Smidt in 1980, the Court of Appeal of California, Fourth Appellate District, upheld a woman's defamation claim based on an allegation of homosexuality and
unchastity. (78) The plaintiff and defendant were co-workers and the latter told several other employees that the former was a lesbian.
Still, HC's view does not depend on "except for
unchastity" making a true exception; indeed, they hardly seem interested in showing it does.
Worse, under a negligence standard, the jury's exercise of its broad power to establish an appropriate standard of care almost inevitably would be affected by evidence of the victim's
unchastity. In nearly every case, the jury would hear evidence that the victim had given her consent to the sexual encounter with the defendant, or had even initiated it.
The threatened paradoxical encounter between virtue and
unchastity that is a persistent risk for right-thinking women is thus tackled openly and honestly in both texts under study.
Rushdoony prescribes the death penalty for such crimes as blasphemy, homosexuality, and (if the perpetrator is female) "
unchastity before marriage." Those who resist conversion to Christianity are to suffer the same punishment.
at 163-65 (stating that some of the customary grounds for divorce include renunciation, abandonment, repudiation, immorality,
unchastity, adultery, conversion, and mutual consent).
The United States (or Canada) under the rule of Dominion Christians would apparently be a theocracy, imposed on all the nation's inhabitants regardless of their own religious beliefs, in which legal sanctions would include enforcing "the death penalty for homosexuality, along with a host of other 'abominations,' including heresy, astrology, and (for women only) '
unchastity before marriage'" (Moser 2006: 1).
Kenny usefully notes that the work is organized on a pattern borrowed from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, with Dipsychus resisting temptations to
unchastity (Clough's outspokenness about sexuality is remarkable, and Mrs.
"Women on Trial" engages with the set of motifs produced by the romances telling the story of an individual woman who finds herself accused of
unchastity, usually by a rejected suitor.
One might wonder why Shakespeare here makes him say 'What's all the doores open here?' On one level, Pandarus's comment may be taken metaphorically as a reference to Cressida's
unchastity, particularly if he places a heavy lewd emphasis on 'all'.
Sengupta argues that while revenge is the purported theme of the play, the core subject is the utter revulsion caused by a mother's
unchastity, which is revealed, to us through dhvani.