Why, I’m Beginning to Think That the Links Between Misogyny and the Anti-Choice Movement Might Not be a Coincidence
Understanding consent is not only contrary to Republican values, it’s contrary to the very will of God!
The latest entrant into the Republican rape insensitivity bake-off is Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who said tonight that “even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” He, of course, joins fellow Senate candidate Todd Akin, with his now-canonical “legitimate rape” comment, and Rep. Joe Walsh, running for election in Illinois, who claimed there was no reason a woman would ever need an abortion to save her life or preserve her health. The trailblazer was Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle, who failed to unseat Harry Reid in Nevada two years ago, and famously said that if a hypothetical teenager was raped and impregnated by her father, it was an opportunity to turn “a lemon situation into lemonade.”
Here’s why this is happening: The newer crop of Republican candidates and elected officials are, more often than not, straight from the base. They’re less polished than their predecessors; they’re more ideologically pure. As a result, they’ve accidentally been letting the mask slip and showing what’s really at the core of the right-to-life movement.
Right: as awful as these comments are, they at least have the advantage about being honest and revealing about the motives and implications of the forced pregnancy lobby.
Related: “It’s starting to look like God is intending that we stop invoking him in political debates.”
This is the logic of some literal understanding of how God operates. I was reading R. Crumb’s graphic novel of Genesis. Joseph told his brothers that they weren’t really to blame for him being sold into slavery. God intended it all along to use him as an avenue to save people from the famine.
The net effect of this is anti-woman, but to be consistent, if you think life is a gift from God and exists at conception, a rape exception is wrong and the life is a “gift from God” that “he” intended, just like he intended things to happen in general by his own mysterious plan.
I’m not defending this logic, but really the whole thing raises bigger issues of the cause of bad things in the world etc.
And if you’re really consistent, then you don’t blame the rapist for the rape, because he was carrying out God’s plan. In fact, it’s not clear how you could ever blame anyone for anything.
That was I.
Something something free will god’s commandments the holy bible something something?
Okay, basically, a majority of people in this country are in some fashion Christians, including many pro-choice Dems. They believe in God something something. Others think they are being illogical. We can try to look at the logic or just take some exaggerated form of it and reject it right away.
Putting aside no one really tends to be totally consistent, the logic basically is that there is evil in the world, those who do it will be punished, but like everything else, it is somehow part of God’s plan. Abortion is one thing, but we can think of something where evil occurs and something bad occurs, but something good might come from it too.
And, there are some women who were raped who decided to have the baby & thought it the one good thing out of a horrible event. As the article notes, that should be a private choice, not public policy.
Yeah, this is pretty much the standard line. I’m a little surprised that people are making a big deal about it; I mean, this is what I was taught in Catholic school 30 years ago.
On second thought, I guess the big deal is that it IS the same thing that Christians have believed for a long time and society is trying to move forward. I think the whole accept-god’s-will thing is less socially acceptable now than it used to be. What people want for their lives–even people that are women–is seen to matter now.
One of many reasons I am not a believer.
About 50% of all fertilizations don’t “take”, this makes God the biggest abortionist and abortion God’s will.
It’s easy to resolve the problem of theodicy if you just redefine “good” to mean “bad things mostly happen to people who picked the wrong parents or gender, race, or nationality”.
The various sects of the American folk religion claiming the mantle of “Christianity” worship a cruel and arbitrary god, whose primary attribute is that he shares their unthinking prejudices and their petty, cramped worldview.
Re: first paragraph – isn’t that pretty much how our, ahem, “criminal justice” system works?
Statistically, yes. Which is how you know it’s divinely ordained, and not a mere instrument of flawed humanity.
To be honest, I have a lot more respect for a guy like Akins or Mourdock, in that at least they’re consistent, than a clown like Mitt Romney, who’s taken more positions than Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson combined – all for political expediency.
At least Akins and Mourdock don’t have any checks to Planned Parenthood that are signed by them, floating around, ala Mittens.
He is far more logically consistent about this than most. Which is a big factor in my apostasy. If you believe in an omniscient, omnipotent god, then nothing can happen without divine approval. Given all the evil in the world and the bad things that happen to good people, this is hard to reconcile with a benevolent and loving god. Either there is no god or else god is a bastard that I want nothing to do with.
Also too – if their God is all-powerful, then he wouldn’t need the rapist as his vehicle – right?
There’s be a lot of Virgin Mary’s and Virgin Anne’s and Virgin Latisha’s and Virgin Jaunita’s running around, pregnant as can be, without having had – right?
I mean, it’s happened before, right?
