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U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin: "legitimate" rape (usually) doesn't result in pregnancy
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/todd-akin-legitimate-rape.php
U.S. Representative Todd Akin (R-MO-02), who is running for the Senate seat currently held by Claire McCaskilll (D-MO), claims that the female body has natural ways to shut down the pregnancy process after rape.
This was said in the context of the topic of abortion policy. Akin seems to be arguing that abortions are generally only sought in the case of "illegitimate" rape, which seems to mean cases where the alleged victim is claiming to be raped in order to get an abortion.
Also not the first time that attempts have been made to differentiate between different "kinds" of rape, according to this article:
His claim about “legitimate” types of rape is not completely foreign to the current Republican Congress, however. In 2011, the House GOP was forced to drop language from a bill that would have limited federal help to pay for an abortion to only victims of “forcible rape.” Akin was a co-sponsor on the bill.
Nor is this Akin’s first time suggesting some types of rape are more worthy of protections than others. As a state legislator, Akin voted in 1991 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.
...thefuckamireading.jpg
Comments
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Wut.
I heard about this and ahahahahaha wat.
I saw this on the news today. And you know what? I'm not surprised anymore. Just deeply dismayed.
lol, republicans
...yeah, I should have seen this coming.
That said, what I'm a bit more curious about is just how these people's belief systems work. Like, do they actually believe in male superiority, or do they just believe in several other things that, taken together, result in effectively a belief in male superiority?
I'd go with "yes, but if you asked them, of course they'd mostly say no."
Well, then how do they justify it?
What is this, I don't know...
^^In a lot of cases, I would guess something along the lines of "the Bible says so."
Isn't that the mandatory go-to source for excuses to degrade people in the US right now?
Yeah, pretty much.
I take solace in the fact that if everything in the Bible is true, these guys will all go to hell anyway because most of them have committed terrible sins such as eating shrimp.
I've thought quite a bit about that, and I think you're right on the money. Even if you take into account the reforms in the New Testament, they're still all basically as screwed as anyone that they choose to spit on from a basic rules and regulations perspective.
Protestant Christianity has a weird way of doing things. For a long time, I believe the Catholic and Orthodox churches have encouraged people to interpret the Bible as allegorical or metaphorical in places rather than taken as an absolute literal truth. One of the issues with Protestant Christianity is how hardline it is about the Bible as the only canonical source on morality, possibly as a result of not having a central authority like the Papacy to assist in interpretation and discussion.
Not that other forms of Christianity are free from their black marks, mind, but the overwhelming majority of modern issues concerning Christianity stem from US Protestants.
Still doesn't solve the problem that in practice what people actually do for any religion is pick the bits that they want to practice and ignore or handwave everything else. I mean, there isn't much room for allegory in "don't eat seafood that isn't fish, ever."
I don't know about Orthodox Christianity, but I know that Catholicism has kinda had over a milllenium over which to iron out its kinks. Protestantism has only been around for a few centuries.
^^ The cherry picking can be a problem, no matter where you are.
That said, I was raised under Irish Catholicism (the dominant form of Christianity in Australia) and as much as we were taught to believe and have faith and all that stuff, we were also taught that good judgement made with proper intention was a superior form of morality compared to blind Bible adherence. I'm pretty sure no-one gave a damn if we ate prawns, the parish priest least of all. I certainly ate the shit out of those prawns.
Today I'm agnostic, which is pretty remarkable given how devout I used to be. That tells me a lot about how reasonably Christianity is approached within various Catholic sects, which is supported by how the Catholic church is generally in favour of scientific progress. For instance, the Catholic church disliked Darwin's theory of evolution not because they felt it contradicted their faith (creationism is pretty much a post-Darwin thing), but because it contradicted the concept of a naturally harmonious world and threatened to obsolete the concept of original sin with the "might makes right" nature of natural selection.
But again, Catholicism (and most religions) have their issues which shouldn't be ignored. But all the same, these issues strike me as remarkably petty when compared to the issue of religion within US politics. Given that US policy influences the rest of the world considerably, be it directly or indirectly, it could be argued that US Protestant sects hold more power than the Catholic church in terms of global influence. This certainly appears to be the case in Africa, where US evangelicals have been preaching homophobia (among other regressive policies).
As long as the problems of a religion can be worked on and kept out of both politics and the personal lives of those who aren't members of said religion, I think there's workable material there. The major issue here is that US Protestant sects have become increasingly extreme while holding significant influence in US politics, which in turn holds sway over global politics. So the issue here is that a regressive series of offshoot cults are holding global political influence moreso than any singular issue of faith or conduct.
The tl;dr version is that the kind of religious extremism we're talking about here is very specific to the North American continent and the USA in particular. Other religions and denominations of Christianity have dealt with their own issues and their own extremism throughout the ages, although none of the instances are quite comparable to the modern USA's kind of cult-driven political economy.
^ By the same token, though, Protestantism started as an attempt to break away from Catholicism in order to do just that -- work out the kinks. Before the Protestant movement in the 16th century, all you have is Catholicism and the Orthodox church, and given that Protestantism had nothing to do with the Orthodox church, it draws on Catholic experience. So all that time Catholicism spent working out its kinks is also applicable to Protestantism.
