Editor’s Note: I’m in the process of pulling in things I’ve written before, figuring out where it fits into the current site, and this was something I did back in April when Arizona was wanting to party like it was 1864 with an abortion ban.

I’ve debated posting this for a couple reasons:

  1. As of September, that ban has been repealed
  2. A reluctance to wade into topics like women’s rights

However, it’s pretty indicative of my personal beliefs, my editorial tone, and it’s time I stopped sanitizing what I put out under my own name because I’m worried what people will think. And if I can’t say what I have to say as me, then maybe I shouldn’t be saying it at all.

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160 years later, Arizona’s Supreme Court has ruled that something written 48 years before the state existed and 39 years before the invention of the wire coat hanger is now the law on abortion.

Since the Copper State’s judiciary has seen fit to reset the clock on women’s reproductive rights to 1864, it’s time to talk to your 10 year old daughter about consent, as William Thompson Howell intended.

To help make that conversation less awkward, here’s the text from Section 47 of the Howell Code, same document that’s spawned Arizona’s current ruling on abortion:

Rape is the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will. Every person of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall have carnal knowledge of any female child under the age of ten years, either with or without her consent, shall be adjudged to be guilty of the crime of rape, and shall be punished by imprisonment in the Territorial prison for a term not less than five years, and which may extend to life.

Since life expectancy was about 35, that would make 10 the new 20, high time to talk to your daughter about consent.

Assuming your daughter knows what that word means, or you do, since education among those settling in places like Arizona was somewhere down the list of priorities after pillaging, colonizing, and fighting off those you just pillaged and colonized.

The most likely context for a consent conversation is going to be when Asa from down the way seeks to have consensual carnal knowledge of your 10 year old, and since she might object, as her parent you’re obliged to correct her, and if she dies in the process of that correction, provided you were moderate in your remonstration, ‘tis merely a “misadventure,” per Section 34.

Excusable homicide by misadventure is when a person is doing a lawful act, without any intention of killing yet unfortunately kills another; as where a man is at work with an axe, and the head flies off and kills a bystander; or where a parent is moderately correcting his child, or a master his servant or scholar, or an officer punishing a criminal, and happens to occasion death, it is only a misadventure, for the act of correction is lawful; but if a parent or master exceed the bounds of moderation, or the officer the sentence under which he acts, either in the manner, the instrument, or quantity of punishment, and death ensue, it will be manslaughter or murder according to the circumstances of the case.

Same applies to slaves, since this was 1864 after all and owning people as property was what helped make America great in the first place.

Sidebar: Little is known about Howell, but we do know that this code was written in 90 days by a committee he chaired, and I can’t help but think that this section…

…as where a man is at work with an axe, and the head flies off and kills a bystander…

…feels like something someone really needed to be added.

Howell: So that’s it for Section 34…yes, Jebediah?

(No, I don’t know why they all have vaguely Book of Mormon sounding names.)

Jebediah: I do think we would be remiss if were to exclude from misadventure any time when an axe head were to fly off and kill someone watching someone else chopping wood, when that someone had been told at least three times to go back in the house and start dinner.

Howell: I confess, that is oddly specific, and I hope faulty axes aren’t common here in the territory, but I’ve still got ink in the well, so why not?

Section 34 also covers teachers killing students, and as a Texas resident I can attest that here we’d view “didn’t empty a second magazine” as “moderate” disciplinary behavior.

Laws like the Howell Code were of a time and place, and pulling them into the present only serves to make issues like abortion the litmus test they shouldn’t be.

Because no one issue should be the only reason we elect a candidate for office.

Still, it’s weird to be somewhere on the same side of an issue as Kari Lake, as the GOP scrambles to establish itself as a party that both respects the rights of women but also wishes they’d all be quiet about it.

Party like it’s 1864, Republicans.

Talk to women like they’re 10.

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