Or yet another narrative to feed America’s bottomless appetite for self-righteous symbolism? Gregory Kane, Washington Examiner:
Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi wasn’t “bullied” to death, but that hasn’t stopped America’s victimhood brigade from saying so.
Let me be clear: The events that led Clementi to leap off the George Washington Bridge to his death were absolutely despicable. He had a sexual encounter in his dorm room with another man. His roommate, Dharun Ravi, allegedly set up a webcam of the encounter and streamed it over the Internet. Ravi was allegedly in a room with another student, Molly Wei, watching the encounter.
Ravi and Wei have been charged with invasion of privacy. If they’re guilty, they absolutely should be. But there has been talk of charging them with a “hate crime,” although there hasn’t been the slightest hint of anti-gay animus on their part in the scores of news stories about Clementi’s death.
In their attempt to feed their never-satisfied victimhood maw, America’s victimhood brigade has made Clementi the poster boy for a nationwide attempt to root out anti-gay bullying. Such bullying should be stamped out, but that’s not what happened in the Clementi case.
Although a letter writer to a Newark Star-Ledger blog said that the Clementi case was a “clear case of bullying,” it was a story on the Web site www.nj.com that got it right. What happened to Clementi was “a college prank gone terribly wrong.”
And what led to such a prank, to the notion that Clementi had no privacy rights anyone was bound to respect? It wasn’t gay bashing or intolerance of gays; it was a society that has, over the years, continued to devalue not only privacy, but also every decent value this country ever had.
Unless and until any proof surfaces that the intent of Ravi and Wei was to debase a homosexual for the express purpose of debasing homosexuality as an act, there is absolutely nothing evidentiary to suggest a “hate crime” was committed. Instead, the appearance of a “hate crime” is heightened by the societal demarcation of homosexuals as a protected group coupled with the (for now) incidental inclusion of Tyler Clementi in said protected group.
Not every crime in which the victim is part of protected group is a hate crime — no matter how forcefully politically motivated identity groups claim otherwise. And that’s because, eg., not all bullying of gays is “gay bullying” in the sense that a hate crime suggests.
Prosecuting the offenders in this case for a hate crime would be — in the absence of any proof that hatred of gays played a role in their actions — akin to allowing the meaning of their actions to be determined by an interpretive community whose own agenda becomes the determining factor in the “meaning” of the act.
And I fear the self-righteous triumph of acting on behalf of strong social “symbolism” may convince certain prosecutors (and jurors) that the individuals involved are less important than the “message” we are supposed to take away from such a manufactured narrative.
Let’s keep a close eye on this one, I say.
Clementi is a dick for what he did to his family I think and also his friends and everyone who liked him and you shouldn’t kill yourself precipitously it’s something you should give a lot of thought to especially when you’re just a freshman in college.
precipitously
Interesting choice of adverb for a guy what jumped to his death.
I also agree that if the guy were in bed with a chick, they’d have streamed the video all the same.
Because this is what happens when you decide that boundaries don’t matter: boundaries stop mattering.
Mitch Albom was demanding twenty years for the two bullies. I nearly drove off the road.
or no thought at all preferably.
The perpetrators were minorities and the victim was white. Only the gay part makes it a “hate crime” in spite of the fact that watching gay sex isn’t all that high on the to do list of most hateful homophobes. Unless they’re hot lesbians, anyway.
I wonder if there was something particularly shameful about the dude he got caught hooking up with.
If the kid had thrown himself off a bridge for being filmed doing a fat chick, what sort of conversation would we be having now? Would Jenny Craig be out there insisting that this was a hate crime? Would Weight Watchers be spitting on his grave because his actions reinforced that having sex with fat chicks is “shameful?” Would Spinal Tap play at his wake?
Weight Watchers is not exactly loved by the “fat acceptance” or whatever those groups call themselves.
hah here is the fat acceptance magazine
the new one has an article about a fat snowboarding hoochie and another article what looks at genetically modified foozles
I will just annoyingly chime in that there should be no “hate crime” legislation in any case. It gets to be too much about getting into someone else’s head, and I don’t see the end of it.
Agreed.
Maybe it was a fat dude.
Hate crime? So it’s not enough that they invaded his privacy? The cynical use of a tragedy by the champions of victimhood.
There wasn’t all that much privacy in freshman dorms even back inna day. For Tyler to not expect something of this sort, to actually predict that something he was shamed to death of would not become an immediate common-knowledge ‘item’, speaks to his long-term battle with depression and…suicidal thoughts.
