Senator Santorum

Paul Robinson paul at iconoplex.co.uk
Thu May 8 03:36:47 PDT 2003


On f, Terry Lambert <tlambert2 at mindspring.com> wrote:

> Actually, the slippery slope, in the limit, is consensual
> crimes include crimes where the victim voluntarily ceded
> rights which are held to be inalienable, e.g. selling
> themselves into slavery willingly in response to a fetish,
> and then being resold unwillingly.

I'm sorry, I was keeping quiet on this one, but can you give me an example 
of a real case of somebody selling themselves into slavery and then being 
resold unwillingly? I know New York can be a bit screwed up at times, but 
surely it's not *this* deranged? :-)

A better description of consensual crimes is, in my opinion, one that states
a crime that whilst clearly illegal, the "victim" or participants are
completely at ease with the crime - e.g. drug consumption and possession.
It's illegal in the UK to smoke dope, but it's now so ill-policed that you
could walk into a police station with a bong on the go and you wouldn't get
arrested. Not only is the smoker consenting (the smoker is considered to be 
a victim), but now even the police are...
 
> I think the senator used the inflamatory examples he used
> merely to gain support for his side of the argument by
> provoking outrage in people who would otherwise support it,
> but couldn't fault his logic.  The most important part of
> his statement was actually "...the right to anything".

Without turning this into yet another anti-US flamefest, US senators are
well known for believing Americans have the right to do anything they want
anyway and don't appear to have a grasp of the differences between rights
and privileges, so I don't see where this guy was really coming from. If you
and your best friend want to put your genitals up each other's bottoms, what
the hell has that got to do with him, me, or anybody else?
 
-- 
Paul Robinson


More information about the freebsd-chat mailing list