ustxtxb_obs_1978_12_15_50_00018-00000_000.pdf

rom Dos Equis pnce a year the brewers of Dos Equis and Tres Equis produce their special Christmas gift for thei tligos Texicanos. Noche Buena and The Good Night celebrate the Feast of the Nativity, th Cl tristtnas Season with an unusually rich and flavorful beer of incomparable body and taste. Say Prry Christmas to your friends this year with the Cerveza Especial. Say.. . 18 DECEMBER 15, 1978 Texa s sex laws. . . from page 13 break t tp. Fina llty, there is the question of whethe r immunity from rape charges can ever be justified simply_ because the assailant z Ind victim happen to be married. Two stl tte legislatures have decided it cannot b”’eOregon passed a law in 1977 allowing wives to charge their husbands with sex ltal assault, and the New Jersey Legislatu .re has approved a similar law that will take effect January 1. The first case undo ;r the Oregon law is currently in court and is certain to be a landmark decision, wl tichever way it goes. Some c f the finest work on this issue has been done not in the United States but in Sou th Australia, a state that shares our Engli ;h common law heritage. Two years ago , South Australia’s legislature adopted tl le view that a husband is not free to raj x his; wife, and the argument advanced then by Attorney General Peter Dun can is worth repeating: “We feel . . . th; A it is anachronistic to suggest that a will ; is bound to submit to inter course with her husband whenever he wishes it, irrespective of her own wishes. . . . As a Government, we are committed to a policy of equal rights and equal opportunity for all. In light of this, we believe that a law which continues to treat a wife as the property of her husband, and marriage as a contract of ownership, should be abolished or amended. Every adult person must be given the right to consent to sexual intercourse both within and outside the marriage. Marriage, and sexual relations within marriage, ought to be a matter of equality, sensitivity, care and responsibility. Indifference, force, recklessness or even intentional sexual brutality should, of course, be no part of any relationship. But unfortunately they sometimes are, and at present a wife is virtually defenseless.” Gender. As the rape statute is written, only a man can commit rape and only a woman can be the victim, and the crime is strictly defined as sexual intercourse without the woman’s consent. With a rape statute that applies only to women, we perpetuate the idea that rape is a sexual act, which it is not, and the Legislature needs to change the language of our rape laws to make them applicable to both sexes. Of the 29 states that have revised their rape statutes recently, 23 have adopted gender-neutral language, meaning that a person of either sex can be the violator or the victim. Such a change in the language not only makes sense, but is called for by recent federal and state court decisions. In 1977, a federal court of appeals struck down New Hampshire’s “statutory rape” law on the grounds that it protected girls but not boys and punished men but not women, and was therefore a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the law. Just two months ago, in Ex parte Groves, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals disavowed its earlier assertions that only women can be victims of rape. The court brought Texas law on statutory rape into compliance with the gender-neutral standard enunciated by the federal appeals court, though it did not rule our statute unconstitutionalinstead, the Texas court found another Texas law