And yeah, I’m with you – if this is their idea of God, then I don’t want anything to do with him either.
God works in mysterious ways. Vile & cruel yes, but your mortal mind is incapable of understanding. Just believe.
See the Virgin Mary song from “Jerry Springer the Opera” (warning: its brilliant but is basically offensive in some way to *everyone*.)
Oh, FFS, will there ever be a time I can stop being ashamed of my home state?
From someone who still lives here: No, Jeremy, there will not be such a time. Just tell people you are from Michigan or Illinois (up-state) and don’t admit it.
Just tell people you are from
Michigan or IllinoisChicago and don’t admit it.FTFY
Try being an Okie sometime.
Or aTexan. It’s worse here because at one time, we knew better.
“Or aTexan. It’s worse here because at one time, we knew better.”
I don’t mean to slag on Texas, but what time was that?
Well, Ann Richards was elected governor once. Also, there’s LBJ. And the state was carried by Carter in 1976 and Humphrey in 1968. So really, it’s been something of an accelerated microcosm of the rise of deranged theocratic dumbfuckery in American conservatism.
And Sam Rayburn, who said he”wanted to put the jam on the bottom shelf so the little guy could get some.” Also Ann, LBJ. Heck we elected the country’s first lesbian mayor in Houston and sheriff in Dallas, but in the burbs and hinterlands it may as well be 1854.
And don’t forget Ralph Yarborough! Yarborough’s loss to Lloyd Bentsen in the 1970 primary was a sign of where the Democrats and American politics more generally were heading.
So did we, but that was more than 20 years ago.
Hey, at least you can be proud of your history. If I recall correctly your state was founded by illegal immigrants (and your state proudly bears their name to this day) who enshrined socialism in your state constitution.
Why yes, I’ve pointed this out to people from OKC with confederate flags on their trucks. Why do you ask?
That really is the scary part. Oklahoma elected more socialists to public office in the early part of the 20th century than any other state ever has. Now they elect Coburn and Inhoffe.
Were they even born in Oklahoma? In Texas we first imported lunacy for the Midwest, in the form of Sick Armey. (Yes, that started as a typo, but is really more of a Freudian slip, so I kept it.)
You did give the world Larry Bird.
This is true.
I live in Maryland. We strut around all day grabbing our crotch and chanting, “Oh yeah, who’s your enlightened daddy, bitch!”
Here in San Francisco, we expect to ascend into Secular Heaven any day now.
No, try being from South Carolina ever. All we can do is be like, “look over there–it’s Mississippi and Alabama! And, and, East Texas!” and then we hide under the tablecloth or something, praying Florida will do some dumbass shit in the next 10 seconds. One doesn’t usually have to wait the whole 10 seconds, luckily.
Hopefully he isn’t elected…
I know I’m voting for Joe.
Y’know, I’m not well informed about theology, ethics, and the like, but I’m pretty sure this joker’s argument falls apart once a rape victim is treated with emergency contraception and announces that, since God permitted it to happen, the emergency contraception was obviously a manifestation of God’s will.
Also: theft, murder, and Justin Bieber are things God intended to happen.
This. How dare someone think that they know that it was God’s plan that the woman be raped and become pregnant, but not part of God’s plan that she undergo an abortion?
The only actions that are in accordance with god’s plan are (a) those actions by individuals that match my prejudices, (b) events that we can’t identify as some individual’s fault, and (c) events for which we can allocate blame to some individual based on my prejudices.
Problem solved.
That is where the second part of the underlying misogyny comes in.
Reproduction is what women are for. Therefore they are rebelling against God by refusing to reproduce.
The purpose of men is to go round being the image of God. Therefore obeying God by acting as though they are God.
Many Christians recognize this particular bit of sophistry for what it is.
The charitable interpretation is that life is “a precious miracle,” and therefore is by virtue of that alone, the conception of a baby is more likely to be God’s will than any old event. Somewhat more concretely, the idea might be that because conception involves a certain amount of random chance, God actively intervenes in making sure conception happens, and therefore has ways of “shutting things down” if it’s not his will that a baby is conceived.
Yes, the choice to have an abortion is due to free will, so it can be a sin (so the “logic” goes).
“This. How dare someone think that they know that it was God’s plan that the woman be raped and become pregnant, but not part of God’s plan that she undergo an abortion?”
Because the first denies her agency, and treats her as livestock.
Yeah, the problem is that these people are not just mysoginists, they are also morons.
I can see how you could argue that after quickening, you are taking a human life by having an abortion, which, even if it is in accordance with god’s will, is still a sinful thing to do.
