Where's the Kangaroo?

Sort of a metaphor for justice in our liberal totalitarian wonderland, where politics determines justice.

In this case it was a male (Boo!!!) accused of rape, who was denied because Due Process because, as Hillary explained, women must be believed (Yay!!!) unless they accuse her husband of rape (Boo!!), in which case they are sluts or nuts or part of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy (Yay!!!).

//After a brief opening statement by Grant Davis-Denny, who represented the University of California system, Justice Huffman interrupted to express his concern with the basic unfairness of the UCSD system. The two other judges quickly chimed in their agreement. Then Huffman noted, “When I . . . finished reading all the briefs in this case, my comment was, ‘Where’s the kangaroo?’”//

Religion and Rape.

BY JENNIFER ROBACK MORSE

And why the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception matters.

//But I have a deeper concern about the overall rhetorical strategy in this article. Dr. Tarico wants to speak of religion in general, and sweeps Catholicism into a bucket with all sorts of religions. She is quite correct to see that in religion after religion, the gods come to earth and rape women. Indeed, this is part of the general pattern of the gods indulging themselves and doing what they like with humans.

Atheists sometimes sneer that "man creates god in his own image." And so we do. Quite regularly, as a matter of fact.

And when we do create god in our own image, this is what we come up with: gods who rape, pillage, get drunk, get jealous, make war, and generally do whatever their superior power allows them to get away with. Alpha males love this kind of stuff. I believe that is why the patterns Dr. Tarico points out are so consistent across time and space. Elites of all societies love having religious sanction to use their power without restraint.

All except Christianity. In Christianity, God sends a gentle messenger to ask Mary to be the mother of His Son. She could have said no. In Christianity, God comes to earth, and allows us to do what we want to Him. We do the worst things we can think of, and He takes it. He triumphs over our worst sins, and over death itself. Christianity most specifically says that the Elites do not get to do whatever they can get away with.

"One of these things is not like the others." So unlike the others, that it is hard to imagine that someone just made it up. One might even suppose that God revealed Himself to us, since He knew we would not figure it out on our own.

The danger of attacking "religion in general" is that it undermines the one religion that has the potential to put the brakes on the rich and powerful. Indeed philosophers from Machiavelli to Nietzsche have understood as much. They hated Christianity precisely for the restraints it places on the Prince and the Uber Mensch. Sweep Christianity away, especially the Catholic version, and all that will be left standing is the paganism that Dr. Tarico rightly fears.//

If only women could be teachers....
Maybe there is more to those female teacher/abuse cases.

Maybe women shouldn't be teachers.

So why are men suddenly showing up as victims? Every comedian has a prison rape joke and prosecutions of sexual crimes against men are still rare. But gender norms are shaking loose in a way that allows men to identify themselves—if the survey is sensitive and specific enough—as vulnerable. A recent analysis of BJS data, for example, turned up that 46 percent of male victims reported a female perpetrator.

The final outrage in Stemple and Meyer’s paper involves inmates, who aren’t counted in the general statistics at all. In the last few years, the BJS did two studies in adult prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities. The surveys were excellent because they afforded lots of privacy and asked questions using very specific, informal, and graphic language. (“Did another inmate use physical force to make you give or receive a blow job?”) Those surveys turned up the opposite of what we generally think is true. Women were more likely to be abused by fellow female inmates, and men by guards, and many of those guards were female. For example, of juveniles reporting staff sexual misconduct, 89 percent were boys reporting abuse by a female staff member. In total, inmates reported an astronomical 900,000 incidents of sexual abuse.//

Weird, surprising, totally unexpected....I'm skeptical but filing it away.

Sad mother's day.

It's easy to sympathize with everyone in this story, but it does suggest that perhaps forgiveness might be an answer.

Date rape victim refuses to meet daughter.

From the "Truth is stranger than fiction" file.

"A man enters the dark bedroom of an unmarried woman after seeing her boyfriend leave late at night, and has sexual intercourse with the woman while pretending to be the boyfriend. Has the man committed rape? Because of historical anomalies in the law and the statutory definition of rape, the answer is no, even though, if the woman had been married and the man had impersonated her husband, the answer would be yes."

