Most Americans have had little attention to spare for matters other than the President’s sex and perjury scandal but the Karla Faye Tucker case pushed it briefly aside. For three days a convulsion of pity and horror gripped the national media till the axe murderer was sent to her reward. Then, scarcely noted came an after-quake, a fitting postscript to several current examples of the systematic gender bias that today passes for law.
Last November in Massachusetts, when Judge Hiller Zobel let British au pair Louise Woodward walk away from the murder of baby Matthew Eappen, in Washington State Mary Kay LeTourneau got six months and counseling for the rape of a 13-year old boy, her former 6th grade student. The fact that LeTourneau was married at the time of her affair and had a son the age of her sex-target-partner seemed of little import to Judge Linda Lau.
“I give you my word,” LeTourneau wept in November, “it will not happen again.” A prosecutor recalled, “she stood there and demurely asked for help. She doesn’t believe she needs treatment because she doesn’t believe she did anything wrong.”
On February 06, 1998 LeTourneau was back in court. Three days before she had been found at 2:40am in a car with the now 14-year old father, her former student. They had beer, passports, the infant of their adulterous and pedophiliac union and $6500 cash and were preparing to flee to Canada. The pedophile how says she planned to marry the child.
“This case is not about a flawed system,” Judge Lau lamely declared before sentencing LeTourneau to seven years. Lau declined to comment on the disparity in sentencing men and women convicted of statutory rape or sexual abuse. [Not surprisingly, LeTourneau went on to become a recidivist defined as a victim with a ‘problem’ while other young female public school teachers began to commit similar crimes. “You’ve come a long way, baby,”the social fabric’s about gone and yes, the system is gravely flawed.]
Speaking of disparities, everyone from Pat Robertson to the Pope to mainstream columnists gushed with sympathy for Karla Faye Tucker who held a grudge against one of her victims “because he had once gotten her living room rug dirty.” Mary Robinson, the UN’s new ‘pro-choice’ High commissioner for Human Rights [a committee that disgraced itself with flagrant anti-Semitism] as Robinson had when with the UN in Hebron] proclaimed herself “saddened” by Tucker’s execution. AOL’s weekly columnist wrote a teary plea for pardon whose first sentence included the words, “small, soft-spoken, shy, smiling” but omitted to describe what it’s like to be on the receiving end of an axe attack.
President Clinton’s legion of lawyers and apologists demand for him the benefit of the doubt in the face of his wrongdoing: fine. But when President Compassion was governor of Arkansas he permitted the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a severely retarded black man unable to understand the charges against him. Rector had the mental age of a three year old and Arkansas law forbade his execution; but Clinton was too busy researching the Bible for evidence that oral sex is not adulterous.
“There simply is no rhyme or reason as to who is executed and who is spared” opined columnist Amy Dickinson, but she is wrong. There is a clear double standard familiar to any serious observer. So here are numbers: since capital punishment resumed in 1976, 431 men have been put to death, two women. That is .0046 per sent. Data from several states show women commit over twelve percent of murders (excluding abortions) and are less likely to be charged in many crimes (see above examples) as men would be. Where are all those who have built careers by shouting “equity” and “discrimination,” by creating Federal and State agencies to enforce “equal opportunity?” Where, to get back to an honorable and simple standard, is equal protection of the law?
Those convulsed with pity for Tucker, LeTourneau and Woodward are silent at he routine separation of children from good and capable fathers by divorce courts. The purveyors of sensitivity are absent, even actively oppose fathers and children who plead to be together; oppose fathers who entreat and petition the legislature to protect their fundamental right to parent their children.
Contempt for men is the logic of law today, – that is why feminists love and protect Bill Clinton. He justifies their hatred for men and, to buy their support and double standards, he afflicts good men with the punishments that those like him deserve. Total abortion “rights,” total feminist bias in the courts, broken families and Bill Clinton: that is the shape and face of American law today.
[Middlesex News, Thursday, February 19, 1998, 13a]