And you could argue that using contraception in consensual sex is sinful because the old testament specifically commands man not to spill their seed in vain.
But it requires a huge leap based on something other than logic to conclude from those two that emergency contraception after rape is sinful. It’s not consensual sex and only a fool thinks that a day or two old embryo constitutes ‘life’.
The world is full of fools.
Bingo. It’s not that unusual to think that every single thing that occurs–including horrific evils like earthquakes, the Holocaust, rape, etc.–is part of God’s mysterious providential plan. (Maybe he foresees and has to permit such evils a part of some greater good, like respecting our freedom or whatever.) I don’t agree with that, but it’s pretty conventional religious belief.
But Mourdock wants to conclude that it’s part of God’s providential plan that a victim of rape get pregnant, and therefore it would be wrong for her to terminate the pregnancy because doing so would be going against God’s will. That doesn’t follow at all. That would be like saying to somebody who has caught a disease that it’s God’s will that you catch the disease, so taking any medicine would be wrong because it goes against God’s plan. (I am not trying to suggest that pregnancy is a disease, so don’t attack the analogy on those grounds.)
This is not an unheard-of position in some religions.
Some practitioners of such put out a pretty good newspaper, in fact.
But the analogy falls apart unless pregnancy is viewed as something negative, like a disease.
A body-changing (permanently), health-affecting, sometimes life-threatening condition forced on this woman against her will? I can totally see how your wingtard talking point applies and (more to the point) why you’d want to defend Mourdock because he wants to destroy any ability the federal government has to protect or provide for the less fortunate.
Everyone, meet the principled libertarian!
Pregnancy wouldn’t be an act of ‘will’, is basically the logic. God allows humans to make choices, but once the sperm has been deposited God decides whether or not a pregnancy happens. In the murder example, this would be whether or not the wounds are fatal, with theft it could be any number of things depending on the theft.
Justin Bieber, however, would be entirely the fault of humans.
I’m not aware I guess, but did Angle actually say that? That’s gotta be the most ridiculous statement I’ve ever heard…besides all the other things she ever said
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/08/sharron-angles-advice-for_n_639294.html
I remember it, although it’s definitely not the first ridiculous thing that comes to mind when I think of her campaign. But when I typed sharron angle into google ‘sharron angle lemonade’ was the first suggestion so maybe it had more of an impact than I recalled.
What really makes it is the extraneous “situation.”
I’m not sure I really get why all this stuff is a big deal. Isn’t this pretty obviously what pro-life people believe? Isn’t all this pretty necessarily a consequence of a genuine commitment to pro-life ideology?
Why is everyone so shocked? And if it’s acceptable to be pro-life in our society, why isn’t it acceptable to state the obvious implications of pro-life beliefs?
The thing is that it’s not obvious to most people. Most people just hear “pro-life” and think it’s all unicorns and rainbows because hell, aren’t most people “pro-life”. And then they don’t think about it again, except to wonder WTF all those crazy feminazis are on about.
The forced-birth lobby has been VERY VERY good at keeping their real agenda under the radar. It’s there if you look, but it’s not in the public eye, and the “rape and incest” straddle has been the most-used dodge, which allows forced-birth politicans to not sound like the complete assholes that they are.
However, we’re now at the evolutionarily-inevitable place where “being a Republican politician” is pretty much synonymous not just with “asshole” but with “stupid asshole”. So they’re letting all the crazy out to get some air, because they’re too stupid not to.
The way these incidents are covered drives me nuts. The media treats it like a gaffe, as if everything would be ok if he said the same thing but obscured the implications. They put pressure on him to apologize. For what? Not using the correct magic words? I assume he’s not expected to apologize for actually believing these things. One of our two parties is driven by extremist religious beliefs. This shouldn’t be treated as new information and should be widely and openly discussed.
I think the media bobbleheads assume they are lying and simply pandering to religious extremists and would not legislate the death penalty for women who have an abortion.
I’m not sure why the media pretends to be ignorant of the fact that the extremists of the religious right spent the past thirty years taking over the Republican party.
Perhaps for the same reason they are so shocked every single time the report a crime that happens four times a day. That’s what they get paid for.
It shouldn’t shock us but this subject is something a lot of people don’t tend to look at closely, having gut feelings about it & supporting such people since they “support life” w/o thinking thru what that means. This guy helps to get people to think things thru.
It’s not that it’s shocking (to people who were paying attention). Yes, being against abortion but supporting these exceptions isn’t logically consistent. But for years the anti-abortion movement was run by people who were smart enough not to say that, who knew that accepting the exceptions gave them cover to engage in more substantive restrictions of the right to choose, and that these exceptions weren’t particularly effective anyway.
