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!”

Actually the one girl said it was a mutual greeting.  But don’t let the truth bother you.  We have deviants to condemn:

Well, fine and dandy. But that doesn’t make the behavior appropriate or right. What the boys did was sexual assault, under the most basic definition. I doubt they thought of it that way before they did it, but that’s what it was.

Actually, no.  The closest it comes is inappropriate touching.  They did a drive by slap, not a grope, a squeeze or a caress.  It is actually more akin to assault.

And I agree it was juvenile behavior.  But it was not a sex crime.  If it is, then if they had slapped a boy’s butt, that would be a gay sex crime, right? 

Someone arrest every baseball player in the country.

Does that mean the boys deserve ten years in jail? Probably not. A heavy suspension probably would have been a more fitting punishment. But certainly, if I ran through my office slapping the behinds of female co-workers, I’d keep my job for about thirty seconds after I did so, and I’d probably face similar charges. While this may be an overreaction, it isn’t so wildly outside the realm of reality as the conservatives would claim.

You are also an adult, not an adolescent boy.  You are holding kids to adult standard…or maybe yourself to a kids standard, it’s hard to tell.

His colleague at Shakespeare’s sister, Kathy, joined in the fun, and went one step further:  Its not just male harassment, it’s white privilege too:

 Slapping Girls’ Butts, and the “Bright Futures” of Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison

I read Jeff’s post this morning about the sex offender charges being brought against two middle-schoolers in Oregon with great interest, since I had not heard or read about the case before. And I share Jeff’s outrage at the (all too typical) trivialization on the right of what Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison did.

I just want to point out a remark made by the boys’ attorney that was quoted in the news article to which Jeff linked:

The boys’ families and lawyers said even sentencing them to probation would turn admittedly inappropriate but not uncommon juvenile rowdiness into a crime. If they are convicted of any of the misdemeanor charges against them, they would have to register as sex offenders.

“It’s devastating,” said Mark Lawrence, Cory Mashburn’s lawyer. “To be a registered sex offender is to be designated as the most loathed in our society. These are young boys with bright futures, and the brightness of those futures would be over.”

This, it seems to me, is at the heart of what’s going on here. The words stopped me in my tracks, because they are almost identical to the kinds of remarks made by defense attorneys and local residents in the 1989 Glen Ridge rape case. Glen Ridge is a small, very wealthy almost all-white town in New Jersey. It’s also the next town over from where I live now. At the time that the gang rape took place, I lived on a one-block street in Montclair that was partly in Glen Ridge.

Get it?  It’s a comparison to gang rape.

Take another look at the words that came out of that defense attorney’s mouth in the Oregon case: “To be a registered sex offender is to be designated as the most loathed in our society. These are young boys with bright futures, and the brightness of those futures would be over.” Those two sentences fairly drip with subtext. “These are boys with bright futures.” Why? Because they are white and upper-middle-class, presumably. If they were black, if they were from working-class or poor families, would their defense attorney be saying they had “bright futures” that entitled them to do whatever they wanted to girls and get away with it?

It’s astonishing, isn’t it? Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison have automatic and unquestionable “bright futures,” by virtue of their whiteness and socioeconomic status, the protection of which trumps their female classmates’ right not to have their body parts touched, fondled, and slapped.

Glen Ridge was a horrible crime.  But so what?

Get a grip people, this is such a lowball example of a sex crime, all you are doing is devaluing the actual crimes, over-sensitizing people to normal behavior and generally making a mockery of childhood.

Boys at that age are immature.  They grow out of it. 

Deal with it on those terms.

Do they deserve punishment?  Absolutely.  Let no one say I want themy relieved of the responsibility of being idiots and the consequences that should bring.

But I doubt that tarring and feathering them is appropriate.  I want some common sense here.

But liberals love to make crimes out of nothing to prove that we are all depraved and they can save us by making us more aware and more sensitive.

What’s happening in the schools is proof of that concept.

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