Thank you Cienna. You're right - it IS important, in spite of what the below comments are bound to say...

or perhaps they were raised to believe that women really are humanish playthings

I really don't understand why you ask this question, when every shred of evidence about the town, the football program, the kind of adults these boys were around points to the fact that this is precisely what happened.

It's the complicity of so many people that's troubling, so many kids raised rotten. Personally, I think the whole town ought to be evacuated like the toxic waste dump it appears to be. I'm sure there are good people there, but if this is the community of young people they managed to create, they're doing something profoundly wrong. Burn it down and salt the earth, I say.

this would happen in most towns across the united states imho. We need to educate kindness to our brothers and sisters.

Is there room in that crying closet? I can bring gin.

@7: gin + confined closet space = piney juniper singularity

Why aren't the witnesses not being charged for failing to report a crime?

Really? Crying over someone who got fingered while blackout drunk, and now the kids at school look at her funny? THAT's what were crying over?

That's relatively low on my list of bad-shit-that-can-happen.

That's relatively low on my list of bad-shit-that-can-happen.

Probably true. You've probably met the poor woman who gave birth to you.

@10 2/10

Anon Trolls do better than you.

Ass.

Disgusting. But where was the outrage when Sarah Palin was being trashed in the national media? With such nasty rumors that Trig (with Down syndrome) wasn't her baby but that she was covering for an out-of-wedlock birth by Bristol?

Where was the outrage when Ed Shultz called Laura Ingraham a slut on national TV?

I know it's a stretch to compare these, but the left cannot in good conscience celebrate depravity when it affects their adversaries but take the high road with innocent young girls.

@14: Older mothers in their 40s, like Sarah, are much more likely to have a Down Syndrome child than younger mothers.

@13 thanks for the laugh, it's been a long day

@13 - Is Daily Kos left enough for you? The left did not celebrate Laura Ingram being called a slut, as you suggest.

@10 You want to see how people troll, see @13z

That's a good troll post. A bit ridiculous but a good troll anyways.

@8- Venomlash, I fucking love you. "Piney juniper singularity." Goddamn.

@13, Sarah Palin and this situation? Really? And fyi, Sarah kind of set herself up for suspicion with her actions when the baby did come. Go look it up - you'd wonder too what was going on. Someone in labor - with their FIFTH child - does NOT going flying all around the country and yet that's exactly what she did.

But to the story at hand, I can tell you one big reason why this happened. It's called small-town sports. I grew up in such a town. They are small, isolated and, as Peter Gabriel says, "they think so small, they use small words."

Their lives are about whatever high school sport is going on at the moment (but primarily basketball and football). They spend huge amounts of education dollars on sports and Friday night? That's entertainment night for small towns across America. That's why these football guys are so protected.

The witnesses? Either too scared to speak up (and get attacked by the town) or too scared to hurt the team. But they all get to live with themselves because, at the end of the day, NO one would have wanted this to happen to their sister or daughter.

And, there's still the issue of whether she got herself drunk or if she was drugged.

@13: It's a shame people say mean things to horrible conservative female celebrities sometimes, but you think that's equivalent to the rape of a teenager?