Why would any woman want to be Christian?

[jstrodel]

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.

Well, I appreciate your zeal for human rights. How do you propose to with an accusation of rape and balance that with civil liberties? Saying "feminist" things is not the same as having an answer. I understand the difficult of the issue, and I am not trying to paint feminists in a negative light. I don't know exactly the right way to handle that, but life is complicated.

Have you ever had a relationship with a women in which there were complicated issues that are not really easy to put in a black and white context? Conflicts, things like that. I am not talking about rape, or anything like that, just conflicts. Life is complicated. Women are not always saints.

As for the issue of bars, I have in my own life on at least 6 or 7 occasions had a drunk or high female try and seduce me. These situations are not that simple, weird stuff happens all the time. I have walked outside of a bar and had women walk up to me, so intoxicated and just grab on to me. I've had that happen a lot of times. Life is complicated. There is no reason to side with women every time, they are just as much of a problem as men are.

If atheists care about rape and crazy stuff happening (prostitution, pimping, crazy screwed up exploitative relationships), they should tell women not to abuse drugs and alcohol. I think a lot of the issues center around that. I know women who are strippers now and have prostituted themselves and women who have been in abusive relationships. In every case, drugs and alchohol were involved.

I am not trying to blame the women, but it is a complicated issue. I know that there are times when it isn't and women are just violently raped and there should be a straightforward prosecution.

I would say that anyone who tells women that it is ok to binge drink and says they are a feminist is just a hypocrite.