I'll admit to making ad hominem attacks against the persons making the argument. But the argument itself is contradictory. On one hand "there should be government intervention to preserve life" (before it is born) and on the other hand "there should not be government intervention to preserve life" (after it is born). Human life is human life, if you believe in government intervention to preserve it then it should be preserved at all times. If you don't believe in government intervention to preserve it then you should not be preserved at any time.
To be morally consistent, the Republicans could support private charities that attempt to educate people about the life of the fetus, just as they support private charities to care for needy children and the education of children and so forth. Then they would keep the government out of the process at all steps, and be consistent. Or they could support government intervention to block abortion, and government intervention to support food, shelter, clothing, education, and medical care for children. Instead they have a contradiction.
I don't think what you are calling "legitimate rape" and what Akins is calling "legitimate rape" are the same thing. He was asserting that a woman cannot get pregnant from "legitimate rape", so even if he is correct - and I believe he is not - his definition of "legitimate rape" would only be a physically violent direct attack on the woman and forceful penetration.
If instead the attacker gets the woman drunk or drugs her, or seduces someone twenty years younger and under the age of 15, or gets her to comply by threatening to kill her if she resists, then the sex itself does not need to include forceful penetration, the risk of pregnancy is high, but the act itself is still rape.
You can't violate the laws of thermodynamics. But some of the obesity epidemic is more than simple gluttony.
1. Raising 1 liter of water 1 degree of temperature Celcius requires 1000 kcal (1 Calorie) of energy. So if you take two people the same size and one has an average body temperature of 96.5 degrees Fahrenheit (low end of normal) and the other has an average body temperature of 98.3 degrees Fahrenheit (high end of normal) the difference in energy use over the course of a year is thousands of Calories.
2. Sleep disturbance and poor sleeping schedules has been shown to reduce resting metabolism by as much as 8%. So take two otherwise identical people that maintain their weight on a 2000 calorie diet and give one a child that sleeps poorly, or a swing shift schedule at work, or sleep apnea (being fat increases your risk of sleep apnea, but lots of thin people have the disorder too). The person with the poor quality of sleep or inadequate sleep now maintains their weight on an 1840 Calorie diet - and their appetite may not necessarily shift to match. 160 extra calories per day over a year can cause more than 10 pounds of fat gain all by itself. This is also thought to be why people who work night shifts are likely to be obese than people who work day shifts - most human beings adapt poorly to sleeping during the day.
3. There is some evidence that eating or drinking something high in sugar or even high in artificial sweeteners will boost your appetite. So even permitting yourself one can of Coke or Diet Pepsi or one bottle of iced tea per day can increase your daily calorie intake a lot more than just the 150 Calories listed on the product label, because you consume larger portions or extra portions later.
Further, excess fat does not require many calories to maintain. Typically it's 1-3 calories per pound. (Muscle, by contrast, takes about 6 calories per day per pound to maintain - but you'll find a lot of fitness authorities that claim muscle requires 50-100 calories per pound per day.) So someone that's 150 pounds fatter than is healthy could be consuming as little as 15% more calories per day than a thin person the same height - one extra bowl of cereal, or two additional cans of soda, or one extra sandwich. The stereotype of the morbidly obese person consuming two or three times the food of a normal person is actually a rarity.
I just started treatment for sleep apnea earlier this year, and it took about two months for me to adjust to wearing the breathing mask at night and get some benefit from it. There's no easy way to be certain how long I've had the disorder, but I haven't awoken this well rested in the morning for twenty years. My appetite is down. With no conscious effort, I find myself more energetic and more interested in exercise - before treatment I exercised twice a week and felt exhausted when I finished, now I've switched to four days per week because I get restless if I don't exercise and I feel fine after. The cliché is "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" - well, now I wonder how many other fatties like myself need to be tested for sleep apnea.
Hypocrisy is central to this issue - if you take away the option of a rape victim - or any other woman - from preventing the child from being born but you oppose the public funding of social institutions to assist in the care of the child, you are implicitly asserting that abortion is murder but neglect, starvation, and lack of health care for the child after it is born is acceptable to you. That contradiction invalidates the entire argument.
Those church affiliated orphanages and adoption agencies, and food kitchens, and schools, and so forth are not adequate to the task. If they were, there never would have been any citizens asking the government to set up public agencies to tackle the same problems. And right now, the biggest thing stopping these public programs that are aided by private programs from solving the problem completely is a political party staunchly opposed to funding them.
