The importance of names

Dennis Prager opines on character assassination and the value of one's good name. Granted, he uses the opportunity to bash the left with his examples, but that's Dennis for you.

The rape of a name can be as vicious a crime and as destructive an act as the rape of a body. Sometimes the rape of a body is worse; sometimes the rape of a name is worse. But they are both rapes. And morally likening the two is in no way meant to lessen the horror of rape; it is meant only to heighten awareness of the horror of intentionally destroying the name of an innocent person.

...Upon first hearing a comparison of name-rape to body-rape, most people are likely to recoil. But upon reflection, it becomes clear that the two are morally comparable. In fact, I have had women listeners to my radio show call and e-mail me to say that they have been raped – one woman had been gang raped – and felt they were better able to go on with their lives than men they loved who had been falsely accused of rape or molestation.

Just gang-raped? That's your best trump card example? Nothing about a woman being raped in the eye, or possibly her lung? "During the Cambodian genocide, one woman was raped by a Communist monkey under the influence of peyote, and she totally agrees with me." Bush league stuff, Dennis.

If you are a woman and this seems far-fetched, imagine that a man you love – such as your father, brother, husband or son – was publicly accused of a rape he had not committed. Imagine the pain he and your family would endure. Why is that pain not comparable to the pain suffered by at least some women who are raped?

"Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?" That was the question the secretary of labor in the Reagan administration, Raymond Donovan, asked, after being acquitted of all charges of larceny and fraud.

Where, indeed, does one go after having one's reputation unjustly ruined?

I don't know, should we ask the Clintons, who folks like WND still insinuate were responsible for murdering various political associates? (Debunked here, if you need it.)

To this day, a decent human being named Clarence Thomas, who has become a major Supreme Court thinker, is identified by his political enemies with sexual harassment (of the most innocuous variety, even if true) and of having looked at pornography (along with the majority of other decent men in America), as if those charges define his life.

Yeah, man, it sure is a good thing no Republicans ever blew incidents of sexual misconduct out of proportion. Otherwise Dennis would be, oh, I don't know, a hypocritical jackass. Way to dodge a bullet there.

The lying woman in the Duke lacrosse case, Crystal Mangum, raped three men. Generally speaking, it is meaningless to speak of women raping men's bodies; it is men who rape women's bodies. What women can rape is a man's name.

Actually, if you saw that episode of Law & Order SVU, you'd know that's not always true...

Dennis closes with a quote from the Talmud about how slandering someone is equivalent to shedding their blood. And, despite his hyperbolic rhetoric, he does indeed have a point.

Which is why I was more than a little saddened to see, on the same page as Dennis' column, a link to a WND news piece on the totalitarianism of Germany's hate speech laws. The link reads, "Comparing abortion, Auschwitz, lands jail time."

Let's be clear. I oppose jailing people for unpopular speech. I think the answer to "bad" speech, and especially misinformation, is more information, is to challenge people and expose their ideas as being flawed, hateful, full of crap, what have you.

But to go from hearing about the sanctity of names and words to seeing WND defending a guy who "compared Germany's abortion rate of 150,000 annually to the murder of Jews in Auschwitz during the Holocaust"? Sorry Dennis, it's just too easy.