Expanding Rape

On 2013-01-01, the US Department of justice greatly expanded the definition of rape to include:

• sexual violence against men.
• sex when one partner was mentally incapacitated e.g. drunk, stoned, on drugs, mentally ill or retarded.
• when one partner is under legal age.

Here is how I see it:

• I can see adding in sexual violence against men, but not the others. Rape should imply violence. Watering it down with other lesser crimes make a rape mean less. The lesser crimes should have a different name.
• Even insects are capable of giving assent to sex. We should not pretend consent is the exclusive preserve of high-functioning humans. We should not use it as a back door way to be cruel to retarded people by preventing them from having sex when they are clearly as eager as anyone else. It is one thing to prevent pregnancy and quite another to deny sexual pleasure. Everyone gives consent to sex after some wine to partners they might otherwise reject. Why do you think men wine and dine their dates? Such a law makes illegal what for millennia has been considered fair play.
• When a barely illegal teen stalks an adult and the adult fails to fight off the advances, that surely is a totally different order of crime from an adult stalking and sexually assaulting a child. We should not be calling them the same thing or imposing the same punishment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)