Redefining Rape

[eredien]

This is required reading for pretty much anyone who's having sex and/or voting in America.

Comments

[seishonagon.livejournal.com]

Okay, what the FUCK.

I just went and read the text of the bill itself, to verify the contents of the article you link to.

You'd expect that something this momentous would get more than a sentence in the bill itself, but no. Just a single, almost offhand comment in paragraph 42 of the bill.

Remove the word "forcible" from the bill, and you still have issues to deal with, but at least it doesn't have the potential to redefine the very nature of a heinous crime.

[q10.livejournal.com]

i want to emphasize that this is a terrible, terrible bill, but...

going by the article you linked to, and a quick skimming of the bill text, i think saying that it's ‘redefining rape’ is misleading. it's saying that certain categories of rape are to be treated differently than others for certain legal purposes (availability of government abortion funding), but, although that is awful, it's not defining the other cases out of the ‘rape’ category. it's entirely possible that i'm misreading something, though.

η: take a formally analogous (although of course morally radically different) case: suppose that the federal government decides to provide citizens with property insurance. suppose further that, by legislation, this insurance doesn't cover property loss due to theft except in cases of ‘armed robbery’. we wouldn't say that that bill was ‘redefining theft’ in a way that excluded kinds of theft other than armed robbery.