Republican Senate Nominee: "Legitimate" rape victims don't get pregnant

I agree, and end of this subject on this thread.

Todd Akin's ignorance is hardly unique
By Leonard Pitts
Contra Costa Times
08/26/2012

Rep. Todd Akin's fame -- more accurately, his infamy -- now reaches all the way to the Congo.

There, Eve Ensler, the award-winning American author of "The Vagina Monologues" and herself a survivor of rape, wrote an open letter castigating last week's suggestion by the Republican congressman that when a woman is a victim of "legitimate rape," her body has means of preventing pregnancy.

As it happens, Ensler is in the Congo working to help some of the thousands of women raped in the fighting there. She called Akin's words "ignorant."

Nor is hers the only voice of international opprobrium. Criticism of the Missouri lawmaker has rung from such far points as London ("shamefully inaccurate"), Belfast ("profoundly offensive") and Paris ("medieval"). A writer in Australia dubbed Akin a "boofhead" -- apparently, not a compliment. All this, plus domestic denunciation, including sharp criticisms from his own party.

Akin, make no mistake, richly earned every ounce of contempt that now rains upon his head. What he told KTVI-TV, the Fox affiliate in St. Louis, manages to combine repulsiveness ("Legitimate rape?" As opposed, one supposes, to the rapes where "she brought it on herself?") and remarkable ignorance (Does he really think the uterus is equipped with a force field?) into one appallingly malodorous ball of stupid.

Naturally, given his grasp of biology, Akin sits on the House Science Committee.

Yes, you read right.

You can't make this stuff up.

Still, this is not about one congressman's need for sensitivity training and remedial science. Akin is hardly unique, after all.

To the contrary, he is just the latest vivid example of conservatism's unrelenting hostility toward women's reproductive rights -- as in a Texas judge who just upheld the state's ban on Planned Parenthood.

Indeed, even as this controversy was simmering, the GOP unveiled a proposed platform plank calling for a constitutional amendment that would ban abortion with no exceptions for cases of rape or incest. It's a plank Akin himself could have written.

But he is emblematic of more than hardcore opposition to abortion. In him, one also senses the juvenile discomfort with which some male conservatives are afflicted at the merest suggestion of female sexuality.

Think then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, piously covering the breasts of the "Spirit of Justice" statue at the Department of Justice. Think then-Rep. Tom Coburn decrying the "full frontal nudity" of a movie broadcast on television -- the movie being "Schindler's List," the nudes being doomed European Jews.

Think Republicans banning Rep. Lisa Brown from the Michigan statehouse for using the word "vagina" -- as opposed, perhaps, to "lady parts," "third base" or "tunnel of love." Think Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a slut because she has, presumably, on occasion had sex.

It's the kind of behavior one associates with a locker room full of adolescent boys, waiting for their faces to clear up and their voices to change. But these are men. Worse, they are men who are judged competent to make, interpret or influence laws impacting the most intimate decisions a woman can make.

Including, for example, whether she must have a probe stuck up her "lady parts" before being allowed to terminate a pregnancy.

The temptation is to view Akin's gaffe in isolation. But there is a pattern here. In his antipathy to abortion and his childish grasp of reproductive science, Akin personifies much of the GOP, increasingly an extremist sect from which moderation has been banished.

He has said he just "misspoke," but that is disingenuous, as is, frankly, much of the criticism from within his party. Their problem and his is not that he misspoke.

It's that he spoke all too clearly.

Leonard Pitts Jr., winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a columnist for the Miami Herald.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_21394670/leonard-pitts-jr-todd-akins-ignorance-is-hardly

Governor Bob McDonnell (R-VA) today claimed the issue of a rape exception to abortion was a “detail” to be left up to states and Congress. On ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos confronted the Governor and Party Platform Chair with the absolutist anti-abortion language in the platform he led the development of. This was his response:


McDonnell: We’re affirming that we’re a pro-life party.The details certainly are left to Congress and, ultimately, to the states and the people on how they ratify such an amendment. More importantly, what they do at the state level.

Stephanapoulous: So is the party for a rape exception or not?

