The issue of believing or disbelieving that women can't get pregnant when raped (forcibly raped), and cannot get pregnant through incest or statutory rape, is a critical one that goes beyond the issues of rape and abortion.
It goes to the uncomfortable denials by current Republican candidates caught in embarrassingly honest admissions about their alternate reality beliefs. NO, this is not partisan snark; it is the subject of a book on political psychology by science journalist Chris Mooney, best selling author of the earlier book, The Republican War on Science.
Mooney looks at BOTH the fallacies and intellectual weaknesses of the right and the left; however he notes that overwhelmingly, the right has established their own alternate facts, and a support system to disseminate them, that is ideology and faith driven, and which is not based in objective reality or verifiable facts. This encompasses the denial of evolution, it includes climate change denial along with the human role in causing it, and it includes false information and distortions about sex and reproduction.
What Mooney notes, beginning with using Andrew Schlafley's Conservapedia's entry denying Einstein's theory of relativity as an example, is the insistence despite refutation, writing:
further along in Ch. 1:
This is turning out to be true for Todd Akin, for Dr. Jack Wilke, Mike Huckabee and Congressman Steve King of Iowa. (I'm not sure ANYTHING can explain the bizarre interior world of Michele Bachmann, but at least this comes closer than anything else.) The more extreme, the more rigid and unresponsive to facts a person will be.
However we have something that is NOT addressed (at least not that I have seen so far) in the situation where the right extremists outlined above are faced with a kind of confrontation with the facts that they have so strenuously resisted. What makes this confrontation unique is that it is not partisan driven but rather driven by the problems the Romney/Ryan ticket is facing if they are seen to be irrational and fact averse, because it makes them look both dangerously ill-informed, and frankly foolish.
So we have Mitt Romney lying about his past and present connections to Dr. Jack Wilke, we have Paul Ryan lying -- or trying to avoid making any answer by not answering direct questions about his term forcible rape. We have Akin floundering, alternately denying and affirming the beliefs about women not being able to conceive from rape. We have a GOP official platform which clearly and emphatically prohibits any exception for abortion, which is polling very unfavorably with an extremely large majority of likely voters, including moderate conservatives, but which in contrast has the extreme right doubling down on insisting on those views.
Romney and Ryan are between a rock and a hard place. Their reliance on lying about their positions, particularly all their past positions where they said whatever they thought their audience might want to hear, is crumbling as evidence of their contradictions is showing up over and over and over again on video recordings.
Romney and Ryan are squarely caught, along with their fellow ideologues, like those named above, in the klieglights of people who DO require at least the semblance of being fact based and reality oriented. They have to choose between their fellow irrational conservatives who form their base, and the electorate they need to persuade to win a general election. They can't afford to alienate either, but there is no way they can have this both ways. Lies aren't going to work, because they will be pinned to real positions sooner or later, AND they will have to explain their inexplicable contradictions.
This will be true in debates, this will be true in advertising, this will be true in the roles played by surrogates. This is the one scenario where the denial they have relied on will be overwhelmed by the cognitive dissonance of the gap between reality and what they believe. There is no retreat to the conservative bubble of an alternate reality this time.
The Republican alternate reality may be imploding before our eyes even more intensely than Hurricane Isaac making landfall in Florida at the same time as the Republican convention. Extremism on the right may have finally hit critical mass and be in the process of imploding. It has always been unsustainable; this may be the tipping point moment.
For myself what I am taking away from this book is that all of the logic and critical thinking, and all the fact checking in the world won't persuade those who don't wish to operate in a fact based logic grounded reality. I am increasingly coming to understand that emotional beliefs cannot be addressed with reason; they must be addresses as what they are -- emotions, and beliefs, not rationality, not objective facts.
It is a perfect explanation why the more facts one presents, the more resistance and intransigence results. Those responses from conservatives are based on a response to threats to their beliefs, to their comfort zone, to their emotions. Challenge those beliefs disturbs their sense of order, the strength of the authoritarianism and certainty that gives them security, it pushes them towards the very change that they so strongly fear and resist, therefore facts push conservatives away from the change one expects from an open, rational mind.
