Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Rape? Doubt it.

Offbeat, yet on the issues affecting today's world.
A brief commentary by Justin L. Yarbrough

WARNING: If you can't handle someone calling it exactly like they see it, don't read on.


After much consideration, I’ve decided to chime in on the whole Duke men’s Lacrosse team rape scandal at the risk of looking like your typical 21-year-old guy at the end of this.

I'd like to think of myself as being cut out of a higher-quality moral fabric than most folks. I don’t like the town bicycle type (you know, everybody’s had a ride) but prefer the kind of girl that I can introduce to grandma without her rolling her eyes. A lot of guys don’t think that way though. And that’s a shame. They’re the same guys that make dating hard on the good guys out there by giving all of us a bad name.

I follow a lot of sports. I really don’t follow much lacrosse because there isn’t much of it in Texas to follow, but I’ll watch it whenever it’s on ESPN. I think of it as hockey on grass. In that light, I think of the players as being about the same too.

My hometown, Beaumont, is the home of a minor-league hockey franchise, the Texas Wildcatters of the ECHL. Being a minor-league team, many of the players are no more than two or three years out of college when they come here to play.. A lot of them take advantage of their “minor celebrity” status that, for some reason, attracts a lot of the aforementioned “town bicycle” types. I don’t think that the players would ever actually cross the line and rape someone though. They’re, for the most part, good guys.

With all that said, I'm not surprised at all that they have parties with strippers and the like going on. I have, though, thought from the start that the rape allegations are probably BS and just her way of taking advantage of the situation. I don’t think that these kids would really do it. I mean, really, with a status like that why would they need to? They can find plenty of young, willing participants (for lack of a better word). They don’t need to rape someone.

I'm not saying that I condone that kind of thing going on, because I don't. It goes against my morals. But at the same time I'm not going to assume that because they do that they're capable of raping someone. Rape is on a totally different level than having a party with strippers or consensual sex with a woman that would be considered “easy.” If they did actually rape the woman, then throw them in jail and toss the key. I just don’t think that they did it.

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