It was a good and bad week for victims of sexual assault and rape. While former House Speaker Hastert was being sentenced to 15 months (yup, only 15 months after the judge declared him a “serial child molester”) for molesting young boys when he coached as a wrestler, the Oklahoma court shocked everyone with the declaration that state law does not criminalize oral sex with a victim who is completely unconscious.
Right, why didn’t we think of that? An unconscious person is completely capable of giving consent so why prosecute someone who took advantage of the VERY fact that the victim was unconscious and orally sodomized her?
I have to be brutally honest here: some days the fight to make folks understand what constitutes violation of a person’s body seems so hopeless. On days like these, I feel I am transported to the hell holes of Pakistan, India and other countries where rape and other forms of violence against women is a daily fact of life. My mind cannot accept the fact that a verdict of that magnitude was issued by a court in the United States. It seems like the work of moron village elders and other local leaders, who need five witnesses to prove a rape, not that of a judicial body in the United States.
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