On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Doug Henwood wrote:
> No, it's not. Drug laws suck, but sexual harassment laws don't. I was
> wondering about the legal point re the VAWA:
>
> >Almost anyone who thinks for a second about Jenna's predicament will
> >find himself pulled in opposite directions. The dual sympathies that
> >result resemble those of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. At least they
> >resemble mine. On the one hand, there was simply no way that the
> >American people should have had their constitutional right to choose
> >their president nullified because moralists objected to that
> >president's having had an affair. On the other hand, the President
> >was in danger of impeachment because he himself had signed a
> >Violence Against Women Act that was an outrage to freedom worthy of
> >the Khmer Rouge.
I was arguing this legal point: this *isn't* why Clinton was in danger of impeachment. It may be bad law for some other reason, but it wasn't sufficient to impeach. So Caldwell's initial analogy, Lewinsky is like Jenna -- the point of this entire passage -- is invalid.
If you meant the discovery issue:
> >And not just signed it-crowed about it, and
> >belittled those who raised libertarian objections to it. Under the
> >act's feminist-dictated terms, any woman suing a man for the
> >nebulous "crime" of sexual harassment was entitled to demand under
> >oath his entire sexual curriculum vitae. And that's just what Paula
> >Jones did.
then I guess I simply assume that Nathan (as you quoted him) is right:
> I was against the trolling in Clinton's personal life for consensual
> sexual relations and thought they should have been out of bounds for
> discovery even in court proceedings, since private non-public
> consensual sex had nothing to do with sexual harassment charges by
> Paula Jones. (Publicly flaunted sex on the job is another matter that
> could have legal implications but Clinton, however reckless, did not
> engage in that.)
and that that Caldwell is wrong, since Nathan usually knows what he's talking about when it comes to legal issues, and Caldwell often doesn't. But I await enlightenment from the Left Barrister Observer corps.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com