If not this trigger, then likely another would’ve set him loose.
The criminal charge(s) will go away rather easily. The civil suit is going to be a fucking show.
My freshman dorm was a zoo. There was no privacy, and that was thirty years ago. The kid was unstable, and as serr8d mentioned, some other trigger would have sent him off a bridge sooner or later.
Likely not even the gay angle, but instead ashamed of the exposure of his furious one-inch.
Micro penis victimhood!
WTF is “lol gaysex?”
It may be enough that merely picking a victim based on a protected classification would qualify.
If it doesn’t, then we can count on the grievance mongers to get NJ to change the statutes so that it does. And if it does, then we can count on the grievance mongers to get every other state to change the statutes to match.
Either way, the thought police are here. I just wish there was a group out there dedicated to rolling back this sort of government over-reach…
WTF is “lol gaysex?”
It’s meya getting the strap-on from Rachel Madcow.
Meya is in one of its manic phases, again.
And here I thought …. Obvious lie. Try again. Or not.
I loathed when some liberal friends I know trotted out their “homophobia” hobbyhorse on this one. so lame. yeah, I know, let’s ramp up this tragedy to the level of full out spectacle! that’s just great.
and I disagree with “And what led to such a prank, to the notion that Clementi had no privacy rights anyone was bound to respect? It wasn’t gay bashing or intolerance of gays; it was a society that has, over the years, continued to devalue not only privacy, but also every decent value this country ever had.” because that’s just a bunch of baloney, and no more or less a hobbyhorse than the “homophobia” charge. if anything, the personal and hand held technology of our time forces us to be more mindful and observant of what we keep and consider private. and yeah, college dorm room. . .duh.
Adam, I think you’re missing the point a bit on devaluation of privacy. It’s not that most people have come to value their own privacy any less; it’s that they’ve been conditioned to treat the private lives of others as an entertainment genre.
Oh, and you are all obviously HOHOPHOBES and are prolly secretly in the closet hoping someone with a wide stance will approach you because you love the cock.
Are hohophobes afraid of twinkies?
No, hohophobes love the Ding Dong
That was a pretty amusing typo, no?
Might as well do it on the quad or the Ratskeller bathroom floor. A freshmen college dorm room is no place to expect privacy. The only people to knock on my door were the campus police, everyone else just walked right in.
Wouldn’t a hohophobe be racist as well? Because of the chocolate.
All I know is, hohohophobes be gettin’ coal in they stocking this year.
yes, Benedick, and I think we’ve also become conditioned at thwarting attempts at making our private lives entertainment. except, you know, on the Intertubes. JEFF I AM AT YOUR MERCY
a hohophobe has an irrational fear of oliverwillis.
just cause the roommate may or may not have committed a hate crime doesn’t mean he doesn’t get all As this semester, right?
It’s like the law I think.
Or rather, a fear of being eaten by an oliverwillis.
Who would have ever thought that hate crimes would expand so far as to become a parody of entire concept of hate crimes.
Look, my old college roommate got more than his share of tail, and I spent a lot of time being conveniently somewhere else. I’ll admit to mouthing off a fair bit about what I thought of my Lothario roommate and his parade of hoochie sorority girls. Still, I must insist that there’s a wide gulf between blowing off steam at the student union versus installing a camera in my room so that I could show everyone at the union just what I was talking about.
Anyone decides to secretly record what me or mine do in our bedrooms, and it isn’t the people in front of the camera what are gonna fall off a bridge.
All right — ten points for happyfeet. That was effin’ funny.
Next thing you know we’ll have an openly gay POTUS.
Not that there’s …
We go-on-living peoples tend to view the self-made dead ones fairly harshly, more or less as a matter of course. The mysteries taught on this stuff are so old they’ve become mysteries of mysteries almost, nearly unknown if vaguely recalled stories about the dead and the happenings to them. But isn’t there something about the self-made dead ones lurking in the stories of the fetal snuffers of their own fetuses, at least to the extent that fetuses are supposed to be a means to carry oneself on into another life to live? It’s cloudy to be sure . . . still . . . I think I detect a linkage in there somewhere.
I hope no one secretly takes video of me in a compromising position and uses it to humiliate me in front of the whole world.
That would suck.
According to the HillBuzz guys, we already do.
Orwell. Really, how far are we from when the “hate” itself is the crime?
