There are two important stories about college athletes in the news.  One you've heard of, one you probably missed.  The case of the Duke Lacrosse team and the Article 32 hearing for Navy quarterback Lamar Owens on a rape charge have some common threads in them.  They don't deal with race, privilege, or status.  They have to do with alcohol and responsibility.  Understand the linkage and both cases become much simpler than the headlines.

You know about the Duke lacrosse team.  They paid $800 to two strippers to come to a house they rented.  There team members, many of them underaged, drank while watching the evening's festivities.  It appears the performance was cut short, an arguement ensued, and now there are charges of rape and accusations of racial slurs.  Not in dispute is an e-mail sent by one team member describing in graphic terms violent and sadistic acts he wished to perform in light of the evening's conclusion.

Owens is a senior at the Naval Academy.  Star quarterback, well liked, and described as very religious.  He has been charged with raping a female midshipman after following her to her dorm after seeing her drinking in a bar.  According to testimony at a preliminary hearing, Naval investigators taped a tearful call Owens made to the woman a few days after in which he apologized and said he didn't use a condom because he stopped during the act since she was asleep.  The woman had been heavily drinking and testified she couldn't remember much of the evening up to the point she woke up with Owens on top of her in her bunk. 

We can't blame society for either case, but it's worth asking how it is that students are so cavalier about drunkeness and so little concerned about it's consequences.  A casual glance at any study on campus drinking suggests that alcohol abuse is so common as to merit little notice and less censure.  Most of the time drunken exploits become the stuff of comedic memory and movies paint these activities as almost innocent rites of passage.

I remember an expression I heard growing up.  "Call a thing by it's name."  We don't do that as a society any more.  Underage drinking is criminal activity.  Someone urinating on a lawn, throwing up on themselves, and acting the fool under the influence is a drunk.  The concept of a gentleman is an outdated one, but it did not then nor does not now include anyone who engages in sexual activity outside of meaningful relationships.

We give a wink and a laugh to such behavior in college students and in doing so give them a false security.  Most of the time drunkeness has no more consequence than a hangover and some bad memories.  But sometimes you pull a card from the deck and it comes up to rape, vehicular manslaughter, court appearances, or expulsion.  This is the message young people aren't getting from parents and schools.   

What did society owe the Duke lacrosse team or Lamar Owens?  It owed them, long before their current troubles, disapproval.  It owed them sanctions, penalties, and restrictions that would have drawn them up short.  It owed them the knowledge that the path they were taking wasn't humorous, something everyone does in college, or anything that would continue to be tolerated.  And it owed them the certain knowledge that respect is earned through respect shown.  These players got none of these things and now are in situations that may haunt them for their professional careers and lives.  

To enter the world with a degree from Duke is to have the keys to success in your hands as you walk out the door from your dorm.  To graduate from the Naval Academy is to enter the profession of arms with your country's respect and admiration.  To flush these things for a few drinks is an act of obscene stupidity.  Someone should have said just that to the Duke lacrosse players and Lamar Owens.