Warning: big trigger alert. I take this very seriously, as I am married to a woman who was targeted for rape on more than one occasion. Although this diary is laced with dark, dark humor, believe me when I say I intend no disrespect whatsoever, and I wish no one, man or woman, to be triggered by the contents of this diary. If you think it will trigger you, please don't read it. It's not worth it.
---------
Todd Akin (R-Cave) is an idiot. A hate-maddened, misogynistic idiot with the intellect of a tree sloth and the educational accomplishments of a sidewalk brick. He apparently thinks most rapes are "illegitimate" and that the few women who are "legitimately" raped have some magical power to terminate the pregnancy via some Jedi uterus trick.
But even idiots can surf the Web, as long as they don't short out their laptop by slobbering on it, and apparently Akin or one of his designated surrogate idiots has been surfing the dank and musty byways of the Intertoobz. One of the many, many people who are lambasting him on his Facebook campaign page (why bother looking, undoubtedly a flunky is busy scrubbing comments as we speak, but you can try) may have found the fount of this particular piece of ludicrously ignorant misinformation.
Up and over for more.
Here it is in all of its twisted glory: The Myth of Rape Pregnancies by some howling jackass named Peter Cornswalled.
If you don't want to sully your hard drive with a link to this fuckhead (and that would be a GOOD call), let me summarize some of the nuggets of stupidity on this page for you, and see if this seems to resonate with Akin's dribbling idiocy.
Apparently all of us "anti-lifers" use rape as a justification for our support for abortion, and if we believe Peter, we all think that children conceived by rape must be aborted. First time I've heard that. But they think we have the same authoritarian mindset they have, and since they think All Children Must be Carried to Term Or Else, they think we believe that All Children (Except for a Select Few) Must be Aborted, Especially Those Conceived via Rape. Limbaugh tends to drool this argument out between hocking up hairballs.
Naturally Peter gets all Biblical next, accusing us of being the intellectual descendents of those "heathens that burned early Christians at the stake and threw us to the lions." Wasn't me or mine, Peter, but let's move on. He sings the standard chorus of Every Sperm is Sacred for a bit.
Now's where it gets interesting. Let's quote the little troll here:
All this assumes however that rape pregnancies are not only common, but common enough to allow loopholes for them in the law. What most people don't know is that rape pregnancies are a myth, and the science proving it has been known for hundreds of years.
People on the edge: if you're on the edge of triggering by reading this through now, STOP. It's about to get a lot worse.
Wow. A myth. That's a hell of a statement. So no woman has ever gotten pregnant due to rape? Gee. Since we know that just cannot be true on its face, the only viable way to make this true is ... what, Peter? All of those women are lying?
He gives us a lesson from the Insane Biology Text of Doctor Phibes, or somewhere, which essentially asserts that if a woman doesn't have an orgasm (which causes the WTF "up suck" phenomenon that draws the sperm into the womb), nothing happens.
Without this up suck, the male seed remains outside the womb, barred entry by a mucus plug that forms when the wife is fertile.
And just to add a dusting of anti-Semitism to the raving ignorance and misogyny of his Science With His Head Up His Ass lecture, he cites the Talmud as support for his "theory."
In Jewish religious law, still in effect in most Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish groups today, a woman can divorce her husband for failing to bring her to the moment of issue because doing so denies her the dignity and fulfillment of conception.
My wife is Jewish, and I know better than to ask her about this. Even if this bit is true (and a Talmudic scholar I am not), I don't care. It doesn't mean what this fuckhead thinks it means.
If he hasn't gone off the deep end before now, he goes there now, dragging us into the muck and mire and shoving our head into the mud at the bottom. Since women, he says, can't get pregnant unless they have an orgasm:
it is not possible for a woman who is actually raped to become pregnant. A woman who becomes pregnant must have had a moment of issue, meaning she enjoyed what happened. Regardless of how the encounter began, by achieving a moment of issue the woman has consented to all that went before. The act of becoming pregnant is, due to the biology with which God gifted us, proof that the woman was not raped.
Does anyone else want to wring his little chicken neck? (Sidebar: Why get all scientific and detailed in laying out how it all really happens? We know Peter is wrong, wrong, so damn wrong. There are palmetto bugs under my floorboards that know more about reproductive science than Peter. And the idea of "orgasm as consent" is so very hateful and so very, very wrong on every level.)
