The Republican Party has risen almost as a body to denounce Rep. Todd Akin's (R-MO) insane, counterfactual and repulsive comments on "legitimate rape" and the mythical ability of a woman's body to reject a rapist's sperm and resist pregnancy after rape. Akin's remarks were in support of his belief in the need for a "personhood" amendment that would declare human life to begin with conception and outlaw abortion even in the case of rape or incest, and would also outlaw most forms of contraception, including the Pill, Plan B contraception and IUDs. What the Republicans have desperately attempted to sweep under the rug is that vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan not only holds views similar to Akin's, but has co-sponsored personhood legislation with Akin that would make abortion except in the case of "forcible rape" murder -- and that this extreme view of the government's role in a woman's private decision is enshrined in the GOP's 2012 platform.
Though Ryan called Akin to urge the representative to resign from the race rather than face certain defeat in November and in so doing damage the top of the Republican ticket, Ryan's own support of Akin's views -- sans the bogus medical nonsense that displays a complete ignorance of the operation of the female reproductive system -- has been firm, unwavering and long-standing. Ryan is on record as far back as his first Congressional campaign in 1998 as being opposed to abortion except in cases where the pregnancy threatened the life of the mother. He and Akin worked together on a personhood bill, as well as on a bill denying Medicaid funding for poor women seeking abortions, except in the case of, as the bill put it, "forcible rape", a clear parallel to Akin's "legitimate rape". Now though, asked if women who are raped should be allowed access to abortions, Ryan refuses to answer, presumably so as not to contradict Mitt Romney's timid support of a rape exception while still maintaining Ryan's credibility with the Hezbollah-ish range of anti-abortion organizations like Personhood USA, which has condemned the Romney-Ryan ticket for supporting a rape exception. Romney and Ryan are, in other words, trying to have it both ways.
Indeed, having it both ways seems to be the official strategy of the GOP with regard to personhood: include a plank in the party's 2012 platform that calls for "a constitutional amendment that would ban abortions with no exceptions for rape, incest, or danger to the life of a pregnant woman" but then attempt to Etch-a-Sketch that plank, downplaying it in the knowledge that it will not play well with the vast majority of American voters in the general election, and certainly not with independents and swing voters. The personhood plank represents the red meat thrown to the Republican base, the morality voters whose main concern is what they see as the moral holocaust of modern life, the conservative activists who would sooner gnaw off their own legs than vote for anyone who supports a woman's right to choose abortion, even if raped. Akin's comments thus brought the Republicans to a crisis of conscience: one of their own, going off-script, had made clear what the party very much did not want clarified: the Republican Party is the party of no abortion, no exception, the party that when a woman is brutalized, tells her, "You're on your own." Would the party live according to the dictates of its conscience -- which, make no mistake, Akin was and is -- or would it throw Akin off the island and under the bus as quickly and as quietly as possible, hoping to minimize the damage that revealing its true face caused?
Well, we know how that went. Romney and Ryan as well as John Cornyn and Mitch McConnell called to urge Akin to drop out, which he has so far refused to do. Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS SuperPAC has pulled its funding from Akin's campaign, as has the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The National Review, Ann Coulter and Mark Levin all jumped on the dump-Akin train. I think the implication is clear: when a Republican actually says out loud and to the nation what the Party would like to keep hidden, their deepest beliefs and desires, he cannot win. As with Romney's and Ryan's budget, which they will not disclose the details of, the only way for the GOP to take an election is to obscure, hide and stonewall, and hope that good looks and in Ryan's case at least glibness carry the day for them.