“Todd Akin believes that women’s bodies have some kind of magical mechanism to prevent pregnancy in the case of a “legitimate” rape.":http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/todd-akin-legitimate-rape.php
Seriously, guys?
I am pretty much writing off the modern Republican party. I can accept that there are crazy people all over, but this has gotten to be way too widespread; the density of misogyny and just plain crazy in the party is out of control.
It’s a combination of things. The absolute lack of awareness or acceptance of even basic science keeps ballooning; once you have a large portion of your party’s platform based on an absolute denial of the basis of pretty much all modern biology, you have established that science is not allowed to tell you what to think about how the world works.
So now we have the modern climate-change “skeptics”. They’re not skeptics. Twenty years ago, being unsure and wanting more data might be skepticism. Now, being “unsure” is dogmatism; it results from considerable effort going into disregarding the evidence, with basically the same exact structure as the anti-evolution stuff. And we have people who believe stuff like “women can’t get pregnant from being raped if they were really raped.”
And then we add in the misogyny and homophobia. Texas has a law mandating an invasive procedure before abortions. How invasive? Well, it involves someone sticking a large, hard, plastic thing into the vagina and prodding around with it for a while. Also the doctor is required by this law to describe at length how awesome your baby would be. So basically, if your kid has a birth defect that would be fatal, Texas law requires the doctor to rape you.
This… Has gone too far. If the Republican party considers this kind of stuff acceptable, then they are quite simply no longer sane. The pact with the “evangelicals” back in the 70s and 80s has gradually turned into a thing which is destroying them. At this point, having grown up with a sort of 20th century view of the ideals of the Republican party, I would say “has destroyed them”.
I am now in the market for a party which favors small government but does not hate gays, treat women as chattel, or insist that the problem with disabled people is that they are not trying hard enough.
EDIT: Akin now claims he “misspoke”, without actually retracting his remarks. Oddly, from a purely factual standpoint, his “apology” appears to be substantially less factual than the Onion’s coverage.