Progressives Break Down Church-State Separation
In my previous post on the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision, I noted that U.S. Progressives are taking their victory laps, and I suspect that before they are done, those laps are going to morph into a marathon. By a 5-4 vote, SCOTUS forever changed the political and religious landscape in a way that ironically breaks down the wall of separation between church and state.
That’s right. For all of their endorsement of the principle that church and state must be separate, American Progressives have made the state the final arbiter of the purity of Christian doctrine, and whether or not the state is willing to permit such doctrines to remain legal. This is a line of action that follows a larger pattern of how Progressives use the power of the state and the implication of state-sponsored violence in order by directing the private and corporate lives of individuals.
For example, Progressives have told us for four decades that any opposition to abortion on demand is rooted in the desire of abortion opponents to “have government in the bedroom” of others, and that pro-lifers want government to interfere in the relationship between “a woman and her doctor.” At the same time, those same Progressives have pushed through “informed consent” laws that place government agents in the bedroom in order to evaluate sexual contact between individuals to determine whether or not official consent existed at all times.
Furthermore, Progressives want to expand the law on sexual assault to include a stray phrase or instances of hand-holding between couples that one of the persons years later decides to interpret as “unwanted.” The American Law Institute is recommending a vast expansion of criminal statutes covering sexual assault including the following scenario as outlined by Judith Shulevitz in the New York Times:
In [the memo], readers have been asked to consider the following scenario: “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).”
Far-fetched? Not as the draft is written. The hypothetical crime cobbles together two of the draft’s key concepts. The first is affirmative consent. The second is an enlarged definition of criminal sexual contact that would include the touching of any body part, clothed or unclothed, with sexual gratification in mind. As the authors of the model law explain: “Any kind of contact may qualify. There are no limits on either the body part touched or the manner in which it is touched.” So if Person B neither invites nor rebukes a sexual advance, then anything that happens afterward is illegal. “With passivity expressly disallowed as consent,” the memo says, “the initiator quickly runs up a string of offenses with increasingly more severe penalties to be listed touch by touch and kiss by kiss in the criminal complaint.”
The obvious comeback to this is that no prosecutor would waste her time on such a frivolous case. But that doesn’t comfort signatories of the memo, several of whom have pointed out to me that once a law is passed, you can’t control how it will be used. For instance, prosecutors often add minor charges to major ones (such as, say, forcible rape) when there isn’t enough evidence to convict on the more serious charge. They then put pressure on the accused to plead guilty to the less egregious crime.
Understand that Shulevitz has outlined a scenario in which someone most likely is going to prison. The ALI has recommended that the new “sex crime” laws be written in a way that require prosecutors to assume sexual assault already has occurred, and it is up to the defendant to “prove” that he (or she, in a few instances) did not commit a crime. In other words, the statutes will overturn the long-held American legal principle of “innocent until proven guilty” and replace it it “guilty until proven innocent,” which essentially means that an accusation alone “proves” guilt unequivocally. This is something out of the old codes of the former U.S.S.R. in which legal absurdities were the order of the day.
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