While I was in Africa my undergraduate alma mater fired its highly successful and lucrative football coach and removed its president in response to an ongoing scandal over campus sexual assault by football players (related Voices post here, citing this victim’s account). It was the right thing to do, or at least, the right initial moves to take (many watching alumni believe that more dismissals are forthcoming).
The university has a responsibility to take reasonable measures to protect its students from sexual violence and to help students who are victims of sexual violence in their search for healing and justice. In these duties Baylor has failed. It is Baylor’s fault that student-athletes considered themselves exempt from standard processes of student discipline and criminal justice. It is Baylor’s fault that student victims of sexual assault did not receive the help they needed from Baylor offices whose very reason for existence was supposed to be to hear the testimony of these victims and take appropriate action. Changes in university leadership are appropriate.
But Art Briles and Ken Starr did not cause these problems, nor are they the most culpable figures involved. They did not cause students to be sexually assaulted; they neglected to help those who had been sexually assaulted.
The blame lies at the feet of the sexual revolutionaries who, starting in the 1960s and continuing through this very day, have acted as though a culture free of sexual taboo would be a culture in which nobody gets hurt, although with their every victory more and more people are getting hurt. They have made “mutual consent” the only valid moral guidance in questions of sex, although they themselves lapse into the nonsensical when trying to tell you what consent actually is (for example, a married couple who has sex after three glasses of wine is legally guilty of rape…the both of them…under “yes means yes” laws).
Within the full Baylor report is a troubling phrase or two, blaming Baylor’s policies on alcohol and extra-marital sex for some of the failure to assist victims. I hope that Baylor will not falsely conclude that traditional Christian sexuality contributes in any way whatsoever to these problems. That will be a step in the wrong direction. Rather, the way forward is a complete and total repudiation of the entire platform of the sexual revolution.
They gave us women in combat. Today 1 in 4 soldiers is a victim of sexual assault while serving.
They gave us sensitivity and inclusiveness training at work. Last year 80,000 women were raped at work.
They gave us “Sex Week” on college campuses. Their own liberal shills report that there is an epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses.
Not just at Baylor. Not just at Duke. Let’s face it: Not just on a college campuses. Rapes aren’t committed by places or corporations, and it exposes the weakness of liberalism (that it minimizes the idea of personal sin and magnifies the idea of corporate or institutional sin) that structural change is the only place they can go in the face of these terrifying changes. Rapes aren’t committed by places or corporations; they are committed by people.
They are committed by the students in your sex-ed classes, liberals. They are committed by the people who sit in the front row at your sensitivity training classes. They are committed by your strongest advocates. Across this country, on campus after campus after campus, they are committed by an entire generation who, more than any before, have subscribed entirely to everything you have said about human sexuality.
This is on you.
And here we stand, looking at the world they have created, watching our friends and our children wade off into it. We—pastors and parents, educators and administrators, supervisors and colleagues—we face the same task now that Ken Starr and Art Briles failed to take up. As much as we can, we must try to protect from this hostile environment the people we love and the people for whom we have responsibility. As much as we can, we must help those who have fallen as prey before these predators as they seek healing and justice. As much as we can, we must try to keep our sons and daughters from becoming perpetrators of these atrocities.
The solution is to call people to find a better god than sex. The solution is the gospel of Jesus Christ, offered without wresting it violently away from the sexual ethic with which it appears.