i grant all your bullet points, and recognize that they're terrible things, but i'm still not really convinced that any of them constitute ‘redefining rape’. in the absolute worst case, this law has the impact of ending all rape-related federal abortion funding. that would seriously suck, but i don't see any evidence that it would do that by denying that any of the rapes involved were in fact rapes.
the law doesn't say ‘rape = forcible rape’ it says ‘only forcible rape gets funding. we won't tell you what forcible rape is.’ there are a lot of reasons why the latter is bad law and bad policy, but it's still not the same as the former.
really, my only point is that saying that the bill is ‘redefining rape’ is inaccurate. that doesn't mean that i think anything about the bill is even remotely okay.
In my opinion, the redefinition of rape that is occurring is not actually a textual redefinition. It's the fact that if we start saying that some rape gets abortion funding and some rape dosen't, it qualifies all of the latter as in some important (and totally non-legally-defined) way not "worth" the funding, because it's "not as bad." It's not redefining rape as "only the forcible kind." It's redefining rape as "a crime our country speaks out against only when it fits into some poorly-defined category." Given how difficult it has been to get legal definitions of rape into the books at all in some places, this is a major step backward that redefines the way the country legally thinks about rape as a crime.
I see your point, but I think it's rather semantic. I agree with seishonagon below: Maybe we're not redefining the word "rape," but we are redefining "which of the things that we call rape are going to be allowed to receive funding."
Maybe because the word "rape" is used in both circumstances it gives people the impression that there is no redefinition going on because the words being used are literally the same. Imagine if we chose instead to use two phrases: "assists" and "denials," and said we'd pay for assists only. That makes it clearer what's actually happening--except for the problem that not using the word "rape" obscures the fact that both the "assists" and the "denials" are actually parts of the *same problem,* which is the most salient point, and that is exactly what the politicians who craft legislation like this would like everyone to forget about.
And it's about more than just funding, I think. It's about which crimes are going to be a part of our national discourse on gender-based violence (because rape, whether the victim is a man or a woman, is gender-based in each instance).
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the law doesn't say ‘rape = forcible rape’ it says ‘only forcible rape gets funding. we won't tell you what forcible rape is.’ there are a lot of reasons why the latter is bad law and bad policy, but it's still not the same as the former.
really, my only point is that saying that the bill is ‘redefining rape’ is inaccurate. that doesn't mean that i think anything about the bill is even remotely okay.
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Maybe because the word "rape" is used in both circumstances it gives people the impression that there is no redefinition going on because the words being used are literally the same. Imagine if we chose instead to use two phrases: "assists" and "denials," and said we'd pay for assists only. That makes it clearer what's actually happening--except for the problem that not using the word "rape" obscures the fact that both the "assists" and the "denials" are actually parts of the *same problem,* which is the most salient point, and that is exactly what the politicians who craft legislation like this would like everyone to forget about.
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