What is wrong with Missouri that they should send a bum like
Todd Akin to Congress? Are that
many folk in the “show-me” state that dense?
It hurts me even to ask that question, since some of my
nearest-and-dearest live in Missouri.
I’m feeling for them right now.
Don’t want to even bring the subject up of this would-be senator of
theirs.
Todd Akin, in case you missed the news, was recently asked
in a television interview whether he was against abortion in cases of
rape. His immediate answer was to
argue that “if it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut
that whole thing down.”
Get your mind around that one. A legitimate rape. Won’t bother to ask how many
classifications of rape this guy runs around with. (Fellow-Republican Ryan uses the term forced rape – as opposed, maybe, to the nice kind.) It would seem he’s trying to
distinguish between unwanted assaults and cases in which women tell you they
were raped when they actually weren’t.
Like how many of those have you experienced lately? As Ilyse Hogue points out in The
Nation, we need to be aware of what’s
behind the very concept of a “forced” or a “legitimate” rape – the fact that
there is another kind. Statutory
rape, for example. If we only
punish “forced” rape, then thirteen-year-olds seduced by their twenty-year-old
boyfriends cannot get medically treated and the crime goes unpunished.
Then there’s the body-shutting-down business. Close your eyes and think of England,
ladies. It’ll all be over in a
minute or two and we can get back to more pleasant things – no need to make a
big deal out of this.
How in the name of heaven does this man’s mind work?
No need to panic.
The body shuts down.
So there’s no rape?
The guy gets asked a question about abortion and misses the
point that it’s also a question about rape. He minimizes the abortion part and ignores the rape part
entirely.
You know why, of course. If you are driven by a right-wing absolutist ideology in
which you commit to the idea that all life is sacred from the moment of
conception, this is the outcome.
Akin isn’t mad. He’s
following an ideology the Roman Catholic hierarchy and most evangelical
born-agains among us push day and night to its only logical conclusion. He is mainstream America – what
mainstream America has become, that is.
This man Akin is a rotten son of a bitch, in my opinion, for
inflicting this ideology on women (and through women to the men who care for
them as well, remember), an ideology that encapsulates – if not the abstract we
know as evil – a patriarchal mind control notion straight out of the Middle
Ages that leads to misery and needless untold suffering.
The man has a master’s degree in religion. A Master of Divinity degree from
Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis. He has an A-rating from the National Rifle
Association. He opposes stem
cell research. Last Thursday at
the Missouri State Fair in Sedalia, he said he didn’t think the federal
government should fund school lunches. He’s against the morning after
pill.
Why am I not surprised he’s a master of religion?
Because we live in society we have
to contend with each other’s ideologies and make room for them the best we
can. I walked into a room
once where a Roman Catholic archbishop was being fussed over. I remember well wondering if I had the
capacity to walk up and slap his face.
I decided I did, and it gave me the chills. I also decided I wouldn’t (I actually thought it through),
not because he wasn’t in the same category as a drug-pusher for his stance on
birth control, abortion and homosexuality – he was – but because I am committed
to the notion that we have to change hearts and minds, not blow people
away. Not even slap them. Not even spit on their shoes.
But it’s hard.
It’s really hard to listen to racists and homophobes and anti-semites
and men who put women down. And it
was really hard getting through the movie, The Help, recently, and watching how Americans in Mississippi
came home from fighting Hitler in Germany to abuse their black servants in a
manner that would make a Nazi proud.
You really want to slap people, and not be constrained by social
convention, sometimes.
We live in a time and a place where we are not challenged
morally by such things as concentration camps. We don’t have to compromise with evil to survive, don’t have
to be enablers of genocide, or slavery.
Not us. Not here.
But we do have to listen to men like Todd Akin and think of
all the women who have been raped and not go all ballistic. One out of six women in America. Think of the statistics, the fact that
women who are raped are three times more likely than other women to suffer from
depression. Six times more likely
to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Thirteen times more likely to abuse alcohol. Twenty-six
times more likely to abuse drugs.
Four times more likely to contemplate suicide.
And we have to smile, and say, “I differ with you,
Congressman. May I freshen your
drink?”
We have to smile and not spit at those who hold that their
hands are clean when bullies beat you up because you’re gay because they were
urging them to “love the sinner,” and are “as shocked as you are” that some
people can’t distinguish between the sinner and the sin.
Akin, like any politician, speaks for millions and not just
for himself. He was re-elected to
Congress six times. And six times
to the Missouri House of Representatives before that, if Wikipedia has their
facts right.
The fact that people like him get this far, instead of being
run out of town on a rail, tells you how desperately retrograde American
society has become. He won the
Republican primary by a comfortable margin. He’s also clearly the evangelicals' great hope. At least 100 pastors endorsed him in
that primary. When you say “Christian” in the American context, this is what
you mean now. Akin’s their
man.
Akin has taken note of the uproar his statement made, and
has made the usual politician’s bullshit substitute for an apology: “I misspoke.”
Really, Congressman?
You misspoke? If
that’s the case, how come you don’t specify what part of what you said fits the
notion of “mis-speaking?” The part
where you suggested women shut down and don’t get pregnant when they are
raped? Did you mean to say the
opposite? I don’t think so,
somehow. I don’t think you
misspoke at all. It sure looks for
all the world like what’s really going on it is that you just wish you hadn’t
said what you really think.
Rape, Congressman Akin, in case you hadn’t thought about it
before, often involves something other than vaginal penetration. It involves anal penetration. Penetration by a foreign object. Some rapists wear condoms to avoid DNA
detection in case the victim has the savvy to get a rape kit immediately after being
attacked. Some victims are too old
to get pregnant. Often rape
victims are on the pill, or are not fertile, so the fact they do not get
pregnant can often be due not to “the body shutting down” but to other things
going on. Their trauma, in any
case, can be just as real.
How come you don’t know that? How come you don’t think of these things before you speak,
instead of preaching the word of your toxic religion first and taking the
coward’s line – you “misspoke” – when all other options close down? (And if you don’t think he’s a coward,
consider his dismissal of those remarks as “off the cuff” – even though he was
on television, speaking on a topic he has addressed countless times before.)
Todd Akin, according to Nate Silver in this morning’s New
York Times, has had the edge until now
against Claire McCaskill to win the senate race in Missouri.
Let us hope Silver is right in suggesting this foot-in-mouth
event showing Akin’s true colors gets Missouri voters off their butts to throw
this bum out.
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