Blog: Watching the video in which Ray Rice knocked out his fiancée (now wife) Janay, the thought occurs: What was she so angry about?
Everybody has focused on the obvious horror of Rice’s punch — the brute force of a 200-pound professional athlete used against a woman — and nobody seems interested in what Janay did immediately before the punch. The couple were in a confined space, inside an elevator, when Janay “got in his face,” screaming and lunging toward Rice. Of course, Janay’s behavior does not justify Rice hitting her, but one wonders why she acted that way, just as one wonders whether the circumstance of being trapped in an elevator with this enraged woman in some way explains Rice’s reaction. That is to say, if her angry rage triggered Rice’s fight-or-flight instinct, he couldn’t flee from her while they were on the elevator, and his adrenalin surge produced an autonomic reflex: BOOM…
Do we have any evidence that Ray Rice is a chronic menace to women? Is there an established record of Ray Rice as a habitual perpetrator of domestic violence? Was this horrific incident caught on video part of a long-term pattern? Who benefits, and who is harmed, by dropping him from the Ravens lineup and indefinitely suspending him from the NFL? Insofar as Ray Rice is suffering the legitimate consequences of his own wrongful behavior, I have no complaint. But it seems to me that Ray Rice — and Janay Rice, and everyone with a direct stake in Ray Rice’s NFL career — is being made to suffer an extraordinary penalty because (a) feminists have turned this into a political cause célèbre, and (b) the NFL is run by cowardly swine who care more about their image than they care about human beings.
