Kaitlyn Ashley Hunt’s prosecution for having sex with a
14-year-old girl has, as I reported last week, made
the Florida teenager a cause célèbre of the
gay-rights movement. Since the 18-year-old ex-cheerleader
rejected a plea bargain on charges of lewd and lascivious conduct
— it is a felony under Florida law for an adult to have sex with
anyone under 16 — officials in Indian River County have braced
themselves for the potential of a trial that could become a
worldwide media circus. The Sheriff’s Office, charged with security
at the courthouse in Vero Beach, is reportedly “having
conversations about what a new security plan will look like if
there’s protestors and a crush of media.”
According to the Feb. 16 arrest affidavit, Hunt admitted to having sex in a school toilet stall with the 14-year-old, a freshman teammate on the Sebastian High School varsity girls basketball squad. Such sordid details don’t seem to matter to those who’ve bought into the “Free Kate” narrative of Hunt as an innocent victim of homophobia, being prosecuted for a “schoolgirl crush” or a “high-school romance.”
To say that liberal media coverage of Hunt has been “favorable” is to say that the Sistine Chapel ceiling depicts a favorable image of God. Last week, Hunt was featured on NBC’s Today show, and was also the subject of a sympathetic segment from CNN, which showed a tearful Kaitlyn as the victim of an “outrageous” prosecution for a “mistake.”
That kind of high-powered public-relations blitz is not cheap and does not happen by accident. Hunt’s supporters include the American Civil Liberties Union and the gay-rights group Equality Florida — the latter organization led by Nadine Smith, who met privately with President Obama two years ago — as well as the 501(c)3 non-profit Purpose Foundation, which receives funding through such philanthropic giants as the Ford Foundation.
Against this powerful coalition of tax-exempt activism and major media cheerleading, opposition to the martyrdom myth of the teenager I’ve dubbed Saint Kate of the Blessed Finger has been scattered on the Internet. Fox News hasn’t touched this controversy yet and, although I was interviewed Wednesday morning by Dallas radio host Mark Davis about the story, most national talk-radio hosts have ignored it. Many conservatives, it seems, are afraid of being called homophobic or “mean-spirited” if they speak out against what is transparently an effort by the Left to overturn Florida’s age-of-consent laws. Rush Limbaugh warned in January of an attempt to “normalize pedophilia,” but apparently Florida Republicans weren’t listening, because GOP state Sen. Thad Altman has proposed to “revise sex offenses law, offering protection to 18-year-olds like Kaitlyn Hunt.”
“Protection” for school restroom sex with ninth-graders — that’s the Florida GOP agenda!
Even without support from Republicans or major conservative organizations, opponents of the “Free Kate” movement have managed to use the Internet to correct the “schoolgirl crush” mythology. Kaitlyn Hunt’s family deliberately misrepresented the ages of the two girls, saying Kaitlyn was 17 and the younger girl was 15, and claiming that the younger girl’s parents are vindictive homophobic bigots who waited until Kaitlyn turned 18 to press charges. This was a lie easy to refute: Hunt’s arrest record states her birthdate as Aug. 14, 1994, meaning she was 18 before she ever met the girl, who didn’t turn 15 until two months after Hunt was arrested.
Yet this hasn’t dissuaded the most fanatical of Hunt’s advocates, whose belief in her symbolic victimhood — gay rights as a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for statutory rape, as Matt Philpin eloquently phrased it — is impervious to facts or logic. The sheriff and the prosecutor in Indian River County have tried patiently explaining the facts, and have pointed out that the plea bargain offer that Hunt rejected was about the best that could be expected. The case involves certain aggravating circumstances: Social-media communications between the teens indicate that Hunt was aware her activities with the 14-year-old were illegal, and then there is the matter of the night of Jan. 4. On that night, the freshman ran away from home to spend the night in Kaitlyn’s bedroom where, to quote the affidavit by Sheriff’s Office Detective Jeremy Shepherd, the two girls “put their fingers inside of each other’s vaginas, put their mouths on each other’s vaginas, and both of them used a vibrator on each other to insert it in each other’s vaginas.”
