaping a public protest.
The origins of this authoritarian impulse can be traced in part to the teachings of Herbert Marcuse, a Marxist professor who was an inspiration for much of the New Left in the 1960s, especially after he published a book calling extreme sexual liberation the best cure for the psychological ills of society. But as the late Andrew Breitbart observed:
Marcuse’s mission was to dismantle American society by using diversity and “multiculturalism” as crowbars with which to pry the structure apart, piece by piece. He wanted to set blacks in opposition to whites, set all “victim groups” in opposition to the society at large.
In order to facilitate his proposed revolution, Marcuse opposed free speech, which he dismissed as a tool of “the oppressors.” “There is no need for logic, debate, and free exchange of ideas,” he declared. In a 1965 article titled “Repressive Tolerance,” he called for “intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions that are outlawed or suppressed.” He coined the term “partisan tolerance” for this idea. But it’s really just another way of saying that politically correct speech should be enforced and opposing views shut down.
Given that many college campuses have become anti-reason, fact-free zones, Republican presidential candidates have been wise to largely avoid them. Here’s hoping John Kasich doesn’t pull back from his refreshing candor. A big feature of this year’s politics is that voters are clearly fed up with PC culture’s squelching obvious truths. People clearly want to restore a little common sense, even if it is, as philosophers have said, “the least common of the senses.”