Dreams Of Noise

If babies had guns they wouldn't be aborted.

• First, of course, came the NRA's repugnant ad (and their remarkable bullshit response to everyone's disgust).
• I'm waiting for a callback from a U-M clinic (no big, about a procedure I'll have next month).
• I'm trying to wrestle with writing some, y'know, music.
• A woman who was my housemate back in the late 80s passed away, and we were never close and I hadn't seen her in years but now I'm the only survivor of that household.
• And then goddamn Rush has to open his yap:

  You know how to stop abortion? Require that each one occur with a gun.

A California appeals court overturned the rape conviction of a man who authorities say pretended to be a sleeping woman's boyfriend before initiating intercourse, ruling that an arcane law from 1872 doesn't protect unmarried women in such cases.

A panel of judges reversed the trial court's conviction of Julio Morales and remanded it for retrial, in a decision posted Wednesday from the Los Angeles-based court.

Morales had been sentenced to three years in state prison. He was accused of entering a woman's bedroom late one night after her boyfriend had gone home and initiating sexual intercourse while she was asleep, after a night of drinking.

The victim said her boyfriend was in the room when she fell asleep, and they'd decided against having sex that night because he didn't have a condom and he had to be somewhere early the next day.

Morales pretended to be her boyfriend in the darkened room, and it wasn't until a ray of light from outside the room flashed across his face that she realized he wasn't her boyfriend, according to prosecutors.

"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," Judge Thomas L. Willhite Jr. wrote in the court's decision.

scifantasy

admnaismith

old_fortissimo

Rep. Todd Akin, a tea party candidate who is challenging incumbent Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill in the closely watched race, was asked in a local television interview about whether he supports access to abortion in the case of rape.

"If abortion could be considered in case of, say, a tubal pregnancy [which threatens the mother’s life], what about in the case of rape?" asked KTVI host Charles Jaco, in a clip that was disseminated by Talking Points Memo. "Should it be legal or not?"

"It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare,” Akin said, referring to conception following a rape. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child."

According to a 1996 study by the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. The journal put the national rape-related pregnancy rate at 5% among victims age 12 to 45.

The original post said, "this sort of thing should be said by a woman, of course, but I don't know if he'd listen to her, 'cause that's just how he rolls," and pocketnaomi pointed out in comments that, while I was trying to make it clear I didn't speak for all or even any women, it's as much the duty of men to speak out against this bullshit as it is the duty of women.