But now that their willing to say it in public, I absolutely support beating them up on it because even people who are squishy on abortion are uncomfortable with callous indifference to rape victims.
It’s not shocking, it’s just gross. And it should be a big deal, because it’s gross.
I’ve been a clinic escort, helping Planned Parenthood patients get past anti-choice clinic protesters, for years. There is not much from that movement that would shock me, but there’s a lot that I still find and will continue to find disgusting and worthy of outrage, no matter how many times I see/hear it.
If you’re a man (and, most importantly, if it’s an election year), it’s not really that big of a deal at all. Go figure.
And, from PA, if your daughter accidentally gets pregnant through consensual sex, it emotionally feels the same to the dad as if she were raped, because daughters should never have sex or would never actually want sex or something. I wonder if he took her to one of those creepy purity balls.
The final paragraph is the best imo.
I’m reminded of a comment I saw right after Akin’s outburst where a dude was like “I did the math and do you know how few pregnancies are the result of rape? We’re only talking about forcing a few thousand women a year to bear their rapist’s children and how dare anyone call that misogynist.”
It’s the same thing as with ‘raaaaaacism.’ They think that because they’re not Nice Pete, it’s illegitimate, unfair, and just gosh-darn mean to call their active indifference and tacit support for other people’s suffering what it is.
Also, any of those rapists that don’t actually get convicted then potentially have a right to visitation with YOUR CHILD for at least 18 years. You can not only be forced to bear your rapists’ child, but forced to communicate with your rapist and share custody of your child with your rapist for 18 years!
oh man why have I not thought about achewood political analogies until now
Democrats think they’re Ray but act like Roast Beef
Republicans think they’re Ray but act like Pat
Romney and Ryan are Liebot and Vlad
The national media is Philippe, the perpetual child
The Great Outdoor Fight is held every four years
Ralph Nader is Todd
When the jobs report comes out it’s a fuck you friday
When your g-d tells you to hate the people you already hate it’s a pretty good sign you’ve made him in your image.
Well, seeing how Mr. Mourdock has followed the direct instructions of Jesus in the New Testament and given everything he has to the poor, forsaken his family, renounced earthly goals, and devoted his life to spreading the word of the Gospel, I think we can safely take him at his word, right?
(1)If conception after rape is God’s plan, why isn’t abortion God’s plan, too? Did he not create abortion and abortionists?
(2) Alternatively, can God be sued for child support?
I hear that the Catholic Church has deep pockets.
Hey, little boy, why don’t you see if there’s some candy in one of these deep pockets?
At 60, I think I am far too old for their tastes (by a factor of at least 4 and more likely 6).
It’s a gift from God and He intended it to happen. Unless the rapist is, say, Willie Horton. Then it’s a 30-second spot.
Thus proving that Willie Horton was in fact a gift from god — to the Republicans.
These are people untroubled by theodicy.
I still can’t seem to figure out how people aren’t smart enough to figure out that any politician who invokes a diety to further his/her own interests is a charlatan and not worthy of a single minute of your time. I guess it’s nice tool to herd tools with, but religion in politics is the epitome of everything that is wrong with humanity.
I now understand why NY, where I live, and Hawaii, where I used to live, are so heavily populated – how could anyone want to live in the states with a population capable of nominating this guy.
As for this being a “Christian” belief, whatever happened to “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” and “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me . . . to preach deliverance of the captives . . . to set at liberty them that are bruised”?
You are reading the Dirty Fucking Hippy Jesus, not the Real True SuperTurbo Jesus who hates all that girly crap.
SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUPERTURBO JESUS FUNNY CARS!
Yikes; Be careful–you are reading the Bible instead of listening to what the reverend wants you to know about it. That’s secularism and a one way ticket to HELL, where you will not be able to pass GO or collect $200.
I’m just going to start calling all members of the party who don’t openly denounce statements like this Rapeublicans
You danged sickos:
So what then? He is announcing that he is a vegetarian out of respect for the life God creates?
I’m beginning to think Scott doesn’t know the definition of misogynist. Then I think he’s just dishonest. Mourdock’s comment isn’t remotely similar to Akin’s.
Akin’s comment, in addition to reflecting a lack of knowledge of biology, implied that anyone who got pregnant must not really have been raped. Mourdock, on the other hand, simply said that a child conceived as a result of rape is just as much a child as any other — a gift from god. This is a strange concept only to the sort of people who regard children as “punishment.”
“a gift from god. This is a strange concept only to the sort of people who regard children as “punishment.””
