Courtship and dating

[FlorenceHamilton]

I am a little bit late to this party. My modern sensibilities do not process a link between rape and courtship and marriage. I can see however, that the bible does link these things together. Biblically, the way that the culture made rapists accountable to the woman they raped was to be forced to marry them. I suspect it is because the Bronze age folks knew that women do indeed get pregnant from rape. Clearly they had no mechanism in place to handle the social and possibly biologic consequences of rape on the woman.

As humans have lived thousands of years since biblical times, some of us have figured out that there are other ways to make amends for the rape victim than to force her to marry her rapist. Unfortunately, the bible still colors the thoughts and opinions of many people and keeps forcing a backstepping to antiquated (and frightening) ideas.

Contrary to the bible, rape is not about sex or sexuality. It is about power and control. Violating a person sexually is a way to exert this power to the very edge of a person's life. And because the consequences are so dire, the violation last for the victim's entrie life. Society has moved so far in removing the stigma....even the stigma of a resulting pregnancy.. from the rape victim. Why are we trying so hard to give this back to her? We need to remove all power from the rapist regarding this woman. We need to put him away so that he harms no one else. We need to protect her from any further threat from him whether he is incarcerated or not. We need to help her deal with the consequences of the violation, whether they are diseases, physical disabilities or a pregnancy. We need to empower her to make all of the choices for her own care. She needs to have the control of her body returned to her.

The bible is wrong.

[debrand]

I for one am very curious about how the subject got changed from incest rape to dating.

How did the girls go from a conversation on incestous rape to dating? I'm not certain how the two could be related. Can you post a bit more how you went from Tamar, the obviously innocent victim of rape to don't date? It is obvious that David did not protect his daughter and actually was incorrect about trusting his own son. The story illustrates that fathers-even those who are good people- don't always know what is best. After all, it was her own father that told her to help Amnon by making the cakes for him. It certainly isn't a good biblical story to use when convincing yourng girls that their father knows best or that they should follow the limits set by him.

That was from me so we will see how she responds.

I never post on these types of blogs but I happen to really be fond of the story of David. He was a deeply flawed person who appeared to want to do good but whose actions led to some serious consequences. I've always found it interesting that Tamars own full brother, Absalom, set out to destroy his father. Perhaps anger over David's choice to not punish Amnon helped lead to Absalom going to war with his dad. The bible says that David's sleeping with Bethsheba led to the death of their first child. However, isn't it interesting that David did not follow the law and kill Amnon but still lost a son. Still later, when Absalom took over David's home, he had sex with the wives that David had left behind. He did this on the roof so that everyone could see. I imagine that the women were raped because when he regained power, David simply set the women away and did not further punish them. Overall it is an interesting story of one family's screwed up dynamics but it is a far cry from illustrating that father's always know what boundaries should be set. If anything it illustrates the opposite.