I really haven’t felt like weighing in on the Don Imus flap. Fortunately, Ann does it for me. (By the way, about a year ago she wrote a piece about the now-absolved Duke lacrosse players that remains a must-read for this important, oft-overlooked point:
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Yes, of course no one “deserves” to die for a mistake. Or to be raped or falsely accused of rape for a mistake. I have always been unabashedly anti-murder, anti-rape and anti-false accusation — and I don’t care who knows about it! -But these statements would roll off the tongue more easily in a world that so much as tacitly acknowledged that all these messy turns of fate followed behavior that your mother could have told you was tacky.
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Yes, of course no one “deserves” to die for a mistake. Or to be raped or falsely accused of rape for a mistake. I have always been unabashedly anti-murder, anti-rape and anti-false accusation — and I don’t care who knows about it! -But these statements would roll off the tongue more easily in a world that so much as tacitly acknowledged that all these messy turns of fate followed behavior that your mother could have told you was tacky.
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Not very long ago, all the precursor behavior in these cases would have been recognized as vulgar — whether or not anyone ended up dead, raped or falsely accused of rape. But in a nation of people in constant terror of being perceived as “judgmental,” I’m not sure most people do recognize that anymore.
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It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that girls shouldn’t be bar-hopping alone or taking their clothes off in front of strangers, and that young men shouldn’t be hiring strippers. But we live in a world of Bill Clinton, Paris Hilton, Howard Stern, Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman,” Democratic fund-raisers at the Playboy Mansion and tax deductions for entertaining clients at strip clubs.
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This is an age in which the expression “girls gone wild” is becoming a redundancy. So even as the bodies pile up, I don’t think the message about integrity is getting through.
Conservative Standards 