Mooney's The Republican Brain, and his earlier Republican War on Science explain conservatives (and in subsequent chapters to those quoted here, there are some home truths for the left as well).
I expect that the confrontation with the alternate, fact-averse, not objective reality based ideology of conservatism is going to be confronted well beyond rape and abortion and conception in this campaign. It has become the central issue in the 2012 election in a way that it has not been in more than four decades.
It goes to the uncomfortable denials by current Republican candidates caught in embarrassingly honest admissions about their alternate reality beliefs. NO, this is not partisan snark; it is the subject of a book on political psychology by science journalist Chris Mooney, best selling author of the earlier book, The Republican War on Science.
Mooney looks at BOTH the fallacies and intellectual weaknesses of the right and the left; however he notes that overwhelmingly, the right has established their own alternate facts, and a support system to disseminate them, that is ideology and faith driven, and which is not based in objective reality or verifiable facts. This encompasses the denial of evolution, it includes climate change denial along with the human role in causing it, and it includes false information and distortions about sex and reproduction.
What Mooney notes, beginning with using Andrew Schlafley's Conservapedia's entry denying Einstein's theory of relativity as an example, is the insistence despite refutation, writing:
"You might be thinking that Conservapedia's unabashed denial of relativity is an extreme case, located in the same circle of intellectual hell as claims that HIV doesn't cause AIDS and 9/11 was an inside job. If so, I want you to think again. Structurally, the denial of something so irrefutable, the elaborate rationalization of that denial, and above all the refusal to consider the overwhelming body of counter evidence and modify one's view, is something we find all around us today. It's hard to call it rational- and hard to deny its everywhere.
Every contentious fact - or science-based issue in American politics now plays out like the conflict between Conservapedia and liberals - and physicists - over relativity. Again and again it's a fruitless battle between incompatible "truths", with no progress made and no retractions offered by those who are just plain wrong -- and can be shown to be through simple fact checking mechanisms that all good journalists, not to mention open-minded and critically thinking citizens, can employ.
What's more, o matter how much the fact-checkers strive to remain "bi-partisan", it is pretty hard to argue that the distribution of falsehoods today is politically equal or symmetrical. It's not that liberals are never wrong or biased; a number of liberal errors will be debunked in these pages. Nevertheless --- and as I will show --- politicized wrongness today is clustered among Republicans, conservatives, and especially Tea Partiers.
Their willingness to deny what's true may seem especially outrageous when it infects scientific topics like evolution or climate change. But there is nothing unique about these subjects, other than perhaps the part of campus where you'll find them taught. The same thing happens with economics, with American history, and with any other factual matter where there's something ideological - in other words, something emotional and personal -- at stake.
As soon as that occurs, today's conservatives have their own "truth", their own experts to spout it, and their own communication channels -- newspapers, cable networks, talk radio shows, blogs, encyclopedias, think tanks, even universities -- to broad- and narrowcast it. The reality described through these channels is vastly different from the reality that liberals occupy. The worldviews are worlds apart -- and at most, the country can only exist in one of them.
further along in Ch. 1:
In these pages, we'll encounter an array of lies, misperceptions, and misguided political beliefs, and marvel at some of the elaborate arguments used to justify them. ...The real goal is to understand how these false claims (and rationalizations) could exist and persist in human minds, and why they are endlessly generated. In other words, we seek to understand how the political right could be so wrong, and how conservatives, Republicans, and Tea Party members could actually believe these things.Mooney goes on to briefly list some of the fallacies that are endemic articles of blind faith on the right; for simplicity sake, I will only outline the paragraph on Sexuality and Reproductive Health, as that is the one that pertains to the current argument about rape, pregnancy and abortion.:
Sexuality and Reproductive Health
Many conservatives -- especially on the Christian Right -- claim that having an abortion increases a woman's risk of breast cancer or mental disorders. They claim that fetuses can perceive pain at 20 weeks of gestation, that same-sex parenting is bad for kids, and that homosexuality is a disorder, or a choice, and is curable through therapy. None of that is true.The fallacies, medically inaccurate information and exaggerations and distortions taught in abstinence only sex ed is a separate category of wrong right wing facts on sexuality and reproduction. Obviously, although not included in this particular list, should be the beliefs about forcible rape and conception. Following the premise of the book, along with the neuroscientific basis (notably the differences in our amygdalas) for our choice of political alignment, is the hypothesis that conservatives are driven by emotion instead of reason, and that therefore the more emotionally charged the topic, the more likely they are to hold an extreme view, and to rely on factually wrong or strongly unscientific justification for that view.
