John Derbyshire commented, in last Friday’s Radio Derb podcast, on the Dharun Ravi trial getting underway today in New Jersey (this is the case in which a gay Rutgers student named Tyler Clementi killed himself some time after Mr. Ravi had secretly recorded Mr. Clementi kissing a male student in his dorm room).
The case appears to be a thoughtcrime persecution for which Mr. Clementi’s suicide was merely a trigger: Mr. Ravi, after all, is not charged with having caused Mr. Clementi’s death, and the prosecution is not allowed even to mention the suicide. I think we can rest assured, though, that this case wouldn’t be happening at all had Mr. Clementi not killed himself. So it seems, then, that what is on trial is the fact that this cruel and as-yet-unenlightened world is still a place that so chafes a young gay man’s sensitivities that he can no longer bear it — and Mr. Ravi, who is guilty of nothing more than a nasty college prank, is about to take the fall for all of us.
I will note in passing how handy the 1984 glossary, formerly a mere literary curiosity, has become these days.
Read Derb’s item here.
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The New Yorker had a story on this:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/06/120206fa_fact_parker
The money quote: “It became widely understood that a closeted student at Rutgers had committed suicide after video of him having sex with a man was secretly shot and posted online. In fact, there was no posting, no observed sex, and no closet.”
This is nothing more than a show trial, to strike fear in others and make clear what our new cultural overlords will not tolerate.