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Dennis Prager brings some much needed perspective and cool, sober, common sense to the bruhaha surrounding the Duke Lacrosse case in his new Townhall offering, “The Rape of a Name is Also Rape.” 

The rape of a name can be as vicious a crime and as destructive an act as the rape of a body.  Sometimes the rape of a body is worse, sometimes the rape of a name is worse.

Yes, nothing is sadder than a name huddled on a gurney in the ER with a black eye, a broken collarbone, and severe vaginal tearing.  A body, on the other hand, pretty much deserves what it gets for wearing provocative clothes and being corporeal.

But they are both rapes. And morally likening the two is in no way meant to lessen the horror of rape; it is meant only to heighten awareness of the horror of intentionally destroying the name of an innocent person.

The fact that Dennis is using what rhetoriticians call the Mounds-Almond Joy Dichotomy (Sometimes you feel like a nut.  Sometimes you don’t.) to draw a parallel between rape and defamation in no way undermines the ethical majesty of his argument.

These words are written in the aftermath of the destruction of three young men’s names by a lying woman whose name is still hidden by The New York Times and other major newspapers whose commitment to truth is not as strong as their commitment to political correctness.

Their names having been destroyed, the three young men must now go through life being known by whatever cast-off, second-hand monikers they can scrounge.  At press time, the victims were calling themselves “Bachelor Number 1,” “Joe Doakes,” and “Miss Thing.”  Victims of “body-rape,” however, don’t have their bodies destroyed, so they can just, in the immortal words of my old baseball coach, “walk it off.”

Upon first hearing a comparison of name-rape to body-rape, most people are likely to recoil. But upon reflection, it becomes clear that the two are morally comparable. In fact, I have had women listeners to my radio show call and e-mail me to say that they have been raped — one woman had been gang raped — and felt they were better able to go on with their lives than men they loved who had been falsely accused of rape or molestation.

Wait, he has listeners who have not only been raped, but have also had their husbands, fathers and boyfriends falsely accused of rape?  Listeners, plural?  Wow.  I would never accuse Dennis of stitching together a hamperful of sock puppets to support his morally dubious fantasias, but I would suggest that some of his fans are a bit overscheduled.

If you are a woman and this seems far-fetched, imagine that a man you love — such as your father, brother, husband or son — were publicly accused of a rape he had not committed. Imagine the pain he and your family would endure. Why is that pain not comparable to the pain suffered by at least some women who are raped?

Because no matter how brutally you’re being raped, eventually the guy’s gonna blow his load and zip up.  But what about your imaginary male relation who’s being roasted in the tabloids?  Makes you feel a little silly, doesn’t it, still moaning and groaning about your concussion, fractured wrist, and hepatitis C?

To this day, a decent human being named Clarence Thomas, who has become a major Supreme Court thinker, is identified by his political enemies with sexual harassment (of the most innocuous variety, even if true) and of having looked at pornography (along with the majority of other decent men in America), as if those charges define his life.

And all he got out of that ordeal was a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court.  Imagine what the first President Bush would have offered Thomas if he’d let the Secret Service sodomize him with a broomstick!

The lying woman in the Duke lacrosse case, Crystal Mangum, raped three men. Generally speaking, it is meaningless to speak of women raping men’s bodies; it is men who rape women’s bodies. What women can rape is a man’s name.

And it’s apparent which of these assaults Dennis thinks is the more heinous.  Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never hurt you!  Names are holy, blameless creatures; white, silken, and pure, like a unicorn’s mane.  And what do you sexist bitches do?  You take our virginal, unsullied names into the shower and treat ‘em like Linda Blair in Born Innocent.

It is a symptom of the major sexism of our time — against men (see Christine Hoff Sommers’ “The War Against Boys” for a detailed discussion of this sexism) — that not only is the rape of men’s reputations not considered anywhere near as serious as the rape of a woman’s body, but the women who perpetrate such destruction are protected by feminist, politically correct news media. That is why, to this day, The New York Times and most other liberal newspapers refuse to publish Crystal Mangum’s name, let alone advocate that she be tried or punished for her cruelty.

