There Goes the Judge

Women rout a rape-condoning Wisconsin jurist

Permissive age or not, it is unwise to be too understanding of rapists even in a relatively liberal university town like Madison, Wis. Judge Archie Simonson learned that lesson last week while handily losing his $36,000-a-year seat on the Dane County (Madison) bench in the first judicial-recall election held in the U S in three decades.

Simonson, 52, a plain-spoken jurist with some mod ideas in other areas of law, became the feminist equivalent of Anita Bryant last May. That was when he announced that "whether women like it or not, they are sex objects" as he set free on a probated sentence a 15-year-old youth who had raped a 16-year-old coed in a high school stairwell. Simonson explained the soft sentence as a message to women to "stop teasing." It was time, he added, for "a restoration of modesty in dress and elimination from the community of sexual-gratification businesses."

Outraged Madison women decided to eliminate Simonson instead. They picketed his courthouse and collected more than 35,000 signatures demanding his recall. When voting day came last week, Moria Krueger, 33, a local feminist attorney, easily swept past four male challengers and soundly trounced Incumbent Simonson by a vote of 21,244 to 18,435. Simonson helped Krueger's cause by campaigning listlessly while keeping up his running feud with feminism. Among other things, he claimed that the 58,000-member National Organization for Women was merely a group of souls who "travel from community to community, from state to state even, to help each other out." As for his views on rape, Simonson saw no reason to recant. Said he: "I might have said them a little differently. But the context would be the same."

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