Why the Fall of the Title IX of Old is a Good Idea GethN7 Follow Sep 25, 2017 · 4 min read

The Title IX controversy refers to a decision by current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to revoke and replace the current definition of it’s protections of people in academic circles. The basics of Title IX are as follow:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

On paper, this is a great idea, and I support its underlying premise. In reality, it has fine print that has created a nightmarish situation where universities have been handed powers that properly belong in the hands of law enforcement and those accused of sexual assault are effectively guilty until proven innocent, a situation that has resulted in more than one college unfairly subjecting the accused to the pillory of public opinion over charges that were later proven false, and so long as it continues, matters better handled by law enforcement (whose job it is to investigate such criminal acts) are being subverted and due process is being thrown into the dumpster.

The opposition argues that the victims deserve more rights than the accused, which is unconstitutional. All are guaranteed due process under the law, which means the accused and accuser are and should be on an equal playing field before the courts of law and that the court of public opinion cannot prejudice their legal rights.

But for those who still insist this is hurting women anyway, a brief flashback in history to a time when we almost fell prey to elevating the accusers above the accused, to an event called the “Boston Massacre”.

In 1770, six years before the United States declared independence from Great Britain, soldiers of the British Army accused of murdering innocent people had no expectation of justice. The city of Boston hated them for the most part, and the accusers would have been happy to have executed the soldiers in the street, mob justice style, as they wanted blood.

However, John Adams, future president of the United States and then a lawyer who himself was no fan of the British administration’s activities, took a stand for the accused despite his prejudices because if the mob had been allowed to murder those soldiers in the street without proof of their guilt, it would have destroyed the very idea of a people who believed in the rule of law and that all have rights subject to those laws, and so he argued in their defense, managing to acquit most of the accused of the crime of murder after successfully proving their innocence of willful malice. Two were found guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter for discharging their weapons into the crowd out of fear and anger, though they were not found guilty of first degree murder because it was proven the crowd has provoked and assaulted them first, and while their response was done in contravention of orders by their superior officer NOT to fire their weapons (future Secretary of War Henry Knox was one of the witnesses who could attest to the British officer in command giving orders to that effect), they were only guilty of a crime of passion due to provocation, but they had not intended to deliberately murder innocents in the street otherwise.

The punishment for those two soldiers was permanent expulsion from the British Army and being branded, the proper punishment for their crime according to the law of the time.

As for the accusers, at least one was guilty of deliberate perjury that was easily discredited by the defense, and even those who wanted blood could bring no stronger case before the court aside from deliberate lies about the accused, and those guilty of spreading them were punished with a whipping and banishment, again, according to the law of the time. The rest wisely chose to not add the guilty of perjury to their names and dropped any charges of their own, and were set free.

The point of this is that, had the mob been allowed to exact revenge on the soldiers for their supposed crime, six innocent men would have suffered and two would have been punished in excess of their actual crimes, but because the law was upheld, the actual guilty parties paid for their crimes as was prescribed by law and those guilty of perverting justice were duly punished.

It was this incident that was one of the reasons the founders of the US Constitution believed so strongly that due process should be protected and enforced by law, not by the public opinion, as despite their prejudices, they knew that their civilization then and now would not last if they allowed justice to become a mockery of itself.

Therefore, for similar reasons, I support Secretary DeVos, who wants to return the burden of proof to being decided by those who are properly deputized to investigate and enforce the law as opposed to being handled in house by universities, as that is no better than throwing the accused into a court of public opinion where all the accuser has to do is bring a charge and the accused are denied a fair trial.