I’m sitting in O’Hare waiting for my connecting flight, and I haven’t had much sleep and I’m sweaty and rumpled and I’ve got that queasy feeling deep in my gut from a digestive tract that says, “hell with you, I’m shutting down anyway”, and I’m reading Jill Filipovic’s summary of all the idiotic things Republicans have said about rape. This is not a good combination. I’m going to be taking the stage at CSICon both pukey and pissed off.
Wait. That might just be exactly the right mood to be in.
Oh, jeez. Here’s another summary of Republican rape positions. I don’t know how anyone can vote for these horrible people.
PZ, many thanks for all you go through to talk to us atheists (and the theists brave enough to listen to reason). It’s enormously appreciated. Take a dose of Pepto-Bismol and break a leg!
Thanks for the link to Jill Filipovic’s artical. It’s terrific–and I’ll be passing it along.
Professor poopyhead is going to vomit forth his bound-to-be-rewritten-once-more talk.
To any audience members: I suggest not sitting in the first few rows.
Reading what Republicans say about rape, you were not expecting to become ill?
If those downticket Repugnantans don’t stop making the mistake of being honest about their beliefs, they may bring the whole party down.
That’s the attitude, PZ. Go get ’em. (And i hope you’re soon feeling better.)
How long before some rethug says that’s it’s not a woman who’s the true victim of rape – it’s her male ‘protector’?
I always hated traveling when not feeling well.
Hope you’re feeling better.
It is pretty well established that when an allegedly straight man obsesses about gay sex, and spends much time and energy condemning it vigorously, he is really trying to convince his closeted self that what he is feeling is wrong.
So here we have a large number of allegedly moral men obsessing about rape, and spending much time and energy justifying it with language such as “gift from God” and “legitimate” and “just relax and enjoy it.” (Reference, beware of triggers.)
What does that say about these allegedly moral men?
Pukey is in! Throwing up on stage is the latest craze among top tier entertainers.
You read each item considering if it is the worst quote you’ve ever heard attributed to someone … then you read the next one.
John Scalzi addressed the issue of Republican men* discussing rape. Before reading it, though, take serious note of his Trigger Warning that leads off that post.**
Like a punch to the gut, that post is…
*Or as Tina Fey recently called them, “grey-faced men with $2 haircuts”
**Post title: “A Fan Letter to Certain Conservative Politicians”, as penned by ‘Just Another Rapist’.
This is the threat women are living with right now. I really do feel threatened by these people’s vile contempt for me and my body, autonomy and status as an equal human being. This is coming from the religious right, and these crazies are staples of atheist community talking points on how religion can be bad. These people are a serious threat to women everywhere.
That context should be remembered by the MRAs and their sympathizers when they use the same tactics of these wingnuts- dismissal, hyperskepticism, victim blaming, shaming, and general denial of respecting women’s right to exist for themselves and not for men. Some wonder why feminists are so, “touchy” and quick on the trigger to tell them to fuck off. This is why, they are a piece of the bigger picture on the same spectrum as the turds in this article. Any atheist who loves to condemn these wingnuts for this kind of nuttery who also engage in tactics against women out of the same play book is a hypocritical asshole.
The cognitive dissonance must be out in force.
“We need as few abortions as possible.”
“We need as few unwanted pregnancies as possible.”
“No birth control or sex education for you, you wanton tramps!”
Oh, ew.
I hadn’t paid attention to the candidate challenging for Maria Cantwell’s senate seat, since I knew she had my vote anyway. To find him among the GOP rape apologists gives me a nice case of the queasies myself. When candidates like that have a firm foothold in a state most perceive to be pretty liberal, it scares the hell out of me to know how much support they have to have in more, erm… red states.
We live in barbaric times. Or rather, some of us more recently became aware of the longstanding barbarism.
Out of fear that the world will fall into order as critics raise their voices in opposition, the barbarians get louder in an attempt to maintain chaos.
I was going to mention some good places to eat in Nashville, but now I think I should perhaps just as soon not.
Hope you get to feeling better!
Horrible as they are, the “no exceptions” types seem to make more sense form a moral reasoning point of view. Take the following two premises:
1. As soon as an ovum is fertilised, it is a fully human being with all the rights of a person.
2. The rights of a (zygote/fetus) as a full human to remain alive trump the rights of the mother to bodily autonomy.
Now, they’re both utterly wrong, but if you actually hold them to be true, then terminating a pregnancy that results from rape is no less murder than any other abortion. You’re still “killing a baby”.
Unless, I suppose, you’re also the sort of immoral imbecile who believes a child should pay for the sins of his/her father…
@mepmep09 – Scalzi’s letter is… wow. I want to say “utterly over the top” but sometimes you need to slap the idiots in the face with a 20 pound salmon to make them understand. He illustrates yet again why I love him as an author and social commentator.
