Bengstra #fundie dailykos.com

No individual is required to sacrifice due process simply for being a man, and that because many men are guilty of sexual assault. There is no collective price to pay.

In a perfect world I’d absolutely agree. I WANT to agree. Yet, I feel “due process” is as impacted by “If sense were common everyone would have it.” as “Affirmative Consent”. “Due Process” simply isn’t consistent from state to state, county to county, town to town, judge to judge, sheriff to sheriff. Would our friend Arpaio have applied the same “due process” as a sheriff in California? To a white man accused of raping a brown skinned woman? To a brown skinned man accused of raping a white woman?

I just don’t believe “due process”, as we want it to exist, exists in this country. Therefore — we can’t make it the defining goal of protection — for anything, by anyone involving gender, race, or class that’s not upper class.

I have no idea what all of that means, but simply disregarding due process makes even less sense.

“Due process” is a myth as long as it is allowed to be interpreted independently within jurisdictions. A brown person rarely, if ever, gets the same “due process” in the south as a white person. Basically, “due process” means whatever the folks in a position of power in any given jurisdiction want it to mean, so saying we should trust it to be the yardstick by which a mans culpability in a sexual assault case is measured is useless.

Due process is not a myth, and casting it aside because it may applied unevenly makes no sense.

And it is not a yardstick to judge culpability, it is the process of getting there.

Due process IS a myth and there is no BETTER reason to cast it aside and come up with a replacement than the fact it IS, not may be, applied unevenly.

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Confused?

So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!

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