It is my understanding that it is perfectly acceptable to refuse unwanted gifts that are harmful, damaging or otherwise inappropriate.
Yeah man, how dare anyone compare a philosophy that says half the population and (just by coincidence, no seriously there’s no way this could be connected) can be ‘gifted’, as a reward for going through one of the most violating things possible (no kiddo, I’m not talking about taxes) an unpleasant and life-threatening medical condition that could end in a life-long souvenir of that experience out for being dehumanizing and in general fucked.
That is just crossing the line.
Oh right yeah, you’re not here to actually say anything substantive in defense of Mourdock (because you get that anyone not in thrall to this bullshit, even people who are just kind of sort of every day misogynist, basically see this shit as massively fucked in the head). This is a chance to ram your glasses up the bridge of your nose and have a satisfying little huff-n-puff about how just how meeeeaaaaan the lib’ruls are for saying you might not be a nice person.
(I really don’t have a read on how sincere Nieporent is about this stuff or how much effort he’s putting into it.)
Scott didn’t actually say they were similarly misogynist. I’ll say that, but he didn’t. He said that they were similar in that they were examples of the new crop of rightwingers’ tendency to say the things out loud that were previously the province of anti legal abortion activists, no the politicians who pander to them.
If you can’t imagine how somebody might feel punished if the state forced her to bear a child of someone who raped her, I think your imaginator might be on the fritz. Some others might look past that and consider it a gift from the flying spaghetti monster. So, you’ve illustrated perfectly why abortion needs to be legal so they can each do what they think is best in the situation. I guess that’s settled.
And the antisex league (I’m sorry, pro life activists) are the ones who think people need to punished with kids they don’t want. Another thing Indiana politicians have been doing a bad job of late is pretending that the antisex league really just care about “life” and don’t have a problem with birth control.
They both reject the biological functions of the human body by declaring pregnancy to be an act of God.
They both want to subject half the population to a religious restriction of their civil rights.
I don’t pretend to any expertise, but one of the things that drives even ignorant me crazy about these discussions is people’s vague use of words like “conception” and “life.” As if it would be easy to agree when “conception” or “new life” occurs. The zygote? The morula stage? Blastocyst? Attachment of the blastocyst to the uteran wall?
If it’s simply zygote — most fundamental sperm + egg — or any stage through blastocyst that might yet implant in wall, then abortions occur “naturally” all the time — really, all the time, in women who are on the whole “fertile.” The “morning-after” pill just makes sure implantation won’t occur. But these assholes consider even taking that pill to be the taking of an independent “life.” (One that already has property rights, apparently — Chris Matthews may harp on this without knowing what he’s talking about, but he is making a fair point.)
For me, the absurdity that an unimplanted blastocyst is a “person” is where they expose their utter hypocrisy. I don’t mean the Akins, since they know nothing about biology in the first place (in general, their idiocy and patriarchal motives are too obvious to argue over), but physicians and nurses of certain religious stripes who do know their biology (far better than I know it) and who still argue for “conception” from the first zygote-formation. (Or rather, they don’t argue; they assert.)
Starting from zygotes and then thinking about “conception” further: is every acorn going to become an oak? What weird thinking! Of course not — and “nature” (the RC position depends on “natural law” arguments, though I apologize if I am citing “nature” wrongly here — I probably am). Even most half-formed half-inch somethings growing out of what was an acorn will fail. If anything, “nature” teaches us that nature is excessive at the beginning, on the assumption that very few beginnings will go anywhere.
Weird how Protestants have started arguing from RC natural law! (Note to non-religious folk here: the world of religion is far richer and more interesting than you seem able to imagine. Among Roman Catholics, not least — though a Protestant myself, I respect the rich and complex traditions within RC, even if I understand most of them very imperfectly.)
Oh hell. Basically, all this is crap. Women should be free to choose an abortion at ANY time. Not because a woman “controls her own body” — what could that mean? some sort of masculinist fantasy, and one that doesn’t sound very pleasurable, anyway — but because she is an agent constructed out of and in world of connections to others. Trust her to make prudent and loving decisions, as men are trusted to make them all the time.
Bodily freedom is a longstanding feminist concern, not a mere masculinist fantasy, but otherwise I agree with your post completely. Even the supposedly “secular” arguments against abortion rely heavily on Catholic understandings of “natural law.”
It used to be that Protestants didn’t care much about abortion–in fact, caring about abortion was suspiciously “popish.” Only when abortion could be turned into a “wedge” issue to counter feminism did Protestants get on that particular bandwagon.
The conservative god is a real asshole, isn’t he? Loves war, bigotry, guns, and hates women.