Dharun Ravi on trial: Are you now or have you ever been anti-homosexual?

“Point of order!” What in fact is the point of putting Dharun Ravi on trial?

Middlesex County First Assistant Prosecutor Julia McClure is gunning for the Roy Cohn Lifetime Achievement Award. Oh sure, she’ll tell us she’s out to obtain “justice” for Tyler Joe Clementi McAllister, the homosexual Rutgers student who committed suicide by jumping off the Tallahatchee George Washington Bridge.

But what she’s really doing is ferreting out anti-homosexual thought-crime. And Ravi’s defense is reduced to producing witnesses who’ll attest that “he didn’t have an issue with homosexuals and in fact, he had a really good friend who was a homosexual.” (The “friend” probably isn’t named Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, or Cairncross though…)

The entire trial is preposterous; a sop to the politically correct Lords of Homosexualism. There is no crime here. There are only (purported) impure thoughts. And “hurt feelings.” Which must be assuaged, preferably by burning Mr. Ravi at the stake.

John Derbyshire is reminded of an old Soviet joke:

Two prisoners are talking in the cattle-wagon headed to Siberia.

Prisoner 1: What’s your sentence?
Prisoner 2: Twenty-five years.
Prisoner 1: What did you do to get twenty-five years?
Prisoner 2: Nothing!
Prisoner 1: You’re lying! You expect me to believe that? Everybody knows: For nothing, the sentence is only ten years.

The main prosecution witness against Mr. Ravi is his one-time “accomplice,” Molly Wei, with whom he is alleged to have commiserated over Clementi’s use of their dorm room for his homosexual adventures. In exchange for her testimony, Ms. Wei was shipped off for a stint at a re-education camp (known colloquially around here as “pre-trial intervention”). She’s undoubtedly been fully counseled in the appreciation of “alternative life-styles,” and is now ready to denounce Mr. Ravi in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations Into Anti-Homosexual Tendencies. Or in a New Brunswick courtroom, her schedule’s pretty flexible.

Dharun Ravi’s show trial is expected to last about a month. If the mobs don’t haul him off first. Think that’s overblown? Think again.

Equality Forum, a national gay-rights organization, released a statement that called the actions of Ravi and Wei “shocking, malicious, and heinous,” and urged “the prosecutor to file murder by reckless manslaughter charges.”

Sadly the actual charges are a joke.

These prosecutors are a disgrace to their profession. The Dharun Ravi trial is a travesty of justice. The actual charges are “invasion of privacy” (in Ravi’s own dorm room!), “bias intimidation,” which basically means having Bad Thoughts, and evidence/witness tampering – deleting tweets and such, really just b.s. what-the-heck charges, added on the off-chance that the court might take them seriously.

Nothing.

For this the Middlesex County prosecutors want ten years.

Because everybody knows, for nothing, the sentence is ten years.

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Cross-posted from WyBlog.us. Follow me on Twitter @WyBlog.

 

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