Why would any woman want to be Christian?

[Esquilax]

An honest statement. I am not trying to argue that women lie about rape often, or argue some sort of crude misogynistic position. Of course, women need to protected by the law. I believe that the vast majority of women who report rapes are honest about it.

Despite this, rape, like other matters, deserve fair criminal procedure. Liberals tend to be strong on advocating for peoples civil liberties (with some exceptions). A good liberal would realize that these civil liberties belong to all people, not only members of groups that are popular to defend. An exceptionally good liberal would realize that even people who are guilty of culturally defined offenses as being more heinous and evil than other offenses are still deserving of civil liberties.

This is the way that the Bible teaches about rape. It does not matter how often women fake a rape testimony, what matters is that people receive a fair trial. This is what Deut 28 is about, it is not about an arbitrarily harsh penalty that is associated with some sex crimes and an arbitrarily low penalty attached to others.

I am not against all aspects of liberalism, but I wish that liberals would be consistent with their application of the value of civil liberties. People accused of rape have civil liberties also.

We're in agreement on the civil liberties issue. The reason we tend to push harder toward women's rights when it comes to rape is because of a one two punch of dishonest shaming and ignorance in the culture about it.

Not only do you have guys like Todd Akin who, without a single iota of knowledge about biology, declare in a public arena that women have magic vaginas that can shut down rape sperm in order to advance a political agenda, but there's more. Women who are the victims of rape have their entire sex lives paraded in front of the court, have the lines of their consent so blurred that it boggles the mind. In what other kind of criminal case would a judge be able to tell the victim that if she wasn't out at night at a bar, she wouldn't have been the victim at all, and have that be adequate reasoning to let her attacker off?

We focus in on these issues because they matter. Because rape is rape no matter what qualifiers you put in front of it. Because as it stands the system can be such a meat grinder that many rapes go unreported, and that's unacceptable. It's not just because we're liberals, or we have an agenda; we've seen an injustice, many of us personally, and we wish to correct it.

So when I hear you talking about X kind of rape, as opposed to Y kind of rape, it sort of makes my blood boil. Rape is rape. That's where the issue should stop.