Nate Silver thinks that the remarks of Missouri Republican Senate nominee Todd Akin – that "if it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down" – could drag him down as much as 10 percentage points. Here's hoping. (In the latest polls, the congressman held a slight lead over Dem incumbent Claire McCaskill.) But what's striking to me is the enduring reality that alleged fiscal conservatives in today's GOP almost uniformly have social views that one normally associates with soft-Islamists. It should be possible to be a total fiscal tightwad and still adopt a live-and-let-live philosophy in government – and yet that is emphatically not the GOP we have today. Akin is a classic Islamist-Republican, seeing women entirely as temptations for men who somehow have responsibility for their fate even when being raped. Women are entirely objects – their lives and crises simply requiring an air-brush to keep the whole neurotic ideology intact.
But Akin has predecessors:
Pennsylvania state Rep. Stephen Freind (R) … looks to be the first legislator to make the argument that rape prevents pregnancy, arguing in the late 1980s that the odds of a pregnancy resulting from rape were "one in millions and millions and millions." His explanation? The trauma of rape causes women to "secrete a certain secretion which has the tendency to kill sperm…." Arkansas politician Fay Boozman followed up during during his 1998 Senate campaign by arguing that "fear-induced hormonal changes could block a rape victim’s ability to conceive." Those remarks lead to a backlash when then-Gov. Mike Huckabee tapped Boozman to run the state’s health department. The argument was most recently – and perhaps most fully – articulated by National Right to Life president John Wilke in a 1999 essay titled "Rape Pregnancies Are Rare." Wilke made a pretty similar case to Akin: That the "physical trauma" of rape has a way of preventing pregnancy.
The truth is five percent of rapes result in pregnancy:
Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency. It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies and is closely linked with family and domestic violence. As we address the epidemic of unintended pregnancies in the United States, greater attention and effort should be aimed at preventing and identifying unwanted pregnancies that result from sexual victimization.
Regardless of the backpeddling, argues Amy Davidson, Akin's thinking is of a piece with a larger GOP attitude:
[T]here is a notion, common in conservative rhetoric lately, that desperation is always elsewhere, and that the crises in ordinary lives do not need to be contemplated or worried about—not by nice people. They are rare; something has gone wrong; maybe the complaint isn’t legitimate; maybe it’s their own fault. That indifference goes beyond the question of rape and abortion.
That's simply the public tidying up that the fundamentalist psyche constantly requires to keep messy, human reality at bay. It's a function of a backwardness and cultural panic that cannot be entirely disguised by an open and affirming convention stage.
The Dish 