The reason Ryan and Akin tried to define "forcible rape"?

[madfloridian]

Mother Jones tells perhaps why these extreme ideologues felt they had to use such a definition which is insulting to all women.

One of these men is running for senate, the other is running to be vice president of our nation. How did we get to this place?

Todd Akin, Paul Ryan, and Redefining Rape


Rep. Paul Ryan (left), now the GOP nominee for vice-president, introduces his 2012 budget as Rep. Todd Akin (right) and other congressional Republicans look on. Pete Marovich/ZUMAPRESS.com

This isn't the first time Akin has expressed fringe views about rape in the context of the abortion debate. Last year, Akin, vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and most of the House GOP co-sponsored a bill that would have narrowed the already-narrow exceptions to the laws banning federal funding for abortion—from all cases of rape to cases of "forcible rape."

After I reported on the "forcible rape" language in January 2011, a wave of outcry from abortion-rights, progressive, and women's groups led the Republicans to remove it. But a few months later, in a congressional committee report, Republicans wrote that they believed the bill would continue to have the same effect despite the absence of the "forcible" language.

So why was the "forcible" language so important? Pro-life advocates believed they needed to include the word "forcible" in the law to pre-empt what National Right to Life Committee lobbyist Doug Johnson called a "brazen" effort by Planned Parenthood and other groups to obtain federal funding for abortions for any teenager by (falsely) claiming statutory rape. Abortion rights groups, Johnson warned, wanted to "federally fund the abortion of tens of thousands of healthy babies of healthy moms, based solely on the age of their mothers." Richard Doerflinger, the US Council of Catholic Bishops' top anti-abortion lobbyist, echoed Johnson in congressional testimony, arguing that the "forcible" language was "an effort on the part of the sponsors to prevent the opening of a very broad loophole for federally funded abortions for any teenager." Planned Parenthood flatly denied having a plan to open up such a loophole.

So how did we get to this place. Perhaps because the last two decades under so-called "centrist" think tank leadership, our party avoided taking stands on women's rights so as not to lose elections in red states.

[Divine Discontent]

1. How DARE women's groups and their supporters say the GOP is waging a war on women! LOL....

Akin stepped right out of some highly controlling religious cult from the 1880's, and.... right into today's GOP.

Their VP nominee has extremist positions on several issues, and that says plenty about their inner feelings about controlling women and other groups in America.




Get it here:
http://www.zazzle.com/paul_ryan_ayn_rand_budget_bumper_sticker-128567915003360711?rf=238107662556833486

[No Elephants]

2. The only way you can "falsely" claim statutory rape is to lie about your age. to

claim you were say 14, when you were actually whatever the age of consent to sex is in your state.

The whole point of having any statutory rape statute is to say, as a society, we are not going to let minors of a certain age to consent to intercourse with an older person.

And, yes, the state legislature has to pick an arbitrary age somewhere between just born and 18 years of age. But legislaturs make arbitrary decisions all the time. That's what they do--and it's okay, unless they are arbitrary about circumbscribing a Constitutional right, such as, oh I don't know, freedom of speech or freedom of reproductive choice.

A woman who had been orphaned at an early age told me of how she "consented" to her brother in law's taking her virginity before she was ten. He had groomed her for a long time and the things he had done to her while pretending to want to teach her to play the piano "felt good." (Oprah Winfrey said very similar things about the relative who had taken her virginity--and both had come from troubled families in which love, as opposed to grooming, had been hard to come by.)

Not only were Akin and Ryan trying to say, "We don't want to protect minors from sexual predators," but they are also violating the alleged Republican value of the rights of states. Since the 1600s, each colony and then each state decided the age of consent.

Now, Akins and Ryan and other Republicans say, to the states, "You can have "states' rights," as long as we agree with the laws you pass. If we don't agree, we will federalize it, as we did with DOMA and tried to do with right to die laws and, now, statutory rape."

Once again, the falsehood of the Republicans being for states's rights and small federal government is exposed.

[Enthusiast]

3. 14 ain't too young.

I didn't force her. Besides, she was my cousin. :rofl: :rofl: