“Preaching” extremely offensiveBy Ariel Franklyn
The 'ledge;
“If your daughter was raped, would you ask her what she was wearing?”
This became my battle cry Tuesday. Over the course of two-and-a-half hours, I asked this question dozens of times, screaming at the top of my voice, but I never received an answer.
On my way to philosophy class on Tuesday morning, I encountered three “preachers” carrying vinyl picket signs proclaiming the dangers of hellfire for fornicators, homosexuals, drunkards and “immodest women.” I never made it to class.
Only one of the men was preaching at a time, while the other two held a sign and a video camera, respectively. I approached him and inquired as to why his sign targeted immodest women rather than immodest people.
His reply was that the Bible commands women to dress modestly in order to prevent men from lusting after them and that, “If a woman goes around in revealing clothing, she is responsible for the consequences of her actions.” I asked if that referred to rape, to which he said, “It sure does, young lady.”
I felt shocked beyond sadness and fear. I was angry. I was enraged, actually, that this man would dare to come to a campus half-full of women, one in eight of whom will be raped during her time in college and tell us that we could be held responsible for that.
I began chanting over his message of hate the words, “Rape is never a woman’s fault. Women never deserve to be raped.”
A small crowd began to form and he began to engage me again, taunting me in front of the crowd.
“Have you ever been raped young lady?” he asked me.
Everyone watching us stopped talking and just stared at him, unable to believe he had just asked such a personal and offensive question.
I wavered for a second, my heart sped up and I felt obscenely vulnerable, but I looked at the people around me and realized that lying to him would defeat my whole purpose of confronting him in the first place. My voice did not shake when I responded, “Yes, sir. Have you?”
He then informed me that my problem was that I was making his universal violent and misogynist statements personally.
He said that being raped was the reason that I haven’t been able to enter a relationship with God. When I replied that God and I were on fine terms, he called me a liar.
He told me I hated God, that I was, in fact, God’s enemy. He called me a fornicator. He asked me if being raped made it OK that I am a lesbian.
By this point, a large crowd had gathered. His degradation and hate speech only intensified once he had an audience to fuel him.
He told two Muslim men who came to speak to him that they were going to hell. He told a gay man the same thing. He was belligerent and angry, refusing to answer any questions posed to him.
When the crowd began to get hostile, he stopped talking and indicated that his partner was going to preach now. They tag-teamed like this, angering the crowd and taunting students, calling them fornicators, baby murderers and hypocrites. In short, they incited a riot.
Eventually another young woman ended up directly in front of him, pushed too close by the rapidly intensifying mass of students.
This so-called preacher barred his arm across her chest in an attempt to move her away from him. She stood her ground and loudly requested several times that he remove his arm from her breasts.
She was heard to say by the crowd, “You are sexually assaulting me now. Please stop.”
Campus police and Gene Fitch, dean of student life, saw all of this and did nothing.
However, when the same woman, after having her pleas for him to stop touching her ignored, retaliated, they took action. In an attempt to move him off her, she shoved him away. Due to the rain and the precarious location of the impromptu protest, the man fell to the ground.
Fitch stated that “We can’t appear to condone behavior like that on this campus,” and the woman was arrested.
The man who sexually assaulted her and verbally assaulted hundreds of students was escorted off campus by police “for his own safety” and taken to the hospital. He sustained no serious injuries.
I find this repulsive. I feel violated. I feel as though my university and its administration let me down. When a man is permitted to come uninvited and publicly humiliate students, damn them and even put his hands on them without consequence, it sends an alarming message.
It says that we are not safe on this campus. It says that we do not care about the rights of our women. It says that hate speech is more protected than our bodies.
Arresting this young woman for defending herself was inexplicable and coincided beautifully with the preacher’s message that a woman is responsible if she is raped. She should be commended for having the strength and courage to protect her body from an unprovoked assault.
Then again, what was she wearing?
