So Much for William Saletan's Future Career as a Babysitter!: Washington Post Company Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch (Just When You Think It Can't Get Any Worse Department)
Just when you think it cannot get any worse, it does. No excuse. No excuse for anything in the company to survive. Shut it down now. People who take Stanley Kaplan courses to prep for tests are guilty of great moral fault, as are all others who fund and enable this load of slime.
William Saletan on Roman Polanski's drugging and raping thirteen year olds:
Human Nature : The Polanski Affair: The average age of menarche... has fallen two to four months per decade, depending on the country.... It's quite plausible that the 13-year-old girl Polanski had sex with in the late 1970s was, to some degree, sexually mature. Having sex at 13 is a bad idea. But if you're pubescent, it might be, in part, your bad idea.... A guy who goes after a womanly body that happens to be 13 years old is failing to regulate a natural attraction. That doesn't excuse him. But it does justify treating him differently.... There's a difference between pedophilia and taking advantage of somebody who's old enough to be interested in sex but too young to judge the physical and emotional risks of messing around. If the legal officers and moral critics of the 1970s saw that distinction more clearly than we do, the shame is ours.
No, Mr. Saletan, the shame is yours. And the shame is that of all the editors and executives of the Washington Post Company.
Patterico has a measured response:
Patterico’s Pontifications: Saletan: Polanski Just Made A “Spontaneous” Error of “Judgment” in Going After a “Womanly Body” That Happened to Be 13 Years Old: If Saletan had just studied up on the case a little bit before writing about it for a national publication, he might have avoid making several foolish remarks.... We went through this when Whoopi Goldberg claimed that Polanski’s offense wasn’t “rape rape” — but I guess Saletan didn’t get the message. Fine; we’ll repeat it. Here again are excerpts from the girl’s grand jury testimony:
A. I was going, “No, I think I better go home,” because I was afraid. So I just went and I sat down on the couch.
Q. What were you afraid of?
A. Him.
. . . .
Q. What happened then?
A. He reached over and he kissed me. And I was telling him, “No,” you know, “keep away.”
But I was kind of afraid of him because there was no one else there.
. . . .
Q. What did he do when he placed his mouth on your vagina?
A. He was just like licking and I don’t know. I was ready to cry. I was kind of — I was going, “No. Come on. Stop it.” But I was afraid.
. . . .
Q. What happened after that?
A. He started to have intercourse with me.
Q. What do you mean by intercourse?
A. He placed his penis in my vagina.
Q. What did you say, if anything, before he did that?
A. I was mostly just on and off saying, “No, stop.”
But I wasn’t fighting really because I, you know, there was no one else there and I had no place to go.
And then he rapes her anally and ejaculates in her anus. As for whether this was some kind of spontaneous, isolated, single instance of bad judgment by a non-pedophile, let’s remember that this is the man who said in 1979:
If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!...
Saletan says:
A guy who goes after a womanly body that happens to be 13 years old is failing to regulate a natural attraction. That doesn’t excuse him. But it does justify treating him differently...
Uh, except that here is a set of pictures of the “womanly body”.... Saletan’s piece makes for a nice philosophical discussion of how various factors might have relevance to another case. But as applied to this case, it’s a joke.
UPDATE: Saletan digs in here:
If you have the goods to convict a man of rape, prosecute him for rape. Don’t invite him to plead guilty to sex with a teenager. That kind of plea deal, coupled with a stiff jail sentence, just furthers the conflation of sexual assault defined by force with sexual assault defined by age.
Not one word about the way that Polanski’s lawyers planned to drag the victim through the mud in international media — which is, of course, the reason the plea went down the way it did.
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
UPDATE: Mark Kleiman:
Saletan on Polanski: “Failing to regulate a natural attraction”: The only premise that would fill in Saletan’s argument is that it’s not that bad for a 13-year-old girl to be molested by a 40-year-old man. I suppose Saletan is entitled to his opinion on that point. But his opinion isn’t the law.... Saletan thinks that the 1970s, when a judge might have cut someone like Polanski some slack, were simply capable of finer moral distinctions than we Puritanical moderns can handle. Well, I suppose that’s one way to think about it. Maybe so. Whatever distinction Saletan thinks he’s making is certainly too subtle for me.