People v. Morales, 2013 Cal. App. LEXIS 2 (Cal. App. 2d Dist. Jan. 2, 2013)

Isn't this a plot device from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure?

Pregnancies from forcible rapes are rare?

That's what this post from the Christian Life Resources argues, and supports with the explanation that the reason isn't some magical, mysterious gift of feminity but that the very brutality of rape causes trauma:

First, let's define the term "rape." When pro-lifers speak of rape pregnancies, we should commonly use the phrase "forcible rape" or "assault rape," for that specifies what we're talking about. Rape can also be statutory. Depending upon your state law, statutory rape can be consensual, but we're not addressing that here.

A relatively new category is "date rape." For some reason this is supposed to be different, but, forcible rape is rape, regardless of whether it occurs on a date or behind the bushes. If a college woman is raped on a date, she should undergo a medical examination and treatment, just as she would in the aftermath of an assault rape. It is not a separate category.

Assault rape pregnancies are extremely rare. Most pro-lifers have heard this comment, but too often cannot back it up with facts. A candidate for office in the State of Arkansas made this comment before the last elections. He was roundly criticized and ridiculed by the opposing candidate and the media. Unfortunately, there was no evidence that he offered substantive proof to back up his claim that rape pregnancies were rare.

How many forcible rapes result in a pregnancy? The numbers claimed have ranged the entire spectrum of possibilities. Some feminists have claimed as high as 5 to 10 percent, which is absurd. One problem has been the lack of available studies and accurate statistics. Often women do not admit to having been raped. On the other hand, it has been known that women, pregnant from consensual intercourse, have later claimed rape. Is it possible to know the actual facts?

There have been some studies. In the statistical abstract of the US in 1989, there were 90,000 rapes reported in the United States. (Bureau of Census Table #283)

Another study was from the U.S. Justice Department, which surveyed 49,000 households annually between the years 1973-1987. In 1973, it reported 95,934 completed rapes. In 1987, the figure was 82,505. The study stated that only 53% were reported to police. Factoring this in, the totals were 181,000 rapes in 1973 and 155,000 in 1987. In August 1995, the US Justice Department, using a different study with different questions, returned a result of 170,000 completed rapes plus 140,000 attempted rapes.

There are approximately 100,000,000 females old enough to be at risk for rape in the United States. If we calculate on the basis of 100,000 rapes, that means that one woman in 1,000 is raped each year. If we calculate on the basis of 200,000 rapes, that means that one woman in 500 is raped each year.

Now for the important question. How many rape pregnancies are there? The answer is that, according to statistical reporting, there are no more than one or two pregnancies resultant from every 1,000 forcible rapes.

But, does it make sense? Let's look, using the figure of 200,000 rapes each year.
• Of the 200,000 women who were forcibly raped, one-third were either too old or too young to get pregnant. That leaves 133,000 at risk for pregnancy.
• A woman is capable of being fertilized only 3 days (perhaps 5) out of a 30-day month. Multiply our figure of 133,000 by three tenths. Three days out of 30 is one out of ten, divide 133 by ten and we have 13,300 women remaining. If we use five days out of 30 it is one out of six. Divide one hundred and thirty three thousand by six and we have 22,166 remaining.
• One-fourth of all women in the United States of childbearing age have been sterilized, so the remaining three-fourths come out to 10,000 (or 15,000).
• Only half of assailants penetrate her body and/or deposit sperm in her vagina,1 so let's cut the remaining figures in half. This gives us numbers of 5,000 (or 7,500).
• Fifteen percent of men are sterile, that drops that figure to 4,250 (or 6,375).
• Fifteen percent of non-surgically sterilized women are naturally sterile. That reduces the number to 3,600 (or 5,400).
• Another fifteen percent are on the pill and/or already pregnant. That reduces the number to 3,070 (or 4,600).
• Now factor in the fact that it takes 5-10 months for the average couple to achieve a pregnancy. Use the smaller figure of 5 months to be conservative and divide the avove figures by 5. The number drops to 600 (or 920).
• In an average population, the miscarriage rate is about 15 percent. In this case we have incredible emotional trauma. Her body is upset. Even if she conceives, the miscarriage rate will be higher than in a more normal pregnancy. If 20 percent of raped women miscarry, the figure drops to 450 (or 740).

