A Good Argument for Vengeance

I don't know these people. I don't know their circumstances. I'm almost old enough to forget what it's like to be an adolescent. My whole experience of it, now, comes from parenting teens.

And that's the whence from which my emotions seethe and fly out of proportion to my connection (as in, none) to these events:

"A teenage girl who was dropped from her high school's cheerleading squad after refusing to chant the name of a basketball player who had sexually assaulted her must pay compensation of $45,000 (£27,300) after losing a legal challenge against the decision.

The United States Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a review of the case brought by the woman, who is known only as HS. Lower courts had ruled that she was speaking for the school, rather than for herself, when serving on a cheerleading squad – meaning that she had no right to stay silent when coaches told her to applaud.

She was 16 when she said she had been raped at a house party attended by dozens of fellow students from Silsbee High School, in south-east Texas. One of her alleged assailants, a student athlete called Rakheem Bolton, was arrested, with two other young men. 

In court, Bolton pleaded guilty to the misdemeanour assault of HS. He received two years of probation, community service, a fine and was required to take anger-management classes. The charge of rape was dropped, leaving him free to return to school and take up his place on the basketball team.

Four months later, in January 2009, HS travelled to one of Silsbee High School's basketball games in Huntsville. She joined in with the business of leading cheers throughout the match. But when Bolton was about to take a free throw, the girl decided to stand silently with her arms folded.

'I didn't want to have to say his name and I didn't want to cheer for him," she later told reporters. "I just didn't want to encourage anything he was doing.'

Richard Bain, the school superintendent in the sport-obsessed small town, saw things differently. He told HS to leave the gymnasium. Outside, he told her she was required to cheer for Bolton. When the girl said she was unwilling to endorse a man who had sexually assaulted her, she was expelled from the cheerleading squad..."

I'm not qualified to properly analyze this within an intellectual framework. I couldn't possibly write commentary that won't be or hasn't already been better put to page and screen by dozens of feminists. But, I do have the words to describe my emotional response:

The superintendent ought to have his tongue cut out of his mouth and stitched to his forehead. The rapists ought to have their raping rapist peckers staple gunned to concrete slabs which are thereupon immediately tossed into the nearest river, and the young woman ought to have whatever other vengeance upon the shitheel Texas town her bright heart desires.