Yeah, the only real sexism in America is prejudice against men!  Need proof?  The sole person who’s been punished in this fiasco is Mike Nifong, the Durham County District Attorney who framed the defendants by lying to the court and concealing exculpatory evidence.  And after all that, he was the one who got disbarred, while the stripper who made the original accusation was apparently allowed to keep her license to practice law.

The Talmud, the set of books of Jewish law and philosophy that rank in Judaism second in importance only to the Torah, says, “Whoever humiliates his friend in public is considered as if he has shed his blood.” That is why some rabbis call undeserved public shaming “emotional murder.”

Occasionally, a woman who has “emotionally murdered” a man can plea bargain the charge down to “psychological manslaughter with intent to commit grievous nomenclatural injury.”

That was written nearly 2,000 years ago.  The lack of interest by elite America in even identifying, let alone punishing, a woman who “emotionally murdered” three young men proves that those who believe in the inevitability of moral progress frequently delude themselves.

In short:  Until the thousands of women who are raped every day in America (yet live) realize that the handful of men who are falsely accused of rape every year are suffering much more than they are (because their names are emotionally dead), the authors of two millenia-old religious texts will think you’re a bitch.

37 Responses to “Dennis Prager Sez: Tell Those Sabine Bitches To STFU”

Dennis sounds a little too upset to be a disinterested commentator, only trying to direct the public towards more moral, civilized behavior. He sounds like a guy who’s REALLY, REALLY worried about a rape accusation ….

I’m sorry, Scott, I really really tried to make it all the way through, but when I got to this line:

“Why is that pain not comparable to the pain suffered by at least some women who are raped?”

I blew out so many synapses, I can’t find my toes at the moment.

We’re not talking about cognitive dissonance here, we’re talking about a little cum-sucking pus-wad of pure, unmitigated EVIL.

And I want his home address, and a good lawyer.

“Yes, nothing is sadder than a name huddled on a gurney in the ER with a black eye, a broken collarbone, and severe vaginal tearing.”

What’s even more fun is when the neanderthal orderlies and residents and nurses and other assorted state-paid troglodytes make a point of OPENING and RE-OPENING the E.R. room door where you’re sitting there in a cervical collar, with the entire right side of your head turning into a giant, swollen, black eggplant, so that every DWI, every convict, every lowlife in New Orleans can STOP ON A DIME and STARE AT YOU LIKE YOU’RE THE NEWEST EXHIBIT WITH THE JIM ROSE FUCKING SIDESHOW.

Seriously.

I want this guy’s home address. I can find a way to get the gas money on my own.

I want Dennis Prager to know what it feels like to be raped. With a four-way tire tool and a MagLite. Oh, and my nephew’s aluminum tee-ball bat, that he gave me when I returned home after the above-mentioned beatdown.

That was seriously one of the most despicable columns I’ve read in a while.

Thanks so much for ripping his column to shreds. i am a black student at NC Central, where Mangum went to school and I am so tired of this whole ordeal. The Duke Lacrosse boys got what they deserved, just as much of the media doesn’t mention Mangum’s name or suggest that she should be punished, much of the media also hasn’t told you what the Duke have admitted to, but Prager won’t talk about that either. He won’t be talking about how they admitted to racially intimidating her, threatened her and told her to penetrate herself with a broomstick. Racial intimidation is a crime in NC by the way, and a Klansman in nearby Oxford, NC was charged with it just a few days ago. So if Prager wants Mangum charged for her sins, they should be charged too, they are not blameless.

I wouldn’t want innocent men to go to prison for a crime they didn’t commit, but Mangum’s accusations have revealed to the world that they are racists and the smear punished them for what they did in fact do to her and it taught them that, despite being lacrosse players with a feeling of entitlement, they are not above the law. Had Mangum simply filed a complaint of racial intimidation, nothing would have been done in Durham, so she did what she had to do to get some sort of justice.

And as far as criticism of the media and how unfair it has been, did you see how the mainstream media kissed Duke Lacrosse team’s booty on their way to losing to John Hopkins in the national championship this year?? They made it seem like this team overcame so much to accomplish so much; please, the team is still made up of a bunch of racist, rich kids who have never had to struggle through anything.

