Tag: law

MRAs against marital rape

David King writes an embarrassingly bad article in an attempt to bring the men’s rights position on marital rape in line with the feminist one.

The core thesis of Talukdar’s article is that the notion of marital rape is a contradiction in terms on the ground that marriage is irrevocable, explicit and on-going consent to sex. I disagree and, further, I think that this position is incompatible with the values and moral basis of the Men’s Human Rights Movement….

Since frequently arguments of this nature revolve around the meanings of
words I will spell out what I understand these core concepts to be and
the meaning with which I use these core words, just like a contract
would.

And there is the first sign that he’s going to get it completely wrong. He’s presenting a legal argument on the basis of what HE understands the core concepts to be and HIS definition of the core words. At this point, we already know he’s going to get it wrong, the only question is how.

Western definitions of marriage include provisions for alimony and division of marital assets after divorce, but I’m not aware that there is (now) any explicit obligation to provide for maintenance during marriage (the assumption being that, in cohabitation and in providing for himself, he provides for his wife also).

He already blew it. He’s ignoring the fact that a husband is legally obligated for his wife’s debts, legally obligated to pay support for her children, and more importantly, the fact that the obligation precedes the very existence of the written law.

“The husband’s duty to support his wife (and, under later common law decisions, his children also), and the wife’s duty to render services to her husband (and a less clearly defined duty to render services to her children), are two of the most ancient concepts of the common law.”
– Virginia Law Review, 1943

There is actually  LESS question concerning a man’s duty to provide for maintence during marriage than there is concerning a wife’s duty to provide for her children.

So, we have an explicit law that criminalises rape and, to my knowledge (though I am no legal scholar), there is no explicit legal obligation, by either spouse, to submit to sexual intercourse — at least, not in any western jurisdiction I know of. Whether there is such an explicit provision in Indian law, I cannot say. On the face of it, therefore, the law requires that, even within marriage, sex requires consent from both spouses or it is a crime.

 This is ridiculous, because without consummation, the marriage isn’t even completed. The focus on “explicit legal obligation” indicates the problem, David King thinks that the law is limited to “black letter law”, which is simply not the case. Both the common law and case law are not only relevant, in most cases they trump black letter law, which is the reason the various courts are able to throw out black letter law and declare it to be invalid.

It should be noted that Historia Placitorum Coronæ (the original
title of Hale’s treatise) is a chronicle, a contemporary description of
facts and events as they were understood at the time; such works were
and are not law and have no judicial authority (then or now), and can be
nothing more than of historical interest.

It should also be noted that Historia was written in 1736, and that both the law and social mores change over time. Once, slavery was lawful and only landed people (which included women, by the way) had the right to vote. If defences of such law offered before slavery was abolished have no moral relevance in the 21st Century, then Hale’s nearly 280-year-old interpretation of marital consent is of questionable relevance today.

First, King fails to grasp that the intrepretation is not Hale’s. He is merely repeating the “the position of the common law, which is that a husband cannot be guilty of the rape of his wife because
the wife “hath given up herself in this kind to her husband, which she
cannot retract”” What King is ignoring is that this is not only settled law, it has been settled law for considerably more than three centuries.

The depths of absurdity to which the denial of marital consent takes King is finally revealed towards the end of his article, where he inadvertently reveals that denying marital consent is tantamount to denying marriage altogether.

There’s something to that, insofaras Talukdar quite reasonably questions what rights the man has in return for the obligation to support and maintain his wife. But, the point could equally be used to argue for abolition of the man’s obligation to maintain his wife as much as to argue that his wife owes him sex in exchange for that obligation.

 In other words, marriage neither grants a right of support to the wife nor a right of services to the husband. Which, one can only wonder, raises the obvious question of why any man or any woman would get married in the first place, if they literally get nothing out of it?

The fact of the matter is perfectly plain. Marriage grants sexual consent, which is precisely why nearly 100 percent of all couples regularly have sex without either party ever granting verbal or written consent to the other. In his desire to play the legal white knight, David King has managed to transform what he claims are the “values and moral basis” of men’s rights into something all but indistinguishable from the Neo-Dworkinian position that all sex is rape.

