I forward this interesting item because some of you may not be on the moveon list.
Yeah, I read about this a while ago. UN-BE-LEAVABLE. I feel like I fell asleep and woke up on a different planet. Rape if the woman is married but not if she isn't? What???!!! Did I read that right?
Are we back to treating women like property again? So if she has a master (husband), there is a victim (the husband) but if she doesn't then no harm, no foul? What about the good old days of yore when the father could claim damages? Oh, yeah. I get it now. We have eliminated the dowry concept so the father has no damages to claim, is that it? And, of course, the damage to her has no value because . . . . why . . . because she is not a sentient being?
One year forward and 3,000 years back.
Nina
Two years ago, Assemblyman Katcho Achadjian, R-San Luis Obispo, introduced a bill to close the loophole but it was blocked in the Senate. I believe it was ABC News who uncovered the reason: a Senate committee was blocking any changes to the Penal Code because of prison overcrowding! (CA prisons are so overcrowded the Federal Court found them to be "cruel and unusual punishment".)
Harland Harrison
Sorry, but I disagree, Rape is already a difficult offense to define.
Expanding the law to include rape by trickery or impersonation creates too
wide and broad a gap.
Suppose a man tells a woman that he has a million dollars and she has
intercourse with him in reliance of that statement.
Then it turns out that he has only $100,000. Can she claim that this was
raped by fraud or trickery and have him arrested and prosecuted?
You can say that this is ridiculous but where do you draw the line?
California already has one of the broadest rape laws of any of the 50
states. I doubt that any other state would have taken this case as far as
it went. Here the woman said that she had intercourse with the man because
she believed that he was somebody else. Was that really rape? This supposed
"loophole" should not be closed.
Sam Sloan
.
Sam raises a very good point. I agree the married/unmarried double standard is archaic and should be thrown out, but I would tend to go the other direction and throw out the law that says someone can be found guilty of rape if he tricked a person into sex by impersonation. That is more an issue of fraud than of rape. To treat it as rape would be like treating a situation in which someone convinces you to give them some money under false pretenses as a case of armed robbery.
It could also be tempting for a married woman caught by her husband having extra-marital sex to lie and say, "Oh, I thought it was you". That should be an issue for the two of them to sort out, not something that results in a third person being charged with rape because someone was afraid to admit infidelity.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))