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Wednesday, June 6, 1990 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Victims on trial
New Florida law prevents woman's appearance from being admitted as evidence in rape cases
It's about time.
Florida's state legislature and Florida Governor Bob Martinez apparently have seen the inappropriateness of trying the victim in a rape case.
The law comes after a man was acquitted in a Florida rape case in October. Several members of the jury in that case reportedly commented that the victim had tempted the assailant by wearing a lace miniskirt and no underwear.
Friday, Martinez signed into law a bill forbidding defense attorneys in rape cases from using a victim's scant clothing as justification for a rape.
The defense attorney argued that the woman had agreed to having sex with the assailant and then had changed her mind. What else could the man have done but rape her?
Surely everyone knows that once you tell a man yes, you cannot stop him. Likewise you cannot stop him if he is aroused by your attire, right?
Wrong. Rape is never the victim's fault. To use a victim's dress as evidence is to put the victim on trial for a crime she did not commit.
Defense attorneys who use a woman's clothing as evidence should understand that a man can stop himself and that to rape or not to rape is a conscious decision; it is the man's decision and only the man's decision.
And this man was acquitted by a Florida
jury and two months later was sentenced to life in prison and a concurrent 20-year sentence by a Georgia court for kidnapping and wri-
by a Georgia court for kidnapping and rape. Luckily, Florida lawmakers have seen the error in the Florida court's ways. But will this work?
The prosecuting attorney in the October case, Alexander Siegel, said he foresaw challenges to the law as soon as the first rape case came up in which the woman's clothing was a factor. He even called the new law unconstitutional.
yet, it is not enough to label the new law unconstitutional. A woman's attire, along with information about the previous sexual behavior of the woman involved, the victim's living arrangements, her marital status, etc., should be recognized as immaterial to the rape case.
Jurors should be enlightened enough to recognize that just because a woman lives alone, she is not necessarily a shady character. Just because a woman may have had extra-marital sex does not mean she asked to be raped. These things simply are not relevant. They are only tools that sleazy defense attorneys use to sway an old-fashioned juror to think that a woman deserved to be raped. No woman deserves to be raped.
we can only hope that more states adopt laws similar to Florida's new one and that Florida's stands as it is, unchallenged.
The editorial board
Success includes motherhood
cheers to Barbara Bush! Learn to the memb
Jeers to the members of Wellesley College, class of 1980, who did not want her to speak at their commencement last week!
When she was chosen, after author Alice Walker declined, some of the seniors started a petition demanding that she not speak.
About 150 of the seniors signed the petition because they thought that she contradicted what they had been taught in their four years at Wellesley about accomplishing things on their own.
Barbara was an inappropriate choice as a speaker as well, they said, because she dropped out of college to marry and had spent the years since then making a home for her husband and had attained her fame because she attained her fame because of her husband's job also did not sit well in their minds.
"What people tend to neglect is that what we've trained for for the last four years is to go out and be successful. . . For us, that means getting a job, not necessarily being a mother," said one graduate.
Since when did being successful rule out motherhood? For that matter, when did motherhood stop being a job?
I have not yet experienced the joys of motherhood, but I have watched an expert for 23 years and it is indeed a job. My mother and Barbara Bush
Kate Lee Managing Editor
may not have had to leave home each morning, but I am sure that they have done their share of work.
A popular theory these days is that a successful woman cannot be a woman who does not work outside of her home. Why? Being a successful woman involves in the best way to involve the bottom, the middle and the bottom line.
Being a success does not mean doing what everyone else is doing simply because everyone else is doing it. A woman who is truly successful is one who does whatever she does to the best of her abilities.
If in doing so she became the richest woman on earth, OK. If she became the CEO of General Motors and raised three children, so be it.
I've never thought that there were things that I could not do simply because of my sex. I have always been taught that women can do anything that they set their minds to. This point was first taught by my parents and the teachers and administrators at my high school —
We were taught that life choices should be made on an individual basis. Because I chose journalism as a career does not mean that my sisters must. In fact, they have been told that their boss has a degree in accounting, the other will begin earning a degree in chemical engineering in the fail.
an all-girls high school.
All of us may someday marry and raise families; then again, maybe none of us will. But that's not the point. The point is that whether we do or not, we can, and will, be successful our jobs to the best of our abilities.
If we can take pride in what we've done then we will be truly successful whether the bottom line is a $1 million profit and the love and respect of our families or simply the love and respect of our families.
