To the Editor:
Michael Belinsky '08's "Breaking Down Partisan Perspectives" (May 5) correctly states that the Duke lacrosse scandal should not be viewed through a partisan lens, "crime." Who exactly is the "we" he claims supposedly all too "easily contextualizes" the incident along ideological lines? Moreover, his definitions of the "conservative" and "liberal" partisan views of the rape case are completely bogus. I sincerely doubt that there is some sort of embedded conservative consensus that views the stripper's rape as "inherent to her profession" of stripping. Additionally, there is hardly any underlying liberal consensus that shares the view outlined in Belinsky's completely inane description of the "liberal" take on all of this. Most people would never have bothered to view this through a partisan lens anyway, and if they did, they surely would not have taken the oversimplified approach outlined by Belinsky, thus rendering his entire article pointless.
A far more appropriate and debatable question to ask would've been whether such a scandal is more likely to happen within the athletic team at Duke, where recruited athletes are obviously more easily shuffled into the institution than, say, Dartmouth, which retains higher admissions standards for most NCAA sports -- not that I would necessarily take a definitive stance on either side of this argument -- but it at least frames the debate along the lines of what people might actually be thinking before they simply pass it off as merely a "crime."
