John Stark
.44 mag
Reductio ad absurdum really is my favorite logical tool, as it reduces things down to the point that the nonsense is there for anyone with eyes to see.Cops get qualified immunity. Legislators just plain have immunity.
They could pass a law re-instating prima-nocta and nothing would happen.
What's worse is that there are cops who'd come to drag your new wife off and say "tell it to the judge".
I used a similar argument as yours many years ago.
I took some pre-law classes as an undergrad. The idea that the law is malleable and flexible, and that it is not informed by any kind of moral standard, was the de facto position of both the "professor" and the "students." I use the scare quotes because both the prof and the learners did nothing but regurgitate the "accepted wisdom." Living Document garbage, deconstruction of language, reader derived meaning of any given text (i.e., literary claptrap meant to deal with symbolism and metaphor, not legal documents or instruments), was the rage then, coupled with a small "t" notion of Truth; i.e., there are no universal Truths, only small truths that depend strictly on the cultural and social context of any given civilization.
So while these people were talking about "Constitutional" law and how it was divorced from the reality of the historical/grammatical approach to interpretation, how it didn't really matter what the men who wrote the Constitution thought about it or said it mean, or what the proper use of English grammar had, I asked a simply question:
What if a Constitutional Amendment was put forth and pushed through the process to make the rape of a woman legal, without punishment for the perpetrator?
Now remember, this is a few decades ago while feminism was still kosher, people knew what a woman was (although the definition of a man was already blurry at that point), and we were also supposed to worship at the Great Altar of Femininity and kiss the proverbial ring (let your imagination run wild with what I mean by that!).
Eyes glazed, brows furrowed, gears began to grind. Thought bubbles of "does not compute" were hanging in the air of almost everyone in the room.
Then the retorts came, and I was of course a villain for even thinking such thoughts.
Oddly the refrain almost invariably was, "That would be WRONG!" and "It would violate the Rights of women!" The female professor turned green and stammered incoherently.
The obvious foolishness and wickedness of the question drew out not just their ire, but the fact that they were utter hypocrites in the way they talked about US law. Women had Rights dammit!
So then I asked: What basis did they have to assert those Rights if men were to pass a Constitutional amendment that stripped women of Equal Rights right along with the one that legalized rape?
Unfortunately, not a single person there would admit that there might have been a flaw in both their legal and moral beliefs and thinking.
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