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Category: Law

HIV Tests for Accused Rapists

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has laudably shifted his stance and backed the rights of rape victims to have EC offered to them in state hospitals. But he’s gone a step further, and proposed legislation which would require rape and sexual assault suspects to undergo an HIV test at the request of the victim.

I have very mixed feelings about this one, and since the law on this issue isn’t cleanly settled, I find myself coming down on the side of the civil liberties advocates. Requiring a suspect — not a convicted criminal — to be tested for HIV, for purposes which are not at all related to evidence-gathering or attempts to make a case against them, seems to me to be an egregious Fourth Amendment violation (but I don’t start Con Law until tomorrow, so, really, I don’t actually know much about this). While we permit DNA tests, breathalizer tests, and other bodily searches, these tests are highly regulated and are used exclusively for the purpose of establishing the suspect’s guilt; in that sense, they can be fairly compared to searching a person’s property. But forcing a suspect to undergo an invasive medical procedure which is unrelated to the question of their guilt or innocence, and is instead being used to offer peace of mind to the victim, is in a different category.

Amanda writes about this one too, and seems similarly conflicted, although she offers good arguments for this policy. And there are great arguments. It does seem especially cruel to rape survivors to oppose a policy that could potentially offer them much-needed peace of mind, and give them information that could assist them in making the best medical decisions possible. But as the article points out, it would be difficult to complete an investigation and go through the necessary legal proceedings in the 72-hour window period. And it also seems that mandatory testing could give rape survivors a false sense of security about their status. If their accused rapist turned up negative for HIV, they may assume that they’re safe from getting it and decide not to take the preventative drugs. But the accused could still be HIV-positive and just not testing for it yet. Or the person could be wrongly accused. The preventative drug treatment is no walk in the park, and it would be nice if there were a sure-fire way to figure out if survivors could safely forgo it. But this doesn’t seem to be the answer.

In fighting for victims’ rights, those of us who also have a strong interest in civil liberties have to be able to strike a delicate balance. Requiring hospitals to offer EC and HIV treatment to rape survivors is well within the realm of what’s reasonable. I’m not sure that mandatory HIV tests for accused rapists are. All that’s required here, from what I can tell, is an arrest — not a conviction. This sets us down a scary road when it comes to medical privacy issues, when invasive medical procedures are being done on accused criminals for reasons completely unrelated to establishing their guilt. Now, if they’re on trial for knowingly transmitting HIV to someone else (which is a crime in some states), then it’s a different story — but that’s not what this legislation is about. And it just doesn’t seem beneficial enough to survivors to outweigh all the civil liberties and privacy concerns.

Bill Seeks To Outlaw Abortion in Indiana; Take the Issue To Supreme Court

A Republican lawmaker has filed a bill to make abortion illegal in Indiana, saying if it became law, it could ultimately be a vehicle to get the U.S. Supreme Court with new members to overturn abortion rights.

But Gov. Mitch Daniels said Thursday that his sense was “it would have a very limited prospect of ultimate success.”

The bill by Rep. Troy Woodruff of Vincennes would change Indiana’s feticide law to make it a Class C felony, punishable with a two- to eight-year prison sentence, to perform an abortion. The only exception would be when carrying a pregnancy to term would pose a “substantial permanent impairment of the life or physical health of the pregnant woman.”

Woodruff said he filed the bill Wednesday in part because there will be a new U.S. Supreme Court and a state must pass a law and then appeal it to the highest court to see if the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling would stand.

“Also the people have never had an opportunity (through their lawmakers) to vote on the matter,” Woodruff said…

Daniels said he was a “supporter of the right to live.” But he questioned whether it have any prospect of success and whether any time and money spent on it would lead anywhere.

“Ultimately for this to change, I think, first the heart of the country and maybe ultimately the view the courts take of states’ rights to place some limits would have to evolve,” Daniels said.

The South Dakota Task Force on Abortion

Several must-reads on the most biased report I’ve ever seen:

Echidne of the Snakes: Pro-Life Objectivity

This, my dear readers, might be the new definition of objectivity in the faith-based society. A painstaking and careful attempt to present one-sided information and to stomp the opposition into silence. You might be interested in learning that the possible health risks of abortion are widely discussed but delivering a child is apparently without any risks whatsoever. Or that all the “victim statements” of abortion sufferers came through one person in Texas. Or that the Report argues for abstinence-only education in the Brave New World that would be created if its other recommendations are followed. Imagine that: you can give birth to a baby because your brother raped you but you can’t learn about condoms.

Thoughts of an Average Woman: South Dakota on Abortion

What should scare the beejeesus out of you, and each and every one of us, is the lack of objectivity. From the start, North Dakotians couldn’t possibly have had any expectations of objectivity from this task force, as 15 of the 17 members were anti-abortionists. You have to acknowledge that the report was biased, as even some of the anti-abortion-believing task-force members called this report biased, and untruthful.

The Well-Timed Period: The South Dakota Taskforce to Study Abortions Report

Again, according to the task force, the criteria used to judge credibility and competence are admitted biases and organizational affiliations. Not relevant education or profession. Not scientific fact. Not study methodology, or any of the other scientifically rigorous, established, and accepted criteria.

So what’s the problem with [at a minimum] Drs. Unruh and Wachs, and Senator Jay Duenwald? According to the task force’s own criteria, since they are advocates for lack of reproductive choice and members of activist organizations that support regulating abortion out of existence, with the admitted bias of stopping abortion, they are neither credible, nor competent. As such, they have no place on a task force to study abortions.

As the first installment of her series as she reads this report, this is a must-read. Ema is also an OB-GYN.

Or you can read the 72-page report for yourself, provided by the kindly women at Feministing. Keep your highlighter handy.

Political Crime and Security Culture

The outrageous news from yesterday pushes me to believe that, even as non-violent and non-activist citizens, we need to cultivate a security culture. Though the preliminary reports are likely incomplete, the information provided by the Times and WaPo, expanded upon by Hilzoy, Terrance, and Avedon Carol, is chilling.

More disturbing is that the Times had this story for over a year and, for whatever reason, did not publish the information. Election politics? The Times also did not disclose what circumstances surrounding the story changed, enabling them to publish the story after sitting on it for a year. To our detriment.

Worse, Bush came out today defending his use of this arguably unconstitutional practice citing that the American people want him to do whatever it takes to “protect” us, and assuring us that it had been cleared by the Justice Department. Thankfully many politicians are refusing to toe a party line and defend the president on this business. Arlen Specter, Judiciary Committee Chairman and Pennsylvania Republican, “planned to investigate use of the wiretaps after the New York Times reported on them. Specter, said such a practice would be ‘clearly and categorically wrong.'”

From Forbes:

According to former officials familiar with the policy, Bush signed an executive order in 2002 granting new surveillance powers to the National Security Agency — the branch of the U.S. intelligence services responsible for international eavesdropping, and whose existence was long denied by the government.

“I want to know precisely what they did: how NSA utilized their technical equipment, whose conversations they overheard, how many conversations they overheard, what they did with the material, what purported justification there was … and we will go from there,” Specter said.

I’m donning my tinfoil cap. *cough*

Also read Bush on Wiretapping : I Did It And I’ll Do It Again, and for a more political angle, Bush’s Critics Are Absolutely Right: The President Must Not be Above the Law

Update: Ezra gets at the heart of the matter. via Majikthise

The Indiana Statehouse’s Little Talk With Jesus

Brian Bosma and other Republicans in the Indiana House of Representatives are fighting for their right to pray to Jesus Christ before getting onto godly duties like “Indiana: Central or Eastern?” and “Should We Salt The Roads When It Snows?”. For nearly 200 years, the Indiana House has opened its sessions with group prayer led by invited clergy. Not too bad, right? Tradition and stuff.

Two weeks ago a federal court judge barred prayers that mention Jesus Christ or endorse any religion at the opening of each daily session of the Indiana House of Representatives. Why?

Of 53 prayers offered in the House during the 2005 session, 41 were delivered by people identified with Christian churches, Hamilton’s written opinion says. Of the 45 prayers for which transcripts were available, 29 were offered in the name of Jesus, the Savior and/or the Son.

One prayer urged that “whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus.” Another called for a worldwide conversion to Christianity: “We look forward to the day when all nations and all people of the earth will have the opportunity to hear and respond to messages of love of the Almighty God who has revealed Himself in the saving power of Jesus Christ.”

This went on unchallenged for many years, until the Indiana Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of four members of the House after the Rev. Clarence Brown sang “Just A Little Talk With Jesus” last April, citing that the Statehouse was overwhelmingly promoting Christian values. This godbagly musical session, which likely ended with lots of hugs, back-pats, and raucous versions of Kum Ba Yah, prompted several members of the House to walk out in disgust.

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the right of government bodies to open sessions with a prayer, noting the “unambiguous and unbroken history of more than 200 years.” But in the 1983 high court decision, the justices said the prayers can’t promote one religion over another or disparage any other religion. The justices also ruled the prayers cannot be used in an attempt to convert.

[Judge David Hamilton, himself the son of a minister,] found that “the consistently sectarian prayers” of the Indiana House go far beyond what that ruling permits.

“The prayer opportunities have frequently and consistently been used to advance the Christian religion,” he said.

Brian “Gay People Are Teh Suck” Bosma, who became the defendent in this case, called the ruling “intolerable,” “terrible,” and “shocking,” says he hasn’t decided whether or not to follow the order, and has recently decided to appeal, all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. But here’s the deal. Judge Hamilton did not impose any punishment for anyone who decides to invoke Jesus, Vishnu, or Allah during the prayer sessions. This is a toothless, symbolic ruling intending to reinforce the Constitutional separation of church and state. Even with a new and changing SCOTUS, I doubt the highest court in the nation will adopt an “anything goes” philosophy when it comes to government and prayer. Bosma’s version of religious tolerance turns faith into mush.

Hamilton, I believe, was rather reasonable (understatement):

Hamilton acknowledged that his ruling “might make it difficult or even impossible for some clergy or believers to offer official prayers.”

“All are free to pray as they wish in their own houses of worship or in other settings,” Hamilton said in his ruling. “The individuals do not have a First Amendment right, however, to use an official platform like the Speaker’s podium at the opening of a House session to express their own religious faiths.”

The only constitutional alternative to nonsectarian prayer, he said, would be no prayer at all.

Recommended Reading:
Meeting the Test of Inclusive Prayer
More at the Indiana Law Blog

In Remembrance: The Montreal Massacre

Yesterday was the anniversary of the massacre at Ecole Polytechnique, which left 14 women dead. Sixteen years ago, a man (whose name I’m not writing because he deserves no recognition, no legacy, and no mention here) walked into the school toting a semi-automatic rifle — with a plan to kill women, simply because they were women and in a “man’s” place. He shot and killed one woman in the hallway, then entered an engineering class and told all the men to leave the room. He lined the women up, and open fired on them while screaming, “You’re all a bunch of feminists! I hate feminists!” Then he went downstairs, firing at random on the way, and he killed three people in the cafeteria. After that, he went into another classroom, where students and professors were cowered under their desks. He climbed on top of the desks to shoot the women underneath them, killing four more people. Then he killed himself.

It is the worst single-day massacre in Canadian history. Two more students who were there the day of the killings committed suicide afterwards. From the killer’s suicide note:

Please note that if I am committing suicide today … it is not for economic reasons … but for political reasons. For I have decided to send Ad Patres [Latin: “to the fathers”] the feminists who have ruined my life. … The feminists always have a talent for enraging me. They want to retain the advantages of being women … while trying to grab those of men. … They are so opportunistic that they neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men throughout the ages. They always try to misrepresent them every time they can.

Attached to that note was a list of 19 prominent Quebec women. He wrote, “[These women] nearly died today. The lack of time (because I started too late) has allowed these radical feminists to survive.”

The killer had been rejected from Ecole Polytechnique, and blamed affirmative action policies intended to increase the percentage of female students.