Devotees of the “Free Kate” cult have reacted to these revelations by saying that only perverts care about the facts of the crime. As I remarked on Twitter, their argument seems to be, “It’s perfectly OK for [Hunt] to do it, but it’s wrong for anyone to describe what she actually did.”
If the fanatics are beyond reach of reason, this agenda has been resisted by more sensible members of the gay community, including activists who anonymously say they’ve come under pressure from the movement’s radical leadership to support Hunt. Two local gay men who “held high ranking positions in a Treasure Coast LGBT advocacy group” quit over the issue, according to a report Tuesday by WPEC-TV’s Peter Schaller, who quoted one of the men: “Some folks in the community, in that organization, were supporting Kate and would not hear the voice of reason… . I resigned as a result of two members in particular who referred to this matter as nothing more than a teenage love story, it is not a teenage love story.”
Yet even as their movement loses support, members of the “Free Kate” Facebook group continue praising their unlikely heroine. Brad Philippone said that in the future, “Kaitlyn will be mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Rosa Parks … one individual chose to defy that unjust law.” That claim inspired many sarcastic rejoinders, including blogger Donald Douglas’s comment: “Right. I can just see Rosa Parks at the back of the bus fingering a 14-year-old. Free at last!”
Kaitlyn’s supporters have sought to portray her as a wholesome all-American student — her lawyer Julia Graves says Hunt is a “model citizen” — but that image suffered serious damage over the weekend. A local teenager, who claims to be a Sebastian High classmate of Kaitlyn’s, posted a video that appears to show her inciting a fight between her younger sister and another girl: “Beat her f–king ass, Emily! Beat her ass! Get that bitch!”
As more facts about the case have emerged — they’ve been compiled at a site called SupportHonesty.net — Kaitlyn’s family have raged online about the “hate” that they attribute to opponents and critics. Kaitlyn’s father Steven R. Hunt Jr. (who was himself arrested on a fraud charge last year) posted a Facebook message invoking the “Word of God” and lamenting that his “poor daughter is suffering tremendously.” Meanwhile, Kaitlyn’s younger sister has been invoking other words on Twitter.
Now that the false narrative of the “Free Kate” movement has unraveled, of course, the national media that celebrated the accused teenage sex offender last week have rather mysteriously lost interest in a story that no longer fits their liberal agenda. It takes a pretty powerful bias, after all, for the networks to resist a story as appealing as Teen Lesbian Bikini Fight Video.
According to the Feb. 16 arrest affidavit, Hunt admitted to having sex in a school toilet stall with the 14-year-old, a freshman teammate on the Sebastian High School varsity girls basketball squad. Such sordid details don’t seem to matter to those who’ve bought into the “Free Kate” narrative of Hunt as an innocent victim of homophobia, being prosecuted for a “schoolgirl crush” or a “high-school romance.”
To say that liberal media coverage of Hunt has been “favorable” is to say that the Sistine Chapel ceiling depicts a favorable image of God. Last week, Hunt was featured on NBC’s Today show, and was also the subject of a sympathetic segment from CNN, which showed a tearful Kaitlyn as the victim of an “outrageous” prosecution for a “mistake.”
That kind of high-powered public-relations blitz is not cheap and does not happen by accident. Hunt’s supporters include the American Civil Liberties Union and the gay-rights group Equality Florida — the latter organization led by Nadine Smith, who met privately with President Obama two years ago — as well as the 501(c)3 non-profit Purpose Foundation, which receives funding through such philanthropic giants as the Ford Foundation.
