WAJ: This is a guest post by
Robert L. Shibley, Senior Vice President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (
FIRE). As "Yes Means Yes" mania sweeps across college campuses, and the lives of innocent men falsely accused are ruined in a witch hunt atmosphere, the FIRE once again is at the forefront of standing up for the individual.
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On Monday,
Vox co-founder Ezra Klein
penned an op-ed about how he firmly supported the affirmative consent bill
recently passed in California despite his candid acknowledgment that the bill was in fact “terrible.”
The general tenor of his column,
which I discussed in The Daily Caller yesterday, was that you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs—the eggs being people unjustly found guilty of rape. Critics
on the left and
the right were equally appalled, as well they—or anyone concerned with civil liberties—should have been.
Under this barrage of well-deserved criticism, Klein returned with
a longer piece yesterday, attempting to justify his candid-yet-horrifying position on California’s law. He fails.
In fact, despite his column’s title, “What people get wrong about the Yes Means Yes law,” he fails to even get basic facts about the law right. Klein does the same thing that so many other supporters of the law have done, which is to present the law and the campus environment in inaccurate ways that just happen to make due process abuses seem less grievous.
So allow me to present a mini-
Fisking of the article, and you can be the judge of who’s right. I won’t address every line of Klein’s long, doomed attempt at self-justification, but I will hit the highlights (or perhaps lowlights). There are plenty of them.
Klein opens thusly:
