The Facts in the Case of M. Polanski: Reification of the Law

Well, Polanski painted himself into a corner real nice. However he tells his story, the peasants ain't gonna like it.

Defending him is a real whack a mole job:

Polanski: She's lying. I didn't rape her. She wasn't unresponsive.

Peasants: Doesn't matter. She was a thirteen-year-old child.

Polanski: But a thirteen-year-old isn't a child; "age of consent" is just a legal fiction. It's not like I slept with a six-year-old or something.

Peasants: Doesn't matter. She testified you raped her.

Yes, Virginia, the peasants are revolting. Once you've refuted one prong of their pitchfork, they fall back on the other.

"A pedophile is a pedophile is a pedophile…" This gem was harvested from the internet.

Well, no. In this and similar cases, a "pedophile" is not a pedophile. A pedophile is a person that is attracted to children that for biological reasons shouldn't be having sex yet. If you look at the evidence in the case, that did not apply to the girl in question.

Look, Edgar Allan Poe married a fucking thirteen-year-old. Now, are you ashamed that one of the world's most celebrated authors was a "pedophile"? What are you gonna do now? Burn his books?

And guess how old Loretta Lynn was when she got married? Right. Thirteen.

What is really revolting here isn't Roman Polanski or "dirty old men." What is really revolting is the mob's approach to the law.

Now, Polanski may have been sailing awfully close to the wind picking up a fuck buddy. While he ought to be presumed innocent, a slap on his wrist, if not right or just, might not be a total outrage.

Yet that's not the consensus of the kangaroo court of public lynch mob opinion. Judging by the articles on the Polanski case and the comments they garner, the general tenor of the mob seems to be that not only Polanski, who slept with a thirteen-year-old, but anybody who sleeps with anybody else under eighteen is a "pedophile."

And, by god, he ought to be raped with a plunger, castrated, and locked up for good. And he ought to be glad he didn't get burned at the stake as he deserves.

Seventeen-year-old "children"? A seventeen-year-old is the same as a six-year-old? Just because the law says so?

I guess we really ought to crack down on those seventeen-year-old pedophiles that fuck sixteen-year-old pedophiles? If we don't murder them for their own good, they might even start smoking weed! We can really learn a lot from Iran, where such perverts are stoned to death.

So for those morons, what constitutes rape or pedophilia is not determined by the facts of reality, but by some arbitrary law, which in the case of California is clearly at variance with the facts. If you fuck a sixteen-year-old in most any civilized country, it's fine. If you fuck a sixteen-year-old in California, you're a "pedophile." Go figure.

I guess the laws of nature and the facts of biology will go out of their way to accommodate California law. Time to write another bull against the comet?

Someone who calls someone who sleeps with a seventeen-year-old woman a "pedophile" just because the arbitrary age of consent picked by the government of his jurisdiction is eighteen would just as well treat a tax evader as a thief because the law calls theft taxation and criminalizes keeping your own money. And worse.

"Sure, Officer Pig, I'll be glad to help you round up the Jews, as the law declares they're cattle."

What a cruel irony that Roman Polanski should have been victimized by that kind of fascist reification of the law twice in a lifetime.

Peasants, will you learn to think for yourselves, or will you help round up the Jews and the "pedophiles" if the law commands you to?