McDonnell: The party didn’t make any judgment on that. It’s a general proposition to say we support human life. The rest of the details are up to the states and the people respectively, George. That’s simply not covered.

McDonnell’s view of the plight of pregnant rape victims appears to be par for the course in the contemporary GOP. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) recently referred to rape as simply one “method of conception.” Indeed, this may be because the Vice Presidential candidate and the broader Republican Party have consistently voted to limit access to abortion even for women who are victims of rape and incest.

Moreover, McDonnell’s interpretation of his platform language is misleading. As Stephanapoulous noted, the platform endorsed a Human Life Amendment “to make clear that the 14th Amendment’s protections apply to all unborn children.” As the 14th Amendment requires all persons receive equal protection under the law, the practical effect of the amendment would be to render any law that allowed for any abortion in any case unconstitutional. This includes state-level laws, which means McDonnell’s line that the rape exception would be left to Congress and/or the states is flatly false.

McDonnell may be working hard to minimize the absolutist character of his party platform for a reason – Presidential candidate Mitt Romney supports exceptions for rape and incest, putting him at odds with the longstanding position of the Republican party platform.

Last week, Paul Ryan gave an interview in which, defending his position that there should be no excuses for abortion, he referred to rape as a "method of conception."

Wow, right? Talk about a benign euphemism. Rape -- RAPE! -- is now a "method of conception." You know, like love-making, just without the love.

There could be no greater testament to the utter abdication of responsibility by what passes for a "news" media in America in 2012 than that, despite the grotesquerie of this cavalierly callous comment, chances are better than good that this is the first you're hearing of it.

Here, watch it -- and try to figure out why this has gotten NO MAINSTREAM MEDIA play (not even here at the Huffington Post) despite it being, to my mind, a far more offensive remark than Todd Akin's imbecilic blurt of last weekend. What, are we tired of stupid remarks about rape now, so Ryan gets a free pass?

Given the demands for Akin's resignation from a mere Senate race when his musings on "legitimate rape" were publicized, what do you imagine the reaction would be if people were as familiar with VP wannabe Ryan's stunning statement? Might there be a cacophony of outrage? Might there be calls for his resignation from the ticket? Might there be a focus on how fundamentally oblivious these people who would make our laws are to not just women's but humans' rights and dignity? Sure, there might, but then of course people would have to have heard about it.

According to the man who would be the proverbial heartbeat away from the White House, and who in any event would -- given Romney's utter hollowness -- have an inordinate influence on the judicial appointments that will determine how much freedom our children get to live under, RAPE = "METHOD OF CONCEPTION." And yet, unless you're a frequenter of one of a dozen or so lefty blogs -- or my friend on Facebook -- you probably knew nothing about it.

I truly despair for the country my 14-year-old daughter is inheriting. That a remark this intensely revealing of the danger posed by this ticket can go basically unreported is as nauseating to me as the quote itself.

Monday, Aug 20, 2012
Akin’s eager apologists

Todd Akin told two lies, and one of them has plenty of supporters in the media and on the right
By Amanda Marcotte

Todd Akin, Republican candidate for Missouri’s Senate seat, forgot himself for a moment and spoke to a reporter (and a TV camera) in the same language that antiabortion activists tend to use mostly among themselves: “It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, [pregnancies resulting from rape are] really rare,” he said, explaining why he though exceptions for rape in his proposed abortion ban were unnecessary. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” The boldness of the lie captured national attention. Not only did Akin have the balls to invent an internal mechanism in the female body that dispenses nature’s own emergency contraception during a rape, but he also invented imaginary doctors to back up his claim.

But while we all boggle at Akin’s utter disregard for biological fact, let’s not forget that on top of making stuff up about pregnancy, Akin boldly insinuated that many, if not most, rape victims are lying. Unlike with the “rape is contraception” lie, unfortunately, Akin has a lot more social support for his suggestion that most rape is not “legitimate.” Akin may have gone a step further into the Twilight Zone with his belief that a woman who got pregnant secretly wanted it, but the narrative that women lie about rape in order to cover up their own slutty behavior shows no sign of disappearing from our culture soon.

