Leave it to progressives to ruin sex
The crusade to criminalize the normal picks a new fight
Nothing is safe from the long, lame arm of the progressive fun police. Not even sex.
While the war against sex rages on college campuses, anti-sex forces are preparing for battle on the legal front.
By changing existing sex-crime laws, progressives pushing this hogwash seek to make current sexual norms obsolete or worse — criminal.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes at Reason:
Forget sex robots, virtual reality porn, and any of the other technological advances feared capable of disrupting current sexual mores. The biggest threat to sex as we know it is the coming revision of U.S. sex-crime laws. For a glimpse into this frightening future, look no further than Judith Shulevitz’s latest in The New York Times. Shulevitz chronicles how “affirmative consent” (the principle, often referred to as “yes means yes,” that the mere absence of a “no” is not sufficient permission to proceed sexually) has been quietly spreading from California universities to colleges across the country, and could soon mutate out of academia entirely.
The American Law Institute (ALI)—a respected body of professors, judges, and lawyers that draft model laws oft adopted in whole by state and federal government—has spent the past three years deliberating over sexual assault statutes (an area it hadn’t revisited since 1962). A draft of the group’s recommendations, released in May, endorsed “the position that an affirmative expression of consent, either by words or conduct, is always an appropriate prerequisite to sexual intercourse, and that the failure to obtain such consent should be punishable under” criminal law.
“The traditional premise in the law has been that individuals are presumed to be sexually available and willing to have intercourse—with anyone, at any time, at any place—in the absence of clear indications to the contrary,” states ALI. The new model “posits, to the contrary, that in the absence of affirmative indications of a person’s willingness to engage in sexual activity, such activity presumably is not desired.”
The proposals were met with backlash from some members.
The draft guidelines drew strong criticism from some members, including law professors and lecturers from the University of Pittsburgh, Duke University, Rutgers, Harvard, and Georgetown University. “If there is political consensus on anything in the United States today, it is the consensus that our government has overcriminalized and overincarcerated the American public,” they write. Yet “against this political consensus and judicial backdrop, the current ALI draft is an extreme deviation, focused on expanding criminal sanctions for sexual behavior.”
Brown explained how the ALI’s draft created more criminal sex offenses and even escalated potential penalties of some existing crimes to life in prison.
Among other new crimes the draft creates is sex “between professionals (mental health providers, lawyers, executives, etc.) and those under their supervision or in their care,” note the dissenting ALI members. In addition to creating new sex offenses, the new draft would also elevate penalties (up to life imprisonment) for all sorts of sexual conduct.
“For example, [the draft code] elevates rape to the level of first degree murder if the rape occurs in conjunction with a commercial sex act,” they note. It “elevates rape to the level of first degree murder if the rapist utilized a lookout. Many other elevations are found throughout the draft without any demonstration of need for even longer sentences in a prison system that is already over-burdened with geriatric prisoners.” Hyperbolic penalties also aid prosecutors in coercing pleas to lesser offenses.
According to the ALI’s blog, the discussion was lively and many voiced their concerns over over-criminalization:
…it was mentioned that Podgor-Ellensome of the definitions went beyond conduct covered in the torts project. Many were concerned about the expansion of criminal law, problems of overcriminalization, and the breadth of the proposed provisions. It was also noted that we were starting with the definitions that would have the effect of determining what would be crimes.
Section 213.2 was examined next. Again comments went to overbreadth and overcriminalization. Terms such as consent, force, against will were topics mentioned.
The discussion continued with comments offered from many different perspectives. My take: this will not be an easy project on which to reach consensus. And as noted by one speaker, the MPC had enormous influence and perhaps a more restrained approach may be warranted here.
Restrained, indeed. There seems to be no end to the crusade to criminalize the normal and make legal or acceptable the fringe.
In: trans-anything, sexual deviancy, fluid gender roles
Out: regular ol’ sex
At what point will enough be enough?
(H/T Instapundit)
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Comments
I don’t suppose these geniuses thought of making the phrases, “What, again? I thought we did that last week.” and, “Are you about finished?”, illegal.
Well, of course…!!!
The Collective HATES people. It HATES and denies human nature.
But it ESPECIALLY HATES men in its current vogue.
Funny thing…MEN hate the Collective back.
Of course “Teh Collective” is at the same time busy doing all they are condemning – busier than rabbits without condoms!
The Progressive philosophy is very interesting. First come abortion, contraception, pornography, no-fault divorce, etc., supposedly to bring about greater sexual liberty. But then it turns out that this “sexual liberty” needs to be under the thumb of the State, and the State’s power to destroy individual lives through criminal prosecution.
Progress is simply unqualified, monotonic change; but has an unearned positive connotation. This is similar to liberalism, which is a degenerative ideology. They each have generational thresholds, but are otherwise unprincipled. This is different from the Progressive Party of the early 20th century and from the established doctrine of classical liberalism.
The prerequisite for liberty is men and women capable of self-moderating, responsible behavior.
There is an analogy here. Anarchy and libertinism serve to establish authority. For example, the “equal” ruling was a progressive regulation of marriage that selectively excludes orientations and behaviors on arbitrary grounds. It is a ruling based on the pro-choice precedent or principle of selectivity that infamously normalized sacrificial rites as a right.
Rush has it right. There is nothing that will satisfy the left on their crusade to make the world the way that they want it.
The government has no business in MY bedroom.
Definition of tyranny: A condition when the law is merely a tool to be used against those the powerful currently wish to target.
My definition of tyranny is: the utopia we will inhabit once I have total authority.
Ah sex, the final frontier…
2015 SpacEX Odyssey:
Matter: Martian men, Venusian women
Anti-matter: the Collective Black Hole
It seems they’re addressing a problem that doesn’t exist.
Except in their own minds.
You can always tell a progressive by the way they view the law. If you view the evolution of laws as following the culture, you are not a progressive. If you view the law as the PRIMARY instrument to change the culture, you are a progressive.
And to the earlier comment that Rush was right from Stan25 – I don’t know the totality of his comments. But he may have missed another key point. Not only will progressives (now synonymous with the left) not be satisfied until they have used the law to shape culture to their liking, but they will also not rest until dissent is equally reformed to no longer exist.
The “progresives” are nuts to begin with, but it doesn’t help that our litigious society is eager to drag in lawyers at the drop of a hat, either. There is something horribly wrong when normal, everyday situations practically require legal advice for successful (= avoiding running afoul of the law) navigation ~
Anuses are in, vaginas are out.
If money changes hands that counts as affirmative consent.
Eh, KK, they are not anti-sex. They are anti heterosexual sex. Make life miserable enough for Herero males and, who knows, they might turn to the homosexuals and so increase those numbers from a measly 1%-2% of the populace. Same for the lesbians. When men cannot be trusted as sexual partners, what’s a girl to do? What else but turn to someone who understands the female body and thinks like she does?
That, I think, is the agenda in play here. Criminalize the normal and realize the Satyricon.
There is also this, to agree with siguiriya, we are also watching the playing out of the Ehrlich Leftists agenda: anti-human, barren, sterile, an earth with zero population growth, and eventually zero population, except for the masters of the universe, that is. In this world, the best people are the homosexual minority. They, by definition, are sterile and many are haters of the “breeders”. Makes a girl wonder about Paul Ehrlich.
Reminds me of Julia and the Junior Anti-Sex League ~