If you have been following the national news, you know that the Tea Party's Missouri Senate campaign is under fire for saying that women who are raped can prevent pregnancy by willing it. The implication is that any woman who is raped and pregnant was not really raped, since otherwise her body would have rejected the baby. They got into this pickle because they foresaw that if an exception to an abortion ban is allowed for rape and incest, all a woman would have to do to get an abortion is claim to be raped. Since these gentlemen are misogynists, they think women would all do this, claiming to be raped, and abortions would continue, essentially on demand. The other argument, that the babies of rape have an independent right and are not tainted by the father or the involuntary treatment of the mother, is the argument the more "genteel" Republicans would like to rely on, but such hairsplitting only points out that to the woman who is the victim of rape and pregnant, she has no rights.
After all the Republican bigwigs and commentators asked Akin to step down, and he appeared to be wavering (or asking for a handout to step down), Romney weighed in and asked him to drop out.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/romney-calls-akin-drop-senate-bid-201918205.html
Akin rejected this request and told Romney to butt out.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-todd-akin-skips-tuesday-withdrawal-deadline-stays-in-senate-race-20120821,0,3005061.story
Democrats eagerly pointed to the fact that Akin's position has been strongly held by most of the leading republicans, including v.p. candidate Paul Ryan, who co-sponsored a bill about this with Akin.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/08/19/712251/how-todd-akin-and-paul-ryan-partnered-to-redefine-rape/
The real loser here is Romney, because it is clear that the Republican party is not answering to him, despite letting him run the convention. That means, should he be elected, he cannot count on the cooperation of any Republicans in Congress, so whatever "moderate" positions he uses to win the general election do not reflect what a Republican Congress would do, and he would be just as impotent as Obama in dealing with his own party in Congress. It also reinforces the notion that he put Ryan on the ticket to remove him from Congress, not to compliment him.
What's more, Romney only called for Akin to step down when it appeared the problem could be solved by a payoff. When that didn't happen, it showed the limitations of the Richy Rich approach to governance.
Romney may be able to buy off the media and a segment of the voters. He has no chance in buying off Congress, who have their own sources of payola.
Any imputation that Romney knows how to conduct a trade war with China; that Romney knows how to keep bankers and CEO's from cheating; and that Romney is just the man to reform America's corrupt business culture....is dead on arrival.
Romney is a fool who is only as popular as he can find desperate people willing to defer to him for money.
And that's even if he holds views more moderate than those expressed by Akin. Chances are, he does not.
The whole episode points out, rather starkly, why women would be stupid to vote Republican. Here it is necessary to point out that no church has been as dedicated to opposing feminism and women's rights as the one Romney has served as Bishop of, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which have maintained their nineteenth century regard for women as a separate species to be removed from power and influence.
http://www.exmormon.org/mormwomn.htm
While Catholics are just as firmly against women priests, it was the LDS church that blocked the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and harassed and excommunicated a pro-ERA Mormon, Sonia Johnson. In Mormondom, excommunication doesn't mean you are merely kicked out of services, you are actively shunned.
Sonia Johnson
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Johnson
Sonia Johnson's speech on women and Mormonism:
http://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon415.htm
Having successfully stopped ERA by hiding their involvement, using front groups and proxies, the Mormons have replicated this in the fight against gays, providing a large majority of all money and volunteers against gay rights in the last twenty years. In a way, I suppose the Democrats should thank them because from 1940 to 1976 Republicans supported equal rights for women and were no worse than Democrats on gays. By making the Republican war on women more stark and effective, the Mormon obsessiveness has actually helped the Democrats more than the Republicans, who could never dream of being a majority party as they once did.
Those who think Romney will not act to promote the views of his religion are not paying attention to the fact that Mormons have become more a political than a religious organization over the last forty years and that their right-wing views on these issues accord well with the violent rhetoric of Akin. Romney wanted him to step down for political reasons, but there is no doubt they are on the same side in practice. The only fakery is that Romney is "leading" any of it.
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