Maybe Wellesley doesn't teach that, or maybe the petition signers just didn't catch on. I hope they do soon, because their lives are the ones that will, in the end suffer if they don't.
As Barbara said, "At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend or a parent." Park aerides study is located at Park Aerides school in Houston.
Officials prefer anonymity
Summit time has been prime time for The Senior Administration Official
Senior Official is the identity assigned to the government experts who provide background, detail and the administration's viewpoint on events like the current summit conference.
Officials sometimes say they can speak more candidly on background, without attribution, than on the record, with names attached. But it is not unusual for an official to hold an unattributed background session
There's been more than one of him and her in the summit buildup, but they spoke with a single, authoritative voice. They also do not permit further identification.
The official is no newcomer to Washington. The briefing system has been around for years, used by successive administrations to tell their stories on such events as a presidential mission aboard or a major policy statement at home. That is done through the agency's rules, in which a source of information provides it only on condition of anonymity.
It doesn't always work out. White House chief of staff John Sununu has had trouble with the system, complaining earlier this year about the use of anonymous sources by reporters, then appearing in the briefing room prepared to speak under senior leaders in the White House, protested the contradiction, but he refused to put his briefing on the record.
More recently, Sununu said under background rules that President Bush's no-conditions terms for budget negotiations did not mean he would tolerate a tax increase, only that Democrats were free to propose one. He made the comments as a senior official, aboard an airplane on April 18, 2015, and so the cover didn't hold. That put the talk in business until a White House official promised again that Bush would set no conditions.
Walter R.
Mears
Syndicated
columnist
one day and show up on network television the next morning, saying many of the same things.
Sometimes the background rule is set by an official who says he doesn't want to be identified because he isn't supposed to be talking for publication. That's not the case when The Senior Administration Office of theormal Warner Hite briefings on an event like the summit conference.
The rule of anonymity is said to apply there because the briefers often are technicians or negotiators, little known to the world outside their specialties, and are not public figures or spokesmen for the administration.
It leaves a margin for error, since any slip is anonymous. It has been described in past administrations as a system that permits diplomats to position themselves upon them to positions that could be a problem at a negotiation table.
And it reserves the public stage for the people elected or appointed to be there. President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III both conducted on-the-record briefings and answered summit questions at the same lectern The Senior Official uses.
With and without attribution, the message from the White House became a self-fulfilling prophecy of summit success, to be validated Sunday morning as Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Kornilov held a meeting on that matterings in Washington and at Camp David Md.
One way that's been done is by trying to lower expectations, much as a presidential candidate sometimes plays down his prospects in a primary election, in order to claim
victory in almost any outcome.
So, with the United States and the Soviet Union in contradictory and so far unyielding positions on the NATO status of a reaffirmed Germany, senior officialdalm said nobody should expect that to be resolved at the summit. Baker then made the same claim later, when he said in an interview, view saying, "involves a whole host of other countries," not only the superpowers.
Another positioning tactic is to make the most of what is available. "As we move from conflict to cooperation," White House Press Secretary Martin Fitzwater said last Wednesday, "agreements reached on Thursday and Friday will provide for a realistic foundation for the growing and changing U.S.-Soviet relationship."
Agreements are reached at summit meetings only in the sense that they get a final endorsement there with the signing of deals negotiated in advance. When the most ambitious of those treaties can't be nailed down in time for summit signatures, the skillful-Senior Administration Official puts the emphasis elsewhere on deals that can be reached and on progress that is not measured by a stack of documents anyhow.
Not that agreements weren't important, the Senior Official said, but the real work of the summit was honest, frank dialogue, trying to move two superpowers just a few steps closer together.
Welcoming Gorbachev, Bush said that the most meaningful measure of success was in "the groundwork for decades of division and discord."
And on that, scorecards that count points won and lost, or agreements signed and shelved, really won't measure results.
That will have to show in what happens in the months ahead, no matter what is said now.
► Walter R. Mears in vice president and columnist for the Associated Press.
LETTERS to the EDITOR Publish or perish
News has reached the suburbs that Professor Dwight Kiel is moving on to warmer beaches, falling tenure at KU.
As a former student of Professor Kiel's, I feel compelled to publicly share my thoughts. Professor Kiel sets extremely high standards for himself and his students. His lectures are always delivered with excellent clarity and exceptionally insight. He is able to achieve through lucid analysis and concrete political examples. Professor Kiel has a wealth of knowledge that he is effectively able to communicate.
and his teachings, at least for me, have had a lasting influence.
