Just Another Conservative Henchman

For anyone who spent yesterday in a cave, Palin is extremely nuts. Just letting you know.

If any feminists out there were starting to get hypnotized by the Republican propaganda, and starting to identify with Palin because she has a vagina, I hope this has snapped you out of it.

One has to ask what the possible motivations were for Palin to want to charge rape victims $300-$1,200 to get the evidence to prove they were raped. Whatever it was, it had to be something that proves that Palin is a true Republican:

(1) Wanted to save her town money so it could do other things with it, or so her or her town would look better

(2) Wanted to make her town look better by improving the crime statistics by discouraging poor women from reporting rapes (Palin may have imagined the victims' forgoing the investigations because they couldn't afford to prove the charges)

(3) Weird conservative ideological shit-- just wanting to reinforce a norm of women not being able to fight against oppression by men, and trying to make women feel like they have to submit to men (lest they be raped, and be unable to do anything about it).

UPDATE: When I wrote about this on another blog's comments, some Internet-crazy-Republican wrote:

Look, the whole rape it thing is a bit of a dodgy attack on our part. Technically, they charged the victim's insurance company, not the victim directly. So, it was a budget cutting measure.

The question is whether they would still charge the victim even if they didn't have health insurance.

Who knows?

But if there wasn't an express procedure in place for not charging those without health insurance, then the policy was to charge them. So that commenter was sticking up for Palin by giving her and her administration an unreasonable benefit of the doubt.

Also, what about those non-denial denials from the Palin camp about her knowledge and approval of the rape-kit policy?

That speaks a volume: Palin probably knew what was up, and wanted it, and it probably specifically had to do with keeping poor women who don't have health insurance (probably the demographic that most commonly reports rapes) from reporting them. Anyway, Palin probably legally couldn't keep the charges from being handled by the health insurance provider. So it's not as if the motivation to stifle poor woman victims is at all unrealistic, especially since we know it's in line with über-conservative patriarchal dogma.

So, since there wasn't any policy in place for women without health insurance to have the rape kits paid for by the town, we can assume the policy was to charge even them for the rape kits. But, of course, Palin and her administration had to have foreseen that the situation of a health insurance provider not being billed for a rape-kit would come up when they crafted the policy, since Palin knows as well as anybody that not everybody has health insurance. Therefore, it's a pretty good chance that part of the point of the policy was to discourage reporting of rapes or to try to coeerce women into fearing men who they'd learn they couldn't really prosecute for rape effectively.