My dear colleague (and formerly my minister) Lynn Ungar has written a thoughtful piece about the Brock Tuner rape case on Patheos.  I appreciate her deep thinking and opportunity to look at the situation differently, but I have to respectfully disagree with her conclusions.

First, like Lynn Ungar, I want to see large changes in our prison industrial system.  I believe too many nonviolent offenders are given long sentences and this is to the detriment of our society.  I want to see people getting rehab, not jail time, for drug use.  But there are a few groups of people I'm willing to see get long prison sentences.  And one of those groups is rapists.  There are cases where I feel bad for a criminal who will have the rest of their life affected.  Brock Turner isn't one of them. 

I'm not a survivor of rape, but I've lived with the aftermath.  In 1995-6 as a graduate student at the University of Georgia, I lived with two other female students, one of whom I hadn't known before moving in together.  That student had been raped not long before we moved in together.  I didn't know intimately what my roommate was going through in the months that followed.  I just knew how I didn't get to know her because she was curled inside a protective shell.  I just knew how she would panic if I left a door or window unlocked.  I just knew how difficult it was for her to sleep without fear.

My roommate raped by John Alexander Scieszka, a serial rapist who had been previously incarcerated, released, and raped again.  He was the kind of rapist who would go out drinking, and then follow a woman home, climb in her window after she had gone to bed, and rape them. 

In an article about the cases, a former police sergeant who spent fifteen years investigating rapes said this:

Ingram said some rapists started out as Peeping Toms, or fed their clothes fetishes, stealing undergarments from clotheslines or homes before targeting victims. Others were simply opportunists.
   ''They were looking for open windows, unlocked doors, people moving around alone,'' he said. ''They were just looking for the opportunity to prey on someone.''

When I see the pictures of Brock Turner on social media, I see similarities between him and John Alexander Scieszka.  Where they are similar is that they both raped a woman, in both cases they went after an unconscious woman, and in both cases it was a woman they didn't previously know.  Brock Turner's rape is sometimes talked about as a "campus rape" which makes it sound like something similar to "date rape," but he didn't know the woman he raped, and he wasn't dating her.

And there are differences -- perhaps -- between Brock Turner and the serial rapist.  This may have been Brock Turner's first rape.  Quite possibly it was not.  And I believe Brock Turner didn't necessarily set out with rape on his mind, unlike John Alexander Scieszka.  Brock Turner is the kind of rapist, probably, who is a opportunity rapist.  He didn't set out to rape, but he saw the opportunity to rape, and he chose to rape.  But there's absolutely no reason to believe that if he was going to follow one girl out of a party, wait until she fell unconscious, and then rape her behind a dumpster, that he wouldn't do this again and again.  He was simply an opportunist, and he found "the opportunity to prey on someone."

There are occasions when consent might be murky.  When the woman is unconscious isn't one of them.  Brock Turner's rape wasn't a date rape, and it wasn't a case of a woman "changing her mind" and it wasn't a case of "he said/she said."  Let's remember that he was caught in the act of raping an unconscious woman.  There's no implied consent, no revoked consent, no question of consent when a woman is unconscious.  There's no sense of "she seemed to want it" or "she was asking for it" -- she was unable to want, unable to ask, unable to consent.  And Brock Tuner chose to violate her. 
 
Yes, our justice system needs reform.  And some people definitely get sentences they don't deserve, and that's the bigger part of the reform needed.  But surely part of what shows us that it needs reform is when a white affluent college athlete gets a lenient sentence for a heinous crime.  How long a sentence should a rapist get?  I think I'm willing to jail a rapist for at as long as it takes a woman who is raped to fall asleep with the light off, and for at least as long as it takes for her to go to bed without triple-checking the door locks.

Secondly, Lynn Ungar invites us to put ourselves in every part of the situation -- "What if I am also the perpetrator, the one who is willing to take what I want even if it causes suffering to others? What if I am the father, willing to make excuses for the causes as well as the people I love, wanting to protect what I care about even at the expense of those who are outside my circle?"

But not every person is willing to harm people, especially to the point of rape, to get something they want, particularly something as fleeting as sexual satisfaction.  (And not every parent is ready to excuse the heinous acts of a child out of the deep parental love they feel.  Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza's father said to the New Yorker, "I wish he had never been born.")

Something that's important to remember, particularly as Brock Turner continues to deny that he is a rapist and blames alcohol and sexual promiscuity for his situation, is that not all people -- not all men, either -- are rapists.  Most people who get drunk don't rape unconscious women.  Most of us, when we find an unconscious woman, even if we were drunk would at best get her help and at worst ignore her.

