Undermining Progress

Weinstein’s arguments seem to parallel those who oppose the distribution of birth control aids to at risk youth—claiming that they would encourage promiscuity or that they aren’t 100% foolproof. It wasn’t a convincing argument against birth control, it isn’t any more convincing about HIV/AIDS. Life has very few solutions that are foolproof, in virtually every arena of life if someone offers a remedy that is 99% effective we’d all take it.

There seems no rational reason why a “non-profit leader” who is ostensibly concerned about AIDS, should have argued against the new policy and seemingly delayed it—yet there it was in today’s paper. Hard to believe.

The “>The New York Times offered another example of “neutral” experts raising issues and “concerns” that defy logic.

Both papers reported on an experiment conducted by researchers on three Canadian college campuses with female freshmen that “substantially lowered their risk of being sexually assaulted, a rare success against a problem that has been resistant to many prevention efforts.”

The “>editorial accompanying the research in the New England Journal by an official of the Center for Disease Control took a similar, rather bizarre line. Katherine Basile asserts that the study’s “primary weakness is that it places the onus for prevention on the potential victim, possibly obscuring the responsibility of perpetrators and others.”

If my kids took karate or judo classes to learn self-defense it was not to exonerate or otherwise minimize the cruelty, criminality, or culpability of bullies or other assaulters; it was a way for them to protect themselves. Similarly, the transparent conclusion of the Canadian study is that providing young women with more tools than they might otherwise have can be very helpful in fending off predators.

Why those who are concerned about rape and sexual assault would construe that finding as somehow taking predators off the hook is hard to fathom. Are they afraid that acknowledging that some action by potential victims in some cases might reduce rapes will undermine public abhorrence of the crime or our interest in punishing perpetrators? Would they prefer that these findings never have been made? Would yong women then be better off?

There is a climate of political correctness that non-profit leaders often promote because of their aura of concern about issues, ideas and principles—as opposed to dollars. But they can be as wrong-headed and dangerous as if they were lusting after bottom line profits to the exclusion of all other concerns or morality.

Between fighting AIDS in LA and reducing campus sexual assaults, the opposition is jaw dropping. A bit like what Alice observed in Wonderland,

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn't be, and what it wouldn't be, it would. You see? 

Got it? Alice makes about as much sense as some of our “experts.”