The First Occupy Movement?  Homeless Sex Offenders

Remember 2010, when “homeless sex offenders living under the Julia Tuttle Bridge” became the latest endangered seals of the liberal left?  I blogged about it here:

[R]eporters coast to coast set out to comb bridges and underpasses, eagerly seeking encampments of homeless sex offenders.  Lightening their trip by jettisoning the heavy burden of objectivity, they finally stumbled upon a handful of men shacked up in the woods outside Marietta, Georgia — living there for about five minutes while other housing was being found for them. . . Meanwhile, nobody really noticed the hundreds of sex offenders living nearby in perfectly legal housing, just like nobody noticed the thousands of non-homeless sex offenders in Miami.

Other than the Miami encampment and the blink-of-an-eye Atlanta thing, the only other reported sighting of a homeless sex offender was by the New York Times’ Dan Barry, and that was entirely accidental: Barry didn’t realize that the manipulative old coot he was slavishly profiling was actually an absconded child rapist . . . because he didn’t do a simple thirty-second online fact-check to confirm any part of the man’s sob story.

Fast-forward two years.  Homeless sex offenders don’t need to rely on Dan Barry for tea and sympathy anymore: they’ve found a brand new affinity group in the Occupy Movement:

Woman Raped at Occupy New Haven: Cops

Police charged England Gamble, 53, of New Haven, with sexual assault.

Gamble is on the state sex offender registry for a first-degree sexual assault conviction in 1991. The registry said he was released from prison in 1996 and did not register his address.

Note that he served merely five years for first-degree sexual assault: thank you, ACLU!  Et. al!

Rather than taking steps to ensure that no other sex offenders are hiding out in their camp, Occupy New Haven is busy denying that Gamble and his victim were part of their movement.  But New Haven police point out that Gamble would not have been able to insinuate himself in the area if not for the now-federally-protected protest encampment:

Members of the Occupy movement said neither Gamble nor the victim are members of the movement. They said both are homeless and set up a tent nearby.  Police have not classified Gamble as homeless, but said if the Occupy movement was not on the green, that Gamble would not have been able to set up camp there.

So where does Occupy New Haven stand on sex offender registration, the pertinent issue here?  I very much doubt they support registration rules for convicted rapists.  After all, they’re part of a movement that includes the entire rainbow of anti-incarceration activism and seeks to “empty the prisons.”  They hate cops.  They view law enforcement as oppression.  They discourage women from even reporting sexual assaults to the police.

And so, another woman gets raped at Occupy.

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It is possible that the New Haven Occupiers didn’t notice a real rapist in their midst because they were too busy accusing all frat brothers of being imaginary rapists down the road at Wesleyan University:

Politely Demonizing Men at Wesleyan, by Charlotte Allen (Nov. 16, 2011)

This past Monday  I delivered a speech at the Delta Kappa Epsilon house at Wesleyan University. I had been invited to speak by DKE and another fraternity at Wesleyan, Beta Theta Pi, because I had written an op-ed article in June for the Los Angeles Times titled “War Waged on College Fraternities.” That was the theme of my Wesleyan speech, too. I had expected the audience to consist mostly of “Deke” and Beta brothers plus other members of Wesleyan’s tiny Greek-letter community who felt beleaguered by efforts of university administrators to regulate and restrict their activities, and calls by activists to put fraternities out of business altogether. But my speech had been advertised in the student newspaper. The room where I spoke–the former ballroom, now all-purpose party room, of the worn nineteenth-century mansion that served as DKE’s house—was packed with an overflow crowd of some 75 young people. At least half of them were non-fraternity members, many of whom had never set foot inside a fraternity house. From them I learned something: how thoroughly college students, at least students at elite colleges such as Wesleyan, have absorbed and internalized all of the negative things—especially about fraternities as supposed hotbeds of sexual assault—that professors and administrators have been harping on for at least two decades. There seemed to be a consensus that university authorities weren’t tough enough in clamping down on Greek-letter societies.

These bright and articulate young people believed everything. They believed, for example, that college campuses are rife with sexual assaults committed by male students on their female classmates. “One out of every four college women is raped,” declared a young man who was obviously not part of the Deke/Beta group during a post-speech question-and-answer session. “That’s been under-reported,” he said. “Actually, it’s been over-reported,” I responded. I explained, as Heather Mac Donald explained in her City Journal article “The Campus Rape Myth,” that the one-in-four statistic came from a single flawed study debunked many times over the years. . .

A male student standing in the back announced, “I don’t feel safe in this room.” “In this room?,” I queried incredulously, pointing around the spacious ballroom with its neoclassical molding and high fireplaces at each end, both topped by oil paintings of men who appeared to be illustrious Dekes of the nineteenth century. “In this room, where you’re speaking your mind freely and everyone is listening respectfully?” “I don’t mean now, but when the parties are going on, when it’s dark and there’s a lot of loud music and drinking and people are being victimized.” A female student chimed in that she didn’t feel “safe,” either. (“Safe” is politically correct campus jargon for “liking what I see or hear.”) A second male student added his two cents: “Everyone knows there’s a lot of rape going on in fraternity houses.” He got a hiss or two from the Greek-letter contingent but the main audience response was the poetry-reading/Occupy Wall Street version of applause: an enthusiastic round of finger-snapping.

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Also this week, the New Haven/Wesleyan Occupiers took time out of their studied avoidance of the rapists amidst them to throw condoms at Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia.  You know, in the name of free speech:

[S]even protesters took off their day clothes and stood up to reveal orange Guantanamo Bay suits and black hoods, protesting Scalia’s complicity in war and torture. These protesters, after refusing to sit down, were escorted out.  Simultaneously, four students dropped hundreds of condoms from a balcony into the crowd to show opposition to Scalia’s assaults on reproductive freedom and privacy.  The condoms bore the label “Practice Safe Sodomy,” referring to his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas arguing in favor of upholding homophobic anti-sodomy laws.   Students also unfurled banners that read, “Scalia Represents the People Inc.” and “There Can Be No Justice in the Court of the Conquered” to oppose his support of corporate personhood and close ties to corporate interests, as well as a national history of colonial subjugation and imperial enslavement which the Supreme Court has codified and enabled.  More Wesleyan students stood up with signs supporting the protesters’ message in overflow rooms.

There are a variety of reasons that students have decided to protest. A media advisory earlier this week said, “Scalia represents highly unjust and oppressive political system, which for example appointed George W. Bush as unelected president in 2000 and increased corporate control of elections in the 2010 Citizens United ruling. In contrast, the Scalia Welcoming Committee is a truly democratic, non-hierarchical group, inspired by the Occupy movement, Arab Spring and global anti-austerity protests. We strongly reject the Wesleyan administration’s choice to invite such a bigoted, sexist, corrupt puppet of the super-rich to speak.”

Bigoted, sexist, corrupt puppet.  At least someone’s teaching them slant rhyme.

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So, to summarize:

Occupy New Haven believes in safe sex for Supreme Court Justices, but not sexual safety for Occupy protesters.  They believe in free speech for themselves so they can remain silent as sexual assaults are committed in their camp, while believing in suppressing the speech rights of frat brothers who are tired of being falsely accused of rape.  By them.    

Get it?