This is my letter sent to several congressional persons, and the Democratic Women's Caucus, the ACLU and my Congress Reps and Senators.
My tee shirt slogan is now EVERY CHILD HAS A FATHER - SOMEWHERE
It has bothered me for years that men who father children and walk away are generally allowed to avoid any responsibility for the cost of raising the child or share in the loss of freedoms of choice that child rearing places on the responsible parent.
The Republican party's insistence the single women are solely responsible for their pregnancy and their children, even when they conceived in violence, and the insistence that the poor are responsible for their poverty, and their religion of responsibility has bothered me more than it might otherwise since it is coming out of the mouths mostly of men and mostly from the wealthy.
Michigan's rape tax/insurance seems to be about the acme of this sociopathic mind set.
Seriously, there are adults sitting in offices, and meetings and churches thinking about these sick thoughts. They are people of power, and they are scarring the shit out me.
Step quietly over the orange kittens. They are sleeping.
I know you know the law far better than I, but most people don't consider men's financial responsibility when looking at victims of rape, especially when considering a resulting pregnancy, and physical harm that can result in large medical bills from specimen collection, to serious injury, and emotional therapy, to prenatal care, and college.
Why should men in Michigan, or any state, not have to pay for rape insurance, since they, as a group, are responsible for causing the rapes, any more than women who aren’t raped are required to fund an insurance pool for those who are?
From that point of view is not the Michigan rape insurance requirement for women only, a civil rights issue under the equal protection clause?
Males are also victims of rape, yet those potential victims are not required to have insurance.
For every rape victim there is a rapists, for every unwanted pregnancy there is a father.
Men are at minimum 50% of the issue in either instance yet the law only holds one party responsible. And in the case of rape it is the victim who is considered responsible.
Is there any other crime, in the actual criminal statutes, not a civil crime, in which the victim has to pay for the investigation of the crime?
Because if the victim, male or female, goes to ER to have semen collected, they pay for the ER visit, and yet that is primary evidence.
In many states the victim has to pay for the processing of the rape kit as well, if they want the attacker identified. In any other crime the cost of forensics is born by the police departmet.
So, yes, maybe there should be something like rape insurance, but the burden should be borne by both potential perpetrators as well as potential victims.
Please write every congress person and entity you can think of. This law is evil. It is not the first such and will not be the last if we sit quietly.