ROMNEY WORDSWORTH - An Oklahoma Court of Appeals has dismissed a rape prosecution against a man who admitted receiving oral sex from a drunk girl. The facts of the case are as follows:
A 17-year-old boy volunteered to give a 16 year old girl a ride home. The two had been drinking in a Tulsa park with a group of friends when it became clear that the girl was badly intoxicated. Witnesses recalled that she had to be carried into the defendant’s car. Another boy, who briefly rode in the car, recalled her coming in and out of consciousness.
The boy later brought the girl to her grandmother’s house. Still unconscious, the girl was taken to a hospital, where a test put her blood alcohol content above .34 (the legal limit is .10 to drive a vehicle). She awoke as staff were conducting a sexual assault examination. The boy claimed to investigators that the girl had consented to performing oral sex. The girl said she didn’t have any memories after leaving the park. Tulsa County prosecutors charged the young man with forcible oral sodomy. The case was thrown out by the trial court, and the State of Oklahoma appealed. The dismissal was upheld by the Oklahoma Court of Appeals by unanimous decision. The Appellate Court held in relevant part:
“Forcible sodomy cannot occur where a victim is so intoxicated as to be completely unconscious at the time of the sexual act of oral copulation,” the decision read. Its reasoning, the court said, was that the statute listed several circumstances that constitute force, and yet was silent on incapacitation due to the victim drinking alcohol. “We will not, in order to justify prosecution of a person for an offense, enlarge a statute beyond the fair meaning of its language.”
This reasoning is significant because it is a rebuke of current rules of consent prevalent on college campuses, and pushed by the Obama Justice Department. Those rules hold that women are insulated from their own actions, and can claim a man “raped” them even if they actively seduced a man while drunk. Men, on the other hand, are charged with the responsibility of being in control of themselves no matter what their state of inebriation might be, and are responsible to know when a woman is drunk and to refuse to have sexual relations with an inebriated woman on grounds that a drunk woman cannot give valid consent. Men are expected to be in strict control of their own actions even when drunk, and even if a woman wants to play a version of Red Light-Green Light while in coitus.
It is a very one sided criminal code that puts all the responsibility on men and requires men to protect women from themselves and their own self-destructive behavior.
It was this theory that was advanced by prosecutors, who argued that a drunk girl could not give valid consent. The problem with this is that it was the girl herself who got drunk in the first place. Very drunk, in fact, with a blood alcohol level of .34. That is enough booze to give even a sumo wrestler a buzz.
I give the court credit for treating the girl in this case the same way a man would be treated. You can’t claim inebriation as a defense to committing a crime if you yourself knowingly got drunk. It is just as wrong for a woman to claim a crime was committed when she got so drunk she couldn’t even remember what happened. At least she was honest about that part. Because she had no memory, there was no one who could give testimony that would contradict the boy’s account.
The Feminists like to claim that feminism is about equality. Well, this is what equality looks like. If you drink like a fish, you will be held accountable for your own reckless behavior. Men shouldn’t be held to be responsible from protecting women for their own bad decisions. Not every man, or even most men, have degrees in toxicology. We shouldn’t have to walk around with a breathalyzer machine to determine if a woman hitting on us or asking for sex isn’t too drunk to know what she is doing.