In fact, while one in four women will be raped in her lifetime, it's not nearly one in four men doing the raping.  The 2002 study by Lisak and Miller found six percent of men admitted to rape, and almost two thirds of them were repeat offenders.  The odds are that Brock Turner would be one of them if he hadn't been caught.

I appreciate the thought of trying to put myself in Brock Turner's shoes, but the fact is I am not likely to wear those shoes, nor are the numerous men around me who are standing up for women and fighting the rape culture.  I'd rather hold up the idea that most men don't rape and fight the rape culture than the concept that we all have a little rapist inside.

Lastly, I too am sick and tired of the outrage, and also sick and tired of the outrageous.  And there are so many pieces of this story that are outrageous, but one of them is surely the lack of responsibility taken by Brock Turner himself, from the denial of his actions to the concept that what he should do to help society as recompense is talk to groups about "sexual promiscuity."  Yes, I believe in Brock Turner's inherent worth and dignity as a person.  I believe he is a child of God, if there is a God.  And I also believe he has to take some responsibility. 

Brock Turner is more than a "douchebag."  He is a rapist. 

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep I had a dream -- that sort of dream where you're not really completely asleep, but you're not driving the dream with your conscious mind anymore.  I dreamed I swallowed a whistle.  I jerked myself back to full consciousness, and tried falling asleep again, and it happened again.  I swallowed a whistle.  For a few minutes I couldn't shake my brain from bringing this whistle image to me again and again.


How strange as a dream it seemed, but I knew right away what it meant.  I knew, with the first dreaming moment, this wasn't just any whistle that was getting stuck in my craw.  This was a rape whistle.  And it wasn't just any rape whistle.  It was the one given to me when I went to seminary.  That was part of the introduction to Chicago, as I remember it, at Meadville Lombard: Welcome to Chicago.  You're in an area that may be more dangerous than you're used to.  Don't walk alone at night.  Here's a rape whistle.

Dreaming of swallowing the rape whistle was a dream with an instantly clear message to me: we have to stop swallowing the idea as a society that the answer to violence against women is to tell women to protect themselves.

It's a message I've heard for decades, and a message that I've helped share, really, and incorporated into the way I lived my life.  I remember my roommate in at the University of Michigan telling me one night when I was going to be walking somewhere at night, "Put on your bitch face, and carry your keys."  She meant carry your keys like a weapon.  (Funny thing, this is now at least sometimes called "Wolverine keys" but because of the X-Men character, not because we Michigan Wolverines did it.)
And I did.  I put on my most confident, I-know-where-I'm-going-and-I'm-tough-don't-mess-with-me bitch face, and I carried my keys like Wolverine. 

And then, years later, I carried that rape whistle with me everywhere I went for years until it rusted off my key chain.  Think about what that means: it's not uncommon for women in this country to carry with them, at all times when not at home, a symbol of violence against women and their own vulnerability to such. 

During my college years there were annual "Take Back the Night" rallies.  I attended some.  But this way of dealing with violence against women was a fringe thing, a feminist thing. So while we yelled "Take Back the Night," we still walked home in groups.

In college at the University of Michigan I was part of a team called SafeWalk.  We volunteered our time for a few hours a week every week, and went to the library where were dispatched, in teams of two, to go anywhere within a mile or so of campus and walk people, mostly women, from wherever they were to wherever they were going. ( It's interesting to see that at some point the University officially incorporated the service into the U, and now they provide rides up to 3 am, which was later than we could go, because the library closed at 2, so we didn't have our dispatching station after that hour.)  The idea back then was that no person at U of M would have to walk alone at night if they weren't comfortable doing so.  It was a good service.  I'm glad I did it.

But it wasn't the solution. 

I'm not saying to just walk alone at night, to just forgo the escort and the whistle and the Wolverine keys.  I'm saying that for decades we've been telling women this was the normal way of life -- the world is violent, protect yourself.  And what we need to be saying is: We need to change the world.  This is not okay.

It's so good and bad all at once to hear everyone talking about the rape culture, about #yesallwomen, about violence and misogyny.  Good, of course, because our society is talking about it.  Bad, because this is still the way it is.  Bad because this year my congregation had a former member killed in an act of domestic violence, and so it's timely for us to be hearing about this in the culture, but we're also perhaps still grieving and raw to some degree, and so it's a hard time to be talking about it.