Oh yeah, and thanks also for mentioning that the media has fried Nifong for his wrongdoings, something else the rightwing doesn’t care to mention when they speak of biased media coverage

Thanks, Scott. As close as I got to a response on that one was “Fuck you, you little prick.” That’s my usual reaction to Dennis, who seems to lack even a vestigial sense of empathy, but I admit it’s getting more emphatic with each column.

I remember the first comment I ever made here at WoC, it was Dennis. He was explaining, if I recall correctly, that the nation was full of minimum wage pussies and killjoy lawyers because they told him in the path of a hurricane that they were not going to check a hotel room to him. He was outraged that they wouldn’t let him take his own risks. (This was pre-Katrina, where I believe he had harsh words for those citizens too lazy to get out of the way of a hurricane, actually.)

My thought at the time was that whole masses of people simply didn’t register in his awareness, which would include hotel employees who would then have to babysit Dennis rather than going home to be with their families.

Now he’s wholesale dismissing rape victims to make a point. Still that same epic lack of humanity and disdain for the legal system. It’s nice to know some things never change.

Incidentally, Dennis, I used to know a guy who’d been molested as a kid, and was later accused of rape by someone on usenet, and I can promise you that the accusations didn’t begin to compare to the rape.

I’m a lazy sod, so I shall merely resubmit the post on the same hideous piece of shit I made @ Sadly, No!:
“I think one of the accused’s names was Whitey McWasp.
Prager rapes his own name every time he opens his mouth.
One can only wonder what the reaction would have been if it had been a Euro-American dancer/party favor @ a kegger thrown by the (I assume, but you never know w/ Duke) mostly Afro-American football team. Presumption of innocence? Doubt it.
Not to mention how completely fucking lame, disgusting & stupid the whole concept of renting someone to dance around half naked for you is in the first place. Coming soon: Naked green slave girls, in a Star Dreck® stylee.”

wow, this guy REALLY is a totally clueless fuck! Does he even KNOW any women who have been raped? Does he know any women at all?

I hope that the boys at Duke never find happiness again and I hope this dried piece of used jet trash, Dennis, gets, at minimum, an introduction to reality.

Yet more “oppressed white man” bull shit. What a fucking putz. Grow the fuck up Dennis! Being falsely accused, and then vindicated (without going to trial)is not morally equivalent (see? Librulz can use that buzz-word to!) to being brutally assaulted and sexually violated. Maybe if they had spent ten years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit, Prager might have a point, but it never even went to trial, so I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with this guy.
What a fucking needle dick.

Oh my sweet Lordy-Gordy.
Y’know, Dennis has a truly amazing gift: every time you think, “He can’t possibly sink any further”, he does it.
Annti, you might have difficulty exacting the appropriate punishment, because the slime trail he leaves is hard to walk through. You’d have to fly over him-but then there’s the stench wafting from him to contend with. In fact, I don’t think there’s a haz-mat suit that could survive contact with him.

“Had Mangum simply filed a complaint of racial intimidation, nothing would have been done in Durham, so she did what she had to do to get some sort of justice.”

Can you say post hoc rationalization? I knew that you could. And as for this:

“I hope that the boys at Duke never find happiness again . . .”

Why? ‘Cause they hired a stripper? ‘Cause they made lewd comments to her? ‘Cause they’re privileged white fratboy assholes? ‘Cause you’re pretty sure someone said the “N” word? Help me understand the logic.

No doubt Prager is a douche, and his comparison of physical rape and defamation is reprehensable. But some of the comments here are contemptable too.

I’ll be back in a minute. I’m busy tallying up all the times Prager complained about prosecutorial malfeasance when it was Ken Starr pipelining false accusations to the Washington Post.

In fact, I have had women listeners to my radio show call and e-mail me to say that they have been raped — one woman had been gang raped — and felt they were better able to go on with their lives than men they loved who had been falsely accused of rape or molestation.

Well, really that just makes it sound like these men who were falsely accused were whiners and wusses.