Sixteen years ago, this tragedy mobilized Canadians to address the issue of violence against women. Gender-based violence is certainly not a problem that we’ve solved yet, and it remains a far-reaching one. It’s just usually quieter and more private than this.

This man’s act was intended to terrorize women everywhere, and his aim was to scare them back into traditional roles. He thoroughly failed: From 1989 to to 1999, the number of women in Canadian engineering schools more than doubled, to more than 9,000.

The names of the murdered women are:

Geneviève Bergeron, aged 21;
Hélène Colgan, 23;
Nathalie Croteau, 23;
Barbara Daigneault, 22;
Anne-Marie Edward, 21;
Maud Haviernick, 29;
Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31;
Maryse Leclair, 23;
Annie St.-Arneault, 23;
Michèle Richard, 21;
Maryse Laganière, 25;
Anne-Marie Lemay, 22;
Sonia Pelletier, 28; and
Annie Turcotte, aged 21.

The Morality of Rape

I really didn’t want to post anything about V-x D-y ever again. I stopped reading his blog. I agreed with commenters who said that linking to him only gives him more attention. I won’t write out his whole name — that way, when he googles himself for masturbatory material, hopefully he’ll come up short. I vowed never to link to him again.

Except now he has a column on WorldNet Daily about the same issue, where he spells out his “Christian Libertarian” beliefs even more clearly (and, naturally, they’re even more offensive than you thought):

The Judeo-Christian moral ethic is clear – rape is a sin, a willful pollution of a temple that rightly belongs to God. Neither the Jew nor the Christian need hesitate before asserting the act of rape to be evil and justly holding the rapist accountable. But this ethic does not offer a blanket excuse to victims, near victims and would-be victims either, since the element of consent – which today draws the dividing line between sex and rape – can also provide a contrarian condemnation of the woman’s own actions.

Rape isn’t bad because it’s harmful to people — it’s bad because it pollutes God’s house.

To put it more clearly, if a woman consents to extramarital sex, she is committing a moral offense which is equal to that committed by the man who engages in consensual sex with her, or by the man who, in the absence of such consent, rapes her. Christianity knows no hierarchy of sins. Since only the woman who is not entertaining the possibility of sex with a man and is subsequently raped can truly be considered a wholly innocent victim under this ethic, it is no wonder that women who insist that internal consent is the sole determining factor of a woman’s victimization find traditional Western morality to be inherently distasteful.

And there you have it: Rape is no worse than consensual, but extra-marital, sex. And unless you were hiding in your house, wrapped in clothing from head to toe, and not even thinking about sex, you aren’t wholly innocent if you’re raped.

Oh, plus he’s just flat-out wrong about Christianity. There are, in fact, different kinds of sins, and some are taken more seriously than others. All sins can be forgiven, sure, and we’re all sinners, but all sins are not created equal. Glad my twice-a-year church visits have taught me something that even a Christian Libertarian with a Satanist haircut doesn’t seem to understand.

His basic point is this: Only Christian morality makes rape “bad,” and even then it’s only as bad as any other sin (or, though he doesn’t say this explicitly, perhaps he means it’s only as bad as any other sexual sin). Without Jesus, we have no basis to make moral judgments.

For someone who claims to be a member of Mensa, this seems like a pretty shallow wade into understanding morality — and one has to wonder about a person who truly believes that the only reason something is wrong is because a certain book tells him so.

Congrats, America!

As of Friday, you’ve executed 1,000 people since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977. Now there’s something to be proud of.

Texas leads the way, accounting for almost 1/3 of these executions (check out this handy visual). In the same time period, 122 people were exonerated, and freed from death row — meaning that for every eight people executed, one death row inmate was found innocent. That isn’t a great track record.

The fact that the death penalty has undoubtedly led to the execution of innocent people is deeply troubling, and a good argument for getting rid of it. But what about people about whose guilt there is no doubt? Suppose Saddam Hussein could be tried in a U.S. court for the crimes he committed against the Iraqi people. There is absolutely no doubt that Hussein was a brutal murderer. Regardless of one’s views on the war, few people actually believe that he’s an innocent man. Are we still against the death penalty when there is no real question of guilt?

