Last year, Phyllis Schlafly spoke on the campus of Bates College where , among other things, she “belittled the feminist movement as ‘teaching women to be victims,’ decried intellectual men as ‘liberal slobs’ and argued that feminism 'is incompatible with marriage and motherhood.'" She then went on to top herself by claiming that a married woman cannot be sexually assaulted by her husband, saying:
"By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don't think you can call it rape.”
Needless to say, those views caused a bit of controversy … controversy that has now reemerged at Washington University in St. Louis when school officials decided to honor Schlafly with an honorary doctorate:
Washington University's decision to bestow an honorary degree on conservative political activist and author Phyllis Schlafly has stirred outrage among some students and faculty.
Opponents of Schlafly's honorary doctorate formed a group on the social-networking website Facebook and had 1,023 members as of Monday evening.
Apparently the students don’t think that Washington University should be honoring an immigrant-hating, UN-detesting, evolution-fighting, court-stripping, conspiracy-theorist anti-feminist hypocrite who blames the Virginia Tech massacre on the English Department – go figure.
But the university isn’t backing down … and neither is Schlafly, who granted an interview to a Washington University student newspaper where she complained that the protesting students have “too much extra time” on their hands and reiterated her view that wives cannot be raped by their husbands:
Could you clarify some of the statements that you made in Maine last year about martial rape?
I think that when you get married you have consented to sex. That's what marriage is all about, I don't know if maybe these girls missed sex ed. That doesn't mean the husband can beat you up, we have plenty of laws against assault and battery. If there is any violence or mistreatment that can be dealt with by criminal prosecution, by divorce or in various ways. When it gets down to calling it rape though, it isn't rape, it's a he said-she said where it's just too easy to lie about it.
Was the way in which your statement was portrayed correct?
Yes. Feminists, if they get tired of a husband or if they want to fight over child custody, they can make an accusation of marital rape and they want that to be there, available to them.
So you see this as more of a tool used by people to get out of marriages than as legitimate-
Yes, I certainly do.