It seems the obvious escapes many wingnuts; that while courtroom injustice sure does suck no matter what, at least these boys didn’t end up beaten half to death by a lynch mob before being hung on a tree limb, unlike countless black men in the Jim Crow era accused of improper relations with a fair lady.

I’m sorry; what’s that, Emmet Till? Did you want to add something?

“Yeah, I’m still fucking dead here.”

I know, Emmet. But it was never about what people like you or even the Duke kids had to go through, it’s about the same old wingnut tribalism. They see politics as a spectator sport, where you just mindlessly cheer your side and boo the opponents. In this case, it’s like “Damn nigras got one over on us!” Doesn’t matter how comparatively lucky they were, the fact that white kids could even begin to face some of the same treatment as countless black guys who who weren’t able to afford top-notch attorneys or tap into a pre-existing Selective Outrage lobby, permanently on hair-trigger alert, is intolerable.

I remember that this and Imus happened right about the same time, and wingnuts who had long been open apologists for a police state all of a sudden rediscovered their inner Patrick Henry over their right to insult black people, and this just added to their sense of aggrievement. Why won’t The Man ever give Whitey a fair shake?

Bill, darling, I’d be willing to take that risk.

Really.

I mean, it’s not like I’m asking you to carry my ammo or anything, but a little encouragement would be nice.

And a bigger MagLite — I’ve got the small “consumer”-sized one that only uses 3 C-cell batteries — I want the BOUNCER-SIZED MagLite that takes FOUR D-CELLS. The ones that I’ve seen used oh-so-effectively on rude/drunk/asinine/handsy scumbag tourists in the Quarter when they don’t know when to shut the fuck up and go back to their hotel rooms.

Gosh, A.F., I will absolutely keep in mind next time I’m pissed off at a rape apologist that I might be earning the contempt of some concern troll I didn’t know existed. And why is it the concern trolls always fingerwag a group based on the comment of someone the group had never heard of either?

Anne, I had that thought too. The existence of exceptionally strong rape victims does not in any way mitigate the damage rape does. And to be honest, people who have been raped are likely to take false accusations of rape very seriously *because* they have been raped, and they know it leads to exactly the kind of bullshit Dennis is shoveling out.

Annti, luv…he lives in Los Angeles. Couldn’t tell you beyond that. Stop at Pink’s while you’re out there - great hot dogs.

It won’t be quite as satisfying, but if you can sound sweet and get past his call screeners, you might be able to get a few relevant words out on the air during his radio show. 1-8-PRAGER-776 or 1-877-243-7776. Not sure when the live broadcast is.

Be sure to tell him you’d just left Bible class, too.

If I accuse myself of rape am I jacking off my name?

A.F.,

Please explain how I’ve committed a post hoc fallacy. I am looking at the statement you quoted and I’m not seeing where I am guilty of the fallacy.

SCS, please don’t feed the concern troll. er, he is not your concern. :)

I thought AF’s post was entirely reasonable. Why the anger and troll accusations?

As someone who was once (horrors!) falsely charged with sexual harassment…I like a dirty joke now and then, unfortunately, this person mistook someone else’s voice for mine…AND as a rape victim, I can assure Dennis he’s talking out of his ass, but let me be quick to add, neither is an experience I would like to relive anytime soon.

Scott, you obviously don’t understand how much these young men have suffered.

[/snark]

But some of the comments here are contemptable too.

The plural. Personally, I wouldn’t claim SCS’s argument that rape accusations are a valid tool to be used against an indifferent legal system, if only because false accusations lead to assholes like Dennis arguing in response that false accusations are just as bad as violently physically assaulting people. But I didn’t see anyone else’s comments here that struck me as even marginally contemptible.

If you’ve got an issue with a specific comment, say so. But AF is either suggesting that we’re collectively responsible for someone I’ve never heard of before or too sloppy to point out who else he or she is suddenly filled with contempt for.

actor212, I’d be willing to accept that false accusations of rape are worse than false accusations of sexual harassment, but even then you could sign me right the fuck up for sexual harassment charges every day for the rest of my life and there’s no way in hell I’d trade it for a single ten minute rape.