Except the Two-Minute Hate, of course. What is not prohibited is mandatory.
Have patience! We’re almost there.
Yay!
I am baffled by this. Two clueless, but tech-savvy and selfish 18-year olds did something without thinking of the repurcussions which is the organic state of affairs for people that age.
There was a seemingly decent but absolutely fragile-piano wire thin–kid who was uncloseted enough to have sexual contact in his dorm room and to shuffle his roommate out of the room so he could get his groove on but when it was broadcast he broadcast his intentions to kill himself and then did it.
A freshman dorm is ground zero for lack of privacy. The stoners are sussed out pretty quickly; so are the girls who slip out of their bras at a moments notice, as is the guy who has the fake driver’s license and can get cases of beer on wednesday and friday.
People study physics and calculus, light farts and give head with about four feet of separation, less in many cases. My best friend would role in from the bars, I’d be asleep in the bed next to his, he’d have sex with his gf and then she would discuss it in the morning. With me.
It’s insane, debasing, liberating, funny, stupid and tragic. Google and a dozen other brilliant companies were hatched in dorm rooms. So was the stupid prank that an RA should have handled.
This is a lot of things. Hate crime isn’t one of them.
> Not every crime in which the victim is part of protected group is a hate crime…
And even if it is, why is hate a worse motive than greed, lust, envy, anger? I would love to see these creeps sent to jail because they hounded a kid and humiliated him to the point where he wanted to die. Whether they did it out of hatred towards homosexuals, or hatred for the guy personally, or for kicks is just not relevant. IMHO.
oh gaga me with a fake nose/dildo
here is a musics about teen suicide kinda
Jebus, mcgruder, I was stuck in a barracks for part of age 18/19… when I got back to college I was in a residence hall with very seerious engineering types.
Of course, two years later I was living in the rugby team’s unofficial house. That was…interesting.
Oh yeah, I can across a song I thought you’d like, ‘feets. Btw, I’ve listened to that live CocoRosie an embarrassing number of times now.
Stories, Col. Give us stories. You can pretend they happened to other people to protect your innocence. I might have mentioned this at some point but the rugby guys at my school were insane people. Like, I think they were literally insane.
I came across
oh hey bh I just heard that on the radio here maybe last week in the car but just once and yeah I thought it was very arresting and I liked it a lot but they didn’t say who it was… it was on the station what mostly just plays taio cruz
thank you and bookmarked.
i’m all for hippie punching
So, who has stepped forward to proclaim Clementi to be exclusively gay? Suddenly a couple of brief college episodes render one perpetually homo? You mean to tell me there aren’t young guys who may think of themselves as straight, otherwise live as straight, yet who will actually fuck anyone not at room temperature?
Maybe the reason he killed himself is that he chose to live as pseudo straight, but also didn’t mind a little home team action on the down low. In which case he died, not for being a gay man, but for being a man who wanted to keep his own flavor of sexuality private and instead was betrayed by the people he trusted.
Maybe he was confused and flat out didn’t know what he was, but would have appreciated a little more time to figure it out without input from the entire world wide web.
I don’t see any evidence of hatred. What I see is indifference to the humanity of an individual. You have to care in order to hate. These people flat didn’t give a shit, and although the law says otherwise, to me that is much worse.
mcgruder, we had an asshole on our floor, so we waited until the first good snowfall when he was home for the weekend and packed his dorm room with snow. Floor to ceiling. And cut off the heat to the room and left the windows open. When he got back Sunday, it took him and the staff about 6 hours to clear it all out.
A buddy of mine had a roommate at Georgia Tech who was in the physics program. Kid next door wouldn’t turn down the stereo, so roommate swiped the Xray source for the Xray laser from the physics lab one weekend and irradiated the stereo and the rest of the room until the stereo quit working.
Dorm life can teach all kinds of lessons on interpersonal dynamics…..
That point where “hate crime” means “anything which causes any kind of harm to a fellow what loves him some cock” just got that bit closer.
as my mom unit always stressed/ as i left the dwelling
“do u have ur hippy punching gloves on?”..
and as i gave her a thumbs up with my ‘mittens of justice’ we just had this knowing look..
and as she strapped my “:helmet of decency” on my head..- i was pre-teen hippie nightmare–
oh/ and mom said meat for dinner/ which made me more pissed at hippies-
I have a very strong attachment to my own cock, does that make me protected?
