Many of today’s young people have been brought up to have very libertine attitudes on sex – free love, free sex, whenever, wherever, with whoever. It’s known as the Hook-up culture. This attitude, unencumbered by morals, comes from the left. This hook-up culture has led to big problems on college campuses.
Legislative Women’s Caucus
Rather than educating students about abstinence and self-respect, the Legislative Women’s Caucus chairwoman and vice chairwoman, Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, and Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara, and Sen. Kevin de Leόn, D-Los Angeles, are the authors of Senate Bill 967, which will require California colleges and universities to deal with campus sexual violence by requiring each school to adopt Legislature-approved “victim-centered sexual assault response policies and protocols that follow best practices and professional standards.”
Jackson, Lowenthal and de Leόn however, are not addressing the hook-up culture; they are declaring sex a contractual event, and redefining consensual sexual relations as “rape” if it occurs on a college campus.
Sen. Hannah Beth Jackson
But how does classifying most consensual sex as rape help rape victims?
According to bill language, “In order to receive state funds for student financial assistance, the governing board of each community college district, the Trustees of the California State University, the Regents of the University of California, and the governing boards of independent postsecondary institutions shall adopt a policy concerning campus sexual violence, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking.”
Consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual encounter, and can be revoked at any time, according to the bill.
Colleges dominated by women
Most college campuses are dominated by women. According to Inside Higher Ed, women outpace men in college enrollment by a ratio of 1.4 to 1. But does this mean women are being sexually assaulted more, as well?
Sexual assault on campus must be decisively addressed when it occurs. But some California lawmakers claim one in five women will be sexually assaulted on campus. One in five is a startlingly high number, and has led to a nationwide panic about the issue of sexual assault on campus.
However, if one in five college women is really being raped, we should be calling in the National Guard rather than legislating morality.
Editorial boards agree
In declaring support for the bill, the editorial boards of the Sacramento and Fresno Bee, and the Daily Californian openly advocated for sex be treated as “sexual assault” unless the participants discuss it “out loud,” and “demonstrate they obtained verbal ‘affirmative consent’ before engaging in sexual activity,” according to attorney Hans Bader.
In a March article for LegalInsurrection.com, Bader argues the language of the proposed law will likely make ordinary people out to be sexual criminals.
Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal
“Since most people have engaged in sex without verbal consent, supporters of the bill are effectively redefining most people, and most happily-married couples, as rapists,” Bader said.
The law could violate individual privacy rights, according to Bader:
“Requiring people to have verbal discussion before sex violates their privacy rights, under the logic of Supreme Court decisions such as Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck down Texas’ sodomy law, and federal appeals court decisions like Wilson v. Taylor (1984), which ruled that dating relationships are protected against unwarranted meddling by the Constitutional freedom of intimate association.”
Senators Jackson, de Leόn, and Assemblywoman Lowenthal claim “One in five women on college campuses have been sexually assaulted.”
This dubious figure has become an article of faith and rallying cry among those pushing government intervention into colleges’ handling of sexual assault claims.
The campus of U.C. Davis, of the 34,155 total students, 19,468 are women. If the chances of women at U.C. Davis being sexually assaulted are one-in-five, there should be about 4,000 sexual assaults on that campus each year.
“But this figure, which comes from the 2007 Campus Sexual Assault (CSA) Study, is hardly undisputed,” Samantha Harris recently wrote in Forbes. Harris is the Director of Policy Research at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
Harris explains:
Cathy Young wrote following the release of the April 4, 2011, Dear Colleague Letter,
[A] close look at the CSA Study’s findings raises some serious questions about its reliability. First of all, the vast majority of the incidents it uncovered involved what the study termed “incapacitation” by alcohol (or, rarely, drugs): 14 percent of female respondents reported such an experience while in college, compared to six percent who reported sexual assault by physical force. Yet the question measuring incapacitation was framed ambiguously enough that it could have netted many “gray area” cases: “Has someone had sexual contact with you when you were unable to provide consent or stop what was happening because you were passed out, drugged, drunk, incapacitated, or asleep?” Does “unable to provide consent or stop” refer to actual incapacitation – given as only one option in the question – or impaired judgment?
“There’s reason to believe that this kind of sloppy question drafting may have had a significant effect on the numbers,” Harris said.
“As Young reports, ‘[t]hree quarters of the female students who were classified as victims of sexual assault by incapacitation did not believe they had been raped; even when only incidents involving penetration were counted, nearly two-thirds did not call it rape.’ Yet this ambiguity is utterly absent from discussions based on that one-in-five number.”