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I don't know. Leaving aside the guy in the original post, who was indeed a dick, I am not sure about even a decent person dating someone developmentally disabled.
I suppose if a qualified mental health professional deems her to have capacity to consent, there is nothing illegal about having sex with her. But still, it seems...I dunno, somehow a little sleazy?
Maybe that's unreasonable. I know some folks who work with the developmentally disabled, and they respect them, and honor them, and really relate to them; why not in a relationship?
And yet, I am a huge believer that a good relationship is one that never involves power differentials. One partner being DD and the other being of normal cognitive ability would seem like a permanent, insurmountable power differential to me....
Maybe this is all tainted by my aesthetic preferences, also: I am a fairly bright guy, and my taste-- more than anything about body type, hair color, etc.-- is for aggressively intelligent women. I like them at least as smart as I am, if not smarter, and the less intelligent a girl is, the less interest she holds for me. Maybe I just can't see it, and therefore it looks strange to me.
I guess I feel like, I wouldn't necessarily take someone to task for doing it, but I could never do so myself....
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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
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