WeDemandJustice
We Demand Justice
To the leaders of congress, Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Chuck Schumer, Minority Leader of the U.S. Senate. To the members of congress, both Democrat and Republican. And to Donald Trump, President of the United States. We, the undersigned, are demanding justice.
In the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein rape and sexual assault scandal, the following information has come to our attention.
“If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise (Exodus 21:22-25).
You, the leaders of congress, and the members of congress, both Democrat and Republican, and you, the president of the United States, need to understand that our complaint, here, is not with the ancient Jewish system of justice; a system of justice that recognizes the victim as being not the pregnant woman, but as her husband. Neither is our complaint with a system of justice that would recognize only the pregnant woman as the victim. Instead, our complaint, here, is with our system of justice, which recognizes neither the husband nor the pregnant woman as the victim.
According to our system of justice, it is our government, of which each of you represent, who is the victim. Why? Because this is the system of justice that your predecessors, politicians like yourself, bequeathed to us. And it is the system of justice that each of you are continuing to force upon us. As a result, all of those women who were raped and sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein, assuming that he is criminally charged, will be treated by the court as simply part of the evidence. In other words, the prosecution will treat this case as a crime against the government.
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Allow us to translate this for you into our modern language. The law was made for man, not man for the law. In other words, the law is here to help the victim, not to become a victim. Yet, you are forcing onto us a system of justice that insists otherwise; a system of justice that has long since declared the law to be the victim…and, by extension, our government, which enacted the law.
You, the leaders of congress, and the members of congress, both Democrat and Republican, and you, the president of the United States, need to understand that, for some of us, it is the pregnant woman who is the victim, not the husband…or the government. And you need to understand that, for others, it is either both the husband and the wife who are the victims, or it is the wife, primarily, and the husband, secondarily, who are the victims. In other words, you need to understand that government is here to serve the people, not to rule over them; to treat them as subjects.
It is, in part, because of this system of justice that your predecessors bequeathed to us, and that you continue to force upon us, that the problem of rape and sexual assault has gotten so out of control. After all, how can you expect people like Harvey Weinstein to stop treating us as though we are less than human, when even our system of justice treats us as though we are less than human? So, the purpose of the court is not to represent government. Instead, it is to make certain that the punishment we impose upon those who hurt us is not excessive. Not an eye for a bruise, or a foot for a tooth, or the offender’s entire estate for a strike that caused that pregnant woman to give birth prematurely.
You, the leaders of congress, and the members of congress, both Democrat and Republican, and you, the president of the United States, need to admit, at the very least, that it is the woman who is the victim, not the government. You need to admit that government is not god, and that [man-made] law is not divine. So, we, the undersigned, are demanding justice. We are demanding that you set aside this archaic system of justice that treats government as god, and the people as subjects, and give us a system of justice that we deserve. We demand that you start holding people like Harvey Weinstein accountable to us, his victims, not to the government.
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