A registered sex offender named James Bays started dating a single mother he met on the Internet. Of course, he molested her son and she reported him to the police. But since she “bought a ticket” on that ride the cops should arrest her too if McCain’s theory of “morality” were America’s standard.
John Wayne Gacy gained control of many of his victims by getting high with them and sometimes offering to show them a “magic trick” which involved being put into handcuffs. According to McCain, the thirty-three young men Gacy raped, tortured and murdered “bought the ticket” to that ride when they trusted their killer.
I am a social conservative–I just happen to not be a Christian–but I know most Christians will agree with me on this point: we must have law and order. Stacy McCain and his “Men’s” Movement groupies are trying to find loopholes for criminals to psychologically and politically justify their wickedness and depravity. This is not conservatism; it is at best nihilism and more likely the misogynist imaginings of misanthropes who wear the mantle of morality but secretly take pleasure in the harm they see done to others.
McCain is still trying to “explain” his theories on crime, reminding us of the fact that his “buy the ticket, take the ride” statement was plagiarized from overrated drug addict Hunter S. Thompson:
The phrase “buy the ticket, take the ride” (from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) is subject to interpretation, but certainly it has something to do with accepting the potentially painful consequences of thrill-seeking. If you rode with the Hell’s Angels, for example, that ride might end in a brutal stomping, for which you had no legal recourse. You chose the outlaw life and unless you were willing to wage war on the entire gang — a war that could only end in your own painful death — there was nothing you could do, no court of appeals to hear your complaint that you had been unfairly stomped.
You bought the ticket. You took the ride.
No refunds. No complaints.
Actually the phrase leaves little room for any interpretation beyond claiming that victims of crime who made bad decisions aren’t deserving of sympathy or justice. McCain and Thompson both are wrong here. No one is beyond justice no matter who their victims are or what their victims have done. The date rape McCain sneers at as less than a crime is the breaking of an oath by one person to another, and an attack on the very social fabric people like McCain claim to uphold. McCain then compounds the enormity of this perfidy by not only denying the need for justice under these circumstance but turning the very idea of justice on its head by claiming that the victim is the guilty party.
While McCain likes to quote hunter Thompson this whole episode reminds me of a quote from Hrafnkel’s Saga: “But my faith tells me that nothing good can happen to people who break their solemn vows.”
