Asia Argento accuses Harvey Weinstein of rape.  Now it turns out that Argento herself raped a 17-year-boy a few years ago and paid him $380,000 to keep quiet about it.  This kind of hypocrisy is rife throughout the MeToo movement, the giveaway of which is that it's exclusively Hollywood lefties involved – you know, casting couches and the like.

What's more, everyone has known this since MeToo started.

The rape issue as it has evolved pits the left against itself.  On the one hand are the MeToo people, who seem to date from the Catharine MacKinnon years, in which even voluntary sex between consenting adults was defined as rape.  On the other hand is the traditional feminist screech of get-outta-my-bedroom free love.  The clash has resulted in Byzantine campus rules, where each step of the seduction ritual requires verbal (and/or written) consent, effectively banishing romance between the sexes.  This is hardly what the sixties feminists had in mind when they copulated in the open at Woodstock and elsewhere.

We need to re-examine everything about rape laws.  Forcible rape is one thing, as is abuse of authority and trust, but to my mind, voluntary sex isn't rape even at 14.  It's an arbitrary line wherever we draw it, but this outbreak of rape shows the disutility of the age-18 consent line in this licentious age.  I welcome a usable rationale for the age of consent but have yet to hear a convincing one for any age.  Whatever issue there is with 14, 15, 16, or 17 also applies to 18.  None of this is tied anymore to morality, so it's catch as catch can.

The only powerful argument is the moral one based on religious stricture: reserve sex for marriage.  Kids raised according to this moral code are less likely to encounter the statutory rape issue as victim or as perp, but this can't be codified in law because of the First Amendment.  From what we've seen of non-Judeo-Christian mores, we can thank the 1A that we don't have laws reflecting them.

A whole other perspective on the issue is that decent people don't generally run into this problem anyway and can leave it to Hollywooders and other trashy people to fight it out in the courts, making the lawyers rich as they shove client faces ever more deeply into the most banal of human depravity.

Jack Rail regularly contributes to American Thinker.  He welcomes your communications at caktusjakk@gmail.com.