The Danger of Laughing at Todd Akin (2 items)

By Ilyse Hogue
The Nation
August 20, 2012 

http://www.thenation.com/blog/169451/danger-laughing-todd-akin?rel=emailnation

The Twittersphere went nuts yesterday after a video was
posted of Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin expressing some
jaw-dropping views on rape and abortion in an interview with
local news:

"First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy
from rape] is really rare," Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview
Sunday. "If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways
to try to shut that whole thing down."

The short-term consequences of such an incendiary remark are
predictable: Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill will
trumpet the remark to her own political advantage, donations
will spike to her campaign and the party committees will
offer the remark as one more proof point of the GOP’s war on
women. But the impact of Akin’s effort to redefine the terms
of this debate reaches beyond this one race. In the
multidimensional chess that shapes public opinion, the game
is less about individual elections and more about a sustained
effort to mainstream radical ideas. In the case of denying
women control over their lives, there’s evidence that the bad
guys may be winning the long-game.

Akin was Paul Ryan’s co-sponsor on a House bill just last
year banning the use of federal funds for abortion except in
cases of "forcible rape." This term seemed laughably
redundant since all rape, by definition, is forced. But this
redefinition of rape was deceptively sinister. Statutory
rapists often use coercion but not physical force. If the
measure had passed, a 13-year-old emotionally manipulated
into having sex with an older friend or relative would no
longer be able to use Medicaid to terminate a resulting
pregnancy. Nor would her parents be able to use their tax-
exempt health savings fund.

While the measure was defeated, conversation around it
introduced skepticism about whether all rape is created equal
and what distinctions should be recognized by law. Instead of
making him politically toxic, Ryan’s support of the
pioneering forcible rape measure likely made him a more
attractive vice presidential candidate to a Romney campaign
needing to energize the right-wing base.

And whether or not Akin loses this cycle, his comments have
already escalated the stakes. In his world view, the rape
victim’s body will be the ultimate judge of whether a crime
has taken place. If she gets pregnant, by Akin’s standard,
her reproductive organs consented to the pregnancy, so she
must have consented to the sex. This bizarre standard of
innocence is reminiscent of medieval Europe, where the men in
authority held the similarly scientific view that women
guilty of witchcraft floated in water while innocent women
would drown. Being cleared of witchcraft was of course not
much consolation to the drowned women, though they at least
got to skip being burned at the stake.

Akin’s comments appear an awful lot like step one in the
GOP’s favorite two-step tactic to redefine the world around
us: first, more extreme figures voice opinions that would
never fly from more politically palatable ones. The right-
wing echo chamber picks up those opinions in the guise of
news coverage. Then, the more politically acceptable
candidates shift their rhetoric to acknowledge the newly
accepted opinion as reality.

Consider our seemingly uncontrollable slide towards climate
catastrophe: in 2006 and 2007, the link between human
activity and climate change was almost incontestable. Al
Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth was a breakout hit; and
the former VP was rewarded for his leadership on the global
issue with a Nobel Prize in 2007. In 2008, both McCain and
Obama openly acknowledged the existence of the threat and the
need for action. Scientists breathed a collective sigh of
relief that the US might finally exert some leadership on
this existential issue.

But when the Obama victory made the idea of a clean-energy
economy a potential reality, the climate deniers kicked into
high gear. Cash from the Koch brothers poured into bogus
organizations to promote climate skepticism and cast doubt on
the scientific consensus. Senator Inhofe called climate
change "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American
people." A 2009 Chamber of Commerce ad buy brutalized House
Democrats who voted for the climate legislation. In the lead
up to the climate summit of 2009, someone even hacked into a
University server and published highly edited e-mails from
climate scientists to make them appear to be fabricating
their results. While the scientists were exonerated, the
damage was done.

The resulting shift in public opinion was almost immediate.
Between 2008 and 2010, the number of Americans who believed
media accounts of climate change were exaggerated jumped from
35 percent to 48 percent. Among self-identified Republicans,
it went to 66 percent. By last year’s Republican presidential
primary, right-wing contenders made seemingly inane
statements that flew in the face of scientific consensus, and
even the ones like Romney who had previously acknowledged the
threat were forced to recant to maintain their viability.

