What A Woman Deserves

It is not to be urinated on.  Headlines are once again calling attention to the abuse of a sixteen year old girl by high school football players in Ohio.  There is no aspect of this that is not despicable, but what caught my attention in this article was the text message by a high school baseball player with regard to what happened.  You can read the article for all the details, but suffice it to say that this girl, inebriated to the point of incapacity, suffered multiple degradations by her peers.  Said one in a text, "Some people deserve to be peed on."

Why?  Because she was, in the words of another peer, a "sloppy drunk bitch?"  Because she had consumed more of a particular chemical than her biology could process, she deserved to be used as a toilet?

On New Year's Eve, we gathered with friends in Bloomington, Indiana, home of Indiana University, and talk turned to missing I.U. student Lauren Spierer.  As in any high-profile case, everyone has his opinion on what happened.  The consensus among our friends who live in Bloomington was that she and her friends had been partying, something went wrong, and her friends hid the body to avoid trouble for themselves.  This is entirely plausible scenario, given the disposable attitude toward human life these days.

Few men woo women with the intent to marry.  Few even have affairs.  Gone is the term "lover."  Instead, "friends with benefits" "hook up."  Some people deserve to be peed on.  And if a "hook up" results in an unwanted pregnancy, murder the little burden before it (certainly not he or she) leaves the womb.

Consider now General Lew Wallace's depiction of Judah Ben-Hur and the Egyptian who caught his eye.

With her eyes giving light to his, the stars might come out, and he not see them; and so they did.  The night might fall with unrelieved darkness everywhere else; her look would make illumination for him.  And then, as everybody knows, given youth and such companionship, there is no situation in which the fancy takes such complete control as upon tranquil waters under a calm night sky, warm with summer.  It is so easy at such time to glide imperceptibly out of the commonplace into the ideal.

Can you not feel the electric romance in that scene?  It is made all the more keen for the lack of touch or physical exposure.  The tension and the passion rise together.  We feel it.  We know what it means.  Is there any woman who, if she has not lost all sense of her humanity and femininity, would not want to be the woman in that description, a woman whose beauty could illuminate the darkness for her admirer?  Is there any woman who would prefer to be carried from party to party, drunk past the point of movement or comprehensible speech, able to be used only as a receptacle for urine?

The two football players who physically abused this girl are guilty, but so are the other teens who tweeted, posted on Facebook and YouTube, and did nothing about it.  Real men do not do these things.  Yes, it could be argued that a decent girl would not have put herself in such a situation.  Yet Jesus did not play the "you asked for it" card with Samaritan woman at the well or the woman caught in adultery, and He was far more of a man than these athletes could imagine.  Fortunately for them, He did not think similarly about what they deserve.