Against this powerful coalition of tax-exempt activism and major media cheerleading, opposition to the martyrdom myth of the teenager I’ve dubbed Saint Kate of the Blessed Finger has been scattered on the Internet. Fox News hasn’t touched this controversy yet and, although I was interviewed Wednesday morning by Dallas radio host Mark Davis about the story, most national talk-radio hosts have ignored it. Many conservatives, it seems, are afraid of being called homophobic or “mean-spirited” if they speak out against what is transparently an effort by the Left to overturn Florida’s age-of-consent laws. Rush Limbaugh warned in January of an attempt to “normalize pedophilia,” but apparently Florida Republicans weren’t listening, because GOP state Sen. Thad Altman has proposed to “revise sex offenses law, offering protection to 18-year-olds like Kaitlyn Hunt.”
“Protection” for school restroom sex with ninth-graders — that’s the Florida GOP agenda!
Even without support from Republicans or major conservative organizations, opponents of the “Free Kate” movement have managed to use the Internet to correct the “schoolgirl crush” mythology. Kaitlyn Hunt’s family deliberately misrepresented the ages of the two girls, saying Kaitlyn was 17 and the younger girl was 15, and claiming that the younger girl’s parents are vindictive homophobic bigots who waited until Kaitlyn turned 18 to press charges. This was a lie easy to refute: Hunt’s arrest record states her birthdate as Aug. 14, 1994, meaning she was 18 before she ever met the girl, who didn’t turn 15 until two months after Hunt was arrested.
Yet this hasn’t dissuaded the most fanatical of Hunt’s advocates, whose belief in her symbolic victimhood — gay rights as a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for statutory rape, as Matt Philpin eloquently phrased it — is impervious to facts or logic. The sheriff and the prosecutor in Indian River County have tried patiently explaining the facts, and have pointed out that the plea bargain offer that Hunt rejected was about the best that could be expected. The case involves certain aggravating circumstances: Social-media communications between the teens indicate that Hunt was aware her activities with the 14-year-old were illegal, and then there is the matter of the night of Jan. 4. On that night, the freshman ran away from home to spend the night in Kaitlyn’s bedroom where, to quote the affidavit by Sheriff’s Office Detective Jeremy Shepherd, the two girls “put their fingers inside of each other’s vaginas, put their mouths on each other’s vaginas, and both of them used a vibrator on each other to insert it in each other’s vaginas.”
Devotees of the “Free Kate” cult have reacted to these revelations by saying that only perverts care about the facts of the crime. As I remarked on Twitter, their argument seems to be, “It’s perfectly OK for [Hunt] to do it, but it’s wrong for anyone to describe what she actually did.”
If the fanatics are beyond reach of reason, this agenda has been resisted by more sensible members of the gay community, including activists who anonymously say they’ve come under pressure from the movement’s radical leadership to support Hunt. Two local gay men who “held high ranking positions in a Treasure Coast LGBT advocacy group” quit over the issue, according to a report Tuesday by WPEC-TV’s Peter Schaller, who quoted one of the men: “Some folks in the community, in that organization, were supporting Kate and would not hear the voice of reason… . I resigned as a result of two members in particular who referred to this matter as nothing more than a teenage love story, it is not a teenage love story.”
Yet even as their movement loses support, members of the “Free Kate” Facebook group continue praising their unlikely heroine. Brad Philippone said that in the future, “Kaitlyn will be mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Rosa Parks … one individual chose to defy that unjust law.” That claim inspired many sarcastic rejoinders, including blogger Donald Douglas’s comment: “Right. I can just see Rosa Parks at the back of the bus fingering a 14-year-old. Free at last!”
Kaitlyn’s supporters have sought to portray her as a wholesome all-American student — her lawyer Julia Graves says Hunt is a “model citizen” — but that image suffered serious damage over the weekend. A local teenager, who claims to be a Sebastian High classmate of Kaitlyn’s, posted a video that appears to show her inciting a fight between her younger sister and another girl: “Beat her f–king ass, Emily! Beat her ass! Get that bitch!”
As more facts about the case have emerged — they’ve been compiled at a site called SupportHonesty.net — Kaitlyn’s family have raged online about the “hate” that they attribute to opponents and critics. Kaitlyn’s father Steven R. Hunt Jr. (who was himself arrested on a fraud charge last year) posted a Facebook message invoking the “Word of God” and lamenting that his “poor daughter is suffering tremendously.” Meanwhile, Kaitlyn’s younger sister has been invoking other words on Twitter.
