Wall Street Journal Scribe: Drunk Women ‘Guilty Of Sexually Assaulting’ Own Rapists

Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto is the target of a petition to get him fired after a column yesterday in which he said that women who are raped while intoxicated are “guilty of sexually assaulting” the men who raped them.

The petition on Change.org had gathered 1,300 signatures as of 2:30 pm Eastern time Tuesday.

Taranto, a conservative columnist who often opines for the Wall Street Journal about rape and sexual issues, earlier came under criticism for a Tweet he posted following the July 2012 Aurora, Colorado, movie theater massacre in which he questioned whether three young women whose boyfriends were killed shielding them from gunfire were “worthy of the sacrifice.”

The writer has also referred to the crisis of sexual assault in the military as a “political panic” and “an effort criminalize male sexuality,” comments contained in the Wall Street Journal Live video below.

He also refers to himself by a self-given nickname, “Tarantosaurus Sex.”

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal column, “Drunkeness and Double Standards,” which was highlighted by the Journal as a “Best of the Web” selection, Taranto approvingly quotes the organization Foundation For Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) as saying, in one of its publications, “if both parties are intoxicated during sex, they are both technically guilty of sexually assaulting each other.”

Taranto in the Wall Street Journal piece, compares alcohol-involved rape to “two drunk drivers in a collision,” a circumstance in which neither party can be held more at fault than the other.

“But when two drunken college students ‘collide,’ the male one is almost always presumed to be at fault,” writes “Tarantosuarus Sex.” “His diminished capacity owing to alcohol is not a mitigating factor, but her diminished capacity is an aggravating factor for him.”

In the unusual cases where two drunk drivers just happen to collide, it seems unlikely that in most cases, one of the two deliberately initiated the crash. A 2001 study by the National Institute of Health showed that rape does not happen simply because one or both parties happen to be intoxicated. In fact, rape is often premeditated.

The prospective rapist who intends to commit a sexual assault then uses alcohol as a means to release his inhibitions against carrying out the crime, and to rationalize having committed rape after the fact — the exact rationalization Taranto says absolves a rapist from sole responsibility for his actions.

As one expert quoted in a USA Today story on drugs, alcohol and rape put it last October, “People don’t get raped because they have been drinking. People get raped because there is a perpetrator there — someone who wants to take advantage of them.”

The NIH study found that, regardless of alcohol use, men who commit rape tend to share certain characteristics. For example, men who characterize themselves as heavy drinkers are more likely to commit rape than men who do not consume alcohol “heavily,” the study also said.

None of the findings in the NIH study would appear to support Taranto’s Wall Street Journal thesis that drunkenness in and of itself places responsibility for rape on the victim equally with the rapist, nor the idea he endorses that intoxicated rape victims are guilty of sexually assaulting their attackers.