Just when you think you’ve seen the worst from our deranged state legislature, along comes a bill that even savages shouldn’t support. But nothing is off the table for our lawmakers so long as it comes with a boatload of cash.

The latest missive is known as the “Massachusetts Survivors Act”. It claims that the purpose of the bill is to ensure justice for victims. Sounds good until you see that the word “victims” refers to criminals who say they were abused at some point before they committed their crimes and that the abuse made them rape or kill an innocent human being.

Let me repeat that. This bill gives rapists, murderers, bank robbers, drug traffickers, child predators, etc. the right to request diversion & dismissal of criminal charges, or substantially reduce their punishment, so long as they claim that they were abused before they committed a crime.

As if that isn’t bad enough, the “abuse” doesn’t have to be serious. It’s enough if someone merely “Attempted to cause physical harm” or was  “controlling” in a way that caused a criminal to feel fear.

In other words, a criminal can get his charges dismissed even if nobody ever touched him, but they made him feel scared. He doesn’t even need any proof, he just needs to make a statement and if the judge believes him, he wins.

Criminals can even use this law if they’re already behind bars. For example, if a guy committed an especially horrendous murder or brutally raped and killed fifteen children, and he’s in prison for life without parole, he can file a motion from behind bars and – get this – have his sentence reduced to “10 years or less.”

Seriously.

Oh, and guess who pays the lawyers to file these motions? You do. It’s our tax dollars at work.

Put aside for a moment the blatant sexism in this bill given that 90% of rapists are men who rape women, and this law effectively decriminalizes rape. Female rape victims rarely hurt anyone, which proves that nothing in human nature causes an abuse victim to harm someone else. But Massachusetts lawmakers don’t care. Giving rapists a pass is a sport in this state thanks to the rapists’ lobby. Common sense and pubic safety be damned.

Nobody actually believes that men rape women because they were abused themselves.

Indeed, research shows that men rape women for one reason: because they can. Men know that 98% of rapists never spend a day behind bars, so it’s a low-risk crime.

Studies also show that a common personality feature of rapists is a sense of entitlement, which is why Harvard and MIT have such high sexual assault rates compared to lower tiered schools. Another big reason men rape women is money. They make videos of their crimes and upload them to the dark web for cash (bitcoin). They aren’t reeling from abuse, they’re businessmen, and this piece of crap legislation will help with profit margins by making it easier for rapists to remain on the streets where they can keep producing new material.

If you wonder who on Beacon Hill sponsored this bill, here are a few of the 21 state reps who put their names on it: Christine Barber, Brandy Fluker-Reid, James C. Arena-DeRosa and Mike Connolly. It’s no surprise that Barber is at the top.

Two years ago, I was at the State House with a rape victim client who was scheduled to testify before Barber’s committee on a bill that would add women to the state’s Hate Crime law. The bill would bring Massachusetts in line with every other state in New England that already protects women, but Barber doesn’t support it. To make her disdain known, she made the rape victim wait for hours to testify, refusing to call on her until after 7 pm.

The victim sat patiently, and by 5 pm was the only one waiting to testify in person, but Barber called on people to testify by Zoom before calling on the rape victim, and most of them didn’t even live in Massachusetts. Worse, they were testifying in support of a much less important bill that dozens of people had already testified about. Only when all of the out-of-state people on Zoom were done did Barber allow the rape victim to talk about how important it is that the hate crime law be amended to protect women. Barber couldn’t have cared less. She sent the bill to a study to kill it, and now she wants you to think she is a champion of rape victims because she sponsored the Survivors Act.

Don’t be stupid.

State Rep. Christine Barber testifies during a virtual meeting on drivers license regulations. (Staff Photo By Stuart Cahill/Boston Herald, File)