I woke up this morning and opened my computer, prepared to
be outraged over more domestic attacks against women and our rights.
Representative Alan Dick (c’mon dude, it’s almost too easy…) didn’t disappoint,
but what really caught my attention was the story about the Moroccan girl being
forced to marry her rapist.
And you know what my very first thought was, when I saw the
story posted on Facebook? ‘Jesus fuck, don’t
give the Republicans any more ideas.’
In Morocco, article 475 of their penal code allows a rapist
to escape prosecution if his victim is a minor and he ‘agrees’ to marry her.
Shockingly, the marriage didn’t end well for the 16 year old girl in this story
– she was raped, forced into marriage, beaten repeatedly to the point of drinking
rat poison to end her own life, and was then dragged by her hair through the
streets until she died.
But at least her ‘husband’ is absolved of guilt. I mean, if
she hadn’t been such a slut and provoked him in the first place…
Stories like this make me want to take my uterus and my
ovaries and my dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged and fly off to the fictional
Galt’s Gulch, where I can escape the farcicality of it all and watch the rest
of the world launch itself off the edge and straight into hell.
Because in a society where just the most recent challenges
to our rights and our freedoms include restricted access to birth control,
reduced health care services for lower income women, transvaginal rape by the
government, and the most recent Dick-ish move, suggested permission slips from
a woman’s owner baby-daddy if she wants to access a legal, medical
procedure, how far, really, are we from a situation like Morocco?
I really wouldn’t be surprised if there were some Republican
men out there going ‘huh, well maybe not in the case of minors, but if we just
had rapists marry their victim, she’d be provided for, so she’d have to shut
up, and he’d be ‘punished.’ Problem solved…!’
Though the indignity of being forced to defend over and over
what is already mine, and what is furthermore unassailable for the male half of
the population, makes my stomach churn, I will continue to do so, because for
now, I can.
Seriously. People become so jaded or, worse, distracted by less irrelevant, trivial issues that they may not even realize that their lives are a mere bill passing short of being changed forever.
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Exactly ... one Republican majority in one Evangelical-Christian-supported state could set off a chain reaction so bad it would take years to undo the damage...
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