Lying To Make Friends

One of the more annoying trends in our national discourse occurs whenever someone has said something offensive, and his/her defenders inevitably defend the comment as being a joke, as if jokes cannot be offensive, and claim that any critics should just get a sense of humor.

An even more disturbing example of this framing can be found in the headline of last night’s KTLA story on “scooping,” which poses the question of whether scooping is “sexual assault” or “a schoolboy prank.”  Reading the description of scooping in the article, it’s impossible to reach the conclusion that the practice is not sexual assault, regardless of whether or not it could also be considered a schoolboy prank.  I’m not sure what the consequence of defining it as a prank is, but it is not, as the headline suggests, that it is not sexual assault.

-AR