“Whether it’s as simple as say they slip off their wedding ring and then they engage in a relationship with someone, but the man or woman has no idea that the person they are with is married,” she added. “Lying to someone else for any reason is never OK, whether it be [for] a job, a relationship, criminal history, parental history, marital history . . .. When did we become a society that thinks it’s completely acceptable to lie to other people on a daily basis and think that’s morally OK?”
Should it pass, such a bill would open up a whole realm of possibilities for tricked lovers.
“On the one hand, we want law enforcement to have the law on their side in order to go after sexual predators who try to lure victims into sexual situations through deceit,” pointed out Kathleen Bogle, assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. “On the other hand, many people lie to get sex and we may not want to cast too broad of a net in pursuing these situations through criminal law.
“Most people would agree that lying to obtain sex is immoral, but only a fraction of those scenarios should be punishable by criminal law,” she added.
She’s right about not clogging up the legal system.
But there’s such a thing as principle. As Yale law professor Jed Rubenfield wrote in a 2013 edition of theYale Law Review, “Rape-by-deception is almost universally rejected in American criminal law. But if rape is sex without the victim’s consent – as many courts, state statutes and scholars say it is – then sex-by-deception ought to be rape, because as courts have held for a hundred years in virtually every area of the law outside of rape, a consent procured through deception is no consent at all.”
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