But now we have a real Duke rape case, and one that largely conforms to the above narrative. Frank Lombard, Duke’s associate director of the Center for Health Policy, faces federal criminal charges for offering his adopted five-year-old son for sex. Where are the parallels? Lombard is white and well-to-do while his victim, the son, is black (Lombard also has a second adopted son, who is black as well).
Yet there are also differences. One is that, unlike the tenuous lacrosse-player case, authorities have Lombard dead to rights. Writes the blog Self Evident Truths:
The arrest warrant states that a person, later identified as Lombard, used video chat on the internet to perfom [sic] sex acts on a child under the age of ten…. The complaint says Lombard’s chat room ID lists him as "perv dad for fun."
The warrant states that an astute police detective contacted Lombard through Yahoo! Instant Messenger. Lombard admitted performing sexual acts on his adopted five year old son. He wrote that he would drug the boy with Benadryl before molesting him. He admitted that he waited to molest the boy until his partner was out of town.
The warrant continues describing the next day, when Lombard offered his five year old to the detective to perform sex acts on him. The detective said he lived out of state, making the solicitation a federal offense.
There are also other differences between the cases. One is that there is no reason to expect the media to do anything but bury this story posthaste. Why? Because, despite the aforementioned parallels, it doesn’t completely accord with today’s favored victimizer/victim narrative, as Lombard is a homosexual, making the victim a child who was adopted by a homosexual. Thus, while Lombard’s sexual inclination alone is enough to make the mainstream media treat this case with the “utmost discretion,” there is an additional factor: disseminate the facts of the crime enough, and people just may get the crazy notion that it’s lunacy to let homosexuals adopt children, especially little boys. So you’ve just got to watch the information you put in the yahoos’ heads.
Not surprisingly, this double standard is already apparent in the reportage. In the Duke lacrosse case, not only was the story front page, but an accuser of the easiest virtue was painted in the best light. For example, the stripper was often called an “exotic dancer,” which is much like calling a prostitute an exotic blind date. In contrast, now the mainstream media seem most reluctant to reveal Lombard’s homosexuality or the adopted victim’s race.
So, as far as how this story will most likely unfold, there are four things I cannot envision happening. First, I don’t foresee Duke’s administration and faculty coming out as a lynch mob and convicting Lombard in the court of public opinion. Second, don’t expect Jesse Jackson et al. to venture to Durham County and play the race card like a Vegas high roller, even though this case lends itself perfectly to it. A white man who adopts a black boy to keep as a sex slave, anyone?
Next, at risk of being redundant, don’t hold your breath waiting for the mainstream stream media to get on board; like the National Organization for Women, with its deafening silence regarding the savaging of Sarah Palin and women’s plight in Moslem nations, they care not about little victims but leftist agendas.
Lastly, the News & Observer tells us that Lombard is “a licensed clinical social worker with a master’s degree in social work, [and] is a health-disparities researcher who studies HIV/AIDS in the rural South” (read: professional victimologist). So, not that any more evidence of his ideological persuasion was necessary, but it’s obvious that the man is thoroughly liberal in his professional life — and libertine in his personal life. Yet don’t expect the purveyors of pablum to be point this out, either.
Speaking of the race card, the hierarchy of victim groups is much like a deck of cards: black is a good hand, but it’s trumped by female. And, it appears, homosexual trumps everything.
Photo of Frank Lombard: AP Images
