by Connie Chastain*
For several weeks, I've been the recipient of some emails from a group called change.org. I don't remember signing up for these emails, although maybe I did. The two or three notices I've received have been about issues I care not one whit about. Until the latest.
It was about our illustrious vice-president's April comments about rape. "Rape is rape is rape," he said at the University of New Hampshire. I admit to being awed by such perspicacity. And I always thought Joe Biden was as dumb as a box of hammers.
Biden cited a story about a college freshman he called "Jenny" who was raped after a campus party and met with resistance from the university when she tried to pursue a case against her "assailant" (the word used in the email).
Now, pardon my skepticism, but that's not enough to go on. All we have is her word for it -- or his claim of her word for it. I know there are people who swallow this stuff without blinking, but I'm not one of them. Aside from the fact that I've heard this one before -- and heard it and heard it -- I'm also a reader of the FRS blog, and I know things that true believers don't know -- and wouldn't believe if they were told.
Rape -- as terrible as it is -- simply isn't that prevalent, certainly not on college campuses. Which explains the next part of the change.org email. They want to redefine rape, to include more ... things.
According to the email, the "FBI omits hundreds of thousands of rapes from its Uniform Crime Report (UCR) because it’s using an 80-year-old definition of rape. ... The FBI’s outdated definition of rape is limited to 'the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.'"
Well, golly. That's what I always thought it was. What has happened in the past 80 years that would make folks want to change the definition of rape? Well, how about feminism? How about women demanding "sexual freedom" so they can be just like men (or how they imagine men to be, although they hate men, so why would they want to be like them? I know.) -- only to find out it's not all its cracked up to be.
Anyway, change.org wants me to sign a petition to tell the FBI to "update" its definition of rape.
Ah, no. Rape is what it has always been -- a crime and a horrible experience. It is NOT drunken consensual sex that a woman regrets afterward. Attempting to redefine rape is just another salvo in the feminist war against men -- an effort that also relegates women to helpless victimhood, without responsibility for themselves or their actions.
Naturally, the e-mail from change.org says not one syllable about how such consensual sex gets called rape, and some man then gets arrested and investigated, and called "rapist" in the newspaper, and maybe TV reports -- for doing what? For doing the same thing the woman with him did. It says not a word about the outright false accusations of rape that get reported in this blog day after day after weary day.
Being a rightwing religious fundamentalist, I frankly disapprove of premarital and extramarital consensual sex. But I'm not so blinded by the light that I can tell the difference between that and rape.
So, no. I'm not signing anything that seeks to equate some sorority chick's morning-after regret with the experience of a woman (or a man) who has been brutally raped, by the real definition of it. I don't hate men, so I'm not enthusiastic about making laws designed to make criminals out of men whose behavior is no different than their partners.
Yes, Joe. Rape is rape. Lies are lies. Parts is parts, and stupid is stupid.
*Connie is an FRS contributor. Her personal blog is http://conniechastain.blogspot.com/
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