The notion that women frequently accuse innocent men of rape was the centerpiece of Politico reporter Dave Catanese’s Twitter defenses of Akin. “So maybe. Just maybe, @ToddAkin didn’t really mean ‘legitimate.’ Perhaps he meant if ‘someone IS really raped’ or ‘a rape really occurs’,” Catanese argued. As a prophylactic against criticism for invoking the “lying slut” stereotype, Catanese followed up by accusing anyone who doubts the widespread mendacity of the fairer sex of terminal liberalism: “So perhaps some can agree that all rapes that are reported are not actually rapes? Or are we gonna really deny that for PC sake?” Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association put it more bluntly: “What Akin meant by “legitimate rape:” actual forcible rape, not consensual sex that later gets called rape. Come on, people.”

Of course, if Catanese and Akin were really speaking of a small minority of reported rapes that are actually false reports, that wouldn’t have any bearing on the topic of rape exceptions. No one on the left disagrees that a small number of reported rapes come from women with mental health problems who are prone to fabrications, though it’s worth noting that a false report is not the same thing as a false accusation. But so what? That a small percentage of women claiming to be raped are lying has no bearing on the 5 percent of rape victims who get pregnant from the assault. Bringing up the specter of false rape claims in a discussion about the majority of absolutely true rape claims only makes sense if you don’t accept that the majority of women who “cry rape” are telling the truth.

The myth of the false rape accusation tends to go as such: A woman is a terrible, dirty slut who gets drunk and soils herself by having sex with a man. She wakes up in the morning, and crushed by the terrible shame, she decides that no one must know that she would do anything so outrageous as consent to have sex with a man. So, in order to conceal her secret shame, she calls the police and accuses her innocent bedmate of rape. What could be a more brilliant way, after all, of hiding her sluttiness than going over her sex and dating life with the police, then the prosecutor, then the victim’s advocate and then finally the defense attorney? How better to hide your partying ways from your mother than a public trial where every decision she made that night is painstakingly discussed over and over by a hostile defense attorney in front of a crowd of people? Having a long, drawn-out trial that can take months or years is clearly the best way to put a night of regrettable sex behind.

These kinds of questions tend to get overlooked in the public discourse around rape because of stereotypes that paint women as irrational creatures who are apparently too short-sighted to imagine what’s going to happen in the few minutes after dialing 911, much less in the years afterward. Do a handful of such women exist? Certainly the human race is large enough to encompass such individuals, but it’s asinine to imagine that they do in such large numbers that the “lying slut” contingent encompasses the whole of women who turn up pregnant after a rape.

The illogic of the lying slut narrative hasn’t done much at all to prevent it from becoming a major and often dominant narrative around pretty much every rape case that makes national news: Julian Assange, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Roman Polanski, any athlete accused of rape. Outside of Jerry Sandusky, who made the mistake of targeting young boys, the accuser in a rape case is swiftly accused of consenting to the encounter and then, instead of just pretending it never happened, calling the police to sign up for a chance to have her reputation dragged through the mud.

The widespread belief that women lie so frequently about rape has serious effects. The arrest rate for rape is 25 percent, compared to 79 percent for murder and 51 percent for aggravated assault. That’s just counting the reported rapes; many rape victims don’t bother to report at all out of reluctance to deal with being accused of lying sluttitude. Considering that most rapists are serial rapists who will attack an average of six women, the lack of consequences for rape directly leads to more rapes. As for women who get pregnant after rape and need to employ one of those handy rape exceptions? Well, they’re out of luck. Medicaid has a rape exception in its ban on abortion funding, but only 37 percent of women who qualify for it actually get past the bureaucracy and fears about female mendacity to actually get the money.

Traditionally, antiabortion activists who refuse to allow for exceptions for rape will at least be commended for their consistency in believing that this really is about “life,” and not about punishing women for sex. Akin’s comments make it clear, however, that this is not actually what’s driving the refusal to make exceptions for rape victims. For many opponents of rape exceptions, the concern has little to do with “life” at all, but instead goes straight back to their overwhelming fear that women are consenting to sex and weaseling out of their due punishment.
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/20/akins_eager_apologists/

narrative that women lie about rape in order to cover up their own slutty behavior shows no sign of disappearing from our culture soon