Rantz: City of Duvall makes mockery of sexual assault, argues jokes are as bad as rape

The city of Duvall proclaimed April to be Sexual Assault Awareness Month. But they couldn’t help but make a mockery out of it, taking a critically important issue — sexual assault — and cramming it through the DEI buzzword machine until it’s unrecognizable.

Of course, we should take sexual assault seriously. No one’s disputing that. But the city of Duvall’s proclamation reads more like a college gender studies syllabus than a call for justice. Instead of focusing on the predators or vowing endless support for the victims, the city throws in a salad of “racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism,” and every other ism the city could think of — because, apparently, acknowledging sexual violence isn’t complete unless you’ve blamed America for it.

The city notes that someone is sexually assaulted in the United States every 68 seconds. But it then immediately leans into identity politics, implying the “significant and complex ways” sexual assault is committed against someone from a “historically oppressed” community is somehow more worthy of condemnation than anyone else becoming a victim of sexual assault.

Duvall proclamation compares jokes and ableism to rape

Most absurdly, however, the proclamation compares the seriousness of sexual assault to racism, transphobia, homophobia, and ableism, implying “rape jokes” are somehow comparable to actual rape.

“Sexual violence exists on a continuum of behavior that includes racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, ableist, or other hate speech. This ranges from rape jokes to verbal harassment to physical assaults,” the proclamation declares.

Contrary to what the city of Duvall may think, when comedian Jimmy Carr makes an off-color joke (ironically, to bring attention to soft-on-crime policies), it’s not “on a continuum of behavior” that leads to rape. “Hate speech” doesn’t exist as some kind of legal category of speech, either. And something tells me there’s not some huge overlap of “ableists” and rapists on the Radical Left’s progressive Venn diagram.

Do we really need a proclamation that sounds like a dissertation from a liberal arts college?

Do we really need to equate rape jokes or ableism with actual rape? That’s not awareness. That’s ideological gaslighting.

Sexual assault is a horrific crime that deserves a clear, unifying, and apolitical message — not one that filters support for survivors through a progressive purity test. Do we have to include progressive buzzwords in absolutely everything? Must every issue be framed through an ideological lens where you can’t just make one point but tie it into every other issue as part of some intersectional dare?

If you want to stop sexual violence, how about we start by prosecuting offenders, backing police, and removing criminals from the streets? You know — solutions that work. If the city of Duvall cared seriously about the politics of this issue, you’d think they’d point out the dangerous folly of releasing sex offenders from McNeil Island to live in your community with lax oversight. Perhaps a line about depopulating prisons or going easy on criminals. Criminal behavior may be on that “continuum of behavior” that escalates into sexual assault.

Instead, it delivers another virtue-signaling proclamation pretending that “standing up to hate speech” as if that is the same as stopping a rapist.

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