Ken Buck: The Pro-Rape Lobby

Some people, many of whom I don’t share much common ground with, get all upset when I use terms like “pro-rape lobby.” I’m late to the Ken Buck story and Feministing and Pandagon have written at length, so I’ll summarize, rather than repeat.

Here’s the facts. The woman was so drunk she was in and out of consciousness. She pushed the rapist away. She thinks she probably said no, but she was too drunk to be sure. The rapist admits she said no. The rapist admits that when he finished, he tried to wake her up to apologize — and couldn’t.

Those are the facts from the police report, and I’m getting them from the transcript of the woman’s meeting with then-Weld County DA Ken Buck, now the Republican candidate for the Senate in Colorado.

Those are the only salient facts. Ken Buck refused to prosecute. I won’t go into the excuses he made, because they’re distractions. They are just bullshit. Ken Buck decided not to prosecute, when the guy confessed, because he didn’t want to. As a friend of mine says, “exercises of power, and excuses therefore.” Media moguls cloak their excuses in “the audience …”, consumer products companies blame “the consumers …”, and prosecutors blame “juries in this county …”

So, about this term “pro-rape lobby.” I said what it was when I first used the term, at Amanda Hess’s old digs at the Washington Citypaper:

What is clear from this thread and others is that there is a very real pro-rape lobby. They talk the language of disbelieving, but when push comes to shove . . . these trolls really do understand that women get raped when they are most vulnerable—but they are in favor of it. … They’re not really in denial—that’s a facade they drop when pressed. In fact, they’re just pro-rape. They think it ought to be open-season for predators on certain women in certain circumstances.

Perhaps there are some rapes that a guy like Ken Buck would prosecute, but there clearly are whole categories that he won’t, and those categories are the majority of rapes in the US (no, I’m not discounting prison rape, but even with our huge prison population there are not enough people in prison to make prison rape more common than the most common type, serial predators raping aquaintances who are under the influence of alcohol.)

That’s the pro-rape lobby. It’s not that they don’t believe the victims. The victim could come forward with a taped confession, a notarized confession, a pack of witnesses — it’s not about belief. Because even when the rapist supports the victim’s account, as he did here, the pro-rape lobby are the people that don’t care that it’s true, that don’t care that it’s nonconsensual, who don’t care that it makes out a violation of the statue, because they really don’t think that certain kinds of rape — against certain kinds of women, or women in certain circumstances, is wrong. They’re perhaps against some rapes, the kind where the rapist jumps out of the bushes with a knife, maybe — but the rest, they’re for. They don’t think most rapes should be crimes, they don’t think the rapists who commit them should go to prison. They’re the pro-rape lobby.

For that reason, anyone who thinks that my use of the term “pro-rape lobby” for hardcore apologists is over-the-top, is just plain wrong.