Today's award goes to the California legislature, along with the Sacramento and Fresno Bee and the Daily Californian. Legal Insurrection reports:
In endorsing a bill in the California legislature that would require “affirmative consent” before sex can occur on campus, the editorial boards of the Sacramento and Fresno Bee and the Daily Californian advocated that sex be treated as “sexual assault” unless the participants discuss it “out loud” before sex, and “demonstrate they obtained verbal ‘affirmative consent’ before engaging in sexual activity.”
. . .
The Fresno Bee praised the bill because “it adopts in campus disciplinary cases the ‘affirmative consent standard,’ which means that ‘yes’ only means ‘yes’ if it is said out loud.” The Daily Californian declared that “the proposal’s requirement that defendants in a sexual assault case demonstrate they obtained verbal ‘affirmative consent’ before engaging in sexual activity makes SB 967 a step in the right direction.”
Since most couples have engaged in sex without “verbal” consent, supporters of the bill are effectively redefining most people, and most happily-married couples, as rapists.
There's more at the link.
I don't know about you, dear readers, but I've encountered a singular lack of rational, logical verbal feedback among most college students I've known, particularly when the liquor's flowing and a few too many merrymaking substances have been abused. I'm not sure how they're going to define 'affirmative consent' under such circumstances . . . but it should be interesting!
Peter
For once, California is not leading the nation. Antioch College in Ohio established the first such policy in 1993. They were a laughingstock then, too.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antioch_College#Sexual_Offense_Prevention_Policy_controversy
Does "My place or yours?" count?
ReplyDeleteDoes saying "yes" multiple times during the act count?
ReplyDeleteAs written the bill is deeply
ReplyDeleteflawed because basically it all
boils down to he said, she said.
Not to worry though, I'm sure in
a few years they'll amend it to
require written permission that
will have to be notarized before
sexual intercourse can actually
take place.
So if you are a mute you cannot have sex but can only be raped?
ReplyDeleteI thought I understood some of the schools with a dry campus- had made it "technically"illegal to consent to sex while intoxicated- due to said intoxication affecting judgement? I was quite chilled by that weirdness! Made it sound like sex+a couple beers =rape~ clearly not rational either!
ReplyDeleteAnd thus the leftwing 'free love' generation returns to the puritanism it once hoped to do away with.
ReplyDelete