Rape And Truth

Dennis Prager is an astute and eloquent observer of the human condition. In Worse Than Wrong, he dissects Representative Akin’s mindflub. An excerpt:

While he should not have used the term “legitimate rape,” he could have explained later that, given the expanded definitions of rape, not all claims of “rape” are truly rape. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for “Feminist Perspectives on Rape,” for example, states that “we must recognize that, in some cases, ‘yes’ also means no. . . . The man may threaten to sue for custody of their children, to derail her green card application, to evict her, or simply to sulk and make her life miserable for days should she refuse to have sex. Which (if any) such nonviolent coercive pressures should be regarded as rape, either morally or legally, is a matter of some controversy.”

That would have largely ended the issue. And he could have further noted that Republicans generally incline toward harsher penalties for violent crime than do Democrats.

However, as usual there are deeper issues with which to contend and Prager, also as usual, does an outstanding job of revealing those issues and thus why Akin’s candidacy is no longer viable.

Read the rest and be edified (or, if you’re a liberal, angered).