One giant leap for Mankind

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Mick Foley has always been a favorite in the RubberCrutch household. The puppet master for demented WWF/WWE wrestling alter egos Mankind, Cactus Jack, and Dude Love, Foley is an authentic badass in the most praiseworthy sense of that term. He is the auteur of countless past jaw-dropping feats of self-endangerment in the ring, the most legendary of which are collected and retold in the 1999 sports documentary Beyond The Mat (still worth renting, in my opinion). That film reveals Foley to be a highly intelligent, sensitive family man (with his lovely wife and adorable kids in tow for portions of the documentary)---an inexplicably genial berserker who is at the core an Everyman and a guy you'd love to have as a neighbor.

A published author many times over (although, admittedly, I think he should consider one more 15-foot dive into a pile of thumbtacks for penning Mick Foley's Halloween Hijinx), Foley has appeared on The Daily Show expressing support for gay rights, and even showed up at a high school with a gay student earlier this year to "threaten" homophobic bullies. He also was  recently a recipient of Jon Stewart's "Medal of Reasonableness" at the recent Sanity/Fear rally in DC.

Now TPM reports that Foley is joining rape survivor advocates to push for federal legislation to move the huge backlog of "rape kits" out of police evidence rooms and through the testing process, where DNA evidence from sexual assaults is analyzed and documented for victims and prosecutors. Activist Julie Weil, with whom Foley is working to promote this legislation, told TPM, "You can't get justice without DNA, it's just the way the world works now. Everyone expects to see DNA."

So hooray for Mankind! I wonder how much more humane and relevant our public discourse might be if, like Mick Foley, America's most hardcore athletic badasses were capable of sincerely and aggressively promoting political causes rooted in basic decency.

But, yet, serious questions are bound to emerge. How will we pay for this Nanny State legislation? Won't it contribute to the bankruptcy of our grandchildren? And, most importantly: if rape victims have no right to terminate pregnancies caused by invasive sexual assault, then what justification can there be to increase the deficit to investigate crimes that the victims probably "asked for," anyway?

Editor's note: this postscript is included to confirm that the previous paragraph is written with satirical intent apropos of certain fundamentalist "Christians" and "social conservatives." Please make a note of it.