Illegitimate Rape

The Democratic Party has many faults, to be sure.  But today I’d like to talk about a problem that disproportionately afflicts the Republican Party.

The G.O.P. has been infected by a serious strain of anti-intellectualism.

The Democratic Party certainly has its fair share of idiotic tropes and shameful propaganda.  However, the Republican Party’s growing Conservative wing continues to promote patriotic jingoism, religious fundamentalism, and increasingly subtle but potent racial politics: a formidable brew contributing to anti-intellectualism within Republican ranks.

Conservative Republican anti-intellectualism takes many forms and has many manifestations.  One obvious example is the Conservative propaganda campaign against educators.  Whether making K-12 teachers collateral damage in the party’s anti-union crusade, or smearing liberally-inclined college professors as spoiled, ivory tower elites detached from the “real world,” Conservatives have made a habit of going after educators.

Political attacks on educators are an outward manifestation of anti-intellectualism; some Conservative politicians cynically use anti-intellectualism to manipulate their constituencies and attack their opponents.

But what happens when you start to internalize it?  What are anti-intellectualism’s inward manifestations for the G.O.P.?

It seems to mean that the Republican Party is increasingly dominated by genuine anti-intellectuals, some of whom are, to be perfectly blunt about it, pretty fucking stupid.  Let’s take a look at Exhibit A.

This is the television footage of U.S. Senate Candidate Todd Akin (R-MO) talking last Sunday about “legitimate rape.”  It’s a short, eye-popping segment.  Take a gander.

Predictably and understandably, the ensuing media storm has centered around Akin’s utterance of the term “legitimate rape.”  After all, it’s such a repugnant concept as to warrant every bit of criticism currently being heaped upon Akin, and leaving ponderous souls to wonder what, exactly, an illegitimate rape is.

I don’t think Akin was intentionally trying to frame himself as a rape apologist.  So if we can manage to look past his inadvertently monstrous articulation, the question then becomes, what was he actually trying to say?

When I watch the footage, what I see is an anti-intellectual desperately grasping at straws as he tries to defend a position that the vast majority of Americans reject.

Should a woman impregnated by rape be allowed to obtain an abortion?

For most Americans that’s a very straightforward question with an easy or relatively easy answer: Yes.

But for Todd Akin, fired by Christian fundamentalism, the answer is No.  He is a religious extremist who devoutly believes a fetus is the moral equivalent of a human being from the moment of conception, and that terminating a healthy pregnancy under almost any circumstance constitutes murder.

But instead of having the courage to fully own his specific beliefs, which are rejected by about 80% of Americans, he attempted to make them more palatable to the general public by couching them in science.

“From what I understand from doctors,” is how he framed his response to the question about abortion rights for women impregnated by rape.

Akin then tried to argue that women’s bodies react to violent rape by reducing the chances of conception.

Huh? Which doctors, exactly, told him this?  The same four out of five who recommend Chesterfield Kings to their patients?

It turns out he was referring to the myth, popular in some religious-right anti-abortion circles, that when a woman is being raped, she secretes hormones that kill the rapist’s sperm, thereby nearly eliminating the chances of impregnation.

Of course, there isn’t a shred of scientific evidence to support this bizarre fantasy, and indeed, the numbers tell a very, very different story.  Sadly, about 5% of female rape victims age 12-45 are impregnated; more than 32,000 American women on average are impregnated by rape each year.

So Akin’s blunder was not just a textbook example of hideous extemporaneous phrasing.  It was also grounded in complete make-believe, nothing more than the wishful thinking of abortion opponents looking to justify their absolutist stance.

According to The Washington Post, the idea of anti-pregnancy rape hormones was first publicly floated by Republican Pennsylvania state Representative Stephen Freind during the late 1980s.  This kind of nonsense is right in line with the other pseudo-science (climate change deniers, intelligent design, etc.) promoted by Conservatives because they and/or their constituents don’t like the political, economic, or cultural implications of real science.

The rape hormone fairy tale has periodically popped up since then, but is only now wilting under the harsh national spotlight because of the firestorm created when Akin stumbled into the phrase “legitimate rape.”

But repugnant terminology aside, Akin appears to actually believe this Easter Bunny bullshit.  It seems he really does think that a woman subjected to violent (“legitimate”) rape will secrete magical, sperm-killing hormones.

And that is internalized anti-intellectualism.

Politics are no stranger to lies and half-truths.  However, this is what happens when an institution actively promotes anti-intellectualism and works hard to discredit established scholarship. Eventually, some of the people who got duped will cycle through the institution’s top positions.  Todd Akin isn’t some random wing nut.  He’s a sitting Congressman running for a seat in the U.S. Senate.  And until his discourse on rapeology, he was leading Democratic incumbent Claire McKaskill in the polls.

In November, we’ll find out if the Conservative movement’s anti-intellectualism, both internal and external, can muster enough pitchforks and torhces to send Akin to Washington.