While the political dynamics around these two issues are
different, there are striking similarities in the right-wing
strategy of capitalizing on extreme statements to shift the
spectrum of what’s possible. And the wary will take heed: in
the span of four short years, we went from having two
presidential candidates who openly advocated action to stop
climate change to having no GOP candidates in 2012 who could
or would affirm its existence and a Democratic president who
seems to wish the issue would magically disappear. The
consequences of inaction are already being felt.

The same process is underway to undermine women’s voices in
our own destiny. Mitt Romney has already flip-flopped from a
pro-choice Senate candidate and a governor who promised to be
"a good voice" among Republicans on reproductive health to
his new incarnation as Paul Ryan’s running mate and an anti-
choice leader. While Ryan allows lesser candidates like Akin
to carry the water on extreme views held by the right-wing
patriarchy, his equally radical views become mainstreamed as
his anti-woman credentials are embraced by the party
leadership. If we don’t stop laughing and start drawing hard
lines around scientific reality, how many Akin’s will it take
before we see a President Romney ordering rape victims thrown
into the water to see if they float?

[For a take on how to fight back against rape culture, read
Jessica Valenti’s "How to Out a Rapist."]

* * * * *

Paul Ryan and Todd Akin Partnered on Radical "Personhood"
Bill 

By Ian Millhiser and Adam Peck
ThinkProgress | Report
August 21, 2012 

http://truth-out.org/news/item/11026-paul-ryan-and-todd-akin-partnered-on-radical-personhood-bill-outlawing-abortion-and-many-birth-control-pills

Yesterday, ThinkProgress reported that Rep. Todd "Legitimate
Rape" Akin (R-MO) and GOP vice presidential candidate Paul
Ryan both cosponsored the bill that introduced America to the
despicable term "forcible rape." As it turns out, this may
only be the second most sweeping attack on reproductive
freedom that both men partnered on. Ryan and Akin also
cosponsored a federal personhood bill, the Sanctity of Human
Life Act of 2009, which declares that a fertilized egg is
entitled to the exact same legal rights as a human being:

(1) the Congress declares that:

(A) the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is
vested in each human being, and is the paramount and most
fundamental right of a person; and

(B) the life of each human being begins with fertilization,
cloning, or its functional equivalent, irrespective of sex,
health, function or disability, defect, stage of biological
development, or condition of dependency, at which time every
human being shall have all the legal and constitutional
attributes and privileges of personhood; and

(2) the Congress affirms that the Congress, each State, the
District of Columbia, and all United States territories have
the authority to protect the lives of all human beings
residing in its respective jurisdictions.

Lest there be any doubt, this bill is unconstitutional.
Congress does not have the power to overrule Roe v. Wade by
an ordinary statue, only a constitutional amendment could
serve that purpose. Moreover, even if Roe were overruled by
the Supreme Court, Ryan and Akin’s bill still attempts to
redefine who "the right to life guaranteed by the
Constitution" applies to. Again, changing the meaning of the
Constitution can only be done through an amendment, not
through an ordinary Act of Congress.

Should Ryan and Akin’s personhood agenda take effect,
however, it would drastically reduce women’s reproductive
choice. The bill declares that a human egg obtains "all the
legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of
personhood" the moment it merges with a human sperm. Thus, a
Blastocyst-American would not only enjoy the same
constitutional status as a fully grown adult, it would also
enjoy any "legal" attributes enjoyed by adults. Because every
states’ law makes it a crime to kill a human adult, the
likely effect of Ryan and Akin’s personhood bill would be to
treat killing a fertilized egg as the same thing as homicide.

Such an interpretation would not simply ban abortion, it
could turn many forms of birth control into the legal
equivalent of a murder weapon. Many forms of contraception,
including many birth control pills, function in part by
inhibiting a fertilized egg from implanting in a woman’s
uterus. Thus, Ryan and Akin’s personhood bill could render
the act of using many forms of oral contraception the
equivalent of a homicide crime.

UPDATE

Recent scientific studies have called into question whether
 birth control pills can act by preventing implantation,
 although this view is still held by many medical
 professionals. 
 
 This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or 
 license.

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