One liberal blog has jumped on the bandwagon about the two middle school kids being charged as sex offenders for running down the hall slapping butts.

This is hardly a shock, this particular blog, Shakespeare’s sister, has left common sense behind ages ago.

First up was Jeff who wrote:

Boys Will Be Boys and They’ll Always be Jerks

I’m always fascinated by what people find to be a travesty of justice. I myself worry about things like torture, or death penalty cases with shoddy evidence. But the right seems to be perpetually concerned about a different class of case.

Most of you have heard about the case of Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison, two middle-schoolers in Oregon who were arrested for slapping the behinds of several of their female classmates. Now, I tend to agree with Tracy Clark-Flory that some of the consequences Mashburn and Cornelison are facing — most notably lifetime registration as sex offenders — are excessive for the crime. But that has to do with my objections to the sex offender registry laws in general, which tend to be extremely punitive and cast too wide a net in affixing scarlet letters, while not actually helping prevent diddly squat.

But while I think that’s perhaps over-the-top, the level of minimization of this crime — and it is a crime, after all — on right-wing blogs is amazing. 

 Of note is the fact the actually took me to task specifically for my denouncement.

Karl at Learning Straight Up says this is a reason to homeschool — not the slapping, but the charges:

Leaning Straight Up, not Learning you moron.

His summary:

Now, I find all this opprobrium fascinating for a variety of reasons, but the main one is how it keeps hammering on the same theme: “What’s a little fondling between friends, huh? Boys will be boys, after all. Some of the girls might have liked it — heck, one girl even said girls slap butts too!”

As expected, Ward Churchill did not accept his loss of tenure gracefully.

Fired Colo. professor sues university

A professor who was fired after comparing some Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi sued the school Wednesday, saying officials retaliated against him for exercising his right to free speech.

Note that straight off the bat the article screws up the facts.  They imply that he made the comparison and was fired for it, when the truth is much different.  The irony is that they knew that, as the next paragraph shows.

Ward Churchill was ousted by the University of Colorado’s governing Board of Regents after three faculty committees accused him of plagiarism, fabrication and other research misconduct.

Churchill, a tenured professor of ethnic studies, had triggered a national outcry with an essay comparing some World Trade Center victims to organizer Adolf Eichmann.

That is clearly true, but he has been busy since then.

said his dismissal was based on other writings and that his firing was unrelated to his Sept. 11 comments. The academic investigation did not include the Sept. 11 essay but began after university officials concluded it was protected by the First Amendment and that he could not be fired for writing it.

As outrageous and disgusting as his writing was, they are right, it was protected speech.  His plagiarism however, is not.

Churchill has denied the research misconduct allegations and called the investigation “a farce” and “a fraud.”

Being himself a fraud, he should know.  There is reason to believe he isn’t even Native American, according to the census records.  See here.  If true, that means his fraud goes even farther back to his hiring, as he was hired under a diversity program.

The best he can claim, apparently, is associate or honorary membership.

His lawsuit, filed in Denver District Court, charged that after the essay came to light, “the university vowed to examine every word ever written or spoken by Professor Churchill in an effort to find some excuse for terminating his employment.”