I don’t wake up nights screaming because I just had a nightmare about someone filing false charges against me, or stay home from work because I’m afraid it’ll happen again. I didn’t even quit the stupid job, but I don’t leave the house after dark.

If I’d been in fact arrested and tried for a false accusation, I’d probably modify my behavior in some ways that are similar to how I have after being raped, I’d for example stop trusting people and probably wouldn’t be spending any time alone with people I didn’t know really well and I might avoid public scrutiny. I might even have a few nightmares about being arrested. It would not be good.

But I probably wouldn’t have required decades of therapy to only be chronically *moderately* depressed and *borderline* suicidal.

So while I am sympathetic to those falsely accused, Dennis Prager can fuck right off.

One thing I have learned from feminism is that anything that happens to men is more important than anything that happens to women. False accusations of rape are far more damaging than real rape, because men are the victims.

What?!?
- I —

He… no. really…
Arrgh — I, I…
He didn’t.
He just couldn’t have!

Gah!

OK, OK, just calm down.
10…
9…
8…
7…
6…
5…
4…
3…

Ah, fuck it. I tried to count it off. Missed it by this much!
Wow, have any of you ever been so angry that you couldn’t even *see* straight? Well, congrats, Dumbass. You’ve just made me that mad. Thanx bupkis for nada, asswipe. And, it usually doesn’t even happen. Not even when Pastor Swank is wishing for my death, and the deaths of all my people. But, this? Fuck Prager sideways with a Target Greaterland. Twice.

Oh, and BTW Annti, I own a Mag-Lite™ that uses 6 D-cells, black, naturally. And stop thinking sick thoughts.

I keep it in my car.

For, you know, flashlighting purposes.

I keep it in my car.

For, you know, flashlighting purposes.

well, as long as you aren’t doing it in the dark it’s prolly ok

D. Sidhe,

I think we both agree that Prager is an absolute asshole, and that his attitude stands directly as an obstacle towards making everyone safe.

If Prager is an asshole (and he is! He IS!!!!!) then what is Dan Riehl? Anybody read his take on the Jessie Davis murder?
Y’know, guys like this make me ashamed of my own gender-is there some third category we could shove them into?

Bill: Tain’t gender, it’s assholery, which of course transcends both genders and all ethnicities.
But what an awful fucking world we do live in, populated by such assholes. ‘Tis indeed a world o’ crap.

actor 212: Absolutely. We actually seem to agree on most things, I’ve found from reading your comments. :-)

And Bill, I won’t hold Dennis against you if you won’t hold Lucienne Goldberg against me. (Um, eeew. Idiomatically speaking of course.)

Because, really, when you come right down to it, misogynists are homophobes and vice versa, and they both go along with racism fairly often. The underlying thread here is that it’s unseemly for straight while males not to be treated better than the rest of us, and for any of the rest of us to be angry about it.

Well, Marq, yet another first.

You’ve given me Mag-Lite envy.

You should feel heartened and duly proud.

(Make whatever tacky puns you will, Preznit.)

But hey, at least now you know what to get me for my birthday!

(And yes, I want a black one, ’cause it’ll match 90% of my wardrobe.)

Bill S,

Dan Riehl was elected by the readers of the (loss lamented) Martini Republic as the single stupidest person on the planet.

“We wanted to nominate him for a Darwin Award” stupid

I think I found somebody stupider-I’ll let all of you be the judge:
http://pandagon.net/2007/06/30/fundie-arrested-for-assault-says-gays-made-her-do-it/

Even for Dennis Prager, this one is WAY out there.

I’m pretty sure it’s all some sort of hallucination.

How do you stay funny when reading shit like this?

Actually, I don’t think anyone that hasn’t been viciously lied about by someone behind their back understands just how bad it can be, but comparing it to being physically abused is, well, kind of like comparing an anxiety disorder with cancer.

While I think that Dennis’s context is way out of whack, I like the fact that he has at least turned this into a talking point that might get more air-time than it has in the past.

As a victim of vicious lies (not the rape-kind exactly, but sexual), I appreciate more discussion in this area, because whenever I tried to bring it up elsewhere, I was generally ignored, but Dennis’s perspective loses me completely after the first minute.

Something to say?