Godstud wrote:I don't care about prior to 1975. We are discussing NOW.
In my state, spousal rape is an offense only if force is used, or if the spouse is incapacitated.
In the state of South Carolina, a weapon or aggravated violence has to be used.
Even then, the maximum penalty for spousal rape is three times less than it is for regular rape.
"Until 1975, every state in the nation considered a husband’s rape of his wife an exception to its rape laws. Legal codes of the time either defined rape as a man having non-consensual sexual intercourse with a “woman not his wife” or defined the victim of the offense to exclude the wife of the actor. (see for example UTAH CODE ANN. § 76-5-402 (1985), ALA. CODE § 13A-6-6O(4) 1977 )
Slowly, states began to repeal these exceptions, with Oklahoma and North Carolina being the last to do, both in 1993. (For context, 1993 was the year that Beanie Babies first became a national sensation.) Today, the law of spousal rape is nuanced. Although it is now technically illegal in every state for one spouse to rape the other, vestiges of the spousal rape exception still permeate into many states’ laws."
From the famous seventeenth-century judge and legal expert, Sir Matthew Hale:
"For the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract."
M. Hale, Pleas of the Crown 629 (1847)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog ... ousal-rape