Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to re: 14

OK.
Mary Anne — (archived)

I can go for conflicting testimony, because the case is unfolding as we argue.

The concept of supporting one's political allies in the face of scandal I can also agree with, since it happens all the time.

The whole idea that Democrats support deviance as a matter of party policy is a canard of the social conservative wing of the Republican Party. The Democrats support equal protection under the law for people who have been descriminated against based on race, gender, creed (yes -- as much as the Christian fundamentalists want to make it look otherwise), and sexual orientation. If social conservatives want to define homosexuality or feminism as deviance, that is their choice. It doesn't make it so.

Re: The Vagina Monologues: The portion of the play you cite does indeed speak of a young girl, certainly less than 16, though it was dubbed in (visibly) as 16 for the HBO version of the play, seduced by a woman in her 20s. It's only a part of the whole play, and that portion is preceded by the rest of the story of this girl, from an interview by the author while the girl (then a woman) lived in a homeless shelter. Her mother humiliated her for any interest in her sexual organ and she suffered visible injuries to her vagina of both an accidental and a deliberate nature before the age of 12, and while at her father's house when she was 13, she was raped by his drunken friend. Her father shot him in the act, paralyzing him and covering the two of them with blood. That was her sexual initiation. The following year, she was seduced by an adult woman in what was the first experience of sexual tenderness she ever experienced. Of course it was wrong of the adult to do this. That the woman whose experience this was didn't tell it that way only makes sense in the context of the brutality of her early life. There's a bigger lesson here than "promoting deviance": it's "the wages of violence". When people are brutalized, mere abuse can seem like kindness. Without the whole story, you don't see that.

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