[Vision2020] "Legitimate" Rape: Male Honor vs. Women's Rights

[Nicholas Gier]

Dear Visionaries:


This is my radio commentary/column for the week.  I knew that I could put
to good use Wilson's Great Commission "penetrate, colonize, plant." The
full version is attached.


Akin is losing by a large margin in Missouri, and RealClearPolitics is now
projecting a 52 majority in the Senate.  Romney may take down the entire
GOP ticket a notch everywhere.


Nick

*
*

*“Legitimate” Rape: Male Honor vs. Women’s Rights*



In the Book of Judges the Levite allows his woman to be gang raped by a mob
of Benjamites rather than be raped himself.  In retaliation the Israelites
nearly annihilate their brother tribe. The remaining 11 tribes are
forbidden to give their daughters in marriage, but they do encourage the
Benjamites to kidnap the daughters of Shiloh. The restoration of an
Israelite tribe is based on the rape of hundreds of young women.


Lot also offered his daughters to the Sodomites to protect his guests, so
the main issue is not the abuse of women but the honor of men.  As Andrew
Solomon states: “Historically, rape has been seen less as a violation of a
woman than as a theft from a man to whom that woman belonged, either her
husband or her father, who suffered an economic loss and an insult to his
honor.”



In the Renaissance, wedding chests were frequently decorated with images of
the Sabine women being ravished, and we must ask ourselves what message
this offered to the bride and groom. It certainly would warn the bride that
the groom has, as local pastor Douglas Wilson claims, “a right to
penetrate,” and she has a duty to “receive, surrender, and accept.”


St. Augustine offered a perverse moral lesson in the rape of Christian
women when the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410. Incredibly, the great Church
father suggests that rape could save women from the sin of pride.  Some
women may have “some lurking infirmity which might have betrayed them into
a proud and contemptuous bearing, had they not been subjected to the
humiliation that befell them in the taking of the city.”


Blaming rape on the victim rather than the rapist goes back as far as
Hammurabi, whose, as Andrew Solomon reports, “describes rape victims as
adulterers; English law of the seventeenth century takes a similar
position. In Puritan Massachusetts, any woman pregnant through rape was
prosecuted for fornication.”



The king’s right of access to all females was certainly present in the
glory days of David and Solomon, who possessed 700 wives and 300
concubines. When David saw Bathsheba bathing, his lust was quickly
satisfied by royal command. David’s punishment was that his God commanded
that one of David’s wives have public sex with a man he knows.



“Top male” access to women still continues among some of our presidents
(the Kennedys and Clinton) and some pious preachers. All males used to have
unconditional sexual license with their wives, and marital rape is still
not illegal in 140 countries. In 1975 South Dakota was the first state give
its women the rights of refusal, but North Carolina lingered until 1993.


               Many conservative Christians, such as local pastor Douglas
Wilson, still insist that the husband must be the lord of his household.
Criminalizing marital rape would, in Wilson’s words, undermine “the concept
of authority and submission in marriage.” Would Wilson ever command that a
congregate who commits adultery must follow God’s example and have his wife
engage in public sex?


                A 2005 survey showed that 34 percent of Britons—men and
women together—believed that women, because of their actions and/or dress,
were responsible for their attacks.  Recent studies show that 43 percent of
American college men believe that it is OK to coerce women to have sex.

*
*

*               *In backing off from his atrocious remarks about
“legitimate” rape, Missouri Congressman Todd Akin said that he meant to say
“forcible” rape.  This phrase was in a bill co-sponsored by Reps. Paul Ryan
and Todd Akin, in which abortions are allowed only in cases of “forcible”
rape.  The clear implication is that some women who claim to have been
raped have somehow consented to the act.


               Ryan now claims that the phrase “forcible rape” was “stock
language,” and that he supported its deletion after wide-spread objections.
The FBI uses “forcible” rape to distinguish it from the crime of statutory
rape. This “stock language” simply does not work for anti-choice
legislators. This would mean that adult rape victims who were really forced
could get an abortion, but underage girls could not.


               In their attempts to control (even to penetrate with vaginal
probes) women’s bodies, far too many American politicians still stand as a
threat to the human rights of women. Especially precarious are those of low
socio-economic status, where most of the rapists and their victims are
found.


               Mitt Romney’s strict anti-abortion stance and plan to defund
Planned Parenthood and other programs for women will further erode the
basics rights of half the American population.



Nick Gier taught philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.
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