skatingbasser wrote:If you con me out of $1000 you conned me. Tricked me, committed fraud, set me up, shook me down, whatever. You didn't steal it from me, and you didn't commit theft.
That's one point of view, but you can be charged with theft for tricking somebody out of his money. In California, for example:
Every person who shall ... fraudulently appropriate property which has been entrusted to him or her, or who shall knowingly and designedly, by any false or fraudulent representation or pretense, defraud any other person of money, labor or real or personal property ... is guilty of theft.
In New York they call it larceny:
2. Larceny includes a wrongful taking, obtaining or withholding of another's property ... committed in any of the following ways:
(a) By conduct heretofore defined or known as ... common law larceny by trick ... or obtaining property by false pretenses;
...
(d) By false promise.
A person obtains property by false promise when, pursuant to a scheme to defraud, he obtains property of another by means of a representation, express or implied, that he or a third person will in the future engage in particular conduct, and when he does not intend to engage in such conduct or, as the case may be, does not believe that the third person intends to engage in such conduct.
The ides is just this: a recognition of the fact that consent fraudulently obtained is really no consent at all. The law recognizes that if you sign a contract with a gun to your head, that's no agreement at all. It recognizes that if I trick you into consenting to give me your money, that's no consent at all. There's no reason why the same reasoning could not or should not be applied to rape law.
I'm saying there is definitely a huge difference between forcing yourself on a someone unwilling and having sex with someone while lying that the sex will help them.
I think I agree with you there. Where I disagree is that I believe they're both rape.