The Mozambique National Assembly is mulling whether to pass a law allowing a rapist to escape punishment if he marries his victim. Don't laugh -- Morocco already has such a law, and even some American right-wingers have wondered out loud how rape could possibly occur in a marriage. But no American right-wingers have proposed letting men off the hook by letting them marry their victims. Mozambique's bill would also allow rape charges to be dropped after five years of marriage -- or not, unless the victim can prove their divorce is the accused's fault. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that wouldn't be easy in a culture that can even contemplate a bill like this -- a bill which also, not incidentally, requires the victim (or a guardian or close family member) to make a formal complaint before criminal charges can proceed, and if upstanding police officers want to stick their neck out and make the complaint themselves, I guess that's just too bad. This is, in short, not how a civilized society conducts its affairs. So Amnesty International helps you tell the Mozambique National Assembly to reject its pro-rape bill.
Meanwhile, Public Citizen helps you tell Dropbox to abandon its plan to abridge the Constitutional rights of its customers by forcing arbitration clauses upon them and banning class action lawsuits. Because that's what Dropbox (like so, so many other corporations) wants to do -- they want to force you to submit your potential grievances against Dropbox to an arbitrator Dropbox will choose and pay (and how do you think that will work out for you most of the time?), thus denying you your right to redress those grievances in a court of law. And millions of folks use Dropbox to store and share files online -- so what happens if Dropbox fails to secure its data from hackers, a conundrum plenty of corporations have had lately? You'll likely lose that case, if you even have the money to make that case. Now I suppose some Libertarian-types would say, why don't you just take your business elsewhere? But that doesn't help when every corporation uses forced arbitration clauses, which is not only an imaginable state of affairs, but a desirable one, from the corporate perspective. Still, the stick of bad PR is a powerful weapon, and we shouldn't be afraid to use it.
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