Gay Conservative

Go ahead and add this story as another chapter in this nation’s often-absurd Book of Socio-Political Correctness (I think I just invented a new term).  Apparently two hardened seventh-grade criminals were sexually assaulting classmates.  Steyn describes the atrocities committed by Cory Mashburn and Ryan Cornelison -

Messrs Mashburn and Cornelison are pupils at Patton Middle School. They were arrested in February after being observed in the vestibule, swatting girls on the butt. Butt-swatting had apparently become a form of greeting at the school – like “a handshake we do,” as one female student put it. On “Slap Butt Fridays,” boys and girls would hail each other with a cheery application of manual friction to the posterior, akin to a Masonic greeting.

This “crime” committed by the boys originally drew charges of felony sexual assault.  Although the charges were later downgraded to misdemeanors, the DA is still advocating that the boys be required to register as sex-offenders, a move that would haunt Cornelison and Mashburn for the rest of their lives.  The DA, Bradley Berry, even suggested that the “assault” committed by the boys was serious and that such “cases are devastating to children.”  I love Steyn’s response -

No, sir. The only one devastating children’s lives is you. If you “win,” and these “criminals” are convicted, 20, 30 years from now – applying for a job, volunteering for a community program, heading north for a weekend in Vancouver and watching the Customs guard swipe the driver’s license through the computer – there’ll be a blip, something will come up on the screen, and for the umpteenth time two middle-age men will realize they bear a mark that can never be expunged. Because decades ago they patted their pals on the rear in a middle-school corridor.

Clearly, this case is a reach.  Students at the school (even some of the victims) almost universally describe schoolhouse hijinx that comes nowhere close to the status of a “sexual assault.”  I am a law-and-order guy, but as more and more DAs and government prosecuters buy into the PC garbage of the left, we are left with trials and decisions that cross over into the realm of absurdity.  In turn, we are left with more and more folks who will be forever scarred by some overreaching DA.

Maybe we can co-star Mike Nifong and Bradley Berry in a new flick.  “D.A.s Gone Wild” comes to mind.