LtC John, SDN, New Router:
Yup. I guess my meta point is that there is a certain collateral and psychic damage we all have to take when we encounter group living. 95% of us, per LTC John and SDN, get some laughs and some bruises and chalk it up to life. We did voluntarily put ourselves in a dorm, or a barracks and we learn to deal with the bong hitter two doors down, your roommate who screws the hoops team, the prissy preppy and the drunk.
For a small minority, there is just intense dislocation. Youre secure enough to have gay sexual contact a few times in your dorm room but not to have it broadcast to people?
I won’t pretend to have any idea how the pride/shame dynamic of gay life goes to war in a young kid’s soul. It has to be an utter bitch.
This tragic Clemenyi figure, I posit, was going thru this dislocation and had some of the gay tumult going on in him. Add to it the surpassing joys of being 18 and trying to figure out lie and how to live it.
Oil and rags become flesh and bone and this selfish prankish stupidity was the heat.
It just wasn’t Matthew Sheppard part two.
Any of you heard about this privacy debacle? I don’t imagine a suicide or two over this would generate the same sort of reactions from the leftroaches.
Congress is considering legislation known as the Safe Schools Improvement Act which defines bullying as conduct that creates a reasonable fear of physical harm based on race, color, national origin, disability, religion or sexual orientation.
Ugh. So many places to start, alas…
But try—try as if someone’s life depended on it. Imagine saying I really wish my son turns out to be gay. Imagine hoping that your 2-year-old daughter grows up to be transgendered. Imagine not assuming the gender of your child’s future prom date or spouse; imagine keeping that space blank or occupied by boys and girls of all types. Imagine petitioning your local board of education to hire more gay elementary school teachers.
What if I don’t want to? What if tolerance is all I feel obligated to give? What if I’d rather not have to pretend that a future gay son and his euphemism paying an obliging lezzie or a Girl-In-Trouble for the fruit of her womb is exactly what I wanted in a grandchild? Do I get a say in my own opinion?
There was a time when the gay-rights movement said to society, reasonably enough, “stop whipping us.” And we obliged. Now they say “Pretend we’re exactly the same.” I think I can be forgiven for wondering how soon comes the day when I’m obliged to head down to the docks and blow a sailor once a year to prove I’m not a “homophobe”.
“Imagine saying I really wish my son turns out to be gay. ”
Why would anyone wish this? Is homosexuality to be regarded as preferable now?
“What if I don’t want to? ”
Then you probably don’t have to worry about being, as the article describes, a “pithy example of the limits of liberal tolerance.”
“Why would anyone wish this? Is homosexuality to be regarded as preferable now?
The point of the exercise appears to be to point out that there are preferences, and that this can cause problems for kids who fail to be the preferred.
“The point of the exercise appears to be to point out that there are preferences, and that this can cause problems for kids who fail to be the preferred.”
Seems a pretty obvious point. I bet there’s parents that prefer their kids don’t turn out to be drug addicts too.
or journalists
Or progressives…
Mama’s don’t let your babies
grow up to be cowboys
Great country song Lee,
Waylon Jennings has a great country music voice…
“Seems a pretty obvious point. I bet there’s parents that prefer their kids don’t turn out to be drug addicts too.”
Yeah, but the point of the exercise is to drive home the point to people who don’t think they’re the type of asshole that thinks being queer is something wrong.
Not a big one for country myself but I’ve always liked this Jennings song for some reason.
Truthfully, I’m not a country music afficianado either bh,
But have been exposed to it over the years by friends and relatives. Exceptions? Bluegrass-the country music version of speed-metal, a band from the 1930’s: Bob Wills and the Texas playboys( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvX8MijgeW8 ), and Junior Brown ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRMNeoaosQw or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_wLVCLPx0M )
allison kraus Choctaw Hayride
was darwin an asshole?
“but the point of the exercise is to drive home the point to people ”
Ah, I see(I’m totally lying).
“who don’t think they’re the type of asshole ”
Everyone?
“that thinks being queer is something wrong.”
Well, you have to admit, from a biological standpoint there’s something not right. Did you say queer?
The biology seems to be there just fine. Not seeing how it is “not right.” But I don’t think you were the intended audience.
Yes, let’s bubble wrap the planet so that the Tyler Clementis of the world don’t hurt themselves. Or, let’s imagine that Clementi was one of the many thousands of gay kids that manage to get through life without offing themselves.
It’s an evolutionary dead end.