I think, as a civilized society, we must be. The death penalty is simply unjustifiable. It’s not a deterrant to crime. It’s not a defense mechanism — it could just as easily be replaced by life in prison without parole, eliminating the possibility of dangerous criminals re-offending. It doesn’t even save money — keeping a prisoner on death row and executing them is more costly than a lifetime jail sentence.

And beyond all that, a government should not have the punitive power to execute its citizens, even the very worst of them.

Feminism Killed Natalee Holloway

Is there anything these people can’t blame feminism for?

Because of politically-correct feminist imperatives, girls now know more about sex but less about the opposite sex. There was a time when girls were told that boys were vastly different from them, possessing stronger libidos and bodies. Girls were taught to avoid placing themselves in compromising situations; they were armed with the facts upon which good judgement rested and safety depended.

Now, though, such counsel is sacrilege. Girls’ minds are filled with notions of the sameness of the sexes, with its corollary that they can go where their sisters of yore feared to tread. Why, God forbid that we should tell them that, like it or not, they are the more vulnerable sex, and that this fact of life should inform their thinking.

Not that I’m laboring under the illusion that modern girls are all sugar and spice and everything nice. Owing to feminism, which liberated the fairer sex from common-sense, morality, restraint, and chastity, quasi-harlotry now infects much of contemporary womanhood. A lady close to my heart said it best: “Forty years ago you knew who the bad girls were; now you know who the good girls are.” And now we have a whole generation of girls-gone-wild.

Because knowing about sex and believing that you have the right to go out alone is what’ll rape and/or kill you. Not, you know, actual rapists and murderers.

But equal with feminism is bad parenting — you know, the people who would let their daughters (and it’s just daughers) go on “hedonistic” vacations to Spanish-speaking countries.

Let’s be blunt, one way a daughter could frame this is, “Hey, Mom and Dad, can I go to Cancun for spring break (or to celebrate, or some other occasion)?” But translated that often means, “Hey, Mom and Dad, can I go to Cancun, where I’ll most likely have sex with some libidinous boy you don’t know from Adam – maybe even with lots of boys – drink, smoke, and perhaps even do drugs?” That sounds crazy but is, in essence, accurate. Crazier still is that the parents’ answer is often “yes.”

Now, I’m not a big fan of the entitlement issues that come along with kids who think they “deserve” an exotic vacation for high school graduation or for simply existing. But that aside, at some point parents have to evaluate whether or not they trust their kids, and they have to let their children grow up and make their own decisions. Were I a parent, would I let my 15-year-old go to Aruba alone? Probably not. But do I hope that I’ll know my 18-year-old well enough to be able to reasonably evaluate whether or not they’ll go on a sex-and-drugs spree in a foreign country.

The “girls gone wild” culture is, as far as I can tell, a non-existant part of the majority of young women’s personal experiences, and to be honest I’m sick of every female in my generation being associated with it. Young women are not all running amok flashing our breasts for beads and enticing innocent high school boys into having sex with us. Those of us who do engage in certain behaviors that this author would criticize — sexual performance to please a male audience, etc — do so as a response to a lot of complicated social factors, and it’s over-simplistic to just call those women heathen sluts and assume that their experiences are universal for young women. Hell, I went to Mexico for spring break last year with six other people, and it wasn’t exactly an exercise in unrestrained hedonism — we were in bed by midnight every night, and woke up by 9am (we did drink Pacifico and pina coladas in the pool all day, but that’s about as wild as it got). I’m sure there were plenty of people there who were a lot crazier than we were, and that’s fine — but just because their experience is more visible doesn’t make it more common.

Of course, what no one seems to be pointing out is that, even if we assume that “girls gone wild” are everywhere, it’s men who are videotaping them, encouraging them to behave a certain way, rewarding sexualized and male-pleasing behavior, and making money off of them. Feminism has never said, “You go, girls! Get naked for that guy and let him make millions off your ass!” We just see the dishonesty in slut-shaming and pinning all the blame on women.