UNITED STATES
Waiting for Godot to Leave
Todd Akin issued a very heart-felt and simple apology for his statement of a few weeks back. In an interview, he had asserted regarding conception and rape, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down”, which angered folks for two reasons
Did Akin imply with the phrase “legitimate rape” that some rapes are not legitimate? Was he implying that statutory rape, for example, is not “legitimate rape”?
Was he implying that if a woman conceives during a rape that somehow that rape was not “legitimate”?
And now just this week Fr. Benedict Groeschel has stumbled into the subject in a similar manner, by saying that sometimes a vulnerable adult can be “seduced” by a minor as young as age 14.
Fr. Groeschel’s comment raised a firestorm of protest, and Fr. Groeschel quickly issued his own simple and sincere apology and retraction.
But both the Akin case and the Fr. Groeschel case have something in common – the implication that statutory rape is anything other than rape plain and simple. As a Facebook friend commented to me, “It is a legal fiction that statutory rape and sodomy are always non-consensual.”
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