Weaponized Sexual Abuse Law

Megan McArdle:

'Affirmative Consent' Will Make Rape Laws Worse

"The "tough on crime" posture is going out of style, even on the right, except when the crime in question is rape. Advocates complain that it is too hard to lock up predators. And so, according to Judith Shulevitz, the American Law Institute, an influential, invitation-only body that publishes model codes and other suggestions for legal reforms, has been considering how we could make the law harsher.

Here is a hypothetical that some concerned members of the group have raised:

Person A and Person B are on a date and walking down the street. Person A, feeling romantically and sexually attracted, timidly reaches out to hold B’s hand and feels a thrill as their hands touch. Person B does nothing, but six months later files a criminal complaint. Person A is guilty of ‘Criminal Sexual Contact’ under proposed Section 213.6(3)(a).

Okay, we can all agree that this is nutty. But as Shulevitz goes on to point out, this is what happens when you combine two principles designed to make it easier to prosecute sexual assault: affirmative consent and "enlarged definition of criminal sexual contact that would include the touching of any body part, clothed or unclothed, with sexual gratification in mind." The result is that "if Person B neither invites nor rebukes a sexual advance, then anything that happens afterward is illegal."

Defenders of the thinking behind this proposal might say no prosecutor is going to bring such a silly case, but that's the opposite of comforting. Who would pass a law intended to be unenforced in almost every case? It's eerily totalitarian: a sort of blanket mandate convenient for targeting undesirables and threatening suspects.

Prosecutors often add minor crimes to major ones, like forcible rape, then pressure people to plead down to the less serious charge when there's not enough to convict on the more serious crime. Juries may be willing to convict on any charge, if they think the accused is a bad guy who probably did something (and let's not forget how often race and class play into assuming someone is "a bad guy who probably did something").

Moreover, as I've pointed out before, the legal process itself can easily become a punishment. That's why courts have a lot of procedures to weed out frivolous lawsuits and prosecutions. But under the proposed standards, these charges will not be frivolous; the behavior, however common or hard to prove, will in fact be against the law.

In fact, I'm struggling to know how a man (or a woman) could ever be fully sure that they were not breaking the law. Even affirmative consent can, after all, presumably be withdrawn at any time -- without a clear "no," under the prevailing thinking about affirmative consent. I'm reminded of a joke about a hypochondriac going to the doctor because he's worried about a silent heart attack, which is to say, a heart attack with no symptoms. The doctor runs a bunch of tests and says: "You're fine, sir. I did all the tests, and you haven't had a silent heart attack." The patient looks at him and says: "Yeah, but what about now? I still have no symptoms." If silence does not signal consent, does it signal consent has been revoked? You see the mess this approach creates."

This is not a response to factual rape statistics; it is driven by Leftist feminist hatred of men... and the lesbian control of the both the narrative and the physical, legal war theory which all of the Left is obliged to obey or be expelled from the Leftist tribe.

This will not be stopped until one power lesbian charges another power lesbian under this totalitarian legal warfare law. But of course that is not RAPE-rape, under the Leftist code for themselves.