You are free to disagree with the law as it’s written. You are even free to break the laws if you disagree strongly enough. But you should not expect to be free from the consequences.
No one does. its not about not prosecuting anyone for what happened on that Island. Its about Stallmans response to the allegations against someone else. Did you respond to the wrong comment by any chance?
I also dont see where you made the jump to the legal/illegal argument. Since we are talking about Stallmans speech, we are clearly not discussing illegal behavior but free speech. Or is what Stallman said illegal by now?
What is this trying to say?
OP mentioned after the part that I quoted that
>This is a man who said something wildly inappropriate in an MIT forum and got fired. He deserved it.
I think you could make the argument that what he said wasnt that "inappropriate", but only in the frame of reference of a rather puritanical American society. Hence the reference to a more far out frame of reference in form of Saudi Arabia.
His original quote is
>The word ‘assaulting’ presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex. We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.
That might not make him a great person, but you can make that argument. That the equivalence of assault and prostitution is a rather American one and not universally. And that the distinction in the form of the age of consent of a 17 year old isnt universally either.