Missouri Republican: 'Legitimate rape' rarely causes pregnancy

[derspiess]

No, the difference is that Obama released all the information he could legally release.  Romney has chosen not to do so, which is a bit odd for a Presidential candidate.

  Let's see those transcripts.

[Viking]

  Yes, because I lie about what I believe.

You said you had evidence to support your belief, you lied about that, you said you believed based on that evidence and you obviously lied about that.

Credibility <> truthfulness.  You believe the nonsense you spout, I'll give you that.  You have no credibility because you have not one shred of objectivity when it comes to the topic.

You call me a bigot while proudly announcing that you didn't read the text that you claim makes me one? Anticipating this kind of idiocy from you I posted an opinion piece from a credible source (Slate which is part of the Washington Post) which agreed with me on the facts and the interpretation.

It's your own bigotry and predjudice that is blinding you here. 

[Admiral Yi]

No, the difference is that Obama released all the information he could legally release.  Romney has chosen not to do so, which is a bit odd for a Presidential candidate.

Eric Holder has not released all the information he could legally release.  Therefore I can claim he was bribed to run guns by Mexican drug lords and that Osama bin Laden put a mind control chip in his brain.

[Razgovory]

No, the difference is that Obama released all the information he could legally release.  Romney has chosen not to do so, which is a bit odd for a Presidential candidate.

  Let's see those transcripts.

What transcripts?

[Razgovory]

No, the difference is that Obama released all the information he could legally release.  Romney has chosen not to do so, which is a bit odd for a Presidential candidate.

Eric Holder has not released all the information he could legally release.  Therefore I can claim he was bribed to run guns by Mexican drug lords and that Osama bin Laden put a mind control chip in his brain.

I didn't know Eric Holder was running for President.

[Jacob]

Because it represents a real trend in american society.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/08/20/todd_akin_s_legitimate_rape_comment_not_a_misstatement_but_a_worldview_.html

Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, the Republican candidate for the Missouri Senate race, told a St. Louis news station on Sunday that "legitimate rape" rarely causes pregnancy: "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

He later took it back, but this wasn't a misstatement. It wasn't a gaffe or a stray bit of medical misinformation that could have attached itself to any one of us. The statement was a crystallization of Akin's worldview: sexist, blame-shifting, and profoundly ignorant.

In case anybody missed this dig at the "no means no" crowd, "legitimate rape" is a coded phrase meant to distinguish between a stranger attacking you in a parking garage, or, say, your date or your youth pastor doing the same. If you're tipsy or wearing a short skirt, it's not rape-rape, etc.

The statement was actually intended to soften Akin's absolute opposition to abortion, even in the case of rape or incest. Why bother to have loopholes for such conditions when they're going to be so rare, goes his thinking? As Talking Points Memo notes, the Congressman has long suspected that rape and abortion laws are less likely to protect women from abuse than to allow them to be abusive:

Akin's past includes praising a militia group linked to anti-abortion extremism in the 1990s and voting against creating a sex-offender registry in 2005. Back in 1991, as a state legislator, Akin voted for an anti-marital-rape law, but only after questioning whether it might be misused "in a real messy divorce as a tool and a legal weapon to beat up on the husband," according to a May 1 article that year in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (via LexisNexis).

The sexism is outrageous, but it's the stupidity that really burns. It takes a lot of work for a member of the House science committee to cultivate an ignorance of science as profound as Todd Akin's. It's not accidental and it's not incidental to his worldview—his belief system requires a rejection of science.

The thing about science, as Neil DeGrasse-Tyson says, is that it's true whether you believe it or not. And the truth is that biology does not give a goddamn how sperm meets egg, whether it's within the bounds of a sanctified marriage, in a test tube, or after a rape.

One of the great gifts of modern medicine is that we can control when and whether eggs are released (through the pill), whether sperm encounter the egg (condoms or vasectomy), whether a fertilized egg implants in the uterus (IUDs), and yes, whether it stays there (abortion). Trauma may increase the spontaneous miscarriage rate, but the effect is trivial, and tens of thousands of women are impregnated by rape annually.

But if you believe that the Bible is the "inerrant word of God," as Akin apparently does, given his Master of Divinity from the Covenant Theological Seminary, then you can believe all kinds of things. That the world is 6,000 years old, for instance, and that evolution is a conspiracy organized by pretty much every biologist, geologist, paleontologist, ecologist, biochemist and geneticist working in the past century and a half, plus Satan. If God can produce Jesus through a virgin birth, he can certainly prevent a worthy-enough victim of "legitimate rape" from carrying her rapist's child.