First, the Republican party wants to dismantle them, or cut funding. Some of those cuts will trim fat, some will hurt people in need.
Second, I presume your 100 million figure includes people collecting Medicare and Social Security, which are systems they paid into for decades before they started collecting benefits. That's not welfare - it's not adequately funded by the payment system, but that's not the fault of the people who paid in over their entire lives.
Third, a lot of careful, well managed social welfare programs can cut social costs, not increase them. Every person on welfare instead of on their own is one less potential criminal. Every person educated well by public schools is one less person that needs welfare. Every child that receives adequate nutrition, career guidance, and especially protection from abuse and neglect is less likely to burden the welfare or the prison system as an adult. etc... etc...
I didn't want to make my post three times as long by adding qualifiers to my statements. Here are the qualifiers:
I agree that when two people that are 14 have sex, it is not statutory rape. I agree if the age difference between two people is six months or a year, or maybe even a year and a half, it is also not statutory rape. I'm saying that if one person is 12 and the other is 25, even if the younger person thinks they are giving consent, we do not consider them adult enough to do so. Picking the exact definition of statutory rape is difficult when the age gap is smaller, but there absolutely is a point at which it can never be acceptable (e.g. 12 and 25 or similar)
If both people are drunk, it's not rape. If one person is drunk and the other is not, and if they have an existing consensual sexual relationship, it's not rape (some people would argue it's still rape, I am not among them). But if one person is drunk and the other is not, and they are not in an existing consensual sexual relationship, it's rape. To repeat an analogy I wrote elsewhere: if I leave a pile of money next to me while I nap in a public park, I am being very stupid but taking my money is still theft.
With respect to the 'shrink', I specifically wrote seduced by their counselor. I did not write anything about relationships between patients, just between patient and counselor.
I'm sorry I didn't add enough qualifiers to my statement. I am speaking strictly of the case when there is a very large age gap between the people involved. If the girl consents and she's 12 and her lover is 54, it's still rape, yes.
Obviously if both people involved are similar in age then much more nuanced rules are required - more nuanced than most states have now.
If they're both drunk, I believe in some states (or most states) the determination of whether it is rape or not comes down to whether they decide to file a complaint, and if so then who files it first. And yes, that's absurd. If they're both drunk, there should be no fault involved.
But otherwise, imagine that you laid down to take a nap in a public park and put a stack of hundred dollar bills on your chest. What you did is stupid, but someone who took the money from you would still be guilty of theft, the same guilt as if they stole the money from your house or your bank account. Just because your stupidity (the hypothetical 'you', of course, not ewibble) made the crime easier, it does not mean the crime itself is less serious.
Citizens are forced to pay for police forces. They're forced to pay for criminal courts and prisons. They're forced to pay for a military, and benefits for veterans. They're forced to pay for road and bridge construction and maintenance. They're forced to pay for agencies that monitor the quality of the food they eat, the air they breathe, and the water they drink. If "being forced" was the issue, there would have been an uprising about those things. "Being forced" is an excuse, contempt and hatred for the stupid and the unlucky is the real problem.
I don't love the Democratic party - they play nice with the Republicans to lock third parties out of local and national elections, they tend to sponsor and support lots of the legislation that does crazy things with copyright and digital rights management, and the nanny state stuff goes too far.
But in fact they do support much better care for children than the Republicans. That's not open to debate - the Republicans ask their supporters to pray that charities will take up the slack left when they cut government programs. But if charity was going to solve this kind of problem, it would have done it already. It never has, which means society needs to vote for policies that will make sure every citizen gets adequate care.
I was bullied badly enough myself, though not nearly as badly as you were. But I'm telling you, I am friends with a few women that were raped and had also been bullied and beaten at other times in their lives, and they swear up, down, and sideways that the two types of events are not comparable.
A sufficiently bad experience will cause some people to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It doesn't affect everyone - some veterans can come home from seeing carnage and losing friends in war and live relatively normal lives, and other veterans flat out cannot. Telling PTSD sufferers some form of "you went though something terrible but you honestly can tough it out, get over it", even if you phrase it diplomatically, does not work. The US military clearly doesn't have a handle on this - if they did, the suicide rate among veterans would be much lower. Many people who experience these kinds of events, whether it's getting raped or watching people die horribly - survive and recover rather quickly. But many do not, and no form of "stop whining" will fix it.