This is turning out to be true for Todd Akin, for Dr. Jack Wilke, Mike Huckabee and Congressman Steve King of Iowa. (I'm not sure ANYTHING can explain the bizarre interior world of Michele Bachmann, but at least this comes closer than anything else.) The more extreme, the more rigid and unresponsive to facts a person will be.
However we have something that is NOT addressed (at least not that I have seen so far) in the situation where the right extremists outlined above are faced with a kind of confrontation with the facts that they have so strenuously resisted. What makes this confrontation unique is that it is not partisan driven but rather driven by the problems the Romney/Ryan ticket is facing if they are seen to be irrational and fact averse, because it makes them look both dangerously ill-informed, and frankly foolish.
So we have Mitt Romney lying about his past and present connections to Dr. Jack Wilke, we have Paul Ryan lying -- or trying to avoid making any answer by not answering direct questions about his term forcible rape. We have Akin floundering, alternately denying and affirming the beliefs about women not being able to conceive from rape. We have a GOP official platform which clearly and emphatically prohibits any exception for abortion, which is polling very unfavorably with an extremely large majority of likely voters, including moderate conservatives, but which in contrast has the extreme right doubling down on insisting on those views.
Romney and Ryan are between a rock and a hard place. Their reliance on lying about their positions, particularly all their past positions where they said whatever they thought their audience might want to hear, is crumbling as evidence of their contradictions is showing up over and over and over again on video recordings.
Romney and Ryan are squarely caught, along with their fellow ideologues, like those named above, in the klieglights of people who DO require at least the semblance of being fact based and reality oriented. They have to choose between their fellow irrational conservatives who form their base, and the electorate they need to persuade to win a general election. They can't afford to alienate either, but there is no way they can have this both ways. Lies aren't going to work, because they will be pinned to real positions sooner or later, AND they will have to explain their inexplicable contradictions.
This will be true in debates, this will be true in advertising, this will be true in the roles played by surrogates. This is the one scenario where the denial they have relied on will be overwhelmed by the cognitive dissonance of the gap between reality and what they believe. There is no retreat to the conservative bubble of an alternate reality this time.
The Republican alternate reality may be imploding before our eyes even more intensely than Hurricane Isaac making landfall in Florida at the same time as the Republican convention. Extremism on the right may have finally hit critical mass and be in the process of imploding. It has always been unsustainable; this may be the tipping point moment.
For myself what I am taking away from this book is that all of the logic and critical thinking, and all the fact checking in the world won't persuade those who don't wish to operate in a fact based logic grounded reality. I am increasingly coming to understand that emotional beliefs cannot be addressed with reason; they must be addresses as what they are -- emotions, and beliefs, not rationality, not objective facts.
It is a perfect explanation why the more facts one presents, the more resistance and intransigence results. Those responses from conservatives are based on a response to threats to their beliefs, to their comfort zone, to their emotions. Challenge those beliefs disturbs their sense of order, the strength of the authoritarianism and certainty that gives them security, it pushes them towards the very change that they so strongly fear and resist, therefore facts push conservatives away from the change one expects from an open, rational mind.
Mooney's The Republican Brain, and his earlier Republican War on Science explain conservatives (and in subsequent chapters to those quoted here, there are some home truths for the left as well).
I expect that the confrontation with the alternate, fact-averse, not objective reality based ideology of conservatism is going to be confronted well beyond rape and abortion and conception in this campaign. It has become the central issue in the 2012 election in a way that it has not been in more than four decades.
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