As an evangelical Christian (who voted AGAINST Bush both times) I do believe that marriage is the best place for fully relational and mutuality-based sex. But I'm not upset by the advice offered by Cary regarding how to treat one's insistent parents. Except...

What's with the advice that she shouldn't tell her mother what her father already knows, and apparently aided and abetted in -- her abuse sexually at the hands of another older man? I must say on that score, as a wannabe Jesus follower, that such hypocrisy has nothing to do with Christianity as Christ taught it. And for their sake, I believe she needs to confront her parents about this. Exactly how that should be done is beyond my ability to suggest. Doing it while visiting at home may be a bad idea. But having a sit-down with both of them re this abuse seems central to me.

Evangelical Christianity has been used cynically by a government hell-bent on repaying evil with evil (and inept even at that!). Just as I react intensely to that evil masquerading as "God's Will" -- each will be rewarded according to their fruits -- I also react to the violence against this woman encouraged (by silence) via the acts of her father. Waking people up to the make-believe nature of their alleged "faith" -- whatever lable they place upon it, be that Christian, Muslim, or Atheist -- is a good thing. A very good, if terribly painful, thing.

Jon Trott / Chicago

An evangelical who is rather obsessively feminist, I found Tracy's article and indignation awakening my own. Yes, it is not a good idea to mix sex with drugs and/or alcohol. (And from my evangelical perspective, sexuality without intimacy -- a.k.a., an egalitarian-based marriage -- is not so great.) But that isn't the issue here. What is the issue is when a man is raping a woman and what lines we as a society will draw to make that rape culturally abhorrent as well as legally prosecutable.

Who would have thought that this level of ignorance regarding what date rape is would be voiced -- by a woman, no less -- in a respected newspaper?

As a man, all I know is that I have wept with women who have been raped, I have seen the destruction wrought via rape, I have known women raped on a "date", and I have tried to deal with what it means to be a man in a culture which -- still! -- makes space for the wretched myth that men cannot control their own sexuality. To borrow and slightly tweak one political candidate's slogan, "Yes he can!" A man certainly *does* have control over his own sexuality. A man can stop himself even at the moment of intromission. He may not want to stop. But he can.

Men need to take back their own sexuality from pornographers and women-haters, and we certainly do not need women such as the blog writer who led to Tracy Clark-Flory's response. It is just amazing to me -- forgive the tangental nature of some of this -- that we men allow ourselves to buy into the myth that rape is sex, as at least one male poster suggested in his comment that rapists "are getting some." Some what? Sex?

Rape is to sex what slicing off someone's head is to shaking hands.

Help us all.

Jon Trott / Chicago

I am a Christian (or at least am trying to be!). I am appalled by the Christian Right. I believe in the Gospel accounts as historic events, faithfully recorded, and with real implications for all human beings. I also believe there are *many* atheists who, in good faith, do not so believe, and like me are struggling to apply what they do believe to their lives and to social injustice around them. Those atheists I am more than willing to be a co-participant with in trying to address the unjust War in Iraq, homeless in the inner city, the just treatment of prisoners nation-wide and worldwide, womens' oppression (often in and by religious communities, I fully agree!), and so much more.

But Chris Hedges nails this new brand of atheism, the arrogance of which I have for some time called "fundamentalist atheism." Richard Dawkins, for instance, did an interview of the mega-church pastor Ted Haggard (before the latter's spectacular and self-destructive flame-out). In that interview, with no provocation whatever, Dawkins compared the worship service in Haggard's Colorado Church to a Nazi rally! What an idiotic, bigoted, and completely uncalled for comparison. If that is the best atheism has to offer, they'd better give up while they're behind.

As far as Hedges' connecting these atheists to the Christian Right, I rather loved the concept and suspect strongly Hedges is onto something big. I'll be reading Hedges' longer treatment of this issue with intense interest, as I think Islam in particular has gotten hammered -- unjustly -- by both secular and Christian resources. I do not hold to Islamic theology, as I stated at the beginning of my post. I do, however, hold to the reality that many of these neighbors of mine are in fact deeply involved in the pursuit of God and of personal meaning. To slam them via cartoonish designations of evil is to instead inform a thoughtful observer than evil lies far closer at hand... perhaps in the mirror?