We see this in drug policy a lot.
“If you want to legalize drugs, why don’t you just go ahead and legalize rape while you’re at it?”
It’s a classic tortured analogy misdirection. Of course, my favorite response to that is a rather facetious “If you don’t know the difference between drugs and rape, you’re not going to get invited to the good parties.”
All of us know why that’s a tortured analogy. It’s an attempt to avoid any real discussion of the issues. Drug transactions are consensual, rape is not. Drugs are demand commodities; rape is not. If you arrest a drug dealer, it creates an immediate job opening caused by demand, so the net effect of the arrest is an increase in drug dealers, whereas if you arrest a rapist, you get the rapist off the street, and it doesn’t result in a demand for new rapists. The illegality of drugs makes them so valuable that corruption in law enforcement and other areas inevitably ensues; the illegality of rape doesn’t make rape valuable.
These things are completely incomparable.-Tortured Analogies
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