Amid all the faux outrage over NFL thug Ray Rice, who clocked his then-fiancée-now-wife in an elevator and knocked her out cold, then dragged & kicked her body as if it were a bag of trash, I'm reposting what I wrote back in January, which also links to an op-ed I did in 2003. Not that any of it matters. Fans will always be fans, no matter how many criminals get in the way:
These rapes on college campuses happen so often they've become mind numbing. I used to get outraged almost beyond words, but by now I've become inured.
It's the same shitty story, over and over, with the same shitty outcome: males, usually athletes or fraternity pigs, gang-rape a drunk girl, taking turns doing it and standing around watching and laughing as the next guy does it. In this day and age, we have the added brutality of picture-taking on cellphones and then the sharing of said pictures to futher humiliate the victim. And then, the school administration sides with the rapists -- usually so the criminals won't miss playing any of their precious football games, which, of course, mean so much in the grand scheme of things. Besides, the rapists are always "nice boys" from "good families."
After all, we all know about the "value" of sports.
Then most of the school administrators and students -- women included -- blame the victim, ridicule and harass her on campus, if she has the fortitude to stay at the school (I wouldn't), and the cycle repeats, again and again, all over the country.
The case of a woman who was raped -- repeatedly -- by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and by medical personnel at the University Medical Center of El Paso has been partially settled.
I first wrote about the case here. Though this kind of thing goes on all the time at borders (and in prisons and detention centers), this particular case was so egregious that even the mainstream media reported on it.
I'm 56 years old. Like most people my age, I've had to endure my share of bores at dinners and cocktail parties blathering on endlessly about their personal obsessions, not noticing the glazed look in the eyes of their interlocutors. These bores are often men. And no subject gets them going quite like the testosterone-soaked game known as American football.