Finally, factor in what is certainly one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that's physical trauma. Every woman is aware that stress and emotional factors can alter her menstrual cycle. To get and stay pregnant a woman's body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain that is easily influenced by emotions. There's no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape. This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy. So what further percentage reduction in pregnancy will this cause? No one knows, but this factor certainly cuts this last figure by at least 50 percent and probably more. If we use the 50 percent figure, we have a final figure of 225 (or 370) women pregnant each year. These numbers closely match the 200 that have been documented in clinical studies.

So assault rape pregnancy is extremely rare. If we use the figure of 200, it is 4 per state per year. Even if we use a figure of 500, we're talking about only ten per state, per year. In the United States in one year, there are more than 6 million pregnancies. Roughly 3 million eventuate in live birth, 1.5 million are aborted and 500,000 miscarry. And so while each assault rape pregnancy is a tragedy for the mother (not for the baby, though), we can with confidence say that such pregnancies amount to a minuscule fraction of the total annual pregnancies in the United States. Further, less than half of assault rape pregnancies are aborted, even though that course of action tends to be vigorously pushed by those around the woman. 2,3

Assuming this information is accurate, and the sources seem dated, those are some surprising statistics, i.e., 15% of the population is naturally sterile? Really?

Also, less than half of assault rape pregnancies are aborted? There have to be more recent studies than 1979 and 1980.

Holding Paper - The Catholic Church has been a force for Good.

The Catholic Church changed perceptions of rape:

Destroying another man’s clothes, injuring his cattle and raping his wife. These three acts, which viewed through modern eyes seem highly different, were all considered vandalism against a man’s property in the early Middle Ages.

Thanks to the Catholic Church, however, this weird view changed during the Middle Ages.

In line with the church gaining influence on society, helped along by cultural trends, the judicial perception of raped women changed.

Suddenly women were regarded as individuals who should be compensated by the rapist for the injuries he had caused.

Helle Møller Sigh, a researcher at the Department of Culture and Society at Aarhus University, has studied the Danish versions of the Norse Laws, which were written down between the 1170s and the 1240s.

“We’re seeing a change in the legislation, in which rape goes from being a violation against the household – the woman’s husband or her father – to being listed as a separate crime which violates the woman,” she says.

“This is in no small way due to the influence of the Catholic Church, which wanted to create a peaceful and civilised society and help the weak, including women.”

Church's Power Changed the Perception of Women

Before the Catholic Church started to gain influence on Danish culture in the Middle Ages, women were commonly regarded as a man’s property.

In the so-called ‘Scanian Law’ the rape of a woman was naturally considered as vandalism. So it was the husband of the raped woman who should be compensated by the rapist – not the raped woman.

But as the church began to gain a foothold in Denmark, it started to influence the country’s legislation. The Bible had provided people of the church with some clear ideas of what was right and wrong, and it was these ideas that became laws which could create a certain order in society.

Changing the attitude towards women was part of the church’s policy.

By engaging with local traditions and slowly influencing them in a Christian direction, it was easier to get people to accept the spillover effect that Christianity had on the laws.

“If the laws hadn’t been rooted in society, no-one would have taken them seriously and they would have vanished,” says Sigh.

“But society needs rules, and the church provided these rules. The rules were always adapted to local tradition and custom to ensure that they were rooted in society.”

The King Jumped on the Bandwagon

The reason the church was interested in changing the perception of rape was that this enabled it to point out that the crime was a violation against the woman. In this way the church could ensure that the rapist was convicted of the violation, something which made society more civilised.

The church had a ‘peace ideology’. This meant, for instance, that there was a wish to replace the right to take the law into your own hands with a fine system, and that the weak people in society should be helped.

“And of all people, it’s fair to say that women back then were among ‘the weak’,” says Sigh.

Since it was in the king’s interest to have a peaceful and harmonious society, he was prepared to comply with the church’s peace ideology.

The more peaceful the society, the easier it was for him to govern. So he did not oppose to the church’s view on rape being written into the law books.