I've been following this event in the blogosphere for awhile but I wanted to assure it wasn't fictional Internet material. The media, however, is now reporting on it and it's accurate.
Back in 2000, when Palin was mayor of Wasilla, the following event occurred and was reported in the local paper in the Wasilla area:
: Knowles signs sexual assault bill - Frontiersman
It's now starting to hit the general media today:
Palin's town used to bill victims for rape kits - USATODAY.com
This issue I suspect will become a larger issue, and I'm raising it because it does bother me quite a bit that this occurred. The idea that rape victims would ever be charged for the assault evidence (basically the rape kit evidence to test the rapists' semen, etc,) is very bothersome.
It does seem to me from reading the 2000 article that Palin did have knowledge and consent to it. Wasilla is a small town, she appointed the chief being quoted, and she has claimed she was the 'person with the responsibilities' in her comments to the public recently. Although I certainly don't think she is pro-rapist because that would be absurd, it seems utterly callous to cite saving taxpayer money as a reason to charge raped women and others for collecting the rape evidence from them. In fact, it even deters reporting the crime because poor women can't afford to pay it.
She denies she ever supported charging these victims, but the denial coming only now isn't credible to me. As the ancient maxim goes:
qui tacet consentire videtur: He who keeps silent is assumed to consent; silence gives consent.
If she had objected, it would have been front and centre back when the incidents were occurring, thus never needing a law to be passed to prevent it. It took a state law to stop it. She was apparently silent when it became big enough an issue that a state law was being proposed to stop it, and yet the practice continued right until the state law was passed. The AK state police and other municipalities plus the governor were expressing outrage at the practice, and nothing stopped the practice in Wasilla. No objecting comments by her appear in the 2000 article to her police chief--whom she appointed--even when he went on the record when the law was enacted to express his opposition because such rape kit tests would otherwise be paid by taxpayers. Wasilla is also a small town, and by her own comments at the RNC and on other stumps, she claims as mayor she was the one with executive responsibility for the town.
What also bothers me is that she did indeed hire lobbyists to get money from Washington and did receive all sorts of large funding for projects, but for the sake of saving between $5,000 to $14,000 a year, women had to pay up for Wasilla to test them to get evidence to charge their rapists.
The practice of charging rape victims for rape kit evidence is now banned by federal law, but what's also noticed by me today is that Biden sponsored it, Obama co-sponsored it with 58 others, but McCain did not.
Whilst the claim has not been made against Biden, when I hear Palin say at the RNC that Obama has "not a single major law or even a reform," I think it's things like this that dispel such a remark as untruthful, and even leaves her and McCain for their own things to answer for things he has helped pass.
If dedicated McCain/Palin supporters get outraged by the theme of my thread, so be it, but I'd just like to state up front that it's not my intent to taunt and troll by picking this theme and expressing my sentiments on it.
This subject has bothered me for the last few days, and it does need public discussion IMO. It's stuff like this that I think people ought to be talking about insofar as analysing tickets, judgements, views, etc, and have a decent conversation about it. What I'm seeing here just seems so callous to me on McCain and Palin for which Obama and Biden ought to be thanked for curing.
A woman who has just been raped and must endure additional humiliation of this:
plus vaginal investigation and swabbings, etc, should never have been humiliated, insulted and burdened by their own town police to have to personally pay for the collection of the evidence just so her attacker can be held accountable for his serious violation and crime. And from a crime enforcement perspective, it just seem ludicrous and helpful to rapists rather than rape victims insofar as encouraging raped women to report the crime and/or for collection of incriminating evidence of that crime.