A counterpoint to the Rolling Stone Article: It's okay to question an accusation

[NaturalHigh]

(CNN) -- Pundit Glenn Reynolds recently wrote: "So as I understand it, Atticus Finch is now the bad guy in "To Kill A Mockingbird," because he doubted a story about rape." How right he was.

A story with a rape allegation carries an immediate electric charge. In Jim Crow's South, lynchings often came with a story of the victim having raped a white girl. With the energy of such a story, it wasn't too hard to whip up a fury strong enough to leave a man hanging from a tree. The "rape propaganda" was necessary to garner the emotions necessary to press the real, dark, agenda.

Al Sharpton took a page out of the old South's playbook and brought us Tawana Brawley, who accused six white men of raping her. The story of white on black crime resonated, and it helped to promote a social justice agenda, but Tawana Brawley was no more a rape victim than two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama, who falsely accused nine black teenagers more than 80 years ago.

What do these stories have in common? Someone had an agenda, and they knew that a rape story would put it on a rocket powered toboggan.


http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/05/opinion/randazza-uva-rape-allegations/index.html?hpt=hp_t3