I think former Senator Ricky Santorum (R-Wingnutopia) says it best:

Santorum Chastises ‘Feminist Community’ For Not Embracing Palin — thinkprogress.org

SANTORUM: “Sarah Palin is the Clarence Thomas for feminists. The civil rights community, the African-American community obviously should have rallied behind Clarence Thomas an his achievement, but they hammered him because he was a conservative. And the civil rights establishment was first and foremost liberal and then for the liberal rights of — as liberals saw it, what blacks should have in this country. And the same thing with the feminist community.”

(Sarcasm alert)

What is a community saying about rape when it doesn’t support an important part of a rape investigation? One would think a community would value getting rapists off the street.

However, no rape victim in Wasilla ever paid a single cent for a rape kit. And you haven’t cited a single source indicating that one did.

Palin makes me feel physically sick. Policies like that don’t seem all that different from rape itself… She might as well just tie women to the bed herself, and give rapists the room key. (Sorry if that’s too graphic.)

Same with “rape kit”.

You want to shift the cost of forensic exams from the survivor to who? Whose purse are you going after?

You fail at fiscal conservatism, jz. Just because the majority of the posters and bloggers here are of a progressive bent doesn’t mean you won’t be called on a basic failure to understand theory. What you’re arguing is that the cost of evidence collection and investigation for one crime should be shifted to the victim instead of the police department/taxpayers. The problem with that is that you create a system in which there is not equal protection under the law, something that is required for even the most conservative of liberty-based governmental systems.

We don’t charge the estate of a murder victim for the cost of investigating their murder. Evidence collection is evidence collection. If we were talking about paying for the hospital stays of rape victims you MIGHT have a point, but we aren’t. If the cops don’t have enough cash in their budget to investigate crimes the answer isn’t to shift the cost of police work to victims. Not only is that monstrous but it is a dereliction of one of the few obvious roles of the government: law enforcement.

Either go back and brush up on your theory or be a better troll.

Sorry, I missed this one earlier. How do you figure it would just be a modest hospital room co-pay? It’s not medical treatment, it’s not medically necessary, and the purpose of the exam is documentary, not diagnostic. Half the insurance companies out there would probably bounce such a claim immediately, and the other half would very likely be within their rights to deny coverage for it at will.

Though yes, it would (and almost assuredly does) function to establish a differential in law-enforcement treatment, where only women who can scrape together the cash for the optional exam would be able to report and have any realistic hope of seeing a conviction, particularly now that forensic evidence is expected in sexual assault cases. I’m sure it would also function to keep women who could theoretically pony up for the exam fee but who’d be left hurting by it from undergoing the exam, given the enormous backlog of untested kits some areas have. Why bother choosing between justice and rent if you know there’s a 90% chance you’ll be sacrificing just so your clothes can take up space in some police department storage locker until the statute of limitations runs out?