I realize the situation I posited was artificial, and pregnancy and birth are natural. But I don't think the difference matters to the moral quandary. In either case, one person is forced to sacrifice some aspects of their health and their freedom in order to keep another person alive, and (in the case of rape) there was no consent to be put into the position.
I don't think anyone is advocating endless welfare dependence. The whole topic is largely a distraction from larger issues - the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program from the US federal government consumes something like 0.5% of the federal budget. The other 99.5% of underfunded expenses are the problem, not that.
1. If you woke up one morning with tubes connecting one of your arteries to another person's body, and were informed that the person could not create their own blood, but you were obligated to supply blood for them for the next nine months or they would die... what would you do? Would you be morally obligated to spend nine months tied to this person you never met, and had not voluntarily consented to caring for?
2. The Republican Party of the United States claims to represent the Christian belief that life begins at conception. However, by their own standards clearly life ends at birth. Because they'd rather light themselves on fire than support the child's medical costs, food, shelter, clothing, and education after it is born. They seem determined to increase our number of homeless, our number of criminals, and the ranks of the youth gangs. Doesn't this blatant contradiction bother you? This party is trying to get more power based on two morally opposed central platforms: on one side, they oppose public access to abortion and contraception; on the other, they oppose public funding for anything that would support families.
But statutory rape is not consensual, that's the whole point. We as a society hold that a 12 year old girl (or boy) lacks the maturity to consent to sex as an adult. So even if she was willing and enjoyed the sexual encounter, it's still rape.
Likewise, someone given roofies or just stupid enough to get really drunk is no longer coherent enough to consent to sex. Even if the person with roofies in them verbally agrees and has a great sexual encounter it is still rape.
And then you have the threat of violence, or the threat of loss of physical security. The attacker doesn't actually hurt the victim, but the attacker plans on beating the victim to death or tossing them outside naked in a Minnesota winter. There could be no physical signs of injury, and it could be difficult or impossible for the victim to prove that the encounter was not consensual. So in many or most of those cases, there is not enough evidence to convict the attacker. But neither is there enough evidence to convict the accuser for filing fraudulent charges. In some of those cases, the threats really did occur and the resulting sex, even if it was not physically forceful, is still rape.
So "legimate rape" is really "rape", and trying to make a distinction where one does not exist means you're either not thinking carefully about the situation or you're a misogynist.
But the whole point is that sex-that-is-legally-considered-rape is morally equivalent to sex-under-duress. The 14 year old girl is too young to consent to sex, so it's still rape. The girl who has sex with a guy because he'll douse her son in gasoline and light him on fire if she refuses is still being raped. The girl who has sex with a guy because he'll kick her out of their home and she'll risk freezing to death is still being raped. The girl that is drunk out of her mind (maybe because her date put roofies into her drink, but even if she was just stupid and drank too much) is still being raped. A person suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, or an anxiety disorder, or some similar mental problem who relies upon her psychological counselor for aid and gets seduced by their counselor is still being take advantage of by someone in a position of authority. She may believe the sexual encounters are consensual, but that person is abusing his or her position - it is still rape. (And just to be clear, I used "girl" and "she" but the victims could also be men.)
Now you can argue that the age of consent for statutory rape laws in most of the US should be lowered, and I would agree. But outside of that, Akin is trying to make a distinction between two things and there is none. Sex has to be between legal adults, without being intoxicated by legal or illegal drugs, with both people on equal footing (i.e. one not in a position of mentoring or authority over the other), without physical violence, without the threat of physical violence, without the threat of loss of physical safety.
You made my point better than I did. The religious conservatives in the United States need another political party, because the Republican Party might fight like hell to keep that fetus alive, but they will march straight into hell before they lift a finger to help it after it's born.
But you do understand that in many cases the woman would have no interest in undergoing the pregnancy or caring for the child when it was born, right?
So clearly you should vote for a political party that supports state-sponsored health care for women impregnated by rape, and extra state-sponsored funding for the health care, shelter, food, clothing, and education of the child, right?
