Last week, Emily Yoffe, a well-known blog writer and columnist for Slate, wrote a personal account titled “My Molesters” on her experience being sexually assaulted by former Georgetown law professor and Jesuit Rev. Robert Drinan. She was 18 or 19 when the incident occurred in the 1970s. Drinan passed away in 2007, and according to Yoffe’s account he was in his 50s during the incident, before he began his tenure at Georgetown.

Yoffe and her family were supporting Father Drinan’s campaign for congressman at the time. Drinan offered her a ride to the subway when the incident occurred:

We got to where he was letting me off, he turned off the engine, and he began jabbering incoherently about men and women. Then he lunged, shoving his tongue in my mouth while running his hands over my breasts and up and down my torso. It seems like the set-up for a joke, a Jewish woman being molested by a Jesuit. As we tussled, I had probably the most naïve thought of my life: “How could this be happening, he’s a priest!”

She mentions that if these events were reported today, the case has the potential to be considered indecent assault and battery. “Again, I told no one. It was embarrassing, revolting, and I had no desire to make accusations against a congressman, especially one I admired,” Toffe wrote.

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The typical birthday dinner 

John Swansburg came down hard in Slate yesterday on a scourge of college life: birthday dinners. Swansburg says they start happening before people get mortgages and after they get degrees, in a time when just going to be a bar seems declasse, but they’re just as prevalent at Georgetown before people are 21. Either way, as Swansburg says, they’re horrible:

Seems like a nice idea, the birthday dinner. It is not. It is a tedious, wretched affair. It is also an extravagantly expensive one. In these wintry economic times, we need to scale back. I hereby propose that the birthday dinner go the way of the $4 cup of coffee, the liar’s mortgage, and the midsize banking institution.

Among his complaints: ending up far from the birthday boy, sandwiched between people you don’t know; wasted food; and an exorbitant bill split equally. For me, the worst part about birthday dinners are people who always want to dress up, even if the dinner is only at Bangkok Bistro. It’d be so much easier and cheaper to stay at home and make spaghetti for everyone instead.

But then, I’m a shut-in. What do you think about birthday dinners?

Photo from Flickr user Michael McDonough used under a Creative Commons license

Slate published a short piece by one of its interns, a Georgetown senior and Hoya writer named Alex Joseph. Entitled “Confessions of a young Hillary Clinton supporter,” the crux of the piece is that a lot of college students, particularly at Georgetown, support Barack Obama, and that both Clinton and Obama supporters are astonished that a college-age man would support Clinton. Because Joseph supports Clinton, he’s “practically a social pariah.” Quel Horror!

Now, when I decided, after long consideration, to support Barack Obama in the 2008 primary, the first thing I did was purge any Clinton supporters from my social life, just as I did with all conservatives back in High School when I decided I was a liberal. Same thing when the Voice endorsed Obama a few weeks ago: All the Clinton supporters (and yes, there are a few, and a majority are men) were kicked off the paper!

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