Policy

Gov. Brown Signs Bill Telling College Kids Where, When to Have Sex

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Queen Victoria
Wikimedia Commons

California Gov. Jerry Brown affixed his signature to SB 967—the "Yes Means Yes" affirmative consent bill—which will require colleges to police their students' sex lives.

Some congrats are in order, I suppose? To collectivist feminists, doomsayers of the "rape is an ever-worsening epidemic" variety, and other puritans: Your so-called progressivism has restored Victorian Era prudishness to its former place as a guiding moral compass. Well done, liberals.

The law instructs colleges to define consensual sex under strict terms brilliantly thought up by the California legislature. It also requires university administrators to investigate accusations of sexual assault under a set of terrible procedures that short-change victims by denying them fundamental due process rights. The law specifically establishes the "preponderance of evidence" standard, which mandates convictions for accused students deemed 50.1 percent likely to be guilty by the campus judiciary body.

The bill's sponsor, state Sen. Kevin de Leon, celebrated the news of Brown's signature, according to the Associated Press. "With one in five women on college campuses experiencing sexual assault, it is high time the conversation regarding sexual assault be shifted to one of prevention, justice, and healing," said de Leon, citing a statistic that is at least dubious, if not entirely wrong.

At least entrepreneurs are hard at work inventing something to lessen the blow (or allow the blowing, or whatever). Good2Go, the affirmative consent iPhone app, theoretically eases the process of inviting a partner to bed, though Greg Piper of The College Fix has published a lengthy criticism of this thinking here.

If universities don't comply with the government's demands regarding students and sex, they could face losses of funding or lawsuits. But if they do comply with the the government's demands, they will probably face more lawsuits from students unfairly convicted of sexual assault under farcical campus judiciary proceedings.

Either way, colleges are fucked.