Jonah Goldberg explores in a column posted at National Review Online one disturbing facet of the news that Rolling Stone‘s University of Virginia gang-rape story is falling apart.

[E]veryone deserves the presumption of innocence.

Apparently, Zerlina Maxwell disagrees. She writes in the Washington Post: “We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”

Let’s cut to the chase. Maybe I live in a cocoon of some kind, but it seems to me that as terrible and unjust as it surely can be, the stigma of having been raped is hardly as deleterious to one’s reputation as the stigma of being accused of being a rapist. I don’t think I know anyone who would discriminate against a rape victim. I’d like to think I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t discriminate against a rapist.

Back to Zerlina Maxwell. She is a lawyer openly advocating the defenestration of the bedrock of American law: the presumption of innocence. More amazing and sad, she’s not alone.

In the wake of revelations that Rolling Stone reported as fact an unsubstantiated story of institutionalized gang rape, many feminist activists have dug in, saying, in effect, the truth shouldn’t matter, or at least it shouldn’t matter very much — not when there’s a “rape epidemic” engulfing college campuses. I put the term in quotation marks because I believe this alleged epidemic is largely a deliberate political fabrication.

Obviously, rapes happen. But this “epidemic” would have to coincide with a decades-long decline in forcible rapes and a decades-long increase in public intolerance for sexual assault and harassment. Moreover, the primary evidence activists cite is a bogus statistic, based upon a Web survey of two universities.

So what’s going on here? Beyond the hysteria and legitimate concern, this is a power grab. It’s no coincidence that the Rolling Stone article spent a great deal of time advocating for the expansion of federal involvement in higher education via Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.

As chronicled by Jessica Gavora (my wife) in her book Tilting the Playing Field, feminist activists, with the aid of sympathetic journalists and allies in the judiciary and the federal bureaucracy, have used Title IX as a “far-reaching remedial tool,” in the words of the New York Times, to reorganize higher education to their ideological agenda.