100% agreed.Netrigan said:To better illustrate what I think that sign was going toward. The Steubenville Rape Case.
A girl got incredibly drunk and was raped by two football players when she wasn't capable of intelligible speech, much less consent to sex.
Yet many people focused on her getting that drunk, as if rape was just one of those things which naturally happens when you pass out drunk somewhere. People made this point so heavily, it often sounded like they were excusing the two boys who raped her.
And, yes, you do have to be careful getting that drunk anywhere. There's a bit of an object lesson to be had here. Getting insensibly drunk is never a smart thing, regardless of gender. But it doesn't make you responsible for the actions of others.
But those two boys still made the decision to rape her. The responsibility is 100% on them. Her being drunk doesn't in any way excuse their actions. At all. Not even a tiny, tiny bit. They're rapist assholes.
Being that she couldn't give consent, or any intelligible speech or that matter, the action was done without consent and thus was rape. Problem is, most cases of "I was drunk so it was rape" aren't about the ones who passed out drunk. If you are passed out, or completely incoherent, you can no longer give consent so yeah, anything you do with them would be by definition rape.
Instead it becomes an issue of giving consent while intoxicated and influenced by alcohol and whether or not that is legally acceptable consent. Drinking affects decision making processes and can make a bad decision seem less so. Thus in order to address the argument that intoxication affects decisions and thus consent, I went about defining it as I have done before along the lines of who made the decision to get drunk in the first place.
My conclusion was "If you choose to get drunk, you still have to accept responsibility for the actions you agree to while under the influence, since the initial decision to reduce your critical thinking was voluntarily taken." Anything less is justification to excuse any action taken while drunk, and would, for example, also excuse the actions of the rapists if they too had been intoxicated.
Being intoxicated is not an excuse for poor decisions, and should never be attempted to be used to avoid personal responsibility, regardless how much the decision is later regretted. The men who raped her should be persecuted for her lack of consent. Those that hook up with someone at a bar should not.