Celebrity attorney Gloria Allred needs to join the 21st century. Or the 20th. Last week, amid the well-deserved outcry over Rush Limbaugh’s stunningly loutish remarks about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke – whom Limbaugh called a “slut” and a “prostitute” for supporting mandated contraception coverage – Allred made a stunningly asinine move of her own. She called for the Palm Beach County Attorney in Florida to charge Limbaugh under an obscure 19th-century state law that makes it a crime to question a woman’s chastity. In the process, Allred sounded as backward as right-wingers who want to keep antediluvian codes like sodomy laws in effect.

I can hear the hysterical cries of “false equivalency!” from liberals as I write this. They were at it last week when commentators like my former TIME colleague Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post or Kirsten Powers of The Daily Beast dared suggest that male media personalities on the left – like Matt Taibbi, Keith Olbermann or Bill Maher, who called Sarah Palin a “c—” on his HBO show last year – are themselves guilty of misogyny. Rather than swallow their ideological pride for a moment, too many liberals, including more than a few leading feminists, have dug in like the Vatican and refused to acknowledge that their side too can be wrong or unfair. Or, as in the case of Maher, who just gave $1 million to a super PAC backing President Obama, as boorish as Rush Limbaugh. …

We in the mainstream media too rarely point out that double standard, but Allred’s retro-hypocrisy – which is about the First Amendment – is too hard to ignore. The obscure Florida defamation code she wants prosecutors to use on Limbaugh is one of those musty statutes that sit forgotten in every state’s penal attic. But to demand in the year 2012 that we criminally prosecute anyone for this kind of speech is disturbing, especially so to correspondents like me who have been chronicling the recent comeback of criminal defamation laws in Latin America. Limbaugh apologized for slandering Fluke; now Allred should apologize for promoting the legal philosophy of Hugo Chávez.