So what party would that be? Because it sure as FUCKING HELL is not the United States Republican party. They'll hate the woman for aborting the embryo, but they'll hate the baby sucking on the social welfare tit even more.
I think there's a fundamental difference between being beat up and having an orifice or two violated for the sexual gratification of someone else. If you have personally experienced the latter, you might have justification for speaking the way you do.
I haven't, so I'm not going to assume I can downplay the significance of the event by classifying it like any other "run of the mill" beating. Everyone I've met that has undergone both - and I've met more than a few - has clearly indicated that they are not the same thing.
I know this sets the requirements pretty high, but I think it's reasonable to expect our lawmakers to investigate what the legal distinction between "rape" and "forcible rape" is, and vote accordingly. Ryan was either not educated enough to do so, which is a character flaw - or he understood the distinction and chose to support "only forcible rape" provisions intentionally, which is damning.
I believe they're trying to make a distinction between a rape that included a separate physical assault (e.g. the victim was punched and kicked, then raped) versus a rape that used the threat of violence to ensure the victim's compliance but is difficult to prove later (e.g. the attacker told the victim that if she did not comply he would kill her children, or the attacker held a knife to the victim's throat but did not actually cut her with it).
There are, of course, cases when women fabricate accusations of rape for the purposes of blackmail or revenge. However, I doubt Akin and Ryan have enough evidence to assert that most or even a notable minority of "non forcible rapes" fit into that category.
After Germany was wrecked during World War 1, we said FUCK YOU and were rewarded with World War 2. After Germany was wrecked during World War 2, we helped them out - and now they're a stable democracy. We might not always like what the German government does, but it's a lot more truly democratic today than it was during the 1930s or than the Russian government is now.
They're not outlawed. The emissions standards are difficult to meet, but they can be meet. The real problem in the US is that taxes on diesel fuels are higher than on gasoline. So the diesel engine vehicle might use 40% less fuel, but since your cost per gallon is 30% higher the savings are negligible.
Also remember that the United Kingdom uses "imperial gallons" for measurement, which are 20% larger than US gallons. Every so often someone mocks the poor fuel efficiency of economy cars on the US market without realizing the difference.
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I'll admit to making ad hominem attacks against the persons making the argument. But the argument itself is contradictory. On one hand "there should be government intervention to preserve life" (before it is born) and on the other hand "there should not be government intervention to preserve life" (after it is born). Human life is human life, if you believe in government intervention to preserve it then it should be preserved at all times. If you don't believe in government intervention to preserve it then you should not be preserved at any time.
To be morally consistent, the Republicans could support private charities that attempt to educate people about the life of the fetus, just as they support private charities to care for needy children and the education of children and so forth. Then they would keep the government out of the process at all steps, and be consistent. Or they could support government intervention to block abortion, and government intervention to support food, shelter, clothing, education, and medical care for children. Instead they have a contradiction.
I don't think what you are calling "legitimate rape" and what Akins is calling "legitimate rape" are the same thing. He was asserting that a woman cannot get pregnant from "legitimate rape", so even if he is correct - and I believe he is not - his definition of "legitimate rape" would only be a physically violent direct attack on the woman and forceful penetration.
If instead the attacker gets the woman drunk or drugs her, or seduces someone twenty years younger and under the age of 15, or gets her to comply by threatening to kill her if she resists, then the sex itself does not need to include forceful penetration, the risk of pregnancy is high, but the act itself is still rape.
You can't violate the laws of thermodynamics. But some of the obesity epidemic is more than simple gluttony.
1. Raising 1 liter of water 1 degree of temperature Celcius requires 1000 kcal (1 Calorie) of energy. So if you take two people the same size and one has an average body temperature of 96.5 degrees Fahrenheit (low end of normal) and the other has an average body temperature of 98.3 degrees Fahrenheit (high end of normal) the difference in energy use over the course of a year is thousands of Calories.
2. Sleep disturbance and poor sleeping schedules has been shown to reduce resting metabolism by as much as 8%. So take two otherwise identical people that maintain their weight on a 2000 calorie diet and give one a child that sleeps poorly, or a swing shift schedule at work, or sleep apnea (being fat increases your risk of sleep apnea, but lots of thin people have the disorder too). The person with the poor quality of sleep or inadequate sleep now maintains their weight on an 1840 Calorie diet - and their appetite may not necessarily shift to match. 160 extra calories per day over a year can cause more than 10 pounds of fat gain all by itself. This is also thought to be why people who work night shifts are likely to be obese than people who work day shifts - most human beings adapt poorly to sleeping during the day.