Now that the false narrative of the “Free Kate” movement has unraveled, of course, the national media that celebrated the accused teenage sex offender last week have rather mysteriously lost interest in a story that no longer fits their liberal agenda. It takes a pretty powerful bias, after all, for the networks to resist a story as appealing as Teen Lesbian Bikini Fight Video.
‘Beat Her Ass!’ Beach Fight Video
New Defense by #FreeKate Defender: ‘But It Would Be Perfectly Legal in Canada!’
'She’s OK with jailbait sex in school toilet stalls, but @monwithmac just told US that it’s #TimeToGetRational -> twitter.com/MonWithMac/sta…
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) May 30, 2013
Having previously discussed the role of Liberal Logic™ in justifying the actions of accused sex offender Kaitlyn Ashley Hunt, it’s time to expand a bit further on their methodology.
You
must understand, when arguing with these people, that no fact or logic
can ever persuade them that they are wrong. You might as well try to
convince me that Auburn University is superior to the University of
Alabama as to attempt to convince a #FreeKate fanatic that this deliberate violation of Florida law should be punished as a felony.
They’ve made up their minds, and further debate is useless.
They began
their argument by reaching a conclusion and are now merely hunting
around for “evidence” to justify whatever emotional prejudice inspired
their initial fact-deficient rush to judgment.
Before we move on to the matter of Canadian “Free Kate” apologist Kristin Ireland, let me remind you of The Story Too Good to Be True:
So,
if we can believe a word Kaitlyn’s mom says (a necessary caveat, as she
has been caught in multiple lies already) precious Kate was a happy,
popular heterosexual until her senior year in high school, when she met
this irresistibly hot freshman girl and — boom! — Instant Lesbian.
What’s wrong with that story? I mean, besides everything?
S.J. Reidhead voiced her own dark suspicions,
and it doesn’t matter whether you share those particular suspicions or
not. My point is that there is something distinctly weird in this story —
something that doesn’t quite add up, some element of implausibility —
which should have been obvious to any reasonably intelligent person the
moment they encountered Kelley Hunt Smith’s account of this case.
Many
people seemed to have an emotional predisposition to believe the “Free
Kate” narrative which overpowered whatever mental defenses they had
against such a dubious tale. Something was being left out of the story,
and I still don’t think we know exactly it was, but if what Kaitlyn’s
mom says is true (a necessary caveat) we’re talking about a hitherto
unknown disorder: Sudden Onset Lesbian Jailbait Syndrome.
Having
often scoffed at those who play the Internet Detective game — people who
think they’re super spies, uncovering Hidden Truth through Google
searches — I will not speculate further as to what it is we don’t know,
except to say we don’t know everything yet, or otherwise my Bullshit
Detector wouldn’t be going off like a fire alarm.
Twenty-seven years in the news business, my friends.
Don’t
ever try to run this kind of dishonest hustle on me. I once drove all
the way to Kentucky to prove Andrew Sullivan wrong, and friends tell me
that Vero Beach is lovely this time of year.
Let’s compare and contrast, shall we? Kaitlyn’s mom:
Anyone
who knows my daughter Kate, knows how wonderful she is. . . . She has
always been a wonderful student, respected and well liked. . . . She has
never been in trouble, ever, she truly is the model student and child.
I
can tell you that the way the media is portraying her is far from
reality. . . . [F]rom personal experience I can say that she is not a
good person and is not ‘innocent’. She is known as a whore throughout
the school, constantly starts high school drama, gets in school
suspensions, and is overall not well liked at all. . . . It’s just that
my whole school knows she’s not a good person and don’t think it’s fair
the media is portraying this otherwise.
