Lloyd Lofthouse

Oprah’s Dr. Phil asked a question on his Twitter account and there was immediate outrage. [Oprah owns the Dr. Phil show]. Source: The Huffington Post

The message, sent late Tuesday afternoon to the self-help guru’s 1.1 million-plus followers, asked, “If a girl is drunk, is it OK to have sex with her? Reply yes or no to @drphil.” It included the hashtag “#teensaccused.”

The anger that Dr. Phil’s Tweet unleashed is an example of how fast a mob driven by political correctness and ignorance can react.

A spokesperson for Dr. Phil’s show soon issued a statement: “This tweet was intended to evoke discussion leading into a very serious show topic. It was not intended to be taken lightly.  It’s based on a recent news story, hence the #teensaccused label.”

I don’t see Dr. Phil’s question as offensive.  I see it as a question to gather info to see what Americans think and to discover how many may think it is okay to take advantage of a drunk teen female.

For example, when I was still teaching high school English/literature, my students debated a similar topic when we were reading Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”.

That topic was about “no” meaning “no”.  The girls all agreed that “no” meant “no”, but many of the guys disagreed and said “no” meant “yes” and that “yes” meant “yes”.

I sided with the girls!

I taught “Romeo and Juliet” for sixteen years to about five classes each year [I taught for thirty years but the first 14 were mostly in 7th and 8th grade where we did not read Shakespeare].

That adds up to about 80 debates with about 3,000 students taking part and that was one of the more lively debates. By the way, the girls ended up winning all those debates but there were a few hard-core male teens that refused to agree.  My suggestion to the girls was not to date those guys.

Dr. Phil, if you are reading this,  that response in my classroom may offer an answer to your question regarding teens.

However, I was offended by the politically correct mob’s reaction that basically censured any honest debate, because who in their right mind would say it was okay even if he thought it was okay.

I’m interested to know if there are any females out there who would agree with the teen boys who said “no” means “yes”.  Never in sixteen years of debates on that question, did one girl agree with the teen boys who thought “no” meant “yes” and “yes” meant “yes”—it seems to me that this sort of thinking among many teen boys shows that parents need to do more parenting and start early.  But I suspect that when it comes to sex, many parents feel this topic is taboo and also politically incorrect explaining the knee jerk reaction of one of today’s politically correct and ignorant mobs.

Parents need to talk to their children about safe sex starting at a young age. Ignoring it, does not make it go away.

America’s Founding Fathers warned the citizens of a newly born United States about how democracy leads to mob rule and it is a challenge to hold on to freedom. This is another example.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine, Vietnam Veteran and English-journalism teacher.

His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy that started life as a memoir and then became a fictional suspense thriller. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

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