If a woman does become pregnant and "regret[s] her choices later on," he writes, perhaps because she's been beating the sheets with the milkman while Her Loving Husband is off earning a living (yes, he cites adultery as a specific reason for this), then the not-raped pregnant woman will run to the abortionist while screaming rape, rape. She will be
murdering a child while slandering his father with false accusations.
He didn't mention the power of women who were "legitimately raped" (whatever the fuck THAT means) to magically terminate their pregnancy as if they were lizards, but that's because he doesn't believe rape victims CAN get pregnant, so no points for that.
------
This isn't funny. It isn't entertaining. If anyone thinks I found any of this remotely amusing, I did not. I've covered hate speech and domestic terrorism for the History Commons for years now, and I'm not sure I've ever dipped myself into a fouler sump of septic gunk as this little blog entry. I'm not sure I have words to express the revulsion and loathing I have for Peter Cornswalled and his intellectual acolyte Todd Akin. I see this as an expression of some of the deepest, darkest evil humanity is capable of articulating without supernatural intervention. "You're pregnant, which means you had an orgasm, which means you couldn't have been raped, which means you fornicated behind your husband's back, which means you are a jezebel, so have your baby and then BURN."
Did Akin get this from Cornswalled's blog? Maybe, there's no way to know unless Akin is hit by a cosmic ray of truth and confesses. Certainly Cornswalled wouldn't be his only source; he wouldn't have got the idea for his Magic Pregnancy Termination Power from there.
I don't know, because I don't get into the weeds with the Promise Keepers and other horseshit male supremacist belief systems, but I doubt very strongly this unhinged blot of misogynistic, science-ignorant filth begins and ends with this nasty little blogger and his ugly little blog. so I'm thinking this "theory," if you can justify this whatever the fuck it is with the word, is more popular than most of us may know among the far, far, far right, where Akin seems to hang his shingle.
I have read a lot of filthy shit on the Internet and diaried about some of it, but I'm not sure I've come away from any of it feeling more dirtied than I feel at the moment. I cannot even begin to imagine how a woman feels after reading this, and as for a woman (or man) traumatized by sexual assault or rape ... there's no way for me to even comprehend that.
I do know that all of us, Missouri residents or not, need to do whatever the hell we can do to keep Todd Akin the hell out of the Senate. I hope this terminates his political career, but the only way that will happen is if we -- not the mainstream media, not Rachel Maddow, and certainly not the "sensible" Republicans (hmph) who so far haven't said jackshit about Akin's ravings -- make it happen by hounding him with this, in every venue we can, from here till Judgment fucking Trump.
If not, mull this over: you're watching a balding Chris Matthews (or whoever) in 2016, who is marveling over the following tidbit: "The longshot presidential candidacy of Senator Todd Akin from Missouri seems to really be catching fire ..."
------
Update (if you can update an as-yet unpublished diary): Apparently this pigshit has been stewing for decades: Lawmaker Says Rape Can't Cause Pregnancy, from 1995.
Women do not get pregnant when raped because "the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work" during an attack, a state lawmaker said yesterday. Republican Representative Henry Aldridge made the remarks to the House Appropriations Committee as it debated a proposal to eliminate a state abortion fund for poor women.
[...]
"It's really common for rape victims to be blamed for being raped," said Margaret Henderson, president of the North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault. "But this is the first time I've heard of rape victims being blamed for becoming pregnant. I am both flabbergasted and offended by this man's remarks." Aldridge had the floor during the committee meeting as he was trying to apologize for earlier remarks implying that victims of rape or incest are sexually promiscuous. "I would invite the representative from Pitt to ask any woman who is the victim of rape or incest if she is being sexually promiscuous," Democratic Representative Dan Blue told him at the time.
Later, Aldridge defended his comments. "To get pregnant, it takes a little cooperation. And there ain't much cooperation in a rape," he said.
Republican House speaker Harold Brubaker said Aldridge's comments "are not the opinion of the leadership of the House."
It's all there: insane, ignorant misogynistic spew while trying to deny poor women health choices, angry retorts, lame-ass nopologies combined with more hateful spew, and
a limp "gee, we don't share this view" rejoinder from the GOP leadership.
I'd like to think both Aldridge and Cornswalled are working at the same outhouse-cleaning firm, and will soon welcome Akin to their ranks.
------
Update and edit: "Preganancies"? Ugh. Fixed.
Thanks so much for rec'ing this one up, guys. And no, I don't believe Codswallop is a satirist. If it's satire, then so is the entire Republican Party platform.