It is impossible to reconcile these accounts. Alternatives:
- The teenager is lying, except that he offers his testimony while providing video that shows Kaitlyn (identifiable by her telltale tattoo) shouting obscenities while inciting her younger sister in a fight against another girl at the beach;
- Kaitlyn’s mother has been deceived by her daughter;
- Kaitlyn’s mother is deliberately lying to defend her daughter;
or perhaps
- A little bit of both #2 and #3.
It’s
up to you what to believe about all this, but unless you altogether
lack any common-sense skepticism, the one thing you can’t do is to
accept Kelley Hunt Smith as a trustworthy witness. Even while I was
writing this, someone called my attention to evidence that would tend to
make me lean toward explanation #3.
BTW, now I’m looking at certain social media I had not previously seen. Does #p2 #LGBT REALLY want to go all-in for #FreeKate?
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) May 30, 2013
We’re talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, folks, and there is no public relations firm
in the world that could fix this problem. It may be too late for the
ACLU, Equality Florida and the Purpose Foundation to rescue their
credibility except by complete repudiation.
But we were talking about Canada, and I digress . . .
Kristin Ireland describes herself as an advocate of “LGBTQ-supportive” parenting, an interesting term in this context, and further says:
Of course, we all know that facts are subjective . . .
Uh,
no, ma’am, they’re not. One thing that facts never are is “subjective,”
but never mind. Let’s get to where you comment on your own post:
I’ve
seen the affidavit. But I have no idea if it’s legitimate or not. I
don’t care if she was 17 or 18 when the relationship began. We are
talking a matter of months here. My point is that it should not be a
crime. And being illegal it certainly should not be a felony. That
anyone would think it should be amazes me.
“I’ve seen the affidavit,” she says, which leads me to suspect that this is how ”LGBTQ-supportive” parenting operates:
“Kaitlyn, I’m running to the store. Be back in an hour.” “OK. . . . Hey, Mom?”
“What, dear?” “Can you bring home some batteries?”
“Sure, honey. What size?” “D cells. And, hey, Mom, while you’re at it –”
“Yes, dear?” “Looks like I’m running a little low on lubricant, too.”
“Sure. Sounds like you’re having another slumber party tonight. Guess I’d better pick up some wine coolers while I’m at it.” “Thanks, Mom — you’re the greatest!”
“What, dear?” “Can you bring home some batteries?”
“Sure, honey. What size?” “D cells. And, hey, Mom, while you’re at it –”
“Yes, dear?” “Looks like I’m running a little low on lubricant, too.”
“Sure. Sounds like you’re having another slumber party tonight. Guess I’d better pick up some wine coolers while I’m at it.” “Thanks, Mom — you’re the greatest!”
What kind of parenting is this? If you’re “supportive,” what is it exactly that you are you supporting? Equality? Do we expect parents to be so blithely accommodating of their teenagers’ heterosexual activity under all conditions? (Emory University student David Giffin easily dismantles this equality-based argument, by the way.)
Yet
Kristin Ireland professes to be amazed that in Florida the parents of a
14-year-old should have the power of the law helping them protect their
child against corrupting influences. And I was amazed at her amazement
until I found out she lives in Ottowa:
Oh, I just checked @monwithmac‘s profile. She’s Canadian, which explains everything.
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) May 30, 2013
Further evidence of the Canadian Menace … twitter.com/MonWithMac/sta… … as if further evidence were needed.
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) May 30, 2013
According to @monwithmac, in Canada it’s legal to bang 14-year-olds in school toilet stalls. Which may explain Alanis Morissette …
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) May 30, 2013
All sarcasm aside, let me quote what the mother of the younger girl said when she learned Kaitlyn Hunt had rejected the plea deal, and that this case would be headed for trial:
“I
think all the mothers and parents that know this is wrong, I think they
will stand by us. I think parents — any parent will protect their
child. That’s what we do as parents. So, I think that they will say,
‘Hey — lets stand with those people.’”
We must pray that she is right. This is not Canada . . . yet.
May 27: The Story Too Good to Be True
May 24: Because She’s Cute, That’s Why
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