“Meg Lanker-Simons is innocent we believe what she did was justified and deserves not to be held accountable for her accusations we stand behind you sister.”
—-The Facebook page dedicated to the plight of University of Wyoming student, progressive blogger and campus radio host Meg Lanker-Simons, who apparently sent an obscene and threatening message to herself online under the guise of an anonymous male conservative, one of her sworn foes. She has been charged with a misdemeanor by campus police.*
I confess, there were more flattering photos of Meg I could use, but she doesn’t deserve to have me use them. What she deserves, really, would be for me to dress up in drag, blacken my teeth and take my own photo, and then not only label it as Meg, but then riff on how ugly she is in the picture, when it’s really me. Meg would approve of that. She’d have to.
Let us stipulate that the title of the Facebook page may well be correct, as James Taranto persuasively argues: threatening yourself, even with rape, which is what Lanker-Simons did, is unlikely to be anything but protected speech.
Beyond that, however, this kind of stunt is low-wattage Tawana Brawleyism, and thus ethically revolting. That 38 Facebook fans and the semi-literate clod who authored the quote above argue that it is “justified” shows that ethics rot has some new and virulent strains.
