then it is not accurate, in my opinion, to call that the same thing as deciding to punish innocent people.
It isn't a matter of opinion but certain fact that this policy will punish innocent people. It does so in 2 ways. First, it invents a whole new crime in which having sex with any person that is "intoxicated" to any unspecified level is a criminal act. The fact that this crime is labeled rape isn't really the issue. This issue is that it makes a crime out an act extremely common act that is not a crime now and 99% of the time it occurs is not associated with any existing crime, or any harm to anyone, any no one perceives themselves as having been wronged at all. What you and all advocates of such policies constantly ignore is the fact that whether an act is a crime and whether a victim reports a crime are completely separate questions. Are there unreported rapes? If yes, then this shows that whether an act is rape has nothing to do with whether it is reported as rape. Are there rape victims who do not realize they were victims of rape? Most supporters of this policy would say "Yes", and much rape advocacy is about convincing women who don't feel like they were raped that they were raped. Again, this shows that the criminal act of rape is independent of the subjective feeling that you were raped. Hypocritically, advocates of these policies frequently argue that feeling one was raped or reporting a rape are often uncommon among women that are raped. Yet in defense of these policies they make arguments that logically presume that an act only becomes a rape when the women feel like and/or reports that it was a rape. This absurd argument is required by them because otherwise every act of intoxicated sex would be rape, and yet 99.9% of such acts have no objective or subjective features of rape outside of the mere fact that one party was intoxicated. Thus, any policy like the one in question that makes intoxication a sufficient criteria for a sex act to be rape, must mean that all acts of intoxicated sex are rape. The only argument they can or do put forth is that "it doesn't matter if no rape accusation is made", but this is nonsense because it contradicts their more general position that whether an act is felt as or reported as rape by a victim is not required for it to be rape. In sum, the policy/ definition of rape in question makes a criminal /wrongful act out of a common and widespread act engaged in my most people and without any objective or subjective evidence of harm or wrongdoing to anyone. It makes a common and harmless act a crime in pursuit of punishing the small % of the times that the act coincides with something that is a crime, thus it makes people innocent of causing any harm to anyone, guilty of wrongdoing.
The second way it increases punishment to innocents is that it equates an accusation with evidence for that accusation, thus all inaccurate accusations will lead to a guilty judgment and life damaging punishment. Again, it lays out no criteria that separate intoxicated sex from rape. The identical act is punished as rape based entirely upon whether one party says it was rape. Since intoxication makes it technically rape, that could be the sole basis for it being said to be so. If I admit to having sex with my girlfriend after we both had a few beers at a party, I am admitting to an act of rape. Whether , I get punished for that act depends upon nothing but whether my girlfriend report something that she knows is technically a crime. If the rule says you were raped, then even if you would not have otherwise felt so, you were. Thus whether you say you were is a matter of whether you accept the definition that this rule uses and that you and other supporters argue for. If you don't say that you were raped after having intoxicated sex, then either you reject the policy and the definition or you know you were raped technically but don't want to get your partner in trouble. You can be there are and will be more advocacy groups pressuring the latter women to report it. In addition, most rape and abuse advocates want their to be prosecution of the crime, even without the support of the victim. When the crime was real and actually harmful and the victim is just afraid, this makes sense. However, in this case when a crime is defined in a way that there is often no harm and no real victim, then it is absurd. Yet, you can be sure that the same supporters of this policy will begin to support enforcement of it even without the support of the "victim". Anyone will be able to report that someone raped someone else, and the only evidence required for punishment will be whether they had sex while one party was "intoxicated" to an unspecified degree.
Sarcasm aside... this seems to mirror a lot of the same concerns and principles that come up in discussions of the Death Penalty versus Life Without Parole. What strikes me as somewhat surprising is that many people who I would otherwise assume to be against the death penalty because of the risk of punishing innocent people, are NOT against this policy, even though it also runs the risk of punishing innocent people.
Yes, the hypocrisy among supporters of these policies is stunning. IT isn't just the death penalty but almost all "law and order" issues that they usually side with having high standards of evidence for punishment to avoid wrongful conviction, plus clear evidence of harm to others for it to even be a crime in the first place. I am with them on those issues most of the time, which leads to opposing drug laws, speech laws, and any efforts to restrict forms of consensual sex. But on this issue they dismiss as completely unimportant the logical certainty that these policies will make many consensual acts crimes (even when not reported), and many innocent people punished who technically violated the law (because most people have violated such a law), but caused no harm to others. Rhea's and others arguments in support of such policies could come directly from the mouths of the neo-fascist "law and order" conservatives that use "the children" and "victims rights" rhetoric to create a criminal class and make it as easy as possible for authorities to convict people for real crimes and for things that should be crimes.
I expect hypocrisy from the general "law and order" conservative types because their positions are so obviously not rooted in any concern for victims of real harm but in wanting to punish personal morality with a strong dash of racism and wanting to protect the illegitimate wealth of the ruling class from any whiff of uprising. Thus, one would not expect any consistency in applying principles of justice, when authoritarianism and inequality are the true goals for which the law is being used.
But I actually think that rape advocates do generally have regard for principles of justice, fairness, and punishment used only to correct/prevent real wrong to others. That makes their hypocrisy more intense, because they so strongly advocate these principles in general that they then are so blatantly violating on this particular issue. Intense aims toward a specific outcome (in this case, punishment for all real rape perps) is what fuels abandonment of procedural principles that define justice and fairness. But it is one thing to bias oneself into unwittingly violating one's own principles. It is another to engage in the kind of belligerent and willful denial of reason and fact that highlight this violation, as we can see on this issue.