Joe Biden Says All Drunk Sex Is Rape: 'It's Rape. It's Rape. It's Rape.' It's Not, Though.
The former vice president doesn't even know what the Department of Justice's definition of rape is.
Former Vice President Joe Biden recently talked to Teen Vogue about his efforts to reduce sexual assault on campus via the federal government's "It's On Us" initiative, which encourages bystanders to intervene at college parties if they suspect a woman is about to be raped.
But Biden is hopelessly confused about the definition of sexual assault—which he claims impacts as many as 1-in-5 female college students. Consider the following startling assertion.
"If a young woman is drunk, SHE CANNOT CONSENT," said Biden. "She cannot consent, and it's rape. It's rape. It's rape. It's rape."
It's not. (It's not, it's not, it's not.) People who are drunk are generally capable of giving consent, unless they have consumed enough alcohol to render them unconscious. The Department of Justice defines alcohol-induced rape as a situation that arises from a state of incapacitation. If a young woman is drunk to the point where she passes out, then she cannot give consent. But people who consume too many drinks to drive home are nevertheless still able to have sex.
There are situations, of course, where drunk sex is rape. Some people who consume too much alcohol enter a sort of sleep-walking state where they are actually black-out drunk but appear lucid to observers. (For more on the difficulties of ensuring consent at such times, check out this Fusion article.)
But Biden implicitly suggested that all drunk sex is rape. What's fascinating about this opinion is that practically no one believes it to be true. It doesn't work, quite obviously, in practice. Drunk couples have sex all the time, and no one believes that these encounters automatically constitute rape. I doubt seriously that most people, or even many people, think cultural norms should be revised so that sex is always off the table the second that alcohol enters the mix. I doubt that even Biden himself thinks this.
And yet the former vice president is proud of the work the Education Department has done to confuse college students about sex and consent. In the interview with Teen Vogue, he expressed concern that the new secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, might reverse the Office for Civil Rights' Obama-era Title IX guidance, which encouraged university administrators to presume that accused males were guilty of sexual misconduct.
"Let me tell you, it bothers me most if Secretary DeVos is going to really dumb down Title IX enforcement," said Biden. "The real message, the real frightening message you're going to send out is, our culture says it's OK."
But what does it say about our culture if the vice president of the United States—the foremost political advocate of policy changes relating to sexual assault on campus—doesn't even know what the definition of rape is?
