As I mentioned in passing last month, some men accused of sexual harassment are using Title IX, which forbids gender discrimination in schools receiving federal money, to sue the colleges for discriminating against men. As that sounds absurd, I eventually read a law review paper on the topic by Alexandra Brodsky, author of the excellent Sexual Justice.
As Brodsky and her co-authors explain, the arguments that the men are the true victims run along lines such as “Twelve men and no women have been investigated for sexual assault this semester! Clearly the college is targeting men!” rather than, say, men committing most assaults or the assaults reported to the college all involved men. Or “we were both drunk when we had sex but I, the man, am the only one under investigation” while ignoring that the woman was the only one to file an assault report (this is a real example). This would be bullshit enough but courts that decide the suits have merit are ignoring years of precedent and case law that would have blocked similar claims if the discrimination victims were women or POC. It’s not that startling there’s another variation on blaming the women for getting raped or showering the rapist with sympathy, but it’s still infuriating.
Now, as to the Southern Baptist Convention and its horrendous history of turning a blind eye to abuse, assault and harassment by ministers, church officials and church volunteers. As Rachel Denhollander says at the link, the outside investigation they commissioned is a bigger step than the Catholic Church ever took but the real test is whether they change. Even people who want to see change have debated whether efforts such as a sexual abuse hotline is working. Now SBC’s reform commission is setting up an independent nonprofit to implement reforms (like maintaining a predator database), a proposal that will come up for a vote in June.
However a number of Southern Baptists are ready to move on and focus on other problems like the threat of women preaching. And William Wolfe, a right-winger, Trump official and Christian supremacist, wants to push the SBC to the right. He’s argued that SBC is no worse than large secular organizations as if this was an excuse. I think he’s wrong in terms of the damage church abusers do. I’ve also come to suspect the statistics. I’ve heard others make the same claim and it’s certainly possible, but he doesn’t seem to have any examples to prove his case. Given that one SBC official in the original Houston Chronicle exposé made the same argument about a predator in his church — I suspect Wolfe’s more offering an excuse than a reasoned argument.
To top that, he went on to lie that there never was an SBC abuse crisis, the SBC never covered up anything and in any case a coalition of independent churches has no responsibility for what happens in other churches (and yet somehow women preaching or gay marriage are taken as serious responsibilities). Like his SBC colleague Dusty Deevers, Wolfe hardly makes a good case for Christianity making us more virtuous. His faith comes off much more the poisonous tree that bears no good fruit.
