Activists Raise Alarm About California Sex Assault Bill

From the Daily Caller:

Legal experts and higher education activists are issuing warnings about a new bill under consideration in California that would dictate how state schools respond to allegations of sexual assault.

The bill, passed through California’s Senate 27-9 last Thursday, would require any school receiving state money to have an “affirmative consent standard” for their policies regarding sexual misconduct. It must still be approved by the state Assembly.

In other words, a student must have clear-and-express positive consent from another person before initiating sexual contact, or else they may be found liable for sexual assault by the school. This contrasts with the standards used in criminal courts, where consent may be unspoken or implied by contextual circumstances, and finding guilt for rape and other offenses requires further proof that an act was forced upon another.

Some activists say this proposed standard goes much too far.

“What is perhaps worst about the bill is that its consent requirement reaches beyond sex to all ‘sexual activity,’ which is defined by some colleges quite expansively to include mere touching, touching that (unlike sex) is not usually preceded by affirmative permission in the real world,” Hans Bader, an attorney with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

He said that putting the onus on individuals to get positive consent for every act of intimacy would be both improbable and dangerous to students’ rights. Strictly applying such a standard would make most ordinary couples potentially liable for sex offenses in the eyes of colleges, he said.

This bill is clearly aimed at men to satisfy the radical feminist demands to punish men for simply being men.