You think they will forget to change the sentencing rules for felony sexual assault if they want to change the sentencing rules for felony sexual assault?
Are you under the impression that I am blindingly stupid so that you have to keep explaining this? Because I assure you, I’m well aware of absolutely everything you posted and you are coming across as patronizing.
I hope all the inmates got their 20 minutes of action.
I don’t. Rape is wrong, regardless of who the victim is.
It’s not rape. It’s “action”.
If you thought it was wrong when Brock Turner did it, then it’s wrong when it’s done to Brock Turner.
It’s really fun to imagine an actual drunk Smurf singing this song. Thanks!
Not cool. A perfect illustration of the dangers of ginning up an Internet mob.
An illustration of the dangers of promoting the idea that protestors should be armed. It’s only a matter of time before one of these armed protests turns into a bloodbath.
One of the guys carrying a gun in this story is also carrying a sign that says, “Shoot your local rapist.”
That got to be precariously close to stepping over the legal boundaries of free speech, doesn’t it?
Well, insofar as it implies that Brock Turner was found guilty of rape, I guess it’d arguably be over the line; do you think it’d be more commendable, if less euphonious, to go with a Shoot The Guy Who Committed Assault With Intent To Rape sign?
I was thinking more about the actual exhortation to shoot a person—any person.
I’ve generally believed that such exhortations should be protected speech, and that we should only punish people who actually act on such exhortations. But while i take an interest in constitutional issues, i’m not a constitutional legal scholar, and i’m not sure where current law and precendet draws the line on something that could be seen as explicit incitement like this.
It seems to me that there’s a different—small, perhaps, but still significant—between a general statement like “Rapists should be shot” and something like “Shoot your local rapist,” especially when the person in the second case seems to clearly have a particular individual in mind, and is standing outside that person’s house.
precendet? WTF is precendet ?
Clearly, i meant precedent.
Apparently it means “returning” in Romanian ;).
That the section of California criminal law he was convicted under terms what he did as “assault” rather than “rape” doesn’t preclude us from calling what he did “rape” in ordinary speech.
And to be clear, the only reason California law doesn’t call it “rape” is because he used his fingers instead of his penis.
So when we speak informally, there’s no reason to refrain from calling him a rapist.
It does if you value precision and clarity in speech and writing. To me, legal technicalities aside, rape means someone putting their penis in someone else’s vagina without their consent. Or perhaps the victim’s anus, but if the victim is a woman then precision demands the adjective “anal” go before the word “rape”.
That’s you. So far as most people I know are concerned, using any part of your body to penetrate a woman’s orifice without consent makes you a rapist, regardless of what specific statute you were prosecuted under. Morally and factually, to insist otherwise is quibbling.
Again, my objection has nothing to do with the statutes, but only to do with the meaning of words. It may be that the vernacular is shifting to colloquially refer to all forms of sexual assault as “rape”, but if so that is unfortunate and I am going to resist it. (I don’t reflexively denounce all evolution in language, but I do lament when words go from having narrower and more specific meanings to broader and more general ones, because then you’ve lost a precision tool and gained nothing in compensation.)
Furthermore, in moral terms I also think it makes a significant difference. Rape is one of the oldest crimes, and long before we had Hobby Lobby et al, it was a primeval way of taking away a woman’s reproductive choices: the fundamental choice of when, and with whom, to procreate. Sexual assault as in this case is also a crime, an invasion of someone’s right to privacy and bodily integrity, but it does not carry with it this abrogation of reproductive choice.