The edge cases may be important in ways people haven’t thought about. State laws on sexual assault often aren’t at all specific about what impairment negates consent. They often don’t distinguish long-term and temporary impairment.
While I don’t mostly see a prosecutor going after both parties who have engaged in a drunken but otherwise seeming consensual sex, I can easily imagine prosecution of someone who had otherwise seemingly consensual sex with a person with even mild intellectual impairments or mental illness. Obviously, there are horrible abuses. There’s also a real and troubling case of the man who was prosecuted for continuing to have sex with his wife as her capacity declined from dementia. I think that there are real–and not just slippery slope–disability rights issues associated with the edge cases.
