The impression that we now live in a lunatic asylum, with the lunatics running it, is getting stronger by the day.
It’s impossible to open a paper, even a supposedly conservative one, without reading at least one article whose author shows every symptom of being not just intellectually backward but downright insane.
Today’s prize in the madness stakes goes to The Mail’s Jan Moir for her article Football’s Vile Rapist Must Never Get His Old Job Back (author’s underline).
What got Miss Moir going is today’s release from prison of Ched Evans, former Wales international.
Allow me to recap the main circumstances of the case for those of you who have negligently missed this week’s most important news item.
Back in 2012 Ched and another footballer went out on the town with the explicit purpose of – are you ready for this? – getting laid. That, in the eyes of the prosecutor and all right-thinking, which these days means self-righteous, people by itself constitutes corpus delicti.
To that criminal, or at least highly unorthodox, end the two culprits checked themselves into a local Premier Inn, thus laying themselves open to a charge of malice aforethought.
The only thing missing at that point was a willing participant, but the two handsome, wealthy footballers didn’t anticipate any trouble finding one.
So it proved. They went to a nightclub and one of them picked up a girl who had had a couple of drinks too many. The girl happily agreed to accompany the ball-kicker to his hotel, where they had sex.
Then, in the good ‘roasting’ tradition of the footballing profession, Ched Evans joined the fun and had the girl as well.
She woke up the next morning naked and alone in bed, after which crying rape seemed like the only possible thing to do, especially since the perpetrators clearly weren’t short of a bob or two.
The two men were arrested and tried for rape. The prosecution’s case was based on the claim that the girl was too drunk to consent to intercourse.
Personally, I find that a bit suspect. The girl was fully conscious, able to walk unaided, consume pizza that she carried across the hotel lobby, get in the lift. As someone who used to get drunk on occasion, I can see how booze could have removed some of her inhibitions, provided she had any in the first place, but not how her free will could have been completely overridden.
But fair enough, the jury accepted the prosecutor’s claim, and the law spoke. The girl couldn’t say no, and the subsequent amorous activity therefore constituted rape.
Yet here’s the weird part: the first man who had sex with the girl was acquitted. Hence the jury accepted the defence’s argument that the girl had consented to sex. Logic would then suggest that she was sober enough to consent.
I don’t know how long the act of consensual love lasted, but let’s assume it was about 10 minutes. During this time the victim supposedly lost her capacity to say no, which means that when Evans then climbed aboard he committed rape.
It was of course possible that the girl fancied the first suitor but not the second. It’s also possible she drew the line at group sex, which is why she rejected Evans’s advances and he had to resort to coercion.
If that’s what the prosecution had claimed, the second act would have been clear-cut rape. But the prosecution claimed nothing of the sort.
The accusation remained the same: the girl was too drunk to reject the second lover even though she hadn’t been too drunk to accept the first one. As she consumed no alcohol in between the two, this sounds odd.
One way or the other, at the end of that extremely soft case Ched Evans was sentenced to five years in prison. Earlier today he was released, having served half his term.
The real fun began a few days ago. The TV personality Judy Finnigan (don’t ask me what she does on TV for I don’t have a clue) had the temerity to suggest that now that Evans had paid his debt to society he should be allowed to resume plying his trade.
That by itself would have been sufficient to impale Miss Finnigan on the stake of what these days passes for public opinion, and what in the relatively recent past would have been called the braying of a mob.
But she made things far worse by saying the public should take it easy on Evans because after all the rape he committed wasn’t violent.
All hell broke loose. For Miss Finnigan implicitly rejected the received opinion, nay diktat, that rape is the only crime that has no gradations and no extenuating circumstances.
When it comes to the taking of a human life, the law accepts such nuances as murder, manslaughter, unintended or accidental homicide and what not. But what’s killing compared to unauthorised hanky-panky?
Thus a savage who jumps a stranger in a park, beats her up, has sex with her while she’s unconscious and leaves her for dead is a rapist in exactly the same sense as someone who forgot to breathalyse a girl before sex.
In other words, Miss Finnigan committed a crime that’s much worse than even Mr Evans’s: he violated one person, she violated the whole modern ethos.
Defenders of women’s rights were aghast enough to unleash a torrent of hate mail, targeting Miss Finnigan even more than Mr Evans.
Refusing to accept her hastily offered apology, the crazed mob… sorry, I mean champions of women’s rights, threatened to rape Miss Finnigan’s own daughter Chloe, which seemed to them like a just thing to do.
A bunch of loonies, you’d think, and you would be right. But here speaks Jan Moir, a columnist in a respectable newspaper committed to the defence of tradition:
“While I have great sympathy for Chloe feeling ‘violated’, her experience doesn’t compare with the 19-year-old girl raped by Evans…” Neither does it compare with the experience of Jews gassed at Treblinka, which has about as little to do with the issue at hand.
Perspective is important, concludes Miss Moir. So is sanity. And a sane person would realise that, since Chloe presumably wasn’t holding the victim down while Evans was having his wicked way with her, that parallel simply doesn’t work. Chloe did nothing to deserve finding herself on the receiving end of criminal threats.
Unless, of course, Miss Moir feels, which she assures us she doesn’t, that Miss Finnigan’s sin is visited upon her daughter, who should therefore grin and bear it.
Of course the title of Moir’s piece is self-explanatory: she doesn’t think Evans should be allowed to make a living in his chosen field. Again, a sane person would know that punishment in a way wipes the slate clean. A released prisoner must be rehabilitated, and easing him back into work is the best way of achieving that.
But Miss Moir isn’t a sane person, she’s a modern one. As such, she isn’t able to put some kind of limit on her sanctimonious hysteria.
Such uncontrollable incontinence used to be regarded as a symptom of insanity. Now it only means that the lunatic is civic-minded and therefore normal.