Wisconsin State Representative Roger Rivard, who was endorsed by GOP Vice Presidential hopeful Paul Ryan in August, is under fire for revealing that his father told him “some girls rape easy” when warning him about having premarital sex.
Rivard’s remarks came in December while discussing a case about a 17-year-old high school senior who had been charged with sexual assault after having sex with an underage girl, reports The Journal Sentinel .
The newspaper interviewing him, the Chetek Alert , quoted Rivard as saying that “some girls rape easy” as a way to warn him that girls can change what they say after the fact about whether sex was consensual or not.
The freshman representative stated on Wednesday that the article didn’t provide the full context of his comments and that his father’s exact words may have been different from how the Chetek Alert printed them.
Roger Rivard went on to say that his father was simply advising him not to have premarital sex. Gawker notes that Rivard stated:
“He also told me one thing, ‘If you do (have premarital sex), just remember, consensual sex can turn into rape in an awful hurry.’ Because all of a sudden a young lady gets pregnant and the parents are madder than a wet hen and she’s not going to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I was part of the program.’ All that she has to say or the parents have to say is it was rape because she’s underage. And he just said, ‘Remember, Roger, if you go down that road, some girls,’ he said, ‘they rape so easy.’ “
Rivard continued:
“What the whole genesis of it was, it was advice to me, telling me, ‘If you’re going to go down that road, you may have consensual sex that night and then the next morning it may be rape.’ So the way he said it was, ‘Just remember, Roger, some girls, they rape so easy. It may be rape the next morning.’ So it’s been kind of taken out of context.”
While Wisconsin Representative Roger Rivard’s December remarks were not initially spoken about, the remarks have come into play due to the Representative’s tight race against Democrat Steven Smith.
Do you think that Roger Rivard should be criticized for his comments, or were they simply taken out of context?