The Steubenville rape case and other ugliness

How tragic: Two teens have been sentenced to prison for raping a fellow student, which became notorious when students began tweeting and texting about it (some samples here and here—but even if you don’t have trigger issues, it’s pretty disgusting). The tragedy, according to CNN, is that two young men and their families have their promising lives blighted by this tragic event (apparently CNN’s reporters think the impulse to rape is something that strikes you from the heavens, like Jove’s thunderbolt, and can’t be controlled). Raw Story covers CNN’s hand-wringing too.
For the record, this isn’t that startling—okay, CNN’s coverage, but not the local reaction. There’s a long history of small-town rape cases where the community rallies around the accused, worries about how awful this is for the and demands to know what the slut was doing having sex/getting drunk/wearing something less revealing than a burkha. That’s not meant as an excuse for the Steubenville response—but nobody should imagine it’s just one small town with this problem.
•Tom Tomorrow sums up the Republican war on women. And at the national level, Rand Paul tries to ban abortions nationwide. My thoughts on the unpleasant consequences of granting fetuses full human rights are here.
•You may have heard about the Iowa dentist who fired his assistant on the grounds she was too sexy and he might not be able to stay faithful to his wife (she wasn’t initiating anything—both she and he are clear on that). Some people (including the state Supreme Court) think that was the moral thing to do.