mr_zoot
Twizted Humanitarian
mr_zoot
I think the punishment was perfectly appropriate. They were fined for exhibitionism. That fits perfectly.
I do have a problem with the symbolic damages though. WTF is that? I realize it was just one euro, but this is like a court charging money for damage to national pride! Damage to the reputation of the soldiers that died maybe? That is utterly ridiculous. People are angry that someone shagged on their memorial, but its not like the dead soldiers care. Its not like they are sitting in heaven going OMG WTF are they doing on my pretty rock!
s**t its not like we are going to forget those soldiers. THey are in the history books we all read in grade school after all, getting upset for damaging a statue is one thing....but damaging the pride of the people who LIKE the statue is not (or should not be) a crime.
Decency is just a rather unquantifiable social norm that changes over time. Trying to use it as a guiding principle of law is unscientific and creates risk of abuse.
Your pissed that they shagged on the pretty statue? then send them an angry letter. The coercive power of the state is not your personal butt paddle to use in spanking naughty children.
I do have a problem with the symbolic damages though. WTF is that? I realize it was just one euro, but this is like a court charging money for damage to national pride! Damage to the reputation of the soldiers that died maybe? That is utterly ridiculous. People are angry that someone shagged on their memorial, but its not like the dead soldiers care. Its not like they are sitting in heaven going OMG WTF are they doing on my pretty rock!
s**t its not like we are going to forget those soldiers. THey are in the history books we all read in grade school after all, getting upset for damaging a statue is one thing....but damaging the pride of the people who LIKE the statue is not (or should not be) a crime.
Decency is just a rather unquantifiable social norm that changes over time. Trying to use it as a guiding principle of law is unscientific and creates risk of abuse.
Your pissed that they shagged on the pretty statue? then send them an angry letter. The coercive power of the state is not your personal butt paddle to use in spanking naughty children.
Hmm... heroes in the grade school textbooks, how many individual heroes do you remember from those years, oh yeah of course we know the big ones like MacArther, Patton, and Nimitz but how many other unsung heroes have we forgotten.
So damaging the statue of liberty even if no one was physically injured in such an attack would be perfectly fine?
So because those who have died may not care what is happening on thier gravestone, what about the family members. How would you like to find out some years in the future that two exibitionists had intercourse on your mother's gravestone? Would you then still say "decency is not a legal matter" when you think about it being naked in public is against the law because it is not decent, for the simple reason that a child might see you naked. While I know nudity is a completely seperate issue from that of sexual intercourse.
By your logic it would appear that one might think that it would be ok to have sexual intercourse on a playground?
Honestly I think this is another case of the breakdown of morality in society, now I know the quote that people like to float by whenever morality is mentioned about how you cannot legislate morality.
However rape is an issue of morality, now I know a lot of people will start to spout off on how its only illegal because it infringes on other people's right to the pursuit of happiness, but consider this...
You have only been victimized if you choose to feel victimized. If a punk in a dark alley in a bad neighborhood decides to instill fear a young woman that will likely last the rest of her life, so he does what the sick twisted part of his brain tells him to do. She goes home, she does not fear and instead decides that no, she's not gonna live in fear, that she's gonna walk down that same alley on the way home from work the next day and she's gonna act like nothing even happened, guess what? The punk's power has just evaporated.
Morality is a valid legal criteria and should remain so for the rest of time, now bringing this back to the original topic while yes those offended by the sexual acts committed on the gravestone chose to be offended, that does not mean that no punishment shall befall those who committed such an act.
I specifically said Damaging the statue would have been different, they did not damage the statue, they damaged the pride of a bunch of people who attach their pride to an inanimate thing, an idol. Damaging the Statue of Liberty would be punished appropriately according to the law, Shagging on it without damaging it would be punished with an indecent exposure fine...as is appropriate.
The people banging in a playground should be fined for indecent exposure....maybe trespassing (some school campuses are restricted nowadays)
If people were shagging on my mother's grave, I would probably be disgusted. Depending on whether the cemetery was private property or not, they might be trespassing. They might be in trouble for nudity. After all that though, I would not seek to use the law to give them extra punishment just because I think sex on a grave is somehow immoral. If I thought that, I could tell them myself and leave the courts out of it.
Protecting morality is not the basis of rational laws. I realize we do it often enough, but that doesn't make it a good, rational thing. Morality is something that exists in our heads and our hearts. It is mostly unquantifiable, and always different from person to person. The fact that everyone seems to agree on a few big things (killing is bad, rape is bad, stealing is bad) gives us the illusion that we have a common morality....we don't. Besides, what goes on in my own head and heart is not within the government's jurisdiction. The coercive power of the state should not be used to change what I think or feel or believe. It should only be used to limit my behavior in some certain ways to ensure the functioning of our civilization.
I agree with you about rape. There is (inappropriately in my opinion) too much morality tied up in those laws. There is too much judgment about sex as something super special, shameful, or defining about a person. Why is injuring someone's v****a worse than...say breaking someone's arm? The arm seems like a more serious injury to me. This attitude about sex is the very thing that keeps many women from coming forward when they've been raped. This attitude about sex is what makes virginity so important to some cultures that they mutilate little girl's bodies to ensure that they can't have sex until marriage. If we didn't train our children to fear/be in awe of/hate sex, or define people by their capacity for sex, rape would not exist...it would just be assault.
I remember on tv some years ago, a female pow from the first Gulf War, I believe, was being interviewed. The dude asked her if she had been raped. She replied that of course they raped her. She said this totally nonchalantly. Well how did that affect you? She replied that they had used many different tortures and raping her was not the worst one. She was in a survival situation. Some of the tortures were dangerous and could kill her....simply being raped was not so threatening compared to that.
I would punish said couple to the fullest extent of the law to make sure those perverts don't try and pull that stunt anymore.
