but what IS to prevent a woman who gets PO'd at a man from obtaining one of these kits after sex and then claiming he raped her?

Nothing, but there's nothing to stop her from doing that right now anyway if she were determined to press charges against the guy. The only difference this would make is that it would allow women the option of first submitting the evidence for a rape kit, and then thinking about whether they want to press charges or not, rather having to decide on the spot whether they're going to press charges or forever forfeit their chance to do so.

I suppose if you really want you can imagine some screwed up case where some scheming woman gets the rape kit done after consensual sex and then tells the guy that she did so and proceeds to blackmail him under threat of going to the cops and using the evidence that's sitting there waiting to be opened. I'm not gonna deny that's possible. But you have to weight it against the statistic likelihood of that to the number of women who actually get raped and don't report it.

I'm not claiming to have the answer here. I think when you talk about the number of rapes that go unreported you have to account for how 'rape' is being defined, and I suspect that a large chunk of that number includes instances where the reason that it's unreported is that the girl is unsure whether it was actually rape (college party, both participants are drunk, not sure what happened, whether she said stop, whether he heard her, etc.) I don't think all of those cases should automatically be considered rape. But I'm inclined to think that even when you exclude these, the number of unreported actual rapes is still high enough to justify something like this.

I agree with the poster who said that this is only a partial solution and the real problem is one of social stigma. Ironically, I think that the refusal of many feminists to make a finer distinction between the situations I described above, where it's at least possible</> that the woman was partly responsible, and actual forced rape contributes to the stigma, because the discourse has become so polluted that when women say 'rape' a lot of people's natural instinct is to assume it was the former kind. I'm not saying this is right, I'm just saying that the horror of the notion of rape has become somewhat diluted by the expansion of the term to include those ambiguous situations.

Try to ignore those italics at the end please.

I don't think I could be any farther away from conservative rednecks demographically or ideologically, but I too am often torn on this issue. I think "no human is illegal" is a stupid slogan that paints over the complexities of the issue. I also don't think we can sustain an endless influx of immigrants, ESPECIALLY not if we want the state to help provide a decent standard of living to all its inhabitants. Otherwise competition for labor increases, wages go down, more jobs get outsourced, and we're back in the 1890's.

That said, I have trouble accepting the motives of the people who seem to be most adamantly opposed to immigration. You'd have to be pretty blind to not see that in many cases it's motivated by racial and cultural fears. I also think that there's a difference between 'breaking the law' for illegitimate gain and causing direct harm to someone, and doing so in the course of trying to survive, without directly victimizing anyone. The illegality argument is a surface issue, since if that were the only problem we could just legalize all immigrants. Obviously the real issue is how much immigration we can handle economically.

The sooner oil costs five bucks a gallon the better off we will all be. Giant SUV's will die in rust heaps.

And what about people in suburbs with little or no public transportation who drive mid-size sedans to get to work?

Locally grown produce will suddenly be cheaper than the part petroleum crap grown god knows where.

I don't see how that works. It will just cost the same as it does now, and the transported produce will cost more.

People will be forced to use their bodies for transportation. Sure it will be painful, but with great reward.

Sure, let's just bike to work for 10 miles through the woods along the Garden State Parkway.

Your post is a prime example of why the "city liberals are out of touch with working folk" drum gets so much beating. I lived in NJ, which actually has a better public transportation system than most states, and everyone I know still found it impossible to get anywhere regularly without a car. Driving is a reality and necessity for the majority of people who live outside the 5 or so major cities. The sooner you can understand that the better.