Suing DeVos, Advocates Admit The Title IX Lie

A pervasive argument against male students whose lives were destroyed by the flagrant refusal to provide due process in campus Title IX sex tribunals is that colleges are not anti-male, but pro-victim. Is it their fault that it’s almost invariably males who rape females? Or at least, females who allege rape, when both are intoxicated and have consensual sex, only to regret it when their girlfriends tell them they’ve been raped?

Title IX advocacy group, SurvJustice (the “surv” standing for “survivors”), has filed suit against the Department of Education, arguing that changes to Title IX regulations are gender-biased.

The Trump administration on Thursday urged a federal judge to reject claims that gender bias drove Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ decision to rewrite an Obama-era directive on campus sexual assault.

Ironies on so many levels, such as the Obama-era “directive” being imposed at the whim of an unaccountable bureaucrat rather than as mandated by law with the requisite transparency, notwithstanding, the argument is an admission.

Three victims’ rights groups, led by SurvJustice, sued DeVos over the new policy in January 2018. The groups claim the policy “disproportionately burdens women and girls” and was motivated by sexist stereotypes that women frequently lie about sexual assault and harassment.

Finally, there is agreement that this is not, and never was, a battle between victims and perpetrators, but women against men. The deprivation of due process wasn’t a matter of being pro-victim, but pro-woman. They say so. They swear it.

The suit complains that DeVos, having met with groups calling for the introduction of minimal due process in a system manufactured to compel colleges to convict all men and vindicate the feelings of female “survivors,” prejudiced the process.

In court Thursday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley appeared open to arguments that advancing the claims of gender bias could make it harder for government agencies to hold pre-decisional meetings with stakeholders in the future.

By accepting the theory, Myers argued a government agency would become marred by the views of any group with which it meets before making an important policy decision.

“That does seem problematic,” Corley acknowledged.

Meetings were held with groups, such as those comprised of mothers whose innocent sons’ lives were destroyed by cries of rape as defined not by facts or elements, but the feelings of “victims” that their consent, if not aggressive initiation of sex, should be vitiated by regret years later. How dare the DoE meet with such groups, consider the views of these people who weren’t willing to allow their male offspring to suffer for the sake of the female narrative of victimhood?

Representing the plaintiff groups, lawyer Robin Thurston countered that the Education Department didn’t just meet with the “men’s rights groups” but coordinated with them to write opinion pieces supporting the department’s new policy. In contrast, the department only met with survivors’ rights groups after repeated requests, and it excluded one group for publishing a critical op-ed, according to the lawsuit.

“It’s not a marketplace of ideas to suggest that this group put out op-eds supporting the policy,” Thurston said. “That’s more than just soliciting information from everyone.”

It appears that conspiracy theories are not just the bastion of the alt-right, when it comes to believing that some nefarious scheme must be happening because there can be no other explanation for everyone not recognizing that Team Victims is on the side of righteousness.

The victims’ rights lawyer cited a July 2017 New York Times article in which Jackson is quoted as saying “the accusations – 90 percent of them – fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.’”

Thurston insisted that this and other statements by Education Department officials show the policy change was “at least in part based on the stereotype that women tend to make false accusations.”

Women? See what she did there? Not victims. Not the survivors of rape and sexual assault. Women. And whether Candace Jackson’s 90% statistic is accurate, her assertion is not wrong. The ballooning of claims of rape and sexual assault have nothing to do with men suddenly running around campus raping women with abandon, but the untethering of the concepts of rape and sexual assault from cognizable definitions and reducing them to whatever the women feels about it after the fact. When rape has no meaning, then any claim of rape is seemingly legit. What infuriates the advocates isn’t that Jackson said it out loud, but that she’s largely right.

But while the claims asserted by SurvJustice, together with their co-plaintiffs, Equal Rights Advocates and the Victim Rights Law Center, may fall short of rational as it complains that the DoE didn’t spend enough time listening to them justify a flagrantly unconstitutional system imposed in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act by a radical bureaucrat with unfettered discretion to make her dream of female victimhood a reality, they are also a confession. The Title IX sex tribunals aren’t about victims or perps, but women and men, and the procedures were crafted with the specific intent to make sure that no man walks away, guilty or not.

Now that we’ve finally come to the point where the lies are admitted and the truth of the matter revealed, we can have a real discussion about why due process is so horrifying to women.

10 thoughts on “Suing DeVos, Advocates Admit The Title IX Lie

  1. Dan

    The question that should have been asked: “So the Obama-era directive was intended to benefit women at the expense of men?” “Case dismissed with prejudice.”

    1. SHG Post author

      It’s the unavoidable conclusion. If due process benefits men at the expense of women, then the converse must also be true.

  2. Vince McCormick

    These advocates don’t seem to understand that an inherently unfair system brings the whole TIX regime into disrepute; and that is counterproductive to their stated goals.

    1. SHG Post author

      If they can sell the narrative, then it’s all about ends rather than means. The Advocacy groups wanted to tell DeVos about the horrible trauma of “survivors,” since no one wants real victims of rape to suffer. If they could capture DeVos’ emotions, then the collateral damage of convicting innocent men would be an acceptable price to pay to provide SurvJustice.

      1. RedditLaw

        What if I told you that the purpose of this lawsuit is not to actually reverse the DoE rulemaking, but to instead create a new narrative that these rules were put in place at the behest of awful people like pick up artists and other misogynists, instead of the mothers of ruined sons?

        That’s just my conspiracy theory.

  3. B. McLeod

    This has followed from the open politicization of the federal courts, and is simply adoption of a tactic that worked in the DACA and travel restriction playbooks. When you can’t show that an action (basically pen-and-phone repeals of pen-and-phone edicts) exceeds executive authority, you just allege a discriminatory motivation or impact. Zamma-zamma, nationwide injunction follows if the plaintiffs picked a sufficiently empathetic court.

    But of course, it is particularly ironic where the claim that the repeal is “gender-biased” takes its central essence from the glaringly gender-biased nature of the edict that is being repealed.

  4. Julia

    It’s not surprising that groups that have “Surv” and “Victims” in their names are not interested in a 90% dropping in the number of “survs” and “victims”. Their business model is to sell “female victimhood” and “rampant rape on campuses” but with due process exercised it might not look so rampant anymore. They don’t really care about the victims but would rather be happy if their number goes higher.

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