POLITICS - Social Conservative Dimwits on Rape

"Caving on rape" by Dick Polman, NewsWorks 2/4/2011

Excerpt

Wouldn't this be a better world if politicians more often acknowledged those instances when they were making fools of themselves?

Put your hands together for the House Republicans, who this week apparently came to the belated realization that they were shamefully insulting the majority gender.

For several weeks, the party's social conservative wing, led by anti-abortion purist Chris Smith of New Jersey, tried to float a bill that would make it more difficult for rape and incest victims to obtain Medicaid-funded abortions. Dissatisfied with the 35-year-old Hyde Amendment, which bans almost all federally-financed abortions but grants an exception for rape and incest victims, the newly empowered conservatives (joined by a small handful of Democrats) came up with a bright idea:

Decree that the Medicaid money be made available only to incest victims under the age of 18, and only to victims of "forcible" rape.

This is what happens when conservatives try to turn back the clock - in this case, by decreeing that one can properly distinguish between "forcible" rape (in their minds, real rape) and unforcible rape (in their minds, not really rape). According to this mindset, which is circa 1950, a woman is not really raped if, for instance, she is drugged before sex; non-violently threatened, or otherwise coerced, into having sex while on a date; or if she is mentally incompetent and then seduced. Under the bill's right-wing language, statutory rape no longer would have been covered, either, either. Nor would any incest victim who was old enough to vote.

Even some Republican aides on Capitol Hill - speaking anonymously to the press, because they were too embarrassed to address this issue openly - suggested that perhaps it was unwise to codify the reactionary belief that some rapes were less important than others. As one aide whispered to Politico, "last I checked, rape by definition is non-consensual." It was noteworthy, this week, that nobody in the conservative camp dared speak publicly in defense of the rape provision.

The provision also reeked of hypocrisy. Conservatives complain all the time about the intrusiveness of big government, yet, under this plan, they wanted big government to intrusively decide whether rape victims seeking Medicaid-financed abortions were in fact really raped (forcible) or not really raped (all other kinds, although the House GOP didn't even offer definitions that would distinguish between the two; nor are there any distinctions in the federal criminal code). It surely would have been perverse if raped women had been compelled to share the specific, intimate circumstances of their victimhood, to prove to the government that they were worthy of Medcaid money.

Anyway, the sexist language ticked off women's groups and triggered press coverage; finally, yesterday morning, the Republicans killed the language.

AH! The light-of-dawn, women VOTE.