Few things make me more angry than injustice to others.  So I confess I was angry when I read an article today in the December 7, 2015 issue of National Review Online by Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson (neither one a conservative  by the way), which discussed and criticized the recent abuses by the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.  The particular abuses chronicled have been on college campuses and have involved blatant and deliberate neglect of due process for students accused of various alleged sexual harassments, abuses or rape.  Moreover the authors also included the extremely disappointing news that the Republicans in Congress are doing little to correct these abuses of authority and are even making matters worse.  For example, Marco Rubio among others is co-sponsoring a bill with Democrats the likes of Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) and Claire McCaskill (Missouri), entitled The Campus Accountability and Safety Act (CASA) which would reduce due process rights further while giving leverage to accusers at every possible turn.  Congress has provided almost no oversight of the OCR, despite its clearly unconstitutional overreach.

You can read the full article at http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428910/campus-rape-courts-republicans-resisting.  But I will quote from a few portions of it to illustrate.  First, on the background of Title IX, the authors state:

“The administration’s crusade against due process for students accused of sexual assault has relied on Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972, a brief, unadorned provision that simply prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions. It has most famously been used against gender imbalances in college athletics and, more recently, in scientific and technical fields, but in the act’s first 39 years, no administration claimed that Title IX gave the federal government authority to micromanage university disciplinary procedures.” (my emphasis)

As one can see this provision had nothing to do with sexual harassment or assault or rape.  Likely the Congress assumed reasonably that local police and judicial systems could and should handle these situations.  But the authors further explain what has happened more recently, since 2011:

“Barack Obama and his appointees adopted a radically different approach. In April 2011, the OCR sent college administrators a 19-page “Dear Colleague” letter that ordered colleges and universities that receive federal funds (as almost all do) to change their disciplinary procedures regarding sexual assault. Each of the required changes — reducing the burden of proof in campus sex cases (and only in those cases) from “clear and convincing evidence” to “preponderance of the evidence,” introducing a form of double jeopardy by allowing accusers to appeal not-guilty findings, and demanding accelerated investigations that hamper the ability of accused students to gather evidence to defend themselves — increased the likelihood of guilty findings. Worst of all, the letter “strongly” discouraged institutions from allowing an accused student to cross-examine his accuser. And a 2014 missive from the OCR threatened schools that allow such cross-examination — “the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth,” as the Supreme Court has repeatedly called it — with a charge of “perpetuat[ing] a hostile environment,” which is illegal.”

Notice that traditional due process and rules of guilt are now missing.  Yet, it appears that the OCR had no legal authority in the statute to do what it did.  I don’t believe anyone has brought a direct challenge to the authority of that agency but it seems worthwhile for someone or organization to think about doing so.  It isn’t clear how a Federal court would rule, but given the pretty narrow language of the original act, the expansion of power by the OCR by reinterpreting it might make it vulnerable.  Then again, nothing is certain with the Federal courts these days.

So what happens?  I am not arguing that rape and sexual assault ought to be minimized.  But these are criminal acts or alleged acts which cannot possibly be determined well by untrained and often already biased campus administrators or (sometimes) students.  And on top of that the OCR and members of Congress are using bogus figures to try to justify their actions and lack of response respectively.  The authors of the article correctly point out that the usual statistics thrown around are just false:

“While rape is a very serious problem for women in their late teens and 20s, the best data show that roughly one in 30 (not one in five, as Obama and his allies claim) women are sexually assaulted while in college; that they are safer on campus than off; that the campus rape rate has plunged since 1997; and that false or likely false accusations are not uncommon, albeit impossible to quantify with confidence. On the last point, accusations against innocent students seem to be increasing at colleges, where accusers are urged by campus sex bureaucrats, professors, and activists to report dubious or simply false allegations. Institutions of higher learning also tend to define rape and sexual assault far more broadly than either the criminal law or common understanding, as in the suggestion that sex with a partner who in any degree is intoxicated constitutes sexual assault.”

For those who believe the NRO is not a credible source I have checked their figures.  They can be found here: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rsavcaf9513.pdf.  This study had a much larger sample (the 1 in 5 report used exactly two (!) sample campuses, incentivized people to take the survey and used a broader definition of rape and sexual assault than normal), about 160,000 students.  The result indicated the rape and assault rate per 1,000 was 6, that is, .6%.  It seems the 1 in 5 figure has been used to create an environment that would scare anyone away from criticizing the clear abuse of power of the OCR and its evident abuse of due process.

This is an unjust situation, and cannot be countenanced by anyone with a conscience.  Every accused person deserves due process, which means simply a fair and impartial procedure, without any attempt to skew the outcome.  All accused students should have a right to counsel, even if it is informal, time to prepare a defense, and the ability to cross-examine witnesses and the accuser.  Accusers of course have an equal right to due process.  While we are at it, why don’t colleges simply put a process in place whereby every alleged assault or rape is automatically referred to the local police as any normal criminal accusation would be.  The police would be immediately called, an investigation would begin, and the normal judicial mechanisms would come into play.  I would dare the OCR to challenge that.

Now why should Christians have an interest in all this?  It is really very simple.  God is a God of justice, and He hates injustice.  This included both unjust outcomes and unjust processes, the latter as indicated by the numerous texts in the Old Testament about the perversion of justice through bribery, bias and corruption.  If Christians should care, Christian universities also should care.  Every aspect of a procedure involving sexual assault or rape should be assured of fairness.  The outcome is not to be pre-determined.  The process should be designed to maximize the probability of obtaining the right or just outcome without bias.  That is God’s standard. Now sometimes we have a tendency to think about justice only in terms of an outcome (was that a just decision? is that a just action?, etc.).  But God is also concerned with the process of arriving at just outcomes.  And since we all are prone to sin, He knows we have tendencies to try to bias outcomes.  That is why He reminds us in the Old Testament about what we today call due process.  Arguably the procedural texts outnumber the substantive ones on justice.

Yes, I am angry.  I am always angry about wilful injustice.  And I hope our Christian institutions will be concerned with it also or else we are violating God’s standards.