[Vision2020] The Sexual Spirit of ’76

[Art Deco]

****Notice the cleverly disguised pun in the first sentence of the fourth
paragraph.***


 [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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August 22, 2012
The Sexual Spirit of ’76 By GAIL
COLLINS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/gailcollins/index.html>

In colonial America, conventional wisdom held that women could not get
pregnant unless they enjoyed the sex.

People, who would have thought I’d have an opportunity to bring up this
factoid right in the middle of a presidential race? Thank you,
Representative Todd Akin of Missouri! Without you, we might have been
condemned to spend today reinvestigating the Congressional Budget Office
Medicare cost projections.

But, instead, we are going to deconstruct the now-legendary explanation
from Akin of how, in cases of “legitimate rape,” women’s bodies will “shut
that whole thing down” before pregnancy occurs.

Akin, a U.S. Senate nominee, has a reputation for, shall we say, thinking
outside the box. It was not for nothing that the incumbent, Claire
McCaskill, had targeted him as the Republican I’d Most Like to Run Against.
McCaskill was particularly attracted by his comparison of federal student
loans to “Stage 3 cancer.” And then there was his vote against the school
lunch program.

But all that paled next to his anti-abortion disquisition during a recent
TV interview. In very few words, Akin managed to make three points. One was
that rape victims can’t get pregnant. This theory goes back to our
forefathers, who believed that in order for our foremothers to conceive,
“the womb must be in a state of delight.”

“They never asked the women,” said Margaret Marsh, the co-author of “The
Empty Cradle,” a history of infertility in America.

The idea never entirely faded away, possibly because it reflects so well on
male lovemaking prowess. (Failure to conceive, by the same rule, was all
because of female frigidity.) Since Akin’s debacle, we’ve learned that a
former member of Congress once told the House Appropriations Committee that
when people “are truly raped, the juices don’t flow, the body functions
don’t work and they don’t get pregnant.” And that James Leon Holmes, a
federal judge *currently hearing cases in Arkansas*, once said that
“concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape
occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami.”

This line of thinking is also familiar to David Wiley, a professor of
health education at Texas State University who co-authored a study on what
Texas school districts were actually teaching their students in sex
education classes. (He was inspired, he said, when “a sincere male student
asked aloud, ‘What is my risk for cervical cancer?’ ”) Searching through
the Web sites of groups that were providing program material to the
districts, Wiley found one that announced: “If the woman is dry, the sperm
will die.”

So the first part of Akin’s comment is not the product of his unique
imagination. It’s still being repeated all over the country, perhaps out of
veneration for the thoughts of the founding fathers.

Part two was Akin’s mention of “legitimate rape.” This is the piece that
had every mainstream Republican honcho in the country calling on Akin to
drop out of the race. Karl Rove pulled the plug on his money. Paul Ryan
reportedly got on the phone and begged Akin to go away for the good of the
team. (The team, or at least the Paul Ryan part of it, had once sponsored
anti-abortion legislation with Akin that referred to “forcible rape” in the
same cringe-inducing fashion.)

But it’s the third point in Akin’s comment that’s really important for this
election. Before he got sidetracked into colonial-era biology, the veteran
House member was trying to explain why he opposes abortion even in the case
of rape. “But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something,” Akin
said, referring to the miraculous female shutdown mechanism that he’d
discovered. The rapist, he continued, should be punished, but not “the
child.”

This is a perfectly consistent theological doctrine. If you believe that
every fertilized egg is a human being, with the same sacred rights as a
newborn baby, then, obviously, you are not going to want it to be aborted,
no matter how it came into the world.

Politicians who say they oppose all abortions are making perfect sense,
except for the part where they try to impose their doctrinal beliefs on the
vast majority of the country, which does not share that particular
religious conviction. It’s the abortion-except-for-rape-and-incest position
that doesn’t compute. Rape victims, yes, but not a 14-year-old who was
impregnated by her 15-year-old boyfriend? The impoverished mother of six
kids whose birth control method failed? There’s no way to set the
worthy-of-compassion bar unless you trust women to set it for themselves.

Maybe Akin’s real sin is that he exposed the phoniness of the
rape-and-incest exception, which is just an attempt to make radical
extremism look moderate. That and the theory of the delighted womb.




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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