RIGHT OF CENTER: WIFE ABUSE AND THE O.J. TRIAL

O.J. Simpson's defense lawyers apparently will get a chance to present their case sooner than previously expected. Prosecutors in the infamous double-murder trial decided this week they won't call witnesses to the stand to testify about Simpson's abuse of his murdered ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson.

The prosecution team early on in the trial used police records to establish Simpson's past abuse. His wife battering led to a conviction, fine and probation. But last week, prosecutors hinted they would bring in friends of the couple who witnessed O.J.'s sometimes cruel treatment of Nicole.

After the glove demonstration debacle by prosecutors, it seems they would try to further paint the defendant as a violent man prone to jealous rage.

But legal analysts say the abuse witnesses weren't called to the stand, because jurors don't think the former football great's past violence against his wife makes him Nicole's murderer. One of the many jurors dismissed in the case described Simpson's past abuse of his wife as "up and downs" every marriage has.

Let me get this straight. O.J. beat the tar out of Nicole Brown Simpson on occasion. He was obsessively jealous of his ex-wife. The glove found in his home matches the bloody one left at the crime scene. The shoe prints there came from shoes that are O.J.'s size. Yes, those were his DNA fingerprints at the crime scene, and yes, those were the victims' DNA fingerprints in the blood spilled in the Bronco and back at O.J.'s place.

The prosecution has a lot of circumstantial evidence, it has the bodies, and it has O.J., who doesn't have an alibi. All that's missing is a motive.

That the prosecution doesn't think jurors would find a motive for murder in O.J.'s jealousy and repeated emotional and physical abuse of the victim is appalling. What's more appalling is that the prosecution likely has it exactly right.

I don't buy the notion that men who refrain from beating the tar out of their wives are the exception rather than the rule. And yet I do know the attitudes men and women hold and how they behave toward each other have changed drastically in the past generation. Those changes foment domestic discord.

We have been told by feminists that, aside from their plumbing, men and women really are no different. Although instinctively we know this isn't true, the message has an effect. Look around. Men no longer open doors for women, or, as I was taught as a boy, walk closest to the street when strolling with a woman so as to take the brunt of puddle splashes or debris coming from the street. For their part, women no longer worry about being seen late at night in a dark nightclub. Few worry about their "reputation," if that word is even used anymore.

All these changes might make it easier to break the ice in a crowded nightclub, but what have they done to our culture? Many women act like men, cursing and drinking like sailors and able to pursue dalliance with as much tenaciousness as any testosterone-fogged man on the make.

The effect on men is that many of them act like boys, eschewing responsibility for their brazen actions with inept rationalization. "I was drunk and didn't know what I was doing." "She was a freak, and I couldn't help myself."

These attitudes spawn selfishness and irresponsibility. Men no longer are motivated by love to nurture and protect their wives, and love no longer motivates women to support their husbands in a marriage partnership. Self-gratification motivates both sides and leads first to emotional manipulation, and sometimes to physical abuse.

It is at that point -- the moment a man lashes out and strikes his wife -- when a man snaps. It is then he violates his true nature. A man unable to control himself and keep from striking his wife certainly is capable of killing her.

In Los Angeles County Courthouse, though, we see further evidence of the crumbling of civility, as jurors are unable or unwilling to connect O.J. Simpson's violent, non-fatal assaults of his ex-wife to a final violent, fatal assault.

~Jay Eastlick is the news editor of the Southeast Missourian.