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Well, I obviously believe that what the guy did should be against the law and Massachusetts should immediately outlaw it and any other state whose laws allow for this same loophole should patch it up immediately, but as far as I can tell, I agree with the court's decision. The court's role in the legal system isn't to be policy makers but to enforce the law as it's written. They shouldn't try to fix the mistakes of the legislative branch by pretending that woman wearing a skirt is partially nude in the eyes of the law or whatever forced interpretation it would have taken to get this guy in jail. They should rule as the law says, and in the written opinion, say "The lawmakers fucked up here. I strongly urge that you fix this immediately."
This is not only a strict adherence to the judge's job, it's also effective. It's the Ruth Bader Ginsburg philosophy of judgement, which is when a law is wrong, you rant and rave about how wrong it is and serve it over to the people who have actual power to actually fix it in a sensible way instead of botching the problem with some nonsensical precedent that makes the law run well enough that it loses media attention but still doesn't work.
On the sexual harassment quote: as far as sexual misconduct goes, I don't know if this could be further from harassment. I more-or-less agree with the connotation that this is a sexual {criminally bad something or other}, and I know that people hate semantics, but whatever the words we use matter. It's not sexual terrorism, sexual perjury, sexual DUI, sexual tax evasion or sexual parking in a loading zone between the hours of 8am and 6pm. When the loophole gets closed, it'll probably fall under invasion of privacy or something and will get the penalty appropriate to that crime.
When you use your words so carelessly, then you muddle everything into a connotation more than actually a specific idea, and it ends up doing every crime you apply it to a disservice. Sexual harassment is such a perfect word to use for illuminating the horror of someone being persistently forced to endure comments/touches/jokes/etc in an inescapable context like the workplace, where they have to friggin spend most of their week if they don't want their children to starve. Why would you turn such a perfect incapsulation of that misery into a catch-all mush of a word that means nothing more than {something that's at least vaguely sexual that has something about it that's at least vaguely bad}. For that matter, why would you associate women having their vaginas unknowningly photographed and having to wonder for what purposes those photographs are being used and where it's been sent to and who's been masturbating to them etc to getting hit on by the fat, sweaty guy at the office? They're completely different sexual crimes with completely different types of associated misery for the victims. Why are we so quick to muddle it all together?
Anyway, that's the end of my semantics rant. TL;DR: the guy is a sexual miscreant. This doesn't necessarily mean that he harassed women. There are a lot of ways to victimize women without being incessant.
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