This is one of the many reasons I am not a Men’s Rights Activist. With friends like these, enemies are superfluous.

Child Protection Stasi in action

This abuse of government authority has got to stop, and stop immediately.

Police seized 10 kids from their rural Kentucky home after receiving an anonymous tip to investigate the family’s “off the grid” lifestyle.

Joe Naugler happened to be away with eight of his children when the authorities arrived on the scene. Nicole Naugler, who happens to be five months pregnant, took their oldest children with her to drive away, but the authorities stopped her and took took them. She was arrested for “disorderly conduct and resisting arrest,” but she claims she was arrested after not allowing the officers to take her children without a “fight.” Officers told her husband he needed to hand over the other children or face felony charges, and he complied.

Pace Ellsworth, a family friend, said he believes the Nauglers were targeted because the government disagrees with their “free” lifestyle of “unschooling,” which focuses on learning through life experience and each child’s individual strengths.

The children have been placed in four different homes in four different counties that CPS chose. On Friday morning, officials inspected the Naugler’s home and concluded that they did, in fact, have good living conditions.

The Nauglers are hopeful to get their kids back. The family will find out the specific reason their kids were taken at an upcoming court hearing, but it’s hard to believe how EASY it was for the authorities to take their kids. This was all based on a baseless, anonymous tip.

There is absolutely no excuse or justification for this sort of thing.
Every policeman and CPS agent involved should be arrested and tried for
kidnapping. Whatever happened to Blackstone’s Formulation and the principle “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”?

The Child Protection Stasi aren’t protecting children. They are abusing them.

Hug rape!

Someone alert David Pakman! There are SERIAL HUG RAPISTS on the loose in Virginia:

A Hug Now Requires “Affirmative Consent” At UVA — Or You’re Guilty Of Sexual Assault

If you don’t explicitly ask for and get permission for your clothed body to touch another person’s clothed body in a hug, you could now be accused of “sexual assault” through “sexual contact” at UVA.

It’s part of UVA’s broad new “sexual assault” policy, explains Hans Bader at Liberty Unyielding:

Because U.Va. lumps together touching, “however slight,” and intercourse when it comes to sexual assault, requiring “affirmative” consent for both. (“Affirmative consent” is a misleading term, and does not include many forms of consent that occur in the real world, and are recognized by the courts, as I explain at this link. The new policy further warns that “Relying solely on non-verbal communication before or during sexual activity can lead to misunderstanding and may result in a violation of this Policy.”

Here is the essential bit from the new UVA “sexual assault” policy:

    A. SEXUAL ASSAULT Sexual Assault consists of (1) Sexual Contact and/or (2) Sexual Intercourse that occurs without (3) Affirmative Consent.

    (1) Sexual Contact is:

    •     Any intentional sexual touching
    •     However slight
    •     With any object or body part (as described below)
    •     Performed by a person upon another person

    Sexual Contact includes (a) intentional touching of the breasts, buttocks, groin or genitals, whether clothed or unclothed, or intentionally touching another with any of these body parts; and (b) making another touch you or themselves with or on any of these body parts.

Better not hug your wife tonight. Not without Affirmative Consent. You might think “hug rape” sounds ridiculous now, but it wasn’t all that long ago that “marital rape” sounded totally nonsensical too.

“A job well done”

Now we know why none of the big banks were prosecuted by the Obama administration:

Just after announcing his resignation as U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder has accepted a top job with Wall Street finance giant JPMorgan Chase.

Starting in early November, Holder will serve as JPMorgan Chase’s chief compliance officer, where his responsibilities will include lobbying Congress on the company’s behalf and ensuring it “gets the best deal possible” from any new proposed financial regulations. Holder will also fetch morning coffee and breakfast orders for CEO Jamie Dimon and board members.

For his efforts, Holder will earn an annual salary of $77 million plus bonuses for a job well done.

At this point, I think the federal government should go back to the spoils system. It would be considerably less corrupt.

