NEVER put anything in an e-mail

"When this email chain inevitably finds its way into the press ..."https://t.co/uoK0AJMkWs

— Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) September 13, 2019

...that you don't want to see on a billboard.  Or in a news article, for that matter.

I thought at first this was taken out of context, or paraphrased incorrectly and the response could be read differently in context:

In response to a student pointing out that Giuffre was 17 when she was forced to have sex with Minsky in the Virgin Islands, Stallman said “it is morally absurd to define ‘rape’ in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.”

I was wrong.  The emails can be read at that link.  There's nothing out of context in that quote at all.

He goes on to argue "sexual assault" is a "slippery concept" and so shouldn't be used in the discussion.  Actually both "rape" and "sexual assault" are terms of art in law, and usually defined in criminal statutes of the applicable jurisdiction.  In this case that jurisdiction would be the U.S. Virgin Islands.  Statutory rape is very clearly defined, when it is at all, as not raising a question of consent.  The purpose of statutory rape is that the minor identified by the statute by age, cannot give consent to the act.  His or her "willingness" is irrelevant to the crime, and yes, the distinction between a 17 year old on the day before her 18th birthday, and on the day of her 18th birthday, may seem an arbitrary one, but such distinctions are common in law and in morality.  It can, indeed, seem "morally absurd" to argue the question of consent in a rape trial, especially if your sympathies, moral and otherwise, are with the victim.  That, however, is the nature of due process.

Now Jeffrey Epstein is no longer subject to due process, and the issue at hand in the e-mails is the connection between the late Mr. Epstein, mostly through his monetary largess, and MIT.  That is a relationship that will only be litigated in the court of public opinion, where precise agreement on what "sexual assault" means won't be readily available.  The truth is, it's not available in criminal court, either.  The judge and the lawyers will argue over how a charge of sexual assault should be represented to the jury in the court's charge, the judge will decide what the charge should say, and the jury will decide what the questions mean and what they think the facts of the case before them are.  I lay that out as precisely as possible, but it is not a precise process, and reasonable minds can differ over how the court charged the case, and how the jury answered.

But is it "morally absurd" to define sexual assault, or rape, in that way?  Perhaps Stallman is looking for a more rigorous definition of "morally," on that excludes all possibility of absurdity.  That, in itself, is morally absurd.  And it's not at all rationally sound, either.  Besides, the defense to a rape charge that "She was asking for it!" is morally offensive; unless you think rape is somehow "morally impossible."

Which is truly absurd, morally or otherwise.