Wednesday, June 23, 2004
STRANGE BARFELLOWS:
Here's the unintended consequence of filing indictments against an unknown rapist's sperm: this will give a major legal incentive to rapists to begin using condoms. This of course is prohibited by those encyclicals. Sure, the criminals are already committing one sin, but why encourage them to add another one by engaging in contraception? As for the claim that use of condoms by rapists might help prevent disease or even pregnancy, the first of those Papal ukases already covered that in typical Vaticanese prose:
I suppose it is too much to hope that at their recent meeting Our Noble Leader asked the Pope to support the ACLU position on this issue. To me it is obvious that the church should make common cause with the criminal apologists just this once. Let the leftist lawyers try to save the body of the elusive rapist from prison decades after their crime, while the priests try to preemptively lessen the darkness of the criminal's soul, sparing them the encouragement to commit still one more sin. It is a temporary marriage of convenience made, if not in heaven, then at least at the Supreme Court building.
The indictments allow cases to be kept open indefinitely, effectively circumventing the statute of limitations ... Using the John Doe DNA indictments, prosecutors bring the charges -- even when they don't know who committed the crime -- against the DNA profile from the evidence they gathered.Naturally the liberals of the ACLU are outraged, claiming the passage of time could make a fair trial impossible years later. This is just more of their usual silliness, claiming you earn a "get out of jail free card" if you can get away with a crime for fifteen years or whatever. But just this once they are actually on the side of the angels, or at least the Popes. Sadly, neither Paul VI's Humanae Vitae nor John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae foresaw such a high tech threat to their teachings.
The approach originated in Milwaukee in 1999 but has spread to counties in Texas, California, New York, and a handful of other states. Last April, Congress passed a bill allowing prosecutors to bring John Doe DNA indictments for federal sex offenses.
Here's the unintended consequence of filing indictments against an unknown rapist's sperm: this will give a major legal incentive to rapists to begin using condoms. This of course is prohibited by those encyclicals. Sure, the criminals are already committing one sin, but why encourage them to add another one by engaging in contraception? As for the claim that use of condoms by rapists might help prevent disease or even pregnancy, the first of those Papal ukases already covered that in typical Vaticanese prose:
In truth, if it is sometimes licit to tolerate a lesser evil in order to avoid a greater evil or to promote a greater good, it is not licit, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil so that good may follow therefrom, that is, to make into the object of a positive act of the will something which is intrinsically disorder, and hence unworthy of the human person, even when the intention is to safeguard or promote individual, family or social well-being.His Holiness failed to make this turgid sentence any less obscure by supporting it with a footnote reference to the eighth verse of Romans 3, a chapter which seems to argue that Jews are not worthless, because they sin just as much as Gentiles. If the relevance eludes you, allow me to paraphrase: condoms are bad, no matter what beneficial side effects they might have.
I suppose it is too much to hope that at their recent meeting Our Noble Leader asked the Pope to support the ACLU position on this issue. To me it is obvious that the church should make common cause with the criminal apologists just this once. Let the leftist lawyers try to save the body of the elusive rapist from prison decades after their crime, while the priests try to preemptively lessen the darkness of the criminal's soul, sparing them the encouragement to commit still one more sin. It is a temporary marriage of convenience made, if not in heaven, then at least at the Supreme Court building.