(And just to be clear, it's not that he's up on the latest evolutionary biology speculation about sperm priming and miscarriage. This idea has been bouncing around conservative circles for years as an excuse for defending an absolute ban on abortion.)

Akin and other Missouri conservatives are now trying to perpetuate this massive misinformation campaign on school children. Missouri's "Right to Pray" amendment, which passed this month, allows kids to opt out of any educational assignments that conflict with their beliefs. As the National Center for Science Education has pointed out, that means children have a legal right to refuse to participate in biology class. Or, presumably, sex ed, where they would have to learn about basic reproductive biology, a class Todd Akin apparently skipped.

It is part of a long standing religiously motivated attempt at regulating the and controlling sexual activity in all of society. By pretending that being rape-raped can't get you pregnant means you don't have to accept the moral argument for abortion in the case of rape or incest, you just assert (contrary to the evidence of course) that since she got pregnant she was to blame.

This is the main reason that I think religion is bad and something should be done about it is people like Akin and his useful idiots who prance around claiming that faith is a good thing when the only thing it really does re-enforce and support mysogynists like Akin in his campaign to oppress women and take away their ability to use science, technology and knowledge to control their bodies.

There are no facts supporting any form of hypothesis on how condoms don't work or rape-rape can't make you pregnant or properly performed abortions are highly dangerous etc.etc. these are assertions de anus. The only purpose of which is to invent facts which supposedly support conclusions already gained from religious texts. Lying for the Lord, like you did when you claimed to have evidence for the existence of god which, when examined you did not.

The US has moved a lot further along the path towards the world in The Handmaid's Tale than I ever imagined.

[Ed Anger]

The US has moved a lot further along the path towards the world in The Handmaid's Tale than I ever imagined.

I'll be Robert Duvall.

[Barrister]

  Yes, because I lie about what I believe.

You said you had evidence to support your belief, you lied about that, you said you believed based on that evidence and you obviously lied about that.

You didn't like the evidence I presented.  That hardly means I was lieing.

Credibility <> truthfulness.  You believe the nonsense you spout, I'll give you that.  You have no credibility because you have not one shred of objectivity when it comes to the topic.

You call me a bigot while proudly announcing that you didn't read the text that you claim makes me one? Anticipating this kind of idiocy from you I posted an opinion piece from a credible source (Slate which is part of the Washington Post) which agreed with me on the facts and the interpretation.

It's your own bigotry and predjudice that is blinding you here.

I did not call you a bigot.  I said you lacked objectivity.  Some may conclude that you are a bigot, but I couldn't possibly comment on that.

[Admiral Yi]

I didn't know Eric Holder was running for President.

Your rule is getting narrower and narrower by the post.

[Barrister]

The US has moved a lot further along the path towards the world in The Handmaid's Tale than I ever imagined.

Except the dude is being rightly pilloried for his comments about "legitimate rape".

[Viking]

The US has moved a lot further along the path towards the world in The Handmaid's Tale than I ever imagined.

Religious people do fucked up shit, but if anything american fundies would be abhorred by the idea of surrogacy of any kind. The Hagar bit of the bible is one they all consistently ignore.

[Razgovory]

I didn't know Eric Holder was running for President.

Your rule is getting narrower and narrower by the post.

I thought we were discussing personal information released by Presidential candidate.  I'm not asking for your personal information, Yi.  Or anyone elses.

Anyway, don't you GOPtards make those sorts of claims about Eric Holder as it is?  If Harry Reid apologizes for his statement does that mean Republicans will stop?

[Admiral Yi]

I thought we were discussing personal information released by Presidential candidate.

We were discussing unfounded allegations made against presidential candidates.  You tried to change the subject to releasing personal information.

Which was probably the card poor Harry was trying to play.  He just did it in the most fucked up way imaginable.

[Razgovory]

I thought we were discussing personal information released by Presidential candidate.

We were discussing unfounded allegations made against presidential candidates.  You tried to change the subject to releasing personal information.

Which was probably the card poor Harry was trying to play.  He just did it in the most fucked up way imaginable.

Oh, I can think of more fucked up ways.  The unfounded allegations were based on unreleased personal information, that is the crux of the whole matter.

[Admiral Yi]

Oh, I can think of more fucked up ways.  The unfounded allegations were based on unreleased personal information, that is the crux of the whole matter.

No they weren't.  They were purportedly based on something a Bain investor said to Harry.

Now it would be accurate to say that the only way to conclusively refute this bizarre-ass allegation would be to release Romney's tax records.  But with the exception of Harry Reid, you, Seedy, and maybe that nutcase from Vermont, no one thinks the allegation needs refuting.