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Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin: The New Face of the Republican Party

Amanda Marcotte
October 25, 2012

One thing continues to bug me when it comes to the various Republicans insisting that God wills all sorts of sexual horrors on women, and it's this: The god of the Christian right is a completely dribbling idiot. The one thing---the one thing!---he cares about more than anything is making sure that mere women don't have control over uteruses, vaginas, etc. So why did he put them in women's bodies? That kind of poor decision-making really should mean he has no right to be worshipped. If my number one priority in the world was keeping someone from making any decisions about, oh, an iPhone, I wouldn't give it to them and say, "Here. It's your job to take care of this phone and carry it around with you at all times. But you are not to use it for surfing the web, checking your email, or accepting phone calls from any other numbers but mine," it's basically my fault if I come back and find that they've been surfing the web with it. That's what their god did with vaginas, by putting them in women's bodies and then telling them that they are just minding the vaginas for their proper owners, their god-given husbands (and apparently random rapists) who use it for procreative purposes. Their god is a moron. Instead of endlessly fighting for laws that enact their god's will, they should turn to their god and tell him, "You're the one who gave women the vaginas in the first place. You fucking deal with it when they do what they want with them."

Of course, the reason they don't do that is there is no god, and they're just making up some dude in the sky giving ladies vagina orders because they correctly realize that if they said, "By the authority vested by me in me, I declare that vagina to no longer be your property," it would be a little less impressive that the sky asshole with a beard. By and large, when someone claims God intends something, they mean they want something. Simple as that.

So, this Richard Mourdock guy. He's in a toss-up race for Indiana Senator, and he joins the growing ranks of what I saw someone on Twitter dub the Rapebulicans, by claiming his god sits around forcing rape victims to become pregnant, presumably because he's peeved at women as a group for playing Angry Birds with their iPhones, if you catch my meaning.

Mitt Romney LOVES this motherfucker. The DNC has already made an ad about it:

Yep, Mourdock is the only Senate candidate that Romney has made an ad endorsing. So reporters are having some fun with this:

 While a Romney campaign aide has said he disagreed with Mourdock's remark, the Republican presidential nominee is standing by Mourdock and hasn't asked the Indiana state treasurer to take down a TV ad Romney filmed for him earlier this week.
Otherwise, Romney has uploaded his "sniveling coward" program and continues to refuse to answer reporter questions about this. Since it's a theological showdown about what God wants in our upcoming theocracy, I believe those questions should be about if there's any difference between Mormons and evangelical Christians on this "God spun the rape wheel and you were the lucky winner" question.
Meanwhile, let's not forget that Todd Akin is out there, and he is worse than you imagined. One thing I don't note in the Prospect article, but is worth floating, is that Akin changed his public name after his first three arrests, which coincides with his move to start seeking public office. That's interesting, but the main issue here is that if Akin wins, the Republicans have reached a new low by giving such a high office to a man who has a long history of toying with violence and force to get his way.
Let's be clear: It's not a coincidence that the anti-choice militant groups that Akin springs from produce outright terrorists regularly. What they do is called "protest" but isn't really protest in the same sense. Political protest is usually aimed at institutions. By protesting clinics, anti-choicers are targeting private citizens making private choices. As a point of comparison, imagine if, instead of occupying Zucotti Park and organizing demonstrations aimed at getting news coverage, the Occupiers instead decided to target individual bankers, stalking them, telling them they know where their children go to school, and trying to physically block them from going to work. Those sort of tactics have the logic of terrorism, and it's not surprising when people who get frustrated that their harassment doesn't work start toying with the idea of escalating to actual violence.
But this is what the Tea Party insurgency in the Republican Party means. Not just electing people who agree politically with militants who use stalking, harassment, and occasionally violence to get their way, but electing people who have actually done these things. We should be afraid.
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