The major issue here is that Protestant sects are instrumental in providing funding and manpower for conservative US politics, so both the US right wing and Protestant sects exist in a sort of symbiotic relationship where what empowers one empowers the other. Religion has been a tool of politics for a long time, but like I discussed above, never quite like this.
No argument here.
Incidentally, IJBM: hearing people claim the US was founded on Christian values.
It should be noted that referring to what's going on as a Protestant school of thought is kind of a minefield, since that's just a catch-all for "schismed from Catholic". When you throw Lutherans, Baptists, Anglicans, and Episcopalians into the same bucket, it's going to resemble a very exotic fruit salad more than a soup.
Matthew 15:11 is the usual standby for why we don't follow that anymore. The Pharisees are being hardasses about the food laws, and Jesus replies something to the effect of "you're defiled by what comes out of your mouth, not what goes in."
Granted, there's more unilateral cherrypicking about a lot of the rest of Leviticus too. We didn't exactly wait for Jesus to say that we probably shouldn't force an heirless widow to marry all her brothers in law.
Beyond the usual "take six bishops, get eight loud opinions" thing causing local pockets of foaming anger, they never even opposed it on an official level -- just the idea of taking it to unhealthy moral conclusions.
Also of note, the first time Copernicus brought heliocentrism around they were pretty stoked. It only turned into a thing when Galileo decided to be a douche about it and it turned into a political pissing match.
Also of note, the Catholic Church is historically very prone to political pissing matches.
Most of European history says hi :P But you're right in that the problems happening are mostly specific to relatively recent revivals local to certain chunks of the US. The kind of fire-and-brimstone stuff you hear about formed shortly before the Revolution as a breakaway from the Church of England, who they thought were hideously corrupt (and to be fair, at the time, they were probably right) -- and it only flared up a second time as recently as the last century in a revival-within-revival thing that backlashed the post-WWII movements.
Most of European historical politics concerning religion is to do with the Catholic and Orthodox churches, especially the former. Given that the Catholic church was and is a central authority and political nexus for this kind of thing, I think it's reasonable to say that the relationship between politics and religion has never been quite like it is today. Even European Protestantism was largely secondary in importance to the Catholic church, who could click their fingers and go "lol fuck you" whenever they liked and everyone would have to listen.
Up to the 1500s, yeah, but then most of the major breakaways happened all at once. The Lutherans broke off in Germany and there was fighting, and Henry VIII decided to make himself head of both church and state so he could give a "lol fuck you" back to the Pope while playing musical wives and England proceeded to shit itself every other time the throne passed because the new head was whichever denomination wasn't official, and France pretty much just shat itself continuously for about 35-some years, and Spain just straight-up ignored the Pope while going amok in the Caribbean and Central America.
Then all of that led into a huge chunk of America's settlers being either breakaway fringes or other nations of disparate denominations that got annexed by England, who only grudgingly let them not be Anglican so they could all just shut up and make money for the Crown, and then the Church of England became something else to break from to solidify casus belli for the Revolution.
That whole chunk of about 300 years was total soap opera material.
England is mostly important insofar as its role as colonialism is concerned, though; our emphasis on English history is understandable given that most of us live in Anglophone nations, but England was actually pretty backwater compared to Spain, France, Germany, the various Italian states and other major European powers. That England decided to break away was chump change compared to the influence the Catholic church still held over Western and Central Europe. These places saw a lot of chaos to be sure, but the Pope more or less retained his lol-worthy, finger-clicking, you-fucking abilities at the end of the day.
^^ The period during which there were two...no, three popes was also soap opera material, so that's actually not new.
Anyway, Alex, you're right, the development of Protestantism has its roots in the development of Catholicism, and for what it's worth, Protestantism cleaned up its house and got a handle on congregational relations a bit earlier than Catholicism did (which waited until the 1960s with the Second Vatican Council, IIRC).
Also, if those were non-deveined shrimp, you literally ate the shit out of them.
@MadassAlex:
Yeah but it was Catholics who were telling the Africans that condoms don't stop HIV transmission...Absolutely, but I don't think there were any proposed death penalties for the use of condoms. I'm not saying that Catholics don't have their own skeletons in the closet, but there's a widespread influence that comes with US Protestantism that makes it several degrees more problematic.
Not to mention something a vast, vast majority of actual Catholics dissent from the official position on that. We're talking like, 90-ish percent give or take a few depending on the poll. There's a whole lot of internal politics preventing a reversal of the official stance, most notably that they'd have to throw out their biggest "RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH" dogmas to do it.
JPII made a comment on the matter:
Or in short,
Speaking as one of his subjects it was one of the most infuriatingly arrogant things I've ever read.
Aaaaaaaaaand Akin is refusing to stand down. Despite driving his career so far into the ground that it's probably in Antarctica by now.
The thing you have to understand about US politics is that changing your mind about something is actually worse for a politician's career here than sticking to an opinion that makes everyone hate him.
In this case, I think changing his mind might be for the best. I mean, even Freep is on his case for this.
In a country where politics have anything at all to do with rationality, that would be the case.
Yeah, even our politicians did an about face on SOPA. The fact that this is less likely to turn the guy around is...disconcerting.