Scott St. Clair: Steubenville Studs Deserve Their Own Medicine

March 21, 2013

SHARE

steubenville rapistsIf I hear one more whining lament about how the lives of those poor boys in Steubenville, OH have been ruined by their rape conviction and the possibility of a life-long tag as registered sex offenders, I’m going to say or do something the whiner will eternally regret. What football jocks Trent Mays, 17, and Ma’lik Richmond, 16, did — rape a passed-out 16-year-old girl — was inexcusable, reprehensible, disgusting and criminal in the worst sense, and they deserve a far harsher punishment than the one meted out to them.

They committed a heinous sex offense, so what’s the big deal about labeling them “sex offenders”? The designation should be tattooed on their foreheads with an invitation for the general public to beat upon them with hammers. Or am I being soft?

Had they raped a girl in another year or two when they were 18, then they would have faced up to 25 years in the penitentiary, which would have given them an opportunity to experience what being a rape victim is all about – a dose of their own medicine.

These two he-men had as much regard and respect for the life of another human being as did the Colorado movie house shooter or the murderer of the school kids in Newtown, CT.

And let’s just cut the drivel about them being “children” whose minds “haven’t fully formed.” They were old enough to know right from wrong, they intended to do exactly what they did and their subsequent behavior evidenced guilt and an attempt to first brag about it and then conceal what they had done.

If you can’t do adult time, don’t do adult crime. A century ago, they would have been hung, so maybe they should thank their lucky stars.

It gets worse. A lot of people who should be punished won’t be because the criminal law doesn’t stretch far enough, a pending Ohio grand jury investigation notwithstanding, to encompass complicit, indifferent and incompetent parents, coaches and school officials who looked the other way, local “citizens” who enabled all forms of illegal and gross behavior in return for fleeting high-school-football glory and much more.

Reno Saccoccia, the head football coach at Steubenville High School is in on it because he knew about the crime but didn’t object to it or report it. In fact and true to his reported history, he tried to “fix it” by covering it up and shielding Mays and Richmond from prosecution as he has for other young minions of his in the past. Just another day at the office for the coach.

One news report described Steubenville sports as “a teenage culture of weak ethics, rampant alcohol abuse and poor family structures” with the rape a result that “wasn’t strikingly different than any other night in the life of a Big Red football player.” After all, boys will be boys, right?

According to CNN, apparently so.  The cable news network has whined about the unfairness of the sentence, yet it has deservedly been on the receiving end of brickbats and bitch slaps for its pro-rape coverage. 

Candy Crawley and Poppy Harlow – how can anyone named “Candy” or “Poppy” be taken seriously? – shed alligator tears over the poor defendants whose lives are now, according to one of them, “ruined.” Well, the rape victim didn’t have a nice day either.

Steubenville is a busted town that offers no hope for anyone or anything save vicarious thrills achieved on the playground of schoolboys who then must be shielded from any sense of responsibility or respect. America is filled with Steubenville’s, large and small, with a variety of assumed names like State College, PA where sometimes the stadia are larger presumably to accommodate the number of victims or the grotesque nature of officially covered-up crimes.

Vicarious living through sports, high school, college or otherwise, isn’t living at all. Nor is it something conservatives and libertarians should endorse since it disabuses an essential tenet of our creed: individual achievement.

Sports are entertainment and fine so far as it goes, but games aren’t a substitute for life. When they become one, as they did in Steubenville or at Penn State, which, for the clueless, is located in State College, PA, then it always ends badly.  

It’s not like I haven’t said it before, but places like these should have their sports programs permanently eliminated, their sports facilities razed and their schools taken over by harsh nuns with switches.

Lorena Bobbitt, where are you now that we need you?

Scott St. Clair is a journalist, rhetorical pugilist, agent provocateur, aider and abbetor of James O’Keefe and a former competitive Highland piper. He says what he thinks, means what he says and doesn’t suffer fools. He’s also a member of the Victoria Taft Blogforce. His opinions are entirely his own, and you shouldn’t expect them to mirror yours.