Necrotyranny
posted by Linda
by Thomas Fleming - Chronicles Magazine
A week or so ago Illinois passed a barbaric law outlawing smoking in all business locations, including outdoor places within 16 feet of a business entrance and including even homes, if part of the home is used for an office that might receive an occasional client.
At about the same time, a Wisconsin appeals court upheld the dismissal of three men accused of digging up a young woman’s corpse in order to have sex with it. They had seen a picture of Laura Tennesen in the newspaper, and that was sufficient provocation. When the three were first released, prosecutors appealed on the grounds that Wisconsin law provides criminal penalties for rapists “whether a victim is dead or alive at the time of the sexual contact or sexual intercourse”. The appeals court, on what basis I cannot imagine, decided that this language, while ambiguous, does not apply to necrophilia.
I have no idea of what the prosecutors plan to do next, but in a better age, these three young men would either be dead or locked away for ever. It is not simply a question of respect for the dead. These perverts were planning to commit a crime against the woman’s family. Some necrophiliacs have been repeated the ludicrous libertarian notion (going back, I believe, to Locke) that we own ourselves. Any normal person in recorded history has known that we belong, in death as well as in life, to our families, and even in the absence of any specific legal language, a decent society would not and cannot give carte blanche to rapists of the dead. I have not so far found out what the Common Law would say about this, though England did have severe penalties for grave robbing, desecration of cemeteries, obscene public conduct, and trespassing.
So here is where we are, today. Legislative busybodies in Illinois tell me I cannot light up a cigar in my home, so long as I entertain a professional colleague in my home office, but judicial busybodies in Wisconsin tell the family of the late Laura Tennesen that sick and evil men who attacked her corpse and gave nightmares to her relatives cannot be punished.
These two incidents are not simply quirky stories or even one more sickening example of what the late Sam Francis called anarcho-tyranny. They reveal an America in which criminal sex acts are tolerated and where fairly innocent habits, once they have been demonized by leftist Puritans, are criminalized. You can rape someone’s dead daughter with impunity, so long as you don’t light up a cigarette afterwards.
If you are waiting for a deafening outcry of public rage, you will wait a long time. I think of a perverse American poet’s insight:
Skip a life completely,
Stuff it in a cup
They said money is like us and time*,
It lies but can’t stand up.
Down for you is up.
For most Americans today, down is up, left is right, and right is wrong. It’s 3:00. Do you know what your neighbors are doing?
*Footnote. Online sources read the apparently nonsensical “like us in time,” but I recall hearing in live performance the improved: “You know you’re just like money and time: You lie but can’t stand up.”
SOURCE: www.chroniclesmagazine.org |
