Talk about unintended consequences:
An Augusta County woman faces a misdemeanor charge under Virginia's new revenge pornography law.
Waynesboro police tell media outlets that 28-year-old Rachel Lynn Craig is accused of posting a nude photograph of another woman on Facebook.
The law went into effect July 1. It makes it illegal to distribute a sexually explicit image of others without their permission. The phenomenon is called "revenge porn."
Police Sgt. Brian Edwards says the 22-year-old victim told police that Craig took the photograph from a cell phone belonging to the woman's boyfriend and posted the image on Facebook. The woman says she had taken the photograph of herself and sent it to her boyfriend's cell phone.
I opposed the revenge porn law personally because I believed it was meant to punish men who get sexually explicit images from their girlfriends/wives. I think that women shouldn’t do that to begin with because it is uncouth and that the only way to resolve that is to allow women to face the consequences of their stupidity.
Now it appears that the law is being applied equally, regardless of gender. I don’t know the backstory behind all this (my guess is it was a lover spurned or something), but it is refreshing to see a law clearly biased against men being applied appropriately.
I still don’t support this law as it is backwards and will only cause more government overreach, especially if it is made into a Federal law. We’ve already had a case in Virginia where an underage kid was being coerced into having a picture taken of his erect penis for comparison with a sext his girlfriend got. That would be considered child porn in any other circle.
So I shudder to think how this law will be applied and if it will be applied fairly in the future. I doubt it will and there will probably be some overzealous prosecutor or police officer who will take things too far. And then get away with it because they are the government after all.