Equality in sentencing

A Michigan judge bucks the trend to let female sex criminals off the hook:

Saying there is no room for double standards, an Oakland County judge sentenced a 30-year-old female teacher to spend the next six to 15 years in prison for having a sexual relationship with a student.

Kathryn Ronk, who taught Spanish at a Catholic high school, could have been sentenced to as little as a year in jail, but Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Nanci Grant opted for prison time Tuesday, noting the boy was 15 at the time.

Grant was dismayed by letters asking for leniency for Ronk, a former teacher at Bishop Foley High School in Madison Heights, but making no mention of concern for the boy.

Attractive woman. Female judge. And what conclusions can we likely draw from this?  It is certainly unusual, given that attractive women usually receive less jail time than unattractive women in these situations.

Adolf Hitler, published author

Stephen Hicks considers the implications of Germany permitting the publication of Mein Kampf for the first time in decades.

German authorities will allow the republication of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, after decades of censorship. Decent people can argue that the book is too dangerous to be published. But the fact is that Mein Kampf is too dangerous not to be published.

The great fear is that Hitler’s ideas are not dead and that his book could trigger another horribly pathological social movement. Nationalism and socialism still appeal to many, and combinations of the two ideologies attract new adherents every day in Europe and around the world.

Mein Kampf is available in many editions, in many languages and online. So the furor over its republication is about the Germans in particular: Can they handle it?

One of many old jokes has one German ask another, “How many Poles does it take to change a light bulb?” The other German replies, “I don’t know. Let’s invade Poland and find out!”

Always fun to poke at the Germans’ historical reputation. But it has been three generations since the end of World War II. There have been major cultural shifts in German attitudes towards militarism, authoritarianism, anti-Semitism, and other elements in the National Socialist package. There is plenty of evidence that today’s German are well above the average in civility and decency. So the post-Nazi cultural training wheels can come off.

Yet beyond the specifics of the German debate, there is a more important general point about prohibiting even the most repulsive of ideas: Censorship weakens our ability to combat them.

Levi Salomon, speaking for the Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism based in Berlin, opposes republication of Mein Kampf: “This book is outside of human logic.”

Salomon’s statement is more outrageous than anything Hitler wrote in the book. National Socialism is not only human logic, it is considerably more logical, and truthful, than Communism, feminism, or secular Zionism. That was part of the tragedy of Germany’s descent into it. Unlike the first two ideologies, it actually functioned effectively.

National Socialism is also cruel, pitiless, and militaristic, but those are undeniably human failings.

Indeed, one of the most striking things about Mein Kampf is that it is not, as one would tend to imagine, a wild-eyed, frothing-at-the-mouth sort of text. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about it is how reasonable Hitler often sounds throughout. And that is possibly the best reason of all that it should be published; it is a vivid reminder that far from being “outside of human logic”, every rational man is capable of choosing between good and evil, and choosing between setting himself to achieving great good and committing great harm.

Expect more of this

Iran contemplates taking away the ability to commit societal suicide from the female half of the population:

Two bills being discussed in Iran will turn women into “baby-making machines” if passed, Amnesty International warned on Wednesday. The bills seek to boost Iran’s population of 77 million. Population growth in the country has been declining since the late 1980s, despite the efforts of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to end family-planning programs. The new bills, which would limit women’s access to contraception and encourage companies to prioritize hiring men with children over other groups, would, Amnesty argues, effectively legalize gender discrimination in the workplace and result in more women seeking out dangerous, unsafe and illegal abortions.

“The bills reinforce discriminatory stereotypes of women and mark an unprecedented move by the state to interfere in people’s personal lives,” Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement Wednesday. “In their zealous quest to project an image of military might and political strength by attempting to increase birth rates, Iran’s authorities are trampling all over the fundamental rights of women—even the marital bed is not out of bounds.”

One thing that is becoming evident is that regardless of culture, women cannot be trusted to use contraception in a socially responsible manner. If it is left up to them, they will kill their societies rather than give up the pleasures of alpha-chasing. This indicates that it will not be left up to them very much longer, as societies that permit women to control their birth rates will prove to be unfit, decline demographically, and eventually expire, while those that control women will prove their fitness, remain stable or continue to grow, and expand to replace the dying societies.