But maybe, just maybe, the time has finally come where we can, as a society, stop swallowing the rape whistle and start to really take back the night.

This blogger has been suffering from writer's block.  The problem is, when I think about opening up a page and writing, there's one thing that's been on my mind to write about.  And when I think about that one thing, I've been so boggled and amazed by what's going on that I can't find a way to write coherently.

So, about this war on women...

Now, I can appreciate and respect a pro-life position.  It's theologically consistent, and has a clear and hard line: life begins at conception, and so abortion is murder.  Unless the life of the woman is at stake, so that it's one life vs. another, or unless the fetus is not viable, murder cannot be justified.  That makes sense to me as a stance to take.  I don't agree, but I respect it.  I understand that what the Republicans are trying to express is, in part, the perspective that while rape is horrible and wrong, it doesn't change that abortion is horrible and wrong. 

But there are whole other levels going on here which are not just about whether or not abortion is murder.  That may be what they're trying to express, but they're also expressing a lot more.  What's going on is, at best, a complete lack of understanding of women from certain politicians, or just paternalism mixed with disregard for them, and, at worst and perhaps more likely, a deep misogyny. 

Let's start here at home, in Michigan, where State Rep. Lisa Brown was barred from speaking in the house because of her statement, "I’m flattered you’re all so concerned about my vagina, but no means no."  This barring her wasn't about her being disrespectful (there's plenty of disrespect being thrown around there all the time)--this was about discomfort with women's bodies, and silencing a woman's voice on the issue.  It really was about the word "vagina," and a belief that talking about women's bodies is, well, dirty and bad.  Rep. Mike Callton said so clearly: "It was so offensive, I don't even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company."  We can't really talk about women's bodies--or rape (no means no)--EVEN when the bill on the floor is about abortion.  In fact, when the bill was in front of committee, they allowed no women to speak to it, and only three men (including my feminist UU colleague the Rev. Jeff Liebmann, who gives his account of it here).  This is a paternalism that says women are not capable of making decisions for themselves, and, what's more, they don't really have anything that we need to listen to to say about themselves, either.  To be fair, the press secretary for Michigan House Speaker Jase Bolger said, "It was his judgment at the time that when she finished her statement by referencing her vagina, and then saying ‘no means no,’ that was drawing in a rape reference, and he felt that crossed the line."  So if it wasn't really discomfort about vaginas (and it so was), well, it was talking about rape that was over the line.  And we want to keep rape out of abortion debates, just as we want to keep women's voices out of debates about abortion--and probably just about always.  In all, it's important that we not allow women to be the ones to talk about rape.  That's a man's job.

You can draw a straight line from the situation in Michigan to the statements from Pennsylvania Senate candidate Tom Smith.  Tom Smith was asked how he would tell a female relative who was raped and pregnant from that rape to keep the child.  Tom Smith said he had a "similar" situation in that a female relative had gotten pregnant out of wedlock and had chosen to keep the baby: "I lived something similar to that with my own family. She chose life, and I commend her for that. She knew my views. But, fortunately for me, I didn’t have to ... she chose they way I thought. No don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t rape."  I wish he had finished that sentence in the middle--he didn't have to what?  There's a clear underlying understanding there of that he, the man, is in charge, and fortunately the woman, the lesser being, followed his wishes.  Her decision seems to have been about his views, in the way he sees it, despite his saying it was "fortunate" for him.  When pushed by the reporter if the situations of pregnancy from rape and other non-intended pregnancies really were similar, he said, "No, no, no, but put yourself in a father's position, yes. It is similar."  So what's similar?  The father's perspective, not the woman's experience.  I don't actually think he thinks rape is similar to consensual sex for a woman.  But that's immaterial.  We know and understand that for many people, and it's now in the platform of the Republican party, that rape is immaterial to the abortion issue, because abortion is just wrong, period.  But I really believe Smith is saying more than that.  He's saying that from a father's perspective a situation where a daughter gets pregnant from rape is similar to a daughter getting pregnant from consensual non-marital sex.  The experience of the woman, i.e. rape, is immaterial to his experience, which is all about the results and not about the experience of the woman, the wishes of the woman, the trauma of the woman, at all.  It's straight-up paternalism at its most extreme.  The man, the father, knows what's best for the woman, and her experience, knowledge, wishes, are immaterial.

What's the right answer to the question of what you would say to a daughter who was raped and was now pregnant?  The right answer might be that you wouldn't say anything at first--you would just listen, and care about her experience and her thoughts.