Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi wasn’t “bullied” to death, but that hasn’t stopped America’s victimhood brigade from saying so.
Let me be clear: The events that led Clementi to leap off the George Washington Bridge to his death were absolutely despicable. He had a sexual encounter in his dorm room with another man. His roommate, Dharun Ravi, allegedly set up a webcam of the encounter and streamed it over the Internet. Ravi was allegedly in a room with another student, Molly Wei, watching the encounter.
Ravi and Wei have been charged with invasion of privacy. If they’re guilty, they absolutely should be. But there has been talk of charging them with a “hate crime,” although there hasn’t been the slightest hint of anti-gay animus on their part in the scores of news stories about Clementi’s death.
In their attempt to feed their never-satisfied victimhood maw, America’s victimhood brigade has made Clementi the poster boy for a nationwide attempt to root out anti-gay bullying. Such bullying should be stamped out, but that’s not what happened in the Clementi case.
Although a letter writer to a Newark Star-Ledger blog said that the Clementi case was a “clear case of bullying,” it was a story on the Web site www.nj.com that got it right. What happened to Clementi was “a college prank gone terribly wrong.”
And what led to such a prank, to the notion that Clementi had no privacy rights anyone was bound to respect? It wasn’t gay bashing or intolerance of gays; it was a society that has, over the years, continued to devalue not only privacy, but also every decent value this country ever had.
Ravi and Wei are also Rutgers freshmen. When they were in middle and high school, what were they likely to find gracing their television screens when they came home after school? Shows like “Maury” and “Jerry Springer.” And what would Ravi and Wei have learned about privacy from these two shows?
That it’s dead, that it doesn’t exist, that on the list of things Americans value it’s at absolutely rock bottom. Here’s the format for the typical Maury Povich show.
A woman brings on six or seven guys to get DNA tests that will either prove or disprove they are the father of a child or children. Most of the time the tests prove the particular guy isn’t the father, at which point the woman sprints off backstage, sobbing uncontrollably.
The Springer show regularly features guests who reveal sordid, embarrassing details about their private lives and then try to resolve their disputes with fisticuffs. That’s the way the Maury and Springer shows went before Ravi and Wei went to Rutgers, and not much has changed. Here’s this week’s lineup for “Maury”:
Wednesday, Oct. 6: “Is My Husband Sneaking Prostitutes Into Our House? Test Him!”
Thursday, Oct. 7: “You Sleep Around … My Husband’s Not Your Baby’s Dad!”
Friday, Oct. 8: “Test Them! Is My Fiance Sleeping With My Mom?”
It’s the Thursday, Oct. 7 Springer show that is perhaps most appropriate in revealing what went wrong in the Clementi incident:
“We Had Secret Sex.”
Twelve years ago, when Ravi, Wei and Clementi were all around 6 years old, a honcho at a Baltimore television station, when challenged to get trash like the Springer show off the air, defended it as “challenging and provocative.” Ravi, Wei and Clementi all grew up watching their elders, the ones who were supposed to protect ideals like privacy and decency, kick them to the curb.
The notion of privacy as an ideal was dead long before young Tyler Clementi died.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