3. There is some evidence that eating or drinking something high in sugar or even high in artificial sweeteners will boost your appetite. So even permitting yourself one can of Coke or Diet Pepsi or one bottle of iced tea per day can increase your daily calorie intake a lot more than just the 150 Calories listed on the product label, because you consume larger portions or extra portions later.
Further, excess fat does not require many calories to maintain. Typically it's 1-3 calories per pound. (Muscle, by contrast, takes about 6 calories per day per pound to maintain - but you'll find a lot of fitness authorities that claim muscle requires 50-100 calories per pound per day.) So someone that's 150 pounds fatter than is healthy could be consuming as little as 15% more calories per day than a thin person the same height - one extra bowl of cereal, or two additional cans of soda, or one extra sandwich. The stereotype of the morbidly obese person consuming two or three times the food of a normal person is actually a rarity.
I just started treatment for sleep apnea earlier this year, and it took about two months for me to adjust to wearing the breathing mask at night and get some benefit from it. There's no easy way to be certain how long I've had the disorder, but I haven't awoken this well rested in the morning for twenty years. My appetite is down. With no conscious effort, I find myself more energetic and more interested in exercise - before treatment I exercised twice a week and felt exhausted when I finished, now I've switched to four days per week because I get restless if I don't exercise and I feel fine after. The cliché is "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" - well, now I wonder how many other fatties like myself need to be tested for sleep apnea.
You were right to call me on it, when I reread my previous post it does look extremist without having enumerated the conditions more clearly.
Hypocrisy is central to this issue - if you take away the option of a rape victim - or any other woman - from preventing the child from being born but you oppose the public funding of social institutions to assist in the care of the child, you are implicitly asserting that abortion is murder but neglect, starvation, and lack of health care for the child after it is born is acceptable to you. That contradiction invalidates the entire argument.
But getting raped isn't a choice, now is it?
Those church affiliated orphanages and adoption agencies, and food kitchens, and schools, and so forth are not adequate to the task. If they were, there never would have been any citizens asking the government to set up public agencies to tackle the same problems. And right now, the biggest thing stopping these public programs that are aided by private programs from solving the problem completely is a political party staunchly opposed to funding them.
First, the Republican party wants to dismantle them, or cut funding. Some of those cuts will trim fat, some will hurt people in need.
Second, I presume your 100 million figure includes people collecting Medicare and Social Security, which are systems they paid into for decades before they started collecting benefits. That's not welfare - it's not adequately funded by the payment system, but that's not the fault of the people who paid in over their entire lives.
Third, a lot of careful, well managed social welfare programs can cut social costs, not increase them. Every person on welfare instead of on their own is one less potential criminal. Every person educated well by public schools is one less person that needs welfare. Every child that receives adequate nutrition, career guidance, and especially protection from abuse and neglect is less likely to burden the welfare or the prison system as an adult. etc... etc...
I didn't want to make my post three times as long by adding qualifiers to my statements. Here are the qualifiers:
I agree that when two people that are 14 have sex, it is not statutory rape. I agree if the age difference between two people is six months or a year, or maybe even a year and a half, it is also not statutory rape. I'm saying that if one person is 12 and the other is 25, even if the younger person thinks they are giving consent, we do not consider them adult enough to do so. Picking the exact definition of statutory rape is difficult when the age gap is smaller, but there absolutely is a point at which it can never be acceptable (e.g. 12 and 25 or similar)
If both people are drunk, it's not rape. If one person is drunk and the other is not, and if they have an existing consensual sexual relationship, it's not rape (some people would argue it's still rape, I am not among them). But if one person is drunk and the other is not, and they are not in an existing consensual sexual relationship, it's rape. To repeat an analogy I wrote elsewhere: if I leave a pile of money next to me while I nap in a public park, I am being very stupid but taking my money is still theft.
With respect to the 'shrink', I specifically wrote seduced by their counselor. I did not write anything about relationships between patients, just between patient and counselor.
I'm sorry I didn't add enough qualifiers to my statement. I am speaking strictly of the case when there is a very large age gap between the people involved. If the girl consents and she's 12 and her lover is 54, it's still rape, yes.
