H. L Mencken really understood politics and wrote that “the aim of practical politics is to menace the people with an endless series of hobgoblins” so they will clamor to the government to save them. We see that far more often now than in his day, and the latest one is the campus sexual assault hobgoblin. Based on utterly bogus statistics on the incidence of sexual assault, the federal government has undertaken to dictate policies to colleges and universities that trample all over the idea of due process of law. Furthermore, California recently enacted a statute requiring “affirmative consent” for each stage of a sexual encounter.

In today’s Pope Center piece, Jesse Saffron takes a look at this bizarre crusade which has, as you’d expect, made its way to North Carolina. “Like the California law,” he writes, “Chapel Hill’s and Duke’s policies impose an extremely vague and unrealistic standard that is out of step with the way our culture views and engages in sexual activity. Under the new rules, for example, hugging could be construed as ’sexual contact.’ Without first receiving a definitive ‘yes, you can hug me’ from his or her partner, an individual could be charged with sexual assault.”

The way the federal policies stack the deck against the accused is so egregious that 28 professors at Harvard Law School, many of them with impeccable liberal credentials, recently denounced the university’s kowtowing to the Department of Justice on this.

Just what gives the federal government any authority here? The fact that it can withhold money from colleges, that’s what. The federal government has no actual authority to give funds to colleges, but it does, and because the camel has its nose under that tent, the government has the leverage to pressure even the likes of Harvard into compliance.

I do not see what the “liberals” behind this mania think they gain by shredding traditional due process of law protections. Saffron concludes, “the accused as well as accusers would be better off with policies and procedures based on sound data and the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ standard rather than fear-mongering and hyper-politicization.” Maybe that answers my question. Fear-mongering and hyper-politicization have become two of the main weapons in the statists’ arsenal.