So, 9 months now I've been posting (and re-posting) the infamous "Republican Rape Advisory Chart", which tracks the idiotic, offensive and flat-out medically/scientifically wrong comments by various members of the GOP on the subject of rape (usually connected in some way to abortion) throughout the years.
Well, in an upcoming issue of Rolling Stone magazine, tennis star Serena Williams proves that not EVERY stupid statement about rape comes from a white, male Republican:
After a stretch of public tranquility, Serena Williams has found controversy once again.
The American tennis star makes explosive comments about the Steubenville rape case in an upcoming issue of Rolling Stone. In the piece, first excerpted by Deadspin, Stephen Rodrick describes how he was watching television with Williams when news of the infamous Ohio rape trial came on the screen.
“Do you think it was fair, what they got? They did something stupid, but I don’t know. I’m not blaming the girl, but if you’re a 16-year-old and you’re drunk like that, your parents should teach you—don’t take drinks from other people. She’s 16, why was she that drunk where she doesn’t remember? It could have been much worse. She’s lucky. Obviously I don’t know, maybe she wasn’t a virgin, but she shouldn’t have put herself in that position, unless they slipped her something, then that’s different.”
When I read about this, a similarly stupid statement about rape from an equally surprising source came to mind: Whoopi Goldberg, who actually tried to defend Roman Polanski 4 years ago when he was (finally) arrested in Switzerland:
Whoopi: "I know it wasn't rape-rape. It was something else but I don't believe it was rape-rape. He went to jail and and when they let him out he was like "You know what this guy's going to give me a hundred years in jail I'm not staying, so that's why he left."
As Jezebel put it in the linked article at the time:
What is worrisome about Whoopi's argument is that she refuses to call a 43 year old man having sex with an unconscious 13 year old girl "rape".
Anyway, I just figured that given how much attention I've been bringing to the moronic things that mostly white, mostly male, almost exclusively Republicans have said about the subject, I had a responsibility to call some attention to incidents that don't match up with that profile.
So, there you have it: Two black, female Democrats (well, Williams doesn't vote since she's a Jehovah's Witness, but she said in the past that she'd vote for Obama if she did) are on record as saying something offensive about rape.
Of course, as gossamer1234 just noted in the comments, neither of these women are elected officials in a position to actually vote on public policy or legal rights.
Meanwhile, here's a sampling of the other 99% of such statements (currently at 43 examples and counting)...