I am a feminist. I have marched at the barricades, subscribed to Ms. magazine, and knocked on many a door in support of progressive candidates committed to women's rights. Until a month ago, I would have expressed unqualified support for Title IX and for the Violence Against Women Act.I have pointed out for years that "women's rights" are totally incompatible with the rights that are the foundation of Western civilization: the right to life, the right to liberty, the right to property, and the rule of law. Unfortunately, most women are absolutely unwilling to consider the matter rationally until a man they love is caught up in the chaotic legal maelstrom created by the so-called rights of women.
But that was before my son, a senior at a small liberal-arts college in New England, was charged—by an ex-girlfriend—with alleged acts of "nonconsensual sex" that supposedly occurred during the course of their relationship a few years earlier.
What followed was a nightmare—a fall through Alice's looking-glass into a world that I could not possibly have believed existed, least of all behind the ivy-covered walls thought to protect an ostensible dedication to enlightenment and intellectual betterment....
I fear that in the current climate the goal of "women's rights," with the compliance of politically motivated government policy and the tacit complicity of college administrators, runs the risk of grounding our most cherished institutions in a veritable snake pit of injustice—not unlike the very injustices the movement itself has for so long sought to correct. Unbridled feminist orthodoxy is no more the answer than are attitudes and policies that victimize the victim.
I feel sorry for the son. But it would be no more than his mother deserves if he was kicked out of school, forced to register as a sex offender, and rendered unemployable by the very regime she worked so hard to impose.
