Best editorial I saw about Randy Voller’s pile of BS about rape

Date: Wed, 8 May 2013 14:34:12 +0000
From: Whatzup
Subject: Best editorial I saw about Randy Voller’s pile of BS

From Jezebel at http://jezebel.com/n-c-democratic-chairman-compares-gop-efforts-to-rape-492631705 , I found some of the best feedback on Randy Voller’s crude and socially unacceptable rape comment

There are so many ways to describe something unpleasant happening that don’t involve alluding to sexual assault that one might think politicians, in their ongoing effort to ingratiate themselves to the voting public, would just leave the word “rape” out of their vocabulary when they’re not, you know, talking about actual rape. Nope! Dammit, elected officials have to stir the people up, and the best way to do that is by using the most viscerally figurative language possible.

North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Randy Voller resorted to such language when he addressed a room full of people at, of all places, the Democratic Women of Guilford County’s spring banquet Thursday.

In the News-Record’s follow-up with Voller, he said that, like the rest of his speech, the comment about rape was made “off the cuff” and he wouldn’t comment on whether or not it was appropriate. He did, however, offer a bizarre justification when the News-Record mentioned that, “given crime statistics and the likelihood that many rapes go unreported,” there might very well have been a woman in attendance at Voller’s speech who’d been sexually assaulted. Instead of simply saying, “Gee, hadn’t considered that. I AM SORRY,” he ventured into MRA territory:

“I don’t know that. Women and men are both victims of abusive power and violence. I personally could have been raped.”

Men and women certainly can both be victims of abusive power and violence, but why does Voller have to wade into hypotheticals here at all? Trying to diffuse a controversial word choice by suggesting that he “could have been raped” is bullshit, and it’s a guaranteed way to attract way more negative criticism to what may have, in truth, been a moment of rhetorical carelessness.