California goes full ‘Demolition Man,’ seeks ‘yes means yes’ sexual consent laws for college students

Stallone Demolition Man

Lawmakers in California must love 1993’s Sylvester Stallone flick “Demolition Man,” because they’re now looking into ways to pass “yes means yes” sexual consent laws. For those who are a bit younger, the film includes a scene where Stallone’s John Spartan is awkwardly asked by Sandra Bullock’s Lenina Huxley if he would like to have sex. The two then use a virtual reality headset to refrain from touching during the process. Just give California ten years and the virtual reality technology will be ready for prime time…

The Associated Press reported:

SAN DIEGO (AP) — College students have heard a similar refrain for years in campaigns to stop sexual assault: No means no.

Lawmakers are considering what would be the first-in-the-nation measure requiring all colleges that receive public funds to set a standard for when “yes means yes.” …

Legislation passed by California’s state Senate in May and coming before the Assembly this month would require all schools that receive public funds for student financial assistance to set a so-called “affirmative consent standard” that could be used in investigating and adjudicating sexual assault allegations. That would be defined as “an affirmative, unambiguous and conscious decision” by each party to engage in sexual activity.

Silence or lack of resistance does not constitute consent. The legislation says it’s also not consent if the person is drunk, drugged, unconscious or asleep. …

After some interpreted that as asking people to stop after each kiss to get a verbal agreement before going to the next level, the bill was amended to say consent must be “ongoing” and “can be revoked at any time.”

John F. Banzhaf III, a George Washington University’s Law School professor, rightly says in the piece that the bill, if passed, would “very, very radically change the definition of rape.”

Indeed. We now live in a world where not only do officials believe they should be able to tax you per teaspoon of sugar you consume, but that they should be able to manage your sex life — down to the point where you must get “affirmative, unambiguous” consent while the process is “ongoing.”

At this point it would be easier if California just mandated that everyone have digital “sexual contracts” on hand that could be signed via cell phone apps and revoked by voice command.

The sad thing is, cultural air raid sirens are going off all around us, and the response by politicians is to create more laws.

Take the case of University of California at Berkeley student Meghan Warner, from the AP piece, for instance. She supports the legislation:

She said she was sexually assaulted during her freshman year by two men at a fraternity but didn’t report it because she believed “that unless it was a stranger at night with a weapon who attacked you when you were walking home, that it wasn’t rape. It’s just a crappy thing that happened.” She now runs campus workshops to teach students what constitutes consent.

“Most students don’t know what consent is,” she said. “I’ve asked at the workshops how many people think if a girl is blacked out drunk that it’s OK to have sex with her. The amount of people who raised their hands was just startling.”

If what Ms. Warner says is true, and a “startling” amount of kids on the Progressive UC Berkeley campus think it’s okay to have sex with a woman who blacks out during a party, then that is a problem that can not be adequately addressed by writing “yes means yes” laws; that is a cultural implosion, which requires the kind of spiritual training that is mocked and ridiculed on college campuses.

As G.K. Chesterton wrote in “Orthodoxy”:

“Not only is faith the mother of all worldly energies, but its foes are the fathers of worldly confusion. The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.”

Perhaps one day California will come to its senses. If not, they will have only themselves to blame for the creation of a cultural wasteland littered with laws that fail them.