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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