A very weird
interview this morning on MSNBC with a very weird man: Former Congressman and failed Senatorial candidate Todd Akin. MSNBC's Chuck Todd, who conducted the interview, began by asking Akin about his infamous "legitimate rape" comment and Akin offered up a new and bizarre explanation for what he said:
Legitimate rape is a law enforcement term [...] it's an abbreviation.
Wait, what? An abbreviation for what now?
I should have said legitimate case of rape, and I have acknowledged it was a poor choice of words.
Oh! So if he had said that if it was a "legitimate case of rape" instead of "legitimate rape," then all would be well? Ah ha! It all makes sense now. As Akin now puts it:
I misspoke some words.
Specifically, he misspoke by failing to insert "case of" between "legitimate" and "rape." That would have literally changed everything about the meaning of his statement, right? So let's give him a complete do-over and ask him whether he stands by the essential argument that he was trying to make, which is that a woman should not have control of her reproductive system ever, even when she's raped. Surely if he can admit that he "misspoke" about "legitimate rape" he can admit that he was wrong about that, right?
Wrong, he says, because in his view the fundamental question has nothing to do with women's right to choose, it's this:
Should the child conceived in rape have the same right to life have the same right to life as the child conceived in love?
The answer, he says, is "Yes." And he defends that position by saying:
I had a number of people on my campaign that were children that had grown up that were conceived in rape. They were helping me in the campaign.
Great! Seriously. That's wonderful. Bless them. And if someone was suggesting that a living, breathing human being should be killed because they were conceived in rape, Todd Akin would have himself a pretty good point there. But nobody is saying that. The question is whether Todd Akin or rapists should be the one deciding the conditions under which women continue pregnancies and give birth, or whether that should be up to the women. And according to Akin, it should be up to him and to rapists. And his continued inability to understand the problem with that position explains exactly why he lost.