Police ain't got no gun (you don't have to run)

Be glad that you are free
Free to change your mind
Free to go most anywhere, anytime

No I didn't write those words it was Prince Nelson Rogers formerly the artist formerly known as Prince from the double album 1999 - which was the most exciting thing that happened to my world in1982 (I was still at school). And yes, these lyrics from “Free” were the inspiration for my blog's title.
 
Prince's enthusiastic endorsement of promiscuity, his sexual ambiguity, his flamboyant fashion sense gave him the appearance of a libertine rather than libertarian. But his libertarian credentials were there all along.
 
Soldiers are a marching, they're writing brand new laws
Will we all fight together for the most important cause?
Will we all fight for the right to be free?
 
These simple words are exactly what I'm writing about 35 years later. Maybe society doesn't change as much as we think it has. Maybe I just never grew up.
 
Libertarians are not anarchists. We don't oppose laws or law making. We just believe that lawmaking should be restricted to protecting citizens and our property rather than forcing us to go along with a socio-political or religious agenda.
 
The most exciting track on that fine album for 15 year old me was D.M.S.R or Dance Music Sex Romance – all of which I was looking forward to in this thing called life.
 
I say everybody - screw the masses
We only want to have some fun
I say do whatever you want - wear lingerie to a restaurant
Police ain't got no gun, you don't have to run
 
The last line baffled me a bit - police in America definitely had guns and were willing to use them. What I believe he was saying was simple libertarian creed. As it is not illegal to wear lingerie to a restaurant, the police cannot take action against you so you have nothing to fear from the law.
 
These days it is not unusual to see young women in lingerie on the streets come Saturday night in summer. Lo and behold – no one arrests them or shoots them. So why not in 1982? What were we afraid of?
 
Well sexual assault for a start. Indecent assault at the very least.
 
Prior to the Crimes (Sexual Assault) Amendment Act of 1981 these offences did not exist in NSW. There was only rape – narrowly defined as a forcible penile penetration of a vagina. To get a conviction for rape there needed to be evidence of violence and it certainly helped if the attacker was a stranger and the victim a virgin. The rapist was best protected by the law - not the victim.
 
Since then, NSW legislation has criminalised most sexually abusive behaviours - not limited to penetrative sexual acts between female victims and male offenders. 
Non-penetrative offences were criminalised as indecent assault. Men, women, children and transgenders are now protected by comprehensive sexual assault laws.
 
But it didn't have to go this way. There are many countries in the world where the law dictates what women should wear in public so as not to provoke sexual urges in men. Blaming women for crimes committed against them was common in Australia at that time and still persists today.

So in my wild erratic fancy I would like to think that that Prince had a hand in all this. That his words resonated with someone other than a dance crazy adolescent with big hair. That when the choice came to either criminalise what women wore in public, or criminalise the behaviour that prevented them from doing so, our lawmakers chose the latter. 
 
They remembered that we are free. Don't ever let them forget.