Happy Sexual Assault Awareness Month!

Thanks to _jeremiad for posting about this and calling my attention.

Al Sharpton and the NAACP Support Dunbar Village Rapists

Do you remember the Dunbar Village rape case? I’m not sure how you could forget; this is the case where a woman was gang raped by 10 men in her own home for over three hours, forced to have sex with her own 12-year-old son and survived an attempt to light both of them on fire. In an update that is a couple of weeks old but I’m just hearing from now via Document the Silence, Al Sharpton and the NAACP are taking to the streets to defend the four arrested rapists. This is despite conclusive DNA evidence and apparent photographic evidence that the rapists took on their cell phones during the attack.

(snip)

Some further notes about the NAACP and Sharpton’s actions: the excuse they’re giving is that a group of white teens who committed the “same crime” were freed on bond. Let me be entirely clear in stating that the white teens should also be in jail. Equal justice is an important goal which I fully support, but the answer isn’t to call for more leniency for black people who commit extremely violent crimes, it’s to call for all violent crime to be taken seriously, regardless of who commits it. Furthermore, though the crime by the white teens is utterly despicable in every sense of decency — five boys sexually assaulted two very drunk, young teenage girls — it is not the same crime. Because do you know the only thing you could possibly do to make a gang rape worse? Gang rape a woman in front of her child, force her to engage in a sexual act with that child, douse them in household cleaners and attempt to burn them alive.

There are resources posted elsewhere on the blog, but my only reaction to this (after the initial stunned staggering away from my computer) is "WTF Al Sharpton. Stop... doing anything. Please."

The shitstorm did reach him, though. There's some serious backpedaling to do, by the NAACP and Sharpton's NAN. They can point fingers at each other all they want. I'm still left with WTFery.