Fictionalized rape reports fueling hysteria on college campuses

It’s a journalistic travesty that Rolling Stone’s discredited and disgraceful University of Virginia rape story ever made it into print.

What’s more shameful is how so many people actually hoped the gory – and phony – tale of the fraternity gang-rape was true.

It’s as if many activists and politicians wanted a freshman named Jackie to have been brutally assaulted in September 2012 by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi frat house. It’s as if they hoped she had gone through a three-hour ordeal that ended in her fleeing the house party in a blood-stained dress.

Because as horrific as all that would have been, it would have helped their agenda.

It would be convenient fodder for liberals crowing about the rape “epidemic” sweeping American universities, where, according to an oft-cited but thoroughly debunked academic study, “1-in-5” college women are sexually assaulted.

It would have bolstered their canard that colleges can’t properly deal with campus rapes, and are in need of “fixing” through expansive new federal legislation.

And it would have dovetailed nicely with the overall “war on women” theme Democrats will trot out between now and 2016, when Hillary Clinton, or possibly Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., runs for president.

But instead, the implosion of the ginned-up UVA rape tale – much like the yarn Hollywood it-girl Lena Dunham spun about being raped by a “moustached campus Republican” named Barry – only erodes public trust in the veracity of bona fide incidents of rape.

And the faculty and administration of UVA headed by President Teresa Sullivan are doubling down, demonizing men in general and making the hot-to-trot "ladies" on campus appear to be victims. It's almost like the Feminists of all sexes want to drive heterosexual men away.