New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg agrees with NBC News: The key takeaway from the Loudoun County, Virginia, school sexual abuse scandal is that conservatives are bad.
By now, you probably know the most important details of the story. A teenage girl was beaten and forcibly sodomized in a school bathroom on May 28 by a skirt-wearing 15-year-old male. Loudoun school officials, who now admit they were aware of the assault, initially tried to cover it up, going so far as to deny at a June 22 board hearing there have been any assaults in school bathrooms in the district.
That hearing, by the way, was the one in which administrators debated a policy to expand protections to transgender students, including allowing them to use the bathroom that corresponds to their preferred gender. The measure passed in August. In other words, school officials knowingly lied about a teenage girl’s rape because they knew it would likely torpedo their efforts to pass a proposed transgender policy.
They covered up a rape for the sake of “progress.”
A Virginia judge this week found the 15-year-old male assailant guilty of that rape. But this predator still faces trial for a second sexual assault he allegedly committed at another school in October, after he was quietly shuffled there after the first rape.
Goldberg concedes most of these details, yet she still argues the Right has twisted the scandal into a “culture war fantasy,” one that may end up helping Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin.
Invoking the classic “conservatives seize” trope, Goldberg argues in a column, titled “The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia,” this rape and its implications are merely an illusion through which conservatives are creating a “nationwide moral panic.”
The “big lie,” according to Goldberg, is that transgender policies such as the one Loudoun school officials passed in August enable attacks such as the one suffered by the 15-year-old teenage girl in May.
Perhaps the Right’s concerns regarding transgender bathroom policies are overblown, but these concerns are not the focus of the outrage over the Loudoun scandal. For the Right, the focus is school board malfeasance. Moreover, it cannot be overemphasized that school officials flat-out lied about the May assault during a hearing on a proposed transgender bathroom policy. The malfeasance and the policy are now linked together. Goldberg cannot write off the scandal as “culture war fantasy” because it happened.
This is the part where Goldberg’s column takes a particularly detestable turn — the part where she suggests the May 28 rape isn’t as bad as conservatives say because the victim had previous sexual encounters with her attacker.
Goldberg writes:
The boy was indeed wearing a skirt, but that skirt didn’t authorize him to use the girls’ bathroom. As Amanda Terkel reported in HuffPost, the school district’s trans-inclusive bathroom policies were approved only in August, more than two months after the assault. This was not, said Biberaj, someone “identifying as transgender and going into the girls’ bathroom under the guise of that.
Are we just going to ignore that the school board, which admits now there have been additional sexual assault cases it covered up, lied about the girl’s assault during a hearing on a proposed transgender policy? Are we going to pretend the rape and the subsequent misconduct by school officials isn’t relevant to the policy they debated at the time?
Goldberg’s article, loosely paraphrased, argues: “Yes, the boy raped one girl in a bathroom and reportedly sexually assaulted another girl, and school administrators covered it up and lied about it during a hearing on transgender policies, but the first case, the one with the forcible sodomy, isn’t as bad as conservatives say it is. You see, the victim said yes previously…”
By this standard, there is no such thing as marital rape. And most of those campus rape cases? Turns out they are automatically not so bad. Many of those accusers consented at some point in the past. Surely, they don’t teach us any broader lessons!
Goldberg concludes thus: “Even as the facts of this case have come out, the damage done by all the disinformation about it will be hard to undo.”
Once again, what “disinformation?” It appears Goldberg just doesn’t like facts when they point in the wrong conclusion. In the case of the Loudoun scandal, she is happy to slut-shame a 15-year-old. But in 2018, when Brett Kavanaugh was accused during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings of fantastic and not-very-credible acts of sexual misconduct, including an attempted rape that neither the alleged victim nor her supporting witnesses could quite recall, Goldberg went all-in arguing his nomination should be scuttled.
“Regardless of what happens to Kavanaugh,” she wrote at the time, “however, this scandal has given us an X-ray view of the rotten foundations of elite male power.”
She added, “Watching all this unfold is radicalizing for reasons far beyond Republican mistreatment of Kavanaugh’s accusers. His story shows, in lurid microcosm, how a certain class of men guard and perpetuate their privileges. … We’ll know things have changed when palling around with sexual abusers carries more stigma than being abused does.
It’s funny how the real takeaway for Goldberg in 2018 wasn’t that Democratic lawmakers and activists had twisted ludicrous and paper-thin allegations of sexual misconduct into a failed campaign to disqualify Kavanaugh from the court. It’s funny how, for the New York Times, the sense of urgency regarding sexual assault varies depending on which political party benefits.
