Driving Votes: Brandon's Blog - Archived Entry

"Its either rape or its not rape." Those were the words of the defense lawyer for Marcus Dixon, a Georgia teenager who was recently released from jail after serving one year of a ten year mandatory sentence for 'aggravated child molestation." In Dixon's initial trial in, then 18 years old, he defended himself against rape charges from a 15 year old white girl with whom he claimed to have had consensual sex. A ten year sentence for teenage sex is obviously Draconian. But, the tone of Dixon's lawyer is problematic. Only the two teenagers know what really occured between them. Certainly, a young man can harm a young women in a sexual encounter in a variety of ways that fall short of the definition of rape. The lawyers insistence that sex is either consensual or not, is proped up on a faulty world view in which ethics is always a matter of choosing the right side of a two-sided issues.

The two-sided world view concieves of a world of right and wrong. In the case of Iraq war, the two-sided world view motivated President Bush to declare that "You are either for us or against us." The two-sided world creates an ethical trap in which the ends justify almost any means because, "well, hell, we're right."

Most of the infantrymen in the armed services come from relatively low-income backgrounds. According to a friend of mine, a tour of duty in Iraq earns about 4,000 per month that is obviously not necessarily spent on out-of-poket expenses. If the soldier has left a job to go fight, they are entitiled to 6 months of paid leave. If that soldier's job earned them $2000 per month, then a one year tour in Iraq would net them $60,000 (please correct me if these numbers are not correct). The result is a great big incentive for people to go fight in a war that they may not believe in. But then, that person cannot claim that anyone made them go to war. You are either a volunteer, or you are not. Its that simple, right?

Nothing is ever that simple. Few decisions are ever made based on a single distinction. Often even mundane decisions encompass an endless string of causation: feelings, desires, fears, and hopes based on past experiences.