Clearly, Professor Kiel's tenure did not turn on his teaching ability. "Publish or Perish" is the favored expression of administrators — administrators who disguise their responsibility to the students with pretentious titles and vague job descriptions — administrators who blind themselves to the brilliance of an educator with a myopic vision of a more published faculty. Administrators, too busy with their demanding state jobs to attend one of Professor Kiel's classes, have turned a dear ear to the unanimous will of the students.
When the KU Greater University Fund solicits my contribution this year, I'll have to decline. Unfortunately, the administration has demonstrated poor investments to the quality of education at KU.
Patrick McGrath 1988 KU graduate
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Coke's MagiCan fizzles at start
Company will come out OK, though
You would have thought that, after the disastrous decision in 1985 to get rid of Coca-Cola, the most popular single product of any kind in the world, and replace it with something called "New Coke," the executives would have learned. But no. Right now they are marketing blunder so fraught with faulty thinking that any beginning grocery store clerk could have told them how wrong the idea was.
Notwithstanding the fact that they run one of the most successful corporations in the history of the world, the top executives of the company once again have inhibited them astonishingly stupid they are.
Coke announced that it was launching a $100 million summer promotion. The company said that special "MagiCans" would be distributed along with regular cans of Coca-Cola Classic. Customers would learn that they had received a MagiCan when they popped one open and a spring-loaded device inside the can thrust a rolled-up piece of paper money, or a coupon, out the hole.
Anyone who saw the TV commercials for the MagiCans sensed that the idea was a little strange. You pop open a can of Coke, and money comes jutting out of the can? What that vision brought immediately to many people's minds, I don't want to drink a Coke
Bob Greene Syndicated columnist
that had money sticking in it,
never mind some "spring-loaded
device." Who wants to drink a pro-
tium? Or the foreign object
floating around in it?
It out turns that the MagiCans with the money and coupons in them would not have Coke in them. Got that? The cans of Coke with the prizes in them were not intended to be sold in a store, but a little nicety that was lost on many consumers; they thought the Cokes were real.
In light of Perris's recent contamination problems, you would think that any beverage company with any marketing sense would realize that the public perception of the purity of a product's contents is paramount. Not the Coca-Cola Co. That company floods the country with images of rolled-up stuff spilling out of the cans.
In Massachusetts, though, a child reportedly opened a MagiCan that "exploded." There was light inside and outside, then it spit it out; it tasted horrible. His parents called the police, who contacted the Coca-
Anyone who saw the TV commercials for the MagiCans sensed that the idea was a little strange. You pop open a can of Coke, and money comes jutting out of the can? What that vision brought immediately to many people's minds was, I don't want to drink a Coke that had money sticking in it, never mind some "spring-loaded device." Who wants to drink a product that had a foreign object floating around in it?
Cola Co. and state health officials.
Thus, last week, all across the United States, there were full-page newspaper ads paid for by Coca-Cola. You didn't have to be a very astute reader to take one look at the ads and realize that Coke knew everything up again. There were two drawings with the ad; one was labeled "Properly Working MagiCan," the other was labeled "Malfunctioning MagiCan."
The ads' text conveyed the
message that the company was floundering. "Although MagiCans don't have Coca-Cola Classic in them, you can't tell them apart from the regular ones. You recognize a MagiCan when you find one."
"In a small number of instances, the prize mechanism may jam. Also, the mechanism in a very small smart robot can fetch cheats from inside the can."
"Please don't try to drink from a MagiCan. It contains chlorinated water which should not be accessible and is not meant for drinking."
"Listen for something giggling inside the can. (That's a detached mechanism — a faulty MagiCan.)"
Lawyers across the United States are already licking their chops, envisioning product liability cases that could keep the Coca-Cola Co. in court well into the next century. The lawyers are stunned that Coca-Cola would blitely put out cans of Coke that purposefully contain foreign objects and a smelly liquid.
If a Coca-Cola truckdriver had made the mistake of delivering the cans to the wrong stores, he might expect to be reprimanded or fired. But remember, the executives behind the MagiCan debacle are the same folks who in 1985 decided to get rid of them and instead helped their colleagues. If they follow the same path they did in '85, none of them will lose jobs. In fact, they'll probably end up giving each other bonuses.
that you can bet that the bonus won't come popping out.
▶ Bob Greene is a Chicago Tribune columnist.
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