Obviously if both people involved are similar in age then much more nuanced rules are required - more nuanced than most states have now.
If they're both drunk, I believe in some states (or most states) the determination of whether it is rape or not comes down to whether they decide to file a complaint, and if so then who files it first. And yes, that's absurd. If they're both drunk, there should be no fault involved.
But otherwise, imagine that you laid down to take a nap in a public park and put a stack of hundred dollar bills on your chest. What you did is stupid, but someone who took the money from you would still be guilty of theft, the same guilt as if they stole the money from your house or your bank account. Just because your stupidity (the hypothetical 'you', of course, not ewibble) made the crime easier, it does not mean the crime itself is less serious.
Citizens are forced to pay for police forces. They're forced to pay for criminal courts and prisons. They're forced to pay for a military, and benefits for veterans. They're forced to pay for road and bridge construction and maintenance. They're forced to pay for agencies that monitor the quality of the food they eat, the air they breathe, and the water they drink. If "being forced" was the issue, there would have been an uprising about those things. "Being forced" is an excuse, contempt and hatred for the stupid and the unlucky is the real problem.
I don't love the Democratic party - they play nice with the Republicans to lock third parties out of local and national elections, they tend to sponsor and support lots of the legislation that does crazy things with copyright and digital rights management, and the nanny state stuff goes too far.
But in fact they do support much better care for children than the Republicans. That's not open to debate - the Republicans ask their supporters to pray that charities will take up the slack left when they cut government programs. But if charity was going to solve this kind of problem, it would have done it already. It never has, which means society needs to vote for policies that will make sure every citizen gets adequate care.
I was bullied badly enough myself, though not nearly as badly as you were. But I'm telling you, I am friends with a few women that were raped and had also been bullied and beaten at other times in their lives, and they swear up, down, and sideways that the two types of events are not comparable.
A sufficiently bad experience will cause some people to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It doesn't affect everyone - some veterans can come home from seeing carnage and losing friends in war and live relatively normal lives, and other veterans flat out cannot. Telling PTSD sufferers some form of "you went though something terrible but you honestly can tough it out, get over it", even if you phrase it diplomatically, does not work. The US military clearly doesn't have a handle on this - if they did, the suicide rate among veterans would be much lower. Many people who experience these kinds of events, whether it's getting raped or watching people die horribly - survive and recover rather quickly. But many do not, and no form of "stop whining" will fix it.
I realize the situation I posited was artificial, and pregnancy and birth are natural. But I don't think the difference matters to the moral quandary. In either case, one person is forced to sacrifice some aspects of their health and their freedom in order to keep another person alive, and (in the case of rape) there was no consent to be put into the position.
I don't think anyone is advocating endless welfare dependence. The whole topic is largely a distraction from larger issues - the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program from the US federal government consumes something like 0.5% of the federal budget. The other 99.5% of underfunded expenses are the problem, not that.
1. If you woke up one morning with tubes connecting one of your arteries to another person's body, and were informed that the person could not create their own blood, but you were obligated to supply blood for them for the next nine months or they would die... what would you do? Would you be morally obligated to spend nine months tied to this person you never met, and had not voluntarily consented to caring for?
2. The Republican Party of the United States claims to represent the Christian belief that life begins at conception. However, by their own standards clearly life ends at birth. Because they'd rather light themselves on fire than support the child's medical costs, food, shelter, clothing, and education after it is born. They seem determined to increase our number of homeless, our number of criminals, and the ranks of the youth gangs. Doesn't this blatant contradiction bother you? This party is trying to get more power based on two morally opposed central platforms: on one side, they oppose public access to abortion and contraception; on the other, they oppose public funding for anything that would support families.
But statutory rape is not consensual, that's the whole point. We as a society hold that a 12 year old girl (or boy) lacks the maturity to consent to sex as an adult. So even if she was willing and enjoyed the sexual encounter, it's still rape.
Likewise, someone given roofies or just stupid enough to get really drunk is no longer coherent enough to consent to sex. Even if the person with roofies in them verbally agrees and has a great sexual encounter it is still rape.
