They Just Can't Control Themselves

Just when Mitt Romney was putting the campaign on cruise control for the last two weeks, another crazy Tea Party guy lost control and opened his yap about rape again. Richard Mourdock, the Republican candidate for Senate in Indiana, has out-Akined Todd Akin by saying that God intends rape victims to become pregnant:

[...] Mourdock said Wednesday that he is standing by his statement that when a woman becomes pregnant during a rape "that's something God intended." He says some people have twisted the meaning of his comment.

Here's Mourdock trying to "untwist" the meaning of his comment:

"I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen," Mourdock said.

I'm not sure how anyone can interpret this in any way other than, "God wanted that woman pregnant so he sent a rapist after her."

"I think that God can see beauty in every life," Mourdock said. "Certainly, I did not intend to suggest that God wants rape, that God pushes people to rape, that God wants to support or condone evil in any way."

If Mourdock and other conservatives who oppose abortion in cases of rape and incest truly believe that God sees beauty in every life, then why do they support expanding the death penalty?  In particular, one wonders whether Mourdock favors the death penalty in cases of rape, which was the norm decades ago.  Several states, including Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas and Oklahoma, had or were considering the death penalty in cases of child rape, but the Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty for child rape (absent murder) in 2008, over the objections of conservative justices Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas.

This kind of thinking is incoherent, considering that conservatives so commonly believe that predisposition to certain behavior is genetic and/or racial. Why do they want to force women to bear the spawn of men so evil they should be put to death? Can't they understand why some women wouldn't want to bear the child of  the monster that violated them? Would these conservatives want their daughters to raise such a child as their own? Would they trust the safety of their childen with the spawn of a rapist?

I don't believe for a moment that all children of rape are doomed to become monsters, but it's a fact that predisposition to mental illness can be inherited. Shouldn't a woman be allowed to protect herself and her other children against that possibility if she so chooses, in exactly the same way she should be able to choose to purchase a handgun to protect herself against future rapists?

Mourdock is the Tea Party guy who beat out Dick Lugar (Dick Lugar!) because Lugar wasn't conservative enough. Men like Akin and and Mourdock are becoming the rank and file of the Republican Party, and the ouster of conservative-but-not-crazy men like Lugar has put all other Republicans on notice that they had better toe the line or they'll be next.

These men and the other Republicans already in Congress are the best argument yet for voting for Barack Obama. There's no way in hell Romney would veto the kind of legislation that Akin and Mourdock will push through Congress. If Romney doesn't do as he's told, he'll suffer the same fate as Dick Lugar.

Conservatives have grudgingly acquiesced to voting for Romney, but only because they have Paul Ryan skulking around with a dagger in his hand, like Brutus shadowing Caesar on the Ides of March.