With thanks to Common Dreams for the wisdom to post this very relevant piece of history:
Statement on the Articles of Impeachment delivered July 25, 1974, House Judiciary Committee by Congresswoman Barbara Jordan:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, I join my colleague Mr. Rangel in thanking you for giving the junior members of this committee the glorious opportunity of sharing the pain of this inquiry. Mr. Chairman, you are a strong man, and it has not been easy but we have tried as best we can to give you as much assistance as possible.
Earlier today, we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States: “We, the people.� It’s a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that “We, the people.� I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included in “We, the people.�
Today I am an inquisitor. An hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution.
“Paedophile jailed for raping girl”
What is wrong with this story, let us count the ways…
First off, this is a misuse of the word pedophile (and no that is not a mis-spelling above, just an English newspaper). There is nothing loving about rape. And the word pedophile comes from a Greek word that means to love children. Secondly, there is no equivalence between having sex and rape. Having sex implies consent, rape is a crime, and an unspeakably heinous one when it involves a child). And as activist Jennifer Drew points out, the child that the victim gave birth to is not “his child”,