Hey, guys! Guys! What day is it??! That’s right! Not Monday! And yet here is Stephen’s post. Sorry for the delay everyone. Thank you, Stephen.
As leftists continue to take the plunge off of the deep end of sanity, they are corrupting the legal system beyond all semblance of reason and rationality much like they have been doing with the culture, or rather hand in glove with the corruption of the culture and education.
This is not a new phenomena but rather the continuing snowball effect of the legal ideation of prior generations and corruptions of not merely the law, but the very precepts upon which law has been built.
It is the traditional legal concept that crime requires both a “mens rea” and an “actus reus”, roughly translated as a “bad mind” and a “bad act”, though their actual legal meaning is more than such a trite expression might indicate.
By a bad mind, it is not a general intent to cause harm or an indifference to that harm which one might cause, but it is the specific intent to do that very action which one does which is inherently wrong.
I say wrong as opposed to malicious, though these terms are often viewed as legally similar, because it is not necessary that you intend or even care about how your actions might affect others if those actions you intend are objectively harmful. A thief may want to take things from you in order to deprive you of what he has taken, or he may merely be covetous and want to take such property for himself indifferent to how it affects you at all, or he may even seek to take your property in order to gift it to another for that person’s sole benefit.
They are a thief regardless of the ignominy or generosity of their intentions, as the “mens rea” only applies to their actual intent to act, and not their intent to harm.
The classic example of this was an accused who was brought to trial for arson, whereas he had stolen into the ship’s hold seeking to obtain a bit of rum which was stored there, however he had the misfortune to knock over the candle he was carrying and set the ship on fire. The court held that while he had intended larceny, to steal the rum, he had not intended to set fire to the ship and thus was not guilty of the arson with which he had been charged.
(This traditional concept runs counter to the modern idea of “felony murder” that a criminal is responsible for any and all crimes or even harms which follow his initial criminal intent. Under this modern perspective, he would have been guilty of the arson because he was in the act of larceny.)
The other side of that phrase, the “bad act” implies not merely that act or action intended by the perpetrator, but that the act is such that viewed objectively on its own would be considered by the observer to be of a nefarious or criminal nature.
The classic example of this is the illiterate man who openly defies the posted sign to fish in the lake knowing it to be illegal to do so and fully intending to break the law; only the sign actually reads “no swimming” not “no fishing”; thus despite his mens rea, his intention to commit a crime, the action in which he engaged was not actually illegal.
From this general background of nearly a millennia of criminal legal understanding, modernists decided that being so modernly educated they could expand upon this tradition to create, define, and generate entirely new offenses in a utopian quest to transform society into a perfect world.
Of course, they were not so foolish as to confront such legal precepts directly, but targeted the concept upon a more lenient and amorphous field of battle, in the area of torts, or civil wrongs, rather than as crimes, or civic wrongs.
Skipping the initial corruption of “negligence”, in this particular attack upon sanity they invented the concept of “sexual harassment” as just bad enough and depraved enough that not merely looking askance the practice, the law would willingly look askance the standards as well; thus willingly throw out the baby with the bath water.
The idea of making the most extreme instance of “sexual harassment” the test case, was the overt and objective demand that an employee engage in sexual activity in order to keep their job.
Of course, in a strictly legal perspective, to demand sex for money is properly classified as the criminal act of “solicitation of prostitution”, but they did not attack that practice as a criminal act but as a civil wrong on the pretense that prosecutors would not prosecute such crimes. However, a criminal prosecution demands more certain proof than a civil claim, demanding proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Further, the lawyers raised the specter that by filing such a criminal complaint the employee subjected themselves to the loss of their employment regardless of whether they prevailed in court and that a low level employee would be the loser financially regardless of the outcome of any criminal case.
This had two main effects, legally speaking, in that it constituted a direct assault upon the idea of the employment relationship being “at will”, that is that an employee could be fired for a good reason, a bad reason, or for no reason at all; and it created a tort which necessitated a complete break from the traditional objective nature of the legal system embodied in the aforementioned “mens rea” and “actus reus” of criminal law.
It is this latter effect which is important to the present discussion, because, aside from that “negligence” area, the civil laws often followed the criminal offenses in character if not in the stringency of proof.
After all, once such a case became president, it was not hard to avoid liability by instituting a company policy forbidding the practice of people in supervisory positions from overtly demanding a quid-pro-quo of sex for employment. However, anyone with half a brain readily knew that human nature was not inclined to change and that there would still exist certain nefarious undesirable people in the appropriate positions to continue the corporate casting couch behavior.
As they purveyors of this new legal standard knew full well would occur, the standard became necessarily increasingly subjective of suggestive behavior rather than overt objective demands; this being the slippery slope of corrupting legal principles. If “sexual harassment” remained an objective standard of the overt solicitation of prostitution, then there would never have been a problem, but then there would have been almost no such legal suits brought.
Because the standard became almost instantly one of subjective rather than objective behavior; it was now necessary to determine if the “victim” subjectively felt “pressured” rather than the alleged perpetrator’s provable objective actions indicated an intent to trade continued employment for sexual favors.
And this is the crux of the corruption, the “mens rea”, or bad mind, was no longer the mind or the “criminal”, the perpetrator, or the tort feasor, rather the person with the bad mind, the bad intent was now the “victim”.
It was no longer a court’s job to determine if a person intended an action which was objectively bad, rather it was to determine if a person was really subjectively offended by an action which many might find intended innocently. The question shifted to “was the person offended?”, not, “did the person intend the offense?”.
Fast forward a generation or three, and we find that this corrupt standard has made its way from the civil claims of dubious merit into civic offenses.
We now have people justifying attacking someone because their victim wore a hat they didn’t like even though that hat says nothing objectively offensive. People are targeted by police in the UK for actual criminal prosecution for “hate speech”. People can be, and have been, imprisoned in Germany for questioning the official history of the Holocaust. Dr. Watson has been stripped of honorary degrees and accolades because he speculated unfavorably about the future of Africa because of the populations’ scores on IQ tests.
The media has targeted and doxxed someone for making an unflattering meme regarding CNN. A Christian preacher on the street in England arrested for disturbing the peace because other people complained that his speech offended them. The SPLC maintains a libelous public list of people they call “hate groups” and publishes it. There are constant controversies over all kinds of anti-this or that comments and derogations. There are many, many other examples.
While there are criminal actions all around the world targeting people for what might at most properly be considered rude behavior or comments, from Europe, to Australia, to Canada, it remains not a crime in the US, for the most part, thanks to the First Amendment. Many of those examples are not government actions but often private technology company censorship, or collective social intimidations, or even quasi-private colleges funded by the government making their censorship a quasi-governmental action.
I cannot honestly say that it looks like it shall continue that way indefinitely. There are people in this country who actively oppose the First Amendment precisely because it prevents the criminalizing of their political opponents’ speech. Free speech is on the defensive worldwide, and the US appears to be being surrounded by its attackers; merely being rude and offending people is becoming increasingly criminalized.
Even the trends in American law do not bode well for the future of the right to offend those lowlife cretins on the other side from whatever issue I happen to be. If I ever end up in prison, it will be for telling people what I actually think, because they have criminalized mere rudeness.
