May I ask you a provocative question?  Have you ever been raped?  Specifically, have you ever been raped and then invited your would-be rapist to spend the night with you afterward, and then had breakfast with your attacker the following morning, and then, sometime later, when the alleged rapist did not call you as he promised he would, only then decided you were raped?

This is not a purely theoretical question, but rather is one of the cases spotlighted by the New York Times to show the need for greater prosecution of "date rape."  The Obama administration felt that there was an epidemic of underreported "date rape" on college campuses.  (Incidences of reported rape were low...and therefore underreported.  If you haven't learned how to think like a liberal, it's never too late to start!)

And so the federal government used its rather amorphous powers under Title IX to press colleges into more aggressive action.  Specifically, Title IX is "the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination in schools that receive public funds[.]"

What, you may ask, does gender discrimination have to do with prosecution of alleged rapes?  Well, not much.  But perhaps if you strain, you can find a shadow or a penumbra of the law (the same magic words used to find the nonexistent right to abortion in the Constitution) that implies a power to impress colleges into prosecuting more men for alleged date rape.

In 2011, following an investigation by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity on campus assault, the Obama administration decided to act. The Office for Civil Rights sent a "dear colleague letter" reminding colleges that sexual harassment and assault create an environment so hostile that women's access to education is jeopardized, violating their civil rights[.] ... A subsequent clarification of the letter created no uniform policy for how schools should adjudicate cases, but it offered recommendations like having schools inform students that drinking "never makes the survivor at fault for sexual violence" and discouraging colleges from allowing either party to directly cross-examine the other in investigations. Schools that failed to uphold standards risked losing federal funds.

Schools, under pressure, started prosecuting men using lower standards of proof:

The most widespread criticism was that the letter forced schools to lower their standard of proof when assessing claims, to the "preponderance of evidence" standard commonly used in civil lawsuits. Unlike the higher standard used in some civil trials, which require "clear and convincing evidence," or the highest standard used in criminal trials, which require certainty "beyond reasonable doubt," preponderance is often described as 50.01 percent certainty of guilt. If an accused student is found more likely than not to have committed the offense, he or she is "responsible," in the parlance of campus hearings. While there were exceptions before 2011 – schools that used "clear and convincing" or, in a few instances, "beyond reasonable doubt" – preponderance was used in about 80 percent of colleges that had any fixed standard.

This brings us to the case of the breakfast date rapist.

At Kennesaw State University, one woman found that as the Georgia debate around Title IX grew, her case was caught up in the furor. According to her complaint, early one morning in February 2016, she was raped by a male friend, when consensual fooling around ended in nonconsensual intercourse that she explicitly refused. At first, she told me, she thought her friend had merely "disrespected" her clear line. She let him spend the night, and in the morning they ate breakfast, making plans to meet later. The man didn't call, and the woman, troubled, talked to friends, who told her she was describing rape.

The man was suspended, but the Times was upset because under the Trump administration, the Department of Education is not pressuring colleges as Obama once did to convict accused men based on lower standards of guilt, and the man's suspension was reversed.  As Georgia state rep. Earl Ehrart said:

"This is the second of the absolutely ridiculous cases I was concerned about. I label this one 'breakfast with a rapist' made for TV absurdity." He noted ... his belief that "with a new administration in D.C., the guidance letters are now garbage, and the threat of federal funding is off the table."

For most crimes, liberals are the first to say leniency should be shown and the accused should be given the benefit of every doubt – except when it comes to the nebulous, murky matter of "date rape."  The fact is that there is already an agency that handles "date rape" besides the federal government.  It's called the police.  But the Obama administration didn't find that police and local prosecutors were taking enough cases.  That's because police and prosecutors adhered to the standard of "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt," which is impossible to prove in cases like the "breakfast date rape."

Now Trump, and by extension his secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, are taking heat for going back to the old standard: innocent until proven guilty.  Liberals are so disconnected from reality that they are using the example of the "breakfast date rape" to show that Trump is insensitive to the alleged date rape of women on campus.  If this were any other crime – drug usage, drug dealing, drunk driving by illegal aliens, or armed robbery – the Times would be making every kind of excuse for the accused.  But since this is a crime against a gender, that makes it political, and the Times effortlessly switches over to "guilty before proven innocent" even for ridiculous cases such as this one.  It's comical to realize how out of touch the newspaper is to highlight this case as a supposed injustice to the "victim," whose behavior would have made it absolutely impossible to prosecute her alleged attacker in any court of law.

Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com.