The horrible truth that young men have been allowed to carry on raping under the watchful eye of the police is bad enough. The story has also picked the scab off some ugly politics.

I am disgusted, most of all, with the men who raped the young women.

I am disgusted with the police for not investigating properly when they had a complaint. 

If they can covertly surveil drug gangs, why can’t they covertly surveil rape gangs? It’s unacceptable that they decided there were only two options; prosecute or do nothing.   Why didn’t they do more with the schools or the parents? Why not get facebook to remove the offending page and protect the girls from the continued naming and shaming? Were they waiting for a suicide?

In the US recently, an anti-police rant on facebook was treated as evidence of ‘illegal threats’ and promptly prosecuted. After the Drummer Lee Rigby was hacked to death in London, a facebook troll called David Lee was prosecuted for telling people to target businesses run by muslims. Boxer Tony Perrin, who threatened Muslims with acts of ‘insane violence’ on facebook after the murder, was jailed for four months. 

Was there really nothing else the New Zealand Police could do to stop these men raping?

I am disgusted by the rape culture that allows this to happen. Imagine if this gang of young men had been allowed to carry on killing people, or beating them up. It would be unthinkable. So why is it acceptable to allow these men to continue to rape young girls ‘because of a lack of evidence’? Is rape not bad enough?

How was simply ‘monitoring’ ever a moral option?

I am disgusted with the attitudes of Willie and JT who repeatedly implied that there is something that the women did that made them partly to blame. ‘The girls got drunk; they knew what would happen, so why were they there? They dressed like sluts.’

But I don’t support banning them from radio. The painful, ugly truth about the attitudes of Willie and JT is that they are shared by tens of thousands of men who think women should take responsibility for not being raped.

The right way to deal with this perverse logic is to confront it, and to have the discussion. Willie and JT are not representing anyone on their show, no matter how often they imply that other people don’t understand what life is like in South or West Auckland like they do, so they should shut up. 

That’s cultural relativism at its worse. Rape is wrong no matter who does it. End of story.

Willie and JT’s job is to discuss stuff. You don’t fix their faulty attitude by telling the part of our community who think they have a point, that it should not have a voice. You deal with it by argument.

Because where do you end up if you get banned for expression? You end up like the pathological blogger Dimpost, who effectively attributes blame to me for the words and attitudes of Willie & JT. 

It goes something like this – I have previously spoken out in support of Willie and JT, as politicians with something to contribute to the community. Therefore, I am responsible for everything JT says (and therefore the inference is that I agree with everything he says).

How perverse do you have to be to implicate a woman in the anti-woman views expressed on radio? What is really happening here is that he is trying to silence me (and others) because he disagrees with me about other political issues. This is where you end up when you try to have Willie and JT removed from the radio – banning people you disagree with, not just those who hold offensive views.

It is very tough to defend freedom of speech when it involves defending someone who has behaved horribly. But it is more important than ever to defend free speech at this time; freedom to agree with people is no freedom at all.