The NDP and the Age of Consent

I don't spend a lot of time talking about the NDP, mostly because I find them more or less irrelevant. However, they've been making a few moves lately that I find very disturbing.

For instance, during the election campaign, Jack Layton came out in favour of a "get tough" policy on crime. Now, Jack's a smart guy, well versed in leftism, and thus really has no excuse for not knowing that "get tough" approaches do not work. They do succeed in putting more people in jail, but time after time this method has failed at actually reducing crime rates. It happens all the time in the US - they enact tougher and tougher penalties, but the crime rate stays the same; states with the death penalty have higher murder rates than states without. So it was equal parts disheartening and sickening for me to see him basically mirror the Conservative crime policy - that is, lock 'em up and throw away the key, no exceptions, and it smacked of Hilary-esque pandering to people who won't vote NDP anyway.

Expelling Buzz Hargrove was, institutionally, quite revealing, and it showed what the NDP really thinks of free speech.

And today, I read a National Post article that the NDP may help the Conservatives pass the age of consent increase, and in particularly Orwellian fashion, change the language, so that it becomes the "age of protection." One assumes that Vic Toews (anti-fun prude that he is) thinks that a consenting 15 year old needs "protection" from an 18 or 19 year old boyfriend/girlfriend.

Age gaps of about that size are actually fairly common; I'd bet everybody knows or knows of somebody who's been involved in a sexual relationship of that type. The new "age of protection" law would include a "close-in-age" exemption, but I somehow doubt the exemption would go as high as that. This means that someone could be forced to become a registered sex offender if they engage in a consensual sexual relationship with a younger partner.

This is particularly timely given the multiple murders of two registered "sex offenders," murdered because they were on that list. One of those on the list was definitely justifiably on there, convicted of rape of a child. But the other was on there because, when he was 19, he had (consensual) sex with his girlfriend, who was just shy of 16. That is enough to get someone on a list with child molesters and rapists. Is this really what we want for Canada? Can we not protect people from sexual exploitation and molestation without putting innocent people in jail for having consensual sex?

Apparently it's what the NDP wants. What the hell are they thinking?