Stigmatizing sexual assault
Paul McCarthy may want to reconsider any future glib remarks about rape and anal sex as sports metaphors for a moment before submitting them for print next time. In the Sept. 11 “Sports Sermon,” McCarthy wrote that “[t]he Eagles, well, they got bent over worse than a Kobe Bryant blind date in Colorado.” McCarthy may want to reconsider whether it is appropriate to make an off-handed comment about a violent sexual assault as something both laughable and degrading, not to the aggressor but to the victim, before you throw it into a column. He may want to reconsider whether he wants to stigmatize anal sex, and implicitly homosexuality, before you use it to signify humiliating embarrassment in the realm of sports.
Or maybe McCarthy doesn’t want to reconsider. Maybe he wants to perpetuate the language of sexual aggression as a proxy for masculinity and maybe he’s unconcerned with how the pervasiveness of such language affects women. Maybe he wants to equate homosexuality with failure, with an inability to succeed in the realm of what is traditionally “masculine.”
Avery Pardee (CAS ‘04)
No critique left behind
I was disappointed to see Dave Stroup’s column on vouchers (“Vouching for D.C.,”News, Sept. 18) that amounted not only to a thinly veiled attack on school choice but also did not report the facts of the proposed choice plan for D.C. schools accurately.
A school choice program for the District would not result in “Every school left behind,” as Stroup likes to suggest.? It is important to note that the $13 million proposed appropriation for vouchers would not reduce the amount of funding received by the already over-budgeted D.C. school system. ?As is frequently noted, D.C. schools have the third-highest per-student funding level in the nation, yet students routinely post the lowest average test scores nationwide.? The poor education offered by public schools in the District clearly cannot be remedied by the method seemingly preferred by Democrats: simply throwing more money at the problem until it goes away.
Stroup’s most offensive comment by far is the suggestion that a choice program would make “the District a guinea pig for programs promoted by the far right.”? I refer to the example of the Milwaukee Public School system, where parents have been able to send their children to private schools using the choice program since 1990.? The vouchers program afforded me the opportunity to escape from Milwaukee’s failing urban high schools and attend a Catholic secondary school where a full 10 percent of the student body received vouchers.?
Blue-collar Milwaukee, with its history of socialist mayors, can hardly be described as a bastion of the far right.?Choice would not make the District a “guinea pig”; vouchers have already been means-tested across the country to great success.
In the words of Washington Post columnist George Will, “It is a pity that ‘pro-choice’ Democrats do not remain pro-choice when poor children make it past birth and reach school age.”
Alex Andrus (CAS ‘06)