Except that this ignores the fact that such rights aren’t respected for all people, only fetuses. Consistency would be if the anti-choice, no exceptions folks were also arguing that whenever your bone marrow is a match for someone who needs it, you’re required to make that donation. It would be logical follow-through that all people are automatically organ and tissue donors throughout life, since the right to life for other people supersedes your right to bodily autonomy. Having one of my kidneys removed is pretty safe (pregnancy and childbirth run a whole host of risks) and it doesn’t take long to recover from it (pregnancy + recovery time from childbirth takes at least a year and usually longer), but no one thinks it would be a consistently pro-life position to force me to give up a kidney.
Currently, if I die and am not an organ donor, my kidneys are going in the ground with me, even if they would have saved my own child’s life. Do you hear these people arguing for no exceptions for rape and incest also demanding that the rights of a corpse not be respected?
No, you don’t. The rights of the corpse are taken for granted, while the rights of a living woman are not.
To applaud their position as being morally consistent is absurd. It’s as consistent as a vegan eating bacon.
Well, there is PZ’s talk right there. This needs to be said often and loudly.
Needless to say, the Tea Party misogyny is straight out of the bible.
Hitchens: Religion poisons everything.
It also ruins countless lives even if you aren’t a religionist. They don’t want to ruin their lives, they want to ruin their lives and yours too.
It’s a mystery.
Right up there with the Trinity, where the Space Reptiles are hiding, and where socks disappear to when you do the laundry.
To make it even more puzzling, many of those voters will be women.
A couple of years ago I had an endometrial ablation. If I conceive with the knowledge that the zygote has nowhere to implant, have I committed murder?
Also, can I write said zygote off as a tax exemption? Should I get it a SSN first?
Corpses have more rights than women, in these fuckos’ minds.
And if they get their way, a lot of women will become corpses a hell of a lot sooner.
It is just like Republicans to place the notional rights of a foetus conceived by rape above the rights of the woman, and thereby effectively grant the rapist greater control of his victim’s body than she has herself.
Being anti-choice is bad enough, but not even accepting exceptions in cases of rape or incest (or even where the woman’s life in endangered, in the case of the real misogynistic wingnuts) is a whole ‘nother level of woman-hating evil.
As PZ says, it beggars belief that anyone can bring themselves to vote for the Republicans, given how heinous their misogyny and desire to drag America into a new Dark Age really is. Their contempt for women couldn’t be any more blatent if they publicly redefined women as chattel – something that no small number of them would probably love to do, given half a chance.
Why isn’t every woman outraged at these misogynistic,dogmatic, self righteous spewers of idiocy? Smacks of the Taliban. How is it possible that any woman would abide this drivel?
I was just reading The Mellow Monkey: Caerie’s post @ 20, and it horrifys me that the conspiciously laid back simian one and Mythbri @ 24 are absolutely right – in the eyes of the Republicans, corpses really do have more rights than living, breathing women.
It leaves me wondering how things got this bad – how is it that in 2012 a candidate from a party with such an unambiguously and toxically misogynistic platform is a serious contender for power in the forthcoming elections? How can the nation not see how dangerous these people are?
Obama has his faults, and plenty of them, but what kind of person would pick Romney and the
death to women partyRepublicans over the relative sanity represented by Obama and the Democrats? How is this election anything other than a foregone conclusion in favour of Obama?I am just glad that I live in the UK. Despite periodic attempts to erode access to abortion services, our anti-choice wingnuts don’t weild that kind of power.
Not yet, at least.
@25
He didn’t exactly redefine legally, but Terry England had no problem comparing women wanting abortions for stillborns to livestock.
Correction to above #28. The TP article refers to abortions of fetuses that are already dead, but other sources clarify it should have said babies that will probably die anyway upon birth. Removing a dead fetus probably wouldn’t meet the legal definition of abortion most places I would hope, but I wouldn’t be surprised any more.
I have some Israeli-American friends who are voting for Romney because they believe (for whatever reason) that Obama is turning the U.S. into an Islamist state and that Obama is buddies with Muslim extremists.
I don’t even…
I used to think that the GOP was using 1950s rhetoric about this issue but reading the comments they have made this is Middle Ages type thinking.
Another thing that annoys me is their use of the term “pro-life”. Hey, I’m pro life, just about everyone on earth is pro life; life is after all kind of a good thing. I am just so sick of the callousness and stupidity of their arguments. They talk like women are just lining up all smiles at the abortion clinic just skipping and singing their way in. They are that far removed from reality.