And then you have the threat of violence, or the threat of loss of physical security. The attacker doesn't actually hurt the victim, but the attacker plans on beating the victim to death or tossing them outside naked in a Minnesota winter. There could be no physical signs of injury, and it could be difficult or impossible for the victim to prove that the encounter was not consensual. So in many or most of those cases, there is not enough evidence to convict the attacker. But neither is there enough evidence to convict the accuser for filing fraudulent charges. In some of those cases, the threats really did occur and the resulting sex, even if it was not physically forceful, is still rape.
So "legimate rape" is really "rape", and trying to make a distinction where one does not exist means you're either not thinking carefully about the situation or you're a misogynist.
But the whole point is that sex-that-is-legally-considered-rape is morally equivalent to sex-under-duress. The 14 year old girl is too young to consent to sex, so it's still rape. The girl who has sex with a guy because he'll douse her son in gasoline and light him on fire if she refuses is still being raped. The girl who has sex with a guy because he'll kick her out of their home and she'll risk freezing to death is still being raped. The girl that is drunk out of her mind (maybe because her date put roofies into her drink, but even if she was just stupid and drank too much) is still being raped. A person suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, or an anxiety disorder, or some similar mental problem who relies upon her psychological counselor for aid and gets seduced by their counselor is still being take advantage of by someone in a position of authority. She may believe the sexual encounters are consensual, but that person is abusing his or her position - it is still rape. (And just to be clear, I used "girl" and "she" but the victims could also be men.)
Now you can argue that the age of consent for statutory rape laws in most of the US should be lowered, and I would agree. But outside of that, Akin is trying to make a distinction between two things and there is none. Sex has to be between legal adults, without being intoxicated by legal or illegal drugs, with both people on equal footing (i.e. one not in a position of mentoring or authority over the other), without physical violence, without the threat of physical violence, without the threat of loss of physical safety.
You made my point better than I did. The religious conservatives in the United States need another political party, because the Republican Party might fight like hell to keep that fetus alive, but they will march straight into hell before they lift a finger to help it after it's born.
But you do understand that in many cases the woman would have no interest in undergoing the pregnancy or caring for the child when it was born, right?
So clearly you should vote for a political party that supports state-sponsored health care for women impregnated by rape, and extra state-sponsored funding for the health care, shelter, food, clothing, and education of the child, right?
So what party would that be? Because it sure as FUCKING HELL is not the United States Republican party. They'll hate the woman for aborting the embryo, but they'll hate the baby sucking on the social welfare tit even more.
I think there's a fundamental difference between being beat up and having an orifice or two violated for the sexual gratification of someone else. If you have personally experienced the latter, you might have justification for speaking the way you do.
I haven't, so I'm not going to assume I can downplay the significance of the event by classifying it like any other "run of the mill" beating. Everyone I've met that has undergone both - and I've met more than a few - has clearly indicated that they are not the same thing.
I know this sets the requirements pretty high, but I think it's reasonable to expect our lawmakers to investigate what the legal distinction between "rape" and "forcible rape" is, and vote accordingly. Ryan was either not educated enough to do so, which is a character flaw - or he understood the distinction and chose to support "only forcible rape" provisions intentionally, which is damning.
I believe they're trying to make a distinction between a rape that included a separate physical assault (e.g. the victim was punched and kicked, then raped) versus a rape that used the threat of violence to ensure the victim's compliance but is difficult to prove later (e.g. the attacker told the victim that if she did not comply he would kill her children, or the attacker held a knife to the victim's throat but did not actually cut her with it).
There are, of course, cases when women fabricate accusations of rape for the purposes of blackmail or revenge. However, I doubt Akin and Ryan have enough evidence to assert that most or even a notable minority of "non forcible rapes" fit into that category.
After Germany was wrecked during World War 1, we said FUCK YOU and were rewarded with World War 2. After Germany was wrecked during World War 2, we helped them out - and now they're a stable democracy. We might not always like what the German government does, but it's a lot more truly democratic today than it was during the 1930s or than the Russian government is now.
They're not outlawed. The emissions standards are difficult to meet, but they can be meet. The real problem in the US is that taxes on diesel fuels are higher than on gasoline. So the diesel engine vehicle might use 40% less fuel, but since your cost per gallon is 30% higher the savings are negligible.
Also remember that the United Kingdom uses "imperial gallons" for measurement, which are 20% larger than US gallons. Every so often someone mocks the poor fuel efficiency of economy cars on the US market without realizing the difference.