Today’s editorial comes out against sexual assault but ignores recent actions by Trump’s education department

This morning’s Wheeling Intelligencer editorial on sexual assault, ”Keeping Campus Safe for Women,” uses a recent increase in sexual assault at Ohio State University to argue that the university needs to act:

If the risk to women has increased, OSU officials need to do something about it.

If one statistic in the report — that one in five female undergraduate students has been victimized by nonconsensual sexual contact — something is wrong.

If they hesitate to recognize that, OSU officials ought to ask a few parents if they consider one-in-five odds that their daughters will be assaulted to be acceptable.

The editorial does not mention that Betsy Devos and the Trump Department of Education decided to roll back Obama-era rules for campus assault two weeks ago. That ruling was widely covered everywhere but not in Wheeling’s “newspapers.” Here, for example, was the opening paragraph from “Betsy DeVos scraps Obama-era college sexual misconduct rules” in USA Today:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Friday scrapped Obama-era guidance intended to better protect victims of sexual misconduct on college campuses, replacing it with an interim rule she says is meant to strike a more appropriate balance between those accused of sexual misdeeds and their accusers.

I find it interesting that the locals have editorially ignored this action by the Trump administration but now want OSU to do something about it.

Today’s morning paper did include an edited version of an AP article about a rape prevention program on page 7

However, “Rape-Prevention Program Faces Questions” included only the first half of the original AP article. Among the AP points that were not included in this morning's paper:

But last month Education Secretary Betsy DeVos criticized the guidance as unfair to men accused of sexual assault, scrapped it, and announced new instructions.

"Schools must continue to confront these horrific crimes and behaviors head-on. There will be no more sweeping them under the rug," DeVos said in a statement. "But the process also must be fair and impartial, giving everyone more confidence in its outcomes."

Activists said DeVos's announcement represents a step backward for efforts to teach bystanders and others in the community to think differently about sexual assault. They found it especially troubling that the move came from the administration of Donald Trump, who was accused of sexual assault by several women, though never charged or convicted. Last fall, a recording from 2005 surfaced on which he was heard bragging that he could grab women and get away with it. He later dismissed it as "locker room talk."

(Note -- the link includes all of the original AP article. The printed version ends after "strange neighborhood, he said.")

Soon to be a local editorial: liberals are hypocrites for not attacking Harvey Weinstein

Unless every liberal (especially the Hollywood variety) attacks producer Weinstein, it will prove that all liberals are hypocrites and consequently no one has the right to accuse our president (or Bill O’Reilly) of sexual misconduct ever again. That will be the conclusion of what I believe will be a soon-to-be-published editorial in one of our local “newspapers.” Does it matter that the locals have never said anything editorially about any of Trump’s sexist statements or actions and that such actions are edited out of AP articles that include them (see above, for example)? Of course not.