So I’m going to get flack for this, and I’ll try to get more info about this, but apparently Obama (in talking about ISIS) stated that “Rule of Law is not an Option.” Maybe it’s because I’ve been on a kick about the Law, the importance of “The Law” and the dangers of rejecting that for the sake of expediency or politics but…if the rule of law is no longer an option, where does us leave this not only in the continuing war, but the things that branch off from that.

Maybe I’ve been listening to far to many “Dead White Men” but the philosophy about the origins of the Law and why we have it. Maybe it’s because “dead white men” are so evil no one seems to be listening to them when they talked about the importance of having the Law.

I’m going to try to find Obama’s speech before the UN and what exactly he meant by “The rule of law is no longer an option.” Certainly, when dealing with ISIS we have something that really hasn’t been in existence for at least a hundred, maybe even a hundred and fifty years. If not more.

We have the creation of a state through conquest.

Because let us not lie to ourselves, ISIS is a state. Though world governments and mass media refuse to admit it, Syria and Iraq as we knew it are gone. We can pretend that the “border” is still there but for ISIS and those living under it, there is no border between Syria and Iraq, there is only the ISIS. In addition, ISIS has a functioning government that collects taxes, directs its military, and services the administrative functions of their nation. ISIS is a functioning nation, and with a daily income of 3 million dollars us a day…probably the only country that is financially successful in the world at the moment.

Now, it is a terrorist state, its army is a terrorist army. But it is also a nation/military that cannot be defeated by simply trying to crush it and restore the previous borders. To fight such a thing, suspending the rules of Law in order to fight them must seem incredibly attractive. But when you suspend one law, you make it easy to suspend others.

This leads down a dangerous path.

Such as what’s happening with Ray Rice and the NFL. Or, the story I found out today, about a Columbia student who is carrying around a mattress with her all the time until the university expels the student who allegedly raped her.

While I don’t have all the details (The article is in the New Yorker, I believe) the relivant ones I did catch are she knew the guy, thought he was a little weird, but had consensual sex with him, up until he got a little rough (I will spare details, but basically “wrong hole fool!) she said no, and he didn’t stop. She didn’t report the rape for I believe several months, until the guys girlfriend said he’d been getting rough with her, and another student claimed he’d groped her. Only then did the student in question decide to go to the university and state she had been raped.

Not the police.

The university did as they do and did an investigation and apparently found the young man innocent. He remained a student at the school. Unhappy with this turn of events, our brave student has decided to engage in disruptive protest until the school does what she wants and gets ride of the man. Now, I’ve done some research and it is apparently very easy for a man accused of rape to be expelled. As in, there doesn’t have to be any evidence. There barely has to be an accusation. In fact, it is so easy that there are enough males who have been expelled on accusations alone that schools are now facing class action discrimination lawsuits. So how he remained in school…I have no idea. But a school intent on a sub-zero tolerance policy for sexual assault apparently didn’t find him worthy of expulsion.

Now, I am not saying the girl is lying. I have no basis to believe she is. But if a crime was committed, she should have gone to the police. She didn’t. If a crime was committed, she should have reported it sooner. And if rape education is anything like I’ve heard, she should have had the sense to go to a damn hospital to get the evidence recorded and preserved. She didn’t. She waited months to act, and then only did so based on the say so of two other individuals who had nothing to do with the crime against her, merely because they involved the alleged rapist. Alleged allegations with no evidence.

There used to be a thing in this country called “innocent until proven guilty.” There’s a very good reason for that. It used to be “guilty until proven innocent.” This was fought against because not only is it incredibly unjust, allowing innocent people to be jailed, punished, or executed for crimes they had never committed. Europeans of many, many nations fought for hundreds of years to change those laws.

But there I go again, listening to dead white men.

Apparently the young woman didn’t go to the police at any point because the police are “ineffective when dealing with rape.” Ineffective. Okay then.

While I am no friend to the Police, and do think they’ve gone a bit power crazy as of late, I recognize the validity of why we have them. They are also bound by the Law, which I think at this point is the source of the “ineffectiveness.”

See, the Law states that rape is forceful sexual acts done without consent. However, the definition of consent and the state in which you can give consent and even withdraw consent are in some ways not as stringent as some would like. For example, I don’t think under the law that being drunk means you can’t consent. Drunk sex happens all the time and the Law generally feels that if you consented at the time, that was consent.

Colleges, however, seem to have different rules. For example, a woman who is drunk cannot consent, even if she consents. A drunk man, no matter how drunk he is, is however conscious enough of his choices to realize that a drunk woman riding him like a bull at a rodeo has in fact not consented. Even though she’s on top of him and doing all the work. Drunk sex is rape…except if you’re a dude, because mutual rape though non-consenting sex is only raping the woman.

Yeah…the Law is really, really ineffective with that.

Because with the law “Yes means yes, no means no.” It doesn’t handle the apparently correct version of “no means no, maybe means no, and yes means no.”

So instead we should have private institutions to punish the guilty, even if the “guilty” have been found innocent. Apparently innocence isn’t an excuse to avoid being punished on no evidence. So being expelled, being fired, Hel’s grace maybe even executed if this goes on long enough, despite no criminal charges, no evidence, and even being exonerated.

What barbarity is this that lies beyond the rule of law.