Many have noted that with feminist numbness to Tara Reade’s sexual assault charges against Joe Biden, #MeToo has become #Who?Me? But whatever one thinks of the presumptive Democrat nominee’s guilt or innocence, there’s an irony here:
When vice president, Strokin’ Joe didn’t just handle women; he also handled the Obama administration’s Title IX policy.
And he made sure that men accused of sexual misconduct on college campuses were essentially considered guilty until proven innocent.
As Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported Wednesday evening:
Before the Obama administration, most colleges handled claims of sexual harassment and sexual assault the way you’d probably want them handled if you were accused of doing something awful. Offenses were narrowly defined as they are in court rather than broadly, and the allegations required had to meet a high burden of proof as they should.
Under Biden’s oversight though, the Obama administration changed everything. They sent a letter to every one of the country’s more than 4,000 colleges and universities with a stern warning. They said that schools would lose all federal funding unless they completely altered the way they treated sexual assault allegations on campus.
Under the Biden rule, the accused were judged on the lowest standard of evidence. They were subjected to kangaroo courts where they could not effectively use legal counsel or contest the accusations against them.
Don’t take Carlson’s word for it. In July 2016, even the left-wing Washington Post (Jeff Bezos’s little vanity project) wrote that “some students and administrators … see the federal involvement as heavy-handed and sometimes unfair” in an article entitled “Biden and Obama rewrite the rulebook on college sexual assaults.”
Last year, Reason called this Biden rewriting “the key domestic initiative of his vice presidency” and wrote that it “was a declaration that the federal government must engage in a far-reaching, top-down intervention in the sexual interactions between young adults, setting new rules aimed at how students must behave and establishing harsh punishments for those who deviate.”
“Biden’s approach to campus sexual assault is part of a pattern,” the site continued. “He identifies an actual problem, engages in inflammatory — and sometimes false — rhetoric about it, then fashions a harsh, overreaching response that sweeps up the harmless and even the innocent.”
“Across the country, if you have kids in college, you know this is true [of Biden’s Title IX perversion],” said Carlson. “Young men found their lives and their careers totally destroyed, not to mention their reputations, by accusations that were sometimes not only untrue, but laughably untrue. In at least one case, a student was expelled from college over an assault, even as police were criminally charging his accuser for filing a false police report in the same case” (video below).
The Washington Post quoted an Obama administration “civil rights” official as saying that on the matter of the much greater risk of innocent students being punished, her office is “constantly in reevaluation over whether what we are doing is right.” But in doing this supposed accuser-accused balancing act, something is forgotten:
It’s not supposed to be a balanced act.
American criminal justice has always been informed by preeminent English jurist William Blackstone’s principle, it is “better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.” Thus has reasonable doubt always been resolved in favor of the accused.
But Biden and his fellow travelers turned this on its head on college campuses in just one area of crime — in a way that targets one group almost exclusively.
Oh, sure, Biden’s Title IX policy technically (and ostensibly) affected all those accused of sexual misconduct equally, regardless of group identity; in practice, though, at issue is almost always a female accuser and a male as the accused.
This reality is tacitly acknowledged, too. For example, the Post quoted Biden as saying of Obama and the “violence against women” issue, that “as his daughters grew, he became more explicitly focused on it.” You don’t hear Biden or anyone else talking about how their sons’ coming of age made them more worried about sexual assault.
Of course, men are far more likely than women to commit sexual assault. Yet it’s also true that women are far more likely than men to level false charges of sexual assault. That’s the point, too: Both transgressions can scar a person and devastate his life.
The irony is that Title IX reads, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex…be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Yet in creating a burden-on-the-accused carve-out for just one area of crime, sexual assault, Biden and his comrades used a provision designed to eliminate sex discrimination in a way ensuring de facto discrimination against one sex: men.
To add perspective, imagine such a standard were applied only to accusations of having leveled false sexual assault charges. Would this carve-out — which would affect women almost exclusively — not be called “sexist” and discriminatory against them?
Don’t ask Joe Biden — or his feminist allies. Relativism-enabled and politics-enabling double standards are their business. Just witness Tara Reade. Because if Biden’s own Title IX policy were applied to him, he’d already be gone.
Speaking of which, politicians are sometimes awarded honorary degrees. Maybe we can make Joe an honorary student — just until he can graduate from the hypocrisy.
Photo: Kameleon007/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
