Republican "Family Values"

Republican Senatorial candidate in Missouri sez that "free enterprise" means it's perfectly all right to deny equal pay to women. Seriously.

Republican 2012 Platform: No Exception for Rape

Apparently, the national Republican Party is just Akin to increase the gender gap.

The Republican platform committee approved an "abortion plank" that rejects exemptions for rape, incest or even to save the life of the mother.

And you say that the phrase "the Republican war on women" is too extreme?

Stupid Stuff Republicans Say. What's Worse, They Believe It

Republicans who oppose abortion under all circumstances -- which is most of them, at least the ones running for office -- go to great lengths to justify their intellectual position that women are breeding stock and have no rights over when and if they give birth. Which is why Republican senatorial candidate Todd Akin of Missouri relieved himself publicly of this opinion: "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing [pregnancy] down."

He opposes abortion under all circumstances, so he apparently needs to believe that a woman who's preggers from rape wasn't really raped at all. She must have consented, else those magical secretions every woman is capable of would have fried that sperm in mid-swim.

Turns out that this is a perennial myth touted by some Republican men (and some Republican women, eh, Virginia Foxx?). Robert Mackey has written a handy primer on the recent history of "God's little shield," which includes one dentist from North Carolina, Henry Aldridge, a Republican member of the NC General Assembly at the time he claimed this: “The facts show that people who are raped — who are truly raped — the juices don’t flow, the body functions don’t work and they don’t get pregnant.”

"Legitimate rape," "true rape," "forcible rape" (which is what Mr. Akin eventually said he meant) ... what gives here? The parsing of words is necessary for the stupidity to work. If the myth sez "real" rape can't result in pregnancy, then women who say they're pregnant from rape are fudging the truth, and therefore, O my brethren, the Republicans in the U.S House (including the ineffable Virginia Foxx) felt fully justified in 2011 in the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" to redefine the rape exception in federal anti-abortion law as applying only to "forcible rape." This law kicked up a hell of a fight in Congress and did not ultimately pass, though Mr. Akin, along with Paul Ryan and Virginia Foxx, voted for it.

Because they believe that shit.