Iran’s leaders understand that the future belongs to those who show up for it. It is a pity that so many political and opinion leaders in the West do not. That being said, historically attempts to legislate demographic growth have not been very successful, dating back to 9 AD and the Lex Papia Poppaea in Imperial Rome.

Sexism 6x worse than racism

No doubt this disparity in criminal sentencing will be of DEEP concern to our friendly neighborhood SJWs:

After controlling for the arrest offense, criminal history, and other prior characteristics, “men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do,” and “[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.” This gender gap is about six times as large as the racial disparity that Prof. Starr found in another recent paper.

It seems to me that a smart criminal should have the good sense to reduce his risk ratio by finding a woman to be his fall gal.

The danger of being correct

It’s fascinating how the New York Times buries the lede in its complaint about the Alabama Supreme Court’s failure to do what it is under no legal burden to do in the first place.

ON Tuesday the Supreme Court of Alabama prohibited the state’s probate judges from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This decision effectively throws down the gauntlet, challenging the federal courts to make earlier federal rulings stick — including last month’s refusal by the United States Supreme Court to stay a federal judge’s decision requiring the state to recognize same-sex marriages. It draws on a disturbing line of thinking in the history of American federalism, one that, were it to gain currency as a model, could compromise our entire system of law….

Since the United States Supreme Court will rule on gay marriage in June, it’s easy to dismiss the Alabama court’s ruling as quixotic. But it raises a real issue: not what state courts can do, but rather what they should do. Because state and federal courts operate on entirely separate tracks, the state court’s position that it need not follow lower federal court rulings is technically correct. Yet if our judicial system is to function smoothly, both court systems must, from time to time, refrain from exercising their legal discretion to ignore the other’s handiwork.

Apparently the New York Times is operating on outcomes-based logic. We’re supposed to believe that our entire system of law is threatened by a state court’s legally correct position? If being correct is “dangerous defiance”, what does that make those being defied?

Justice belatedly prevails

It doesn’t matter what you think of Adrian Peterson. It doesn’t matter if you think he should be hung, drawn, and quartered for the crime of overdisciplining his son, for which he has already been dealt the legal consequences. All that matters is the basic legal principle that the worse commissioner in NFL history, Roger Goodell, violated, the principle of retroactivity:

The 16-page ruling from Judge David Doty that reinstates Vikings running back Adrian Peterson turns on one fairly simple conclusion:  The NFL cannot apply its new personal conduct policy retroactively.

“There is no dispute that the Commissioner imposed Peterson’s discipline under the New Policy,” Judge Doty wrote. “It is also undisputed that in the [Ray] Rice arbitration, the hearing officer unequivocally recognized that the New Policy cannot be applied retroactively, notwithstanding the Commissioner’s broad discretion in meting out punishment under the CBA. . . . Consistent with that recognition, the Commissioner has acknowledged that he did not have the power to retroactively apply the New Policy: ‘The policy change was forward looking because the League is “required to provide proper notice.”‘ . . . Yet, just two weeks later, the Commissioner retroactively applied the New Policy to Peterson.”

In other words, Judge Doty concluded that the NFL was making it up as went along.

This is further evidence that the Sports Guy was right and Goodell is a dishonest man who is overmatched by his responsibilities, overly concerned with PR details that he should leave well alone, and fundamentally out of control. As for those who feign concern for women and children, and claim that the likes of Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson should be prevented from making a living, how can anyone possibly pretend that removing the ability of those who support them to do so going to help the victims of these petty domestic crimes.

And they are petty. It may, depending upon the circumstances, be wrong to punch a woman once. It is certainly too harsh to spank a child until he bleeds. But in a nation where not one single banker has been jailed despite the theft of literal trillions of dollars for a wide variety of shamelessly dishonest acts, it is ludicrous to pretend that these are the serious crimes that demand more significant punishments.