While I’m all for life and think its great when have kids for the right reasons or make a tougher choice to give a child up for adoption (after all there are many people who would love to adopt a child) I also recognize that it isn’t my choice. It’s not my body, it’s not my pregnancy, so it isn’t my choice.
Why is it so hard for these people in the GOP to recognize that this is an agonizing decision for the woman? Why can’t they see that no one is happily making this choice?
Obviously in the cases of incest, rape, and the health of the mother abortion should be an option, yet the GOP can’t even bring themselves to go this far. Probably because none of them have been pregnant from incest or rape or faced a life and death situation due to pregnancy. In reality because it’s not my body it’s not ever my choice and so only the woman in the situation (and her doctor) should be making this decision.
I wish that the GOP would just have a little empathy. When that young girl or woman walks into the clinic just try to put yourselves in her shoes. I can’t even imagine how overwhelming and scary that must feel. What she should receive isn’t forced medical procedures but an arm around her and a comforting voice telling her that it will be okay. She should be offered any type of counseling or medical treatment she wishes free of charge. She should be told, whatever you need we will give it to you and we will help you make the decision that is best for you. We are here for you and here to help you. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. It’s what I’d want for my daughter if she faced that choice (and once again it would be her choice not mine). Yet even this amount of empathy is just too much for the GOP.
The problem is, when they do, hypothetically, put themselves in the mind of a girl or a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, they think she wants someone to show her the light of god’s endless and unconditional love which woul mean she would immediately fall on her knees, praise jeebus for saving her, and denounce the medical staff as Satan’s minions who were out to murder her precious life from god.
Back when I had a blog, I had a go-round with a right wing religious asshat who insisted that the Golden Rule meant ‘Treat others the way I want to be treated.” And extended that to some bizarre comments claiming that if he were an atheist he would want someone to bring him the Good News of God and save his soul so subjecting others to his proselytizing is fulfilling what then empty soul wants. So I think the GOPers do have empathy for the girl or woman facing an unwanted pregnancy. They just have a completely different working definition. And god tells them they are right so no argument could possibly sway them.
But then, I am notoriously cynical.
Sadly I think you’re exactly right Ogvorbis. One more reason I can’t vote for these people. They just don’t live in the real world.
Obama is buddies with Muslim extremists.
right, so killing Bin Laden just wasn’t enough?
they want us to nuke Iran I suppose?
Shadowspade – while I agree with most of what you say, I think it’s wrong to emphasize that abortion is a difficult and traumatic decision. Getting an abortion can be traumatic because in many areas, it’s been made to be traumatic. But, in a normal world, it’s not always a tough decision or difficult experience.
I know a woman who needed a late term abortion because of a pregnancy that had gone horribly wrong (trisomy 13). This was a much wanted, long awaited pregnancy and terminating it was a heartbreaking tragedy – but not a difficult decision.
On the other hand, I found myself pregnant at 19 (my IUD failed – although, really, I shouldn’t have to justify my situation!) with only a casual relationship with the father and struggling to support myself while I attended college in order to have a future (I was the first woman in my family to attend college). Having a child would have been a disaster for me and the child. Much to my surprise, the decision to terminate didn’t require more than a nanosecond’s thought and no guilt whatsoever. I couldn’t wait to get that parasite out of me. I was just incredibly grateful that abortion had recently been legalized. The experience itself was no big deal and I met a nice couple in the waiting room who gave me a ride home (I was going to take the bus.)
I think we play into the patriarchs by saying that abortion is a difficult decision and a challenging experience. It’s just a medical procedure – and, in the early stages when most abortions occur, a relatively trivial one involving an embryo about an inch long. And, like any medical procedure, sometimes there are going to be difficult issues to weigh. Other times, not so much.
The day I gave up thinking the forced birth brigade had any thought about the pregnant woman at all, was the day I was arguing about the teaching of “abortion” techniques to OB/Gyns. The “pro-life” people were against teaching any technique that could be used in a late term abortion. When I pointed out that the same techniques are used to remove already dead fetuses, illustrating with the story of a friend who had to carry and then deliver, at great risk of infection, a rotting corpse, because there was no one in a 100-mile range who knew the proper procedures, I was told “It’s disrespectful of the fetus to carve up the body.”
Yep. They were more concerned about the respect according to a rotting, dead fetus, than the possible death of the mother through sepsis. Charming folk.
positivevorticityadvection
I would agree with what you say. I guess my point was that it can be a tough decision and that everything the GOP is doing is just making it harder when it doesn’t have to be. I appreciate your post and really do agree with what you say. We should be working to make it less traumatic, not more just as you say. Thank you.
Oh and again to your point, you’re right it’s society that makes it traumatic not the situation itself. I wanted to make sure that I agreed with your point on that too.