Conservative Hypocrisy and Double Standards of Justice -- Easy on themselves, MAX Harsh on everyone else

Conservatives are hypocrites.

Conservatives want a lenient justice for them and their children, and the harshest possible justice for other people.


We see this in Jim-Bob Duggar, when it comes to his son being guilty of a sex crime, against his four sisters and another girl.


We see it with Jeb Bush when his kids were guilty of crimes while he was governor, especially when his daughter was a drug addict. Daughter Bush went to rehab, but at least went through the justice system -- but only apparently because Jebbie couldn't avoid it. Jim-Bob Duggar acted as a vigilante, keeping HIS son out of the system of justice entirely, and certainly did not hold him accountable under our system of laws, much less subject him to the death penalty for rape and incest.

We see it when Mike Huckabee used his position as governor to keep his son from being held accountable in the courts for animal cruelty in hanging a stray dog. Then-governor Huckabee is alleged to have used his power and influence to prevent an investigation and prosecution, according to the authorities who attempted to investigate and prosecute the case. Of course, this NEVER stops ol' Mike Hucksterbee, purveyor of quack cures, from being critical of OTHER people's parenting, like his criticism of the Obama's for the choice of music they allow their daughters -- while Huckabee pals around with pedophile Ted Nugent, performing sexually offensive lyrics with him -- and then lying about it.
From Right Wing Watch:

After Mike Huckabee criticized Beyoncé’s music as “obnoxious and toxic mental poison” unfit for children and compared the singer to a prostitute, it didn’t take long for people to point out that he himself had once joined with Ted Nugent to perform a sexually explicit song on his national television program.

Huckabee is, predictably, reacting by pretending that what happened didn’t actually happen, telling the Christian Post today that Nugent “changed the lyrics pretty dramatically” when he sang the song “Cat Scratch Fever” on Huckabee’s Fox News show.

In fact, anyone who watches a video of the performance can see that Nugent didn’t change any of the song’s explicit lyrics as Huckabee accompanied him,

Video available here.  You have to wonder at how much forgiving of the pedophiles Mike "Family Values" I-Wannabe-President REVEREND Huckabee can offer. It appears to be quite a lot, given that among the many examples truly evil sexual conduct in super close friend Ted Nugent, covered by the HuffPo a year ago February:

In fact, in the case of Nugent, we have even come to see alleged child sexual abuse as some sort of eccentricity or harmless vice. Can you imagine anyone else who had been accused of having sex with a 12-year-old, written a song about raping a 13-year-old and adopted a 17-year-old so that he could have sex with her going on to campaign alongside all the most conservative "family values" candidates?

When Ted Nugent was 32 years old, he released the song "Jailbait." Here's a taste of the lyrics (written by him):

Well, I don't care if you're just 13

You look too good to be true

I just know that you're probably clean...

Jailbait you look fine, fine, fine...

It's quite alright, I asked your mama

Wait a minute, officer

Don't put those handcuffs on me

Put them on her, and I'll share her with you

The albums' next track is titled "I Am a Predator."...

Two years before recording "Jailbait," Ted Nugent had the novel idea of becoming legal guardian to a 17-year-old girl, so that they could have sex without, you know, her parents having legal recourse. They acquiesced. "I guess they figured better Ted Nugent than some drug-infested punk in high school," he told VH1, years later. In the same documentary, he claimed to have had several relationships with young girls, and seems to brag about gaining their parents' approval, too. (Though he didn't go so far as to adopt any of them.)

Oh those hypocritical claims of the moral high ground! Another perfect example of the conservative do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do, and- if-it-becomes-inconvenient- lie ideology. Another example of the problem with conservatives, sex, and religion -- because of course, Hucksterbee shares a love of god and guns and maybe grits with gravy with the Nuge, and that makes everything else all okey-dokey and forgiveable.


Justice under conservatives is for OTHER PEOPLE, not 'them" and not "theirs' - and that is dangerous, that is unfair, that is uncivilized, that is not the rule of law under the U. S. Constitution. Justice is for evangelical conservative men, and screw justice and legal protection for women and girls.

Via Patheos:

Before he was the star of 19 Kids and Counting, Jim Bob Duggar was a prominent political figure in Arkansas, serving as a member of the state’s House of Representatives before running for the U.S. Senate in 2002.

Duggar lost his 2002 bid to be the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate, however, he did take positions as a candidate. While trying to justify his anti-choice, anti-abortion stance, U.S. Senate candidate Jim Bob Duggar stated forcefully and clearly that those guilty of rape and incest should be put to death.

The following appeared on Duggar’s campaign website:

Q. What is your abortion position, and specifically, where do you stand on rape, incest, and threat to the mother’s health?

A. If a woman is raped, the rapist should be executed instead of the innocent unborn baby. Adoption is an option. Many couples would love to adopt and are waiting for a baby. Abortion has been and always will be the destruction of an innocent child. Rape and incest represent heinous crimes and as such should be treated as capital crimes. The developing infant committed no crime and should be allowed to live. In the unlikely event that the life of both mother and baby would both be lost (for example, a tubal pregnancy) all should be done to save the life of the mother.

Here is just a part of what is wrong with what passes for Duggar thinking, above and beyond the draconian punishment that characterizes conservatism. It is that we should not be executing anyone, even rapists. I'll give Duggar this much agreement, rape IS a heinous and terrible crime, for which there should be appropriate and severe consequences AND FOR WHICH THERE SHOULD BE DUE PROCESS IN CRIMINAL COURTS.  Josh Duggar should receive real legal consequences, but he should also receive real treatment, not fake pray-away-the-gay/pedophile and incest pseudo-treatment under restorative sentencing.

But in seeking restorative justice rather than retributive justice (eye for an eye), we should be seeking treatment for offenders, not simply the most extreme punitive action we can devise. Nothing is made whole or better after excessively punitive justice, in contrast to restorative justice where the goal of the process focuses on an outcome that is not based on vengeance, on trying to feel better by hurting a person who did something wrong or bad.

From Wikipedia:

Restorative justice is an approach to justice that focuses on the needs of the victims and the offenders, as well as the involved community, instead of satisfying abstract legal principles or punishing the offender. Victims take an active role in the process, while offenders are encouraged to take responsibility for their actions... In addition, it provides help for the offender in order to avoid future offences. It is based on a theory of justice that considers crime and wrongdoing to be an offence against an individual or community, rather than the state. Restorative justice that fosters dialogue between victim and offender shows the highest rates of victim satisfaction and offender accountability.

We do not have exemptions for abortion as a constitutional right; this is something that conservatives, in their fundamentally flawed concepts of right and wrong, innocence and guilt, are attempting to impose on the women in this nation. Women have a right to abortion (a limited right as established by Roe v. Wade) because women have autonomy over their bodies, because women have a right to determine if they consent to being pregnant rather than having it imposed on them against their will.


Embryos and fetuses are clumps of cells in the process of differentiation into a variety of kinds of tissues and potentially into the component body parts and systems. But embryos and fetuses are NOT PEOPLE, they lack the essential neurological development to have the essential awareness and capability that we define as living human beings. We use the same criteria to determine if someone is alive or brain dead -- and no longer able to think or feel as a living human being, even if there is some residual bodily processes that continue.


The simple reality is that most fertilized ova do NOT go on to become human beings, due to a failure to implant in the uterus and therefore they fail to complete that developmental process, possibly as high a rate of failure as 80% without intervention, and as high as 100% with contraception. The fertilized ova has no rights and deserves no rights, contrary to the efforts of extremist conservatives to force personhood on the nation as law. A conceptus is NOT A PERSON, and is unlikely to become one.


The simple reality is that many embryos and fetuses in nature do not continue to develop either. We can engage in a superstitious idea about reproduction, or we can accept the reality that pregnancy is a choice, and that most attempts at reproduction are not successful, much less entitled to continue at the expense of an unwilling woman's body. 

It is very difficult to rationalize that some omnipotent deity, or the biological system of nature  created by such a deity, produces all these little zygotes, these fertilized ova, and then fails to follow through with them -- but we are supposed to believe that we humans cannot make this conscious decision for ourselves about reproduction?  That is ridiculous on the face of it, and there is nothing anywhere in the Judeo-Christian religious texts which preclude doing so.  In fact quite the opposite is true -- there are a lot of accounts in the Bible of ripping open pregnant women so as to destroy pregnancies among conquered peoples.  The Bible actually requires it in the old testament, unless you posit that God only creates SOME pregnancies but not others.

2 Kings 15:16King James Version¹⁶ Then Menahem smote Tiphsah, and all that were therein, and the coasts thereof from Tirzah: because they opened not to him, therefore he smote it; and all the women therein that were with child he ripped up.

Hosea 13:16King James Version ¹⁶ Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.

Abortion has NOTHING whatsoever to do with guilt or innocence of that potentially developing cellular process. The reasoning that posits this is a human being with rights or guilt or innocence is BADLY FLAWED.


Even if you accept the premise of religion over rational thought, even Jim-Bob Duggar's own faith posits that a conception is not 'innocent', because of the doctrine of original sin -- that EVERYONE is born with sin and guilt. The Duggars, like former ordained pastor Mike Huckabee, are Southern Baptists; but the concept of original sin is a foundational concept and part of most forms of Christianity.

Southern Baptists and the Doctrine of Imputed Sin

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Joshua Breland

James Petigru Boyce (1827-1888), the founding president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, affirmed the federal headship of Adam and the doctrine of original sin. On whether man inherits guilt and is under condemnation prior to actual personal transgression, Boyce writes:Consequently, at the very moment of birth, the presence and possession of such a nature shows that even the infant sons of Adam are born under all the penalties which befell their ancestor in the day of his sin.

In other words, there is no state of innocence unique to the zygote, conceptus, embryo or fetus that places them in a position superior to assert a right over an existing fully formed human being.

It is not for conservatives in their flawed concept of good and evil, innocence and guilt, to decide that women are bad for having sex, so they deserve pregnancy, or that people are to be divided into good and evil -- which is apparently synonymous (or should that be SIN-nonymous) with being part of "them" in a black and white extremism of right and wrong that gives passes to conservatives but imposes the harshest possible outcomes on those they identify as 'other' or different than them.

EVERY human being on this planet, now and in the past and in the future, is a combination of good and bad, regardless of their religious or political beliefs -- or lack of them.

As to the notion that women should simply hand over 9 months of their lives, and their bodies, to continue as victims of rape or incest, because there are lots and lots of waiting adoptive parents......if that were true we would not have so many children in need of adoption already.

When we look at the generous forgiveness of those conservatives supporting the Duggars, including Mike Huckabee who was governor while Jim-Bob was in the Arkansas legislature, and while the Josh Duggar incest crimes were taking place, we see this about the outcomes of the conservative hypocritical justice system, from the fact check of Huckabee's past political ads:
Via On the Issues:

When it comes to violent crimes, a category that includes murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults, Huckabee’s record is mixed: Murders and robberies declined, while rapes and aggravated assaults increased. Overall, the violent crime rate was actually 5.2% higher than in 1996, when he took office.

Thanks to the double standards and conservative hypocrisy of Jim-Bob Duggar and Mike Huckabee, add Josh Duggar's multiple incidents of rape and incest against his four sisters and another young girl to those statistics -- because they were excluded under the term in office of Jim-Bob Duggar and Mike Huckabee in Arkansas.


Conservatives FAIL at governance, because their fundamental - and fundamentalist - concepts of how the world generally, and how government, and especially justice specifically operate are flawed and faulty, and inherently unfair and unjust. Conservatives mean well, but do badly... and they hate being held accountable for those failures and failings. Accountability is reserved for anyone who does not think or believe as they do.


THAT is why not one of the conservatives currently running for office should be elected, and why those who are the most extreme pose the greatest danger to our society and citizens.

March 8th is International Women's DayConservatives don't VALUE Women, they just try to control, restrict and dominate women and girls

Next door in South Dakota we have another example of racism meeting misogyny, and attempt by right wingers to intrude more of THEIR religious bias into governmental authority, using it AGAINST women, their families, clergy, and doctors.

The radical right just cannot let people make their own decisions. Rabid conservatives in South Dakota are trying to pass a law that would make it a felony to have an abortion because of gender selection of the embryo - and they are blaming this on a small increase in the Asian population of the state, not on any actual indication that such abortions are taking place in the U.S., by Asians or anyone else.

Earlier this week, the gender abortion ban deadlocked in the Senate, after having passed the House, as noted in SF Gate.

PIERRE, S.D. (AP) — South Dakota's proposed ban on gender-selective abortions would stigmatize Asian-Americans and promote racial stereotypes, opponents of the measure said during a hearing Monday.
Lena Tran, an Asian-American student at the University of South Dakota, said the ban would result in racial profiling against Asian women in doctors' offices.
"I personally would not get an abortion," Tran said to the Senate Health and Human Services Committee. "I do not want my friends and neighbors to look at me with suspicion."

We should not be passing racist bills in this country, directed at someone's ethnicity or country of origin. This is both racist, and just one more effort to prevent women from making decisions about their bodies and their reproductive health that is their constitutional right.

I don't actually find the Radical Right valuing women in the U.S.

They oppose paying women equal compensation for equal work, they oppose paying a fair minimum wage which affects women more than men, they support legislation that is intended to take away autonomy of women over their own bodies, and to shame and humiliate women with costly and intrusive procedures like medically unnecessary ultrasounds. The extremist conservatives on the Radical Right opposed the Equal Rights Amendment - they do not WANT equal rights for women. The radical right opposes affirmative action, which seeks to advance women more proportionately in education and employment on the basis of merit. The Radical Right fought passage of the [Anti] Violence Against Women Act, and have supported a pro-rape culture, including attempting to redefine rape so as to exclude existing rape definitions such as statutory rape and rape where a woman is rendered incapacitated by drugs or alcohol. The Radical hateful right also has done their level best to cut aid to single mothers.

The radical right has passed laws that REQUIRE a doctor to give women seeking abortions medically INACCURATE information, and they have passed laws that allow a doctor, as a matter of his or her conscience, to LIE to women about their medical care and health, including lying to them about even being pregnant. And of course we have the radical right's support for abstinence only sex education which ALSO promotes medically inaccurate information being taught, and which teaches women that they have no value if they are not virgins when they marry or if they have sex without deciding to get married -- an exclusively religious belief that devalues women and puts them at risk of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease.

The radical right also has cut funding for health care for women, and is opposing making contraception affordable for women under the ACA --- which is necessary for women to be able to be in control of their reproductive years, affecting their education and career choices. The radical right also gives little authority or roles of significance to women in politics, and the radical religious right insists on dominion or domination of men over women, and that women must submit themselves to ALL male authority.

THIS is how the radical right 'values women and girls'.

So for the radical right in South Dakota to claim that this legislation or legislation like it is about valuing women is a crock of excrement. From SFGate:

Rep. Don Haggar, R-Sioux Falls, suggested during a House debate that the bill was necessary because of an influx of immigrants to the state. And Rep. Stace Nelson, R-Fulton, said that he spent 18 years in Asia in the military and believes parts of the world don't value women as much as he values his daughters.

The SF Gate article continues outlining that this is a solution seeking a problem, not the other way round, and I provide a larger context to the why this is NOT valid legislation immediately following.

No one at Monday's hearing endorsed sex-selective abortions, and there are no available statistics to demonstrate that sex-selective abortions have taken place in the state.
"We really have no indication as to whether this is really a problem. Or is this a solution looking for a problem?" asked Sen. Bruce Rampelberg, R-Rapid City. A Fiscal Impact Statement on the bill says, "violations are likely to be rare, and successful prosecutions very rare."
South Dakota is among a number of states proposing legislation to ban gender-selective abortions. A similar bill that explicitly references race is currently being challenged in Arizona courts. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights nonprofit whose statistics are widely respected, reports that seven other states already have laws banning abortion based on the gender of a fetus. Such laws remain in effect in six states.

The very definition of right wing big government is reducing rights, and passing laws that don't actually address real problems, issues or behavior.

While there ARE cultures and countries that engage in widespread sex-selection abortions, there is no evidence that we have a problem with that here. In China for example, where there is a fairly strict policy of one child per couple, the ratio of boys to girls being born is 80 girls for every 100 boys. The normal ratio of male to female births is approximately 106 male births to every 100 female births, while the actual ratio of adults world wide is roughly 101 males to 100 females. This is actually a separate specialized field of scientific research:

In the United States, the sex ratios at birth over the period 1970–2002 were 1.05 for the white non-Hispanic population, 1.04 for Mexican Americans, 1.03 for African Americans and Indians, and 1.07 for mothers of Chinese or Filipino ethnicity. Among Western European countries ca. 2001, the ratios ranged from 1.04 in Belgium to 1.07 in Switzerland,Italy, Ireland and Portugal. In the aggregated results of 56 Demographic and Health Surveys^[ in African countries, the ratio is 1.03, though there is also considerable country-to-country variation.
Even in the absence of sex selection practices, a range of "normal" sex ratios at birth of between 103 to 108 boys per 100 girls has been observed in different economically developed countries, and among different ethnic and racial groups within a given country.
In an extensive study, carried out around 2005, of sex ratio at birth in the United States from 1940 over 62 years, statistical evidence suggested the following: For mothers having their first baby, the total sex ratio at birth was 1.06 overall, with some years at 1.07. For mothers having babies after the first, this ratio consistently decreased with each additional baby from 1.06 towards 1.03. The age of the mother affected the ratio: the overall ratio was 1.05 for mothers aged 25 to 35 at the time of birth; while mothers who were below the age of 15 or above 40 had babies with a sex ratio ranging between 0.94 to 1.11, and a total sex ratio of 1.04. This United States study also noted that American mothers of Hawaiian, Filipino, Chinese, Cuban and Japanese ethnicity had the highest sex ratio, with years as high as 1.14 and average sex ratio of 1.07 over the 62 year study period.

While there are more males at the baby end of the life span spectrum, in nearly every society and culture, women out live men, resulting in more women at the elderly end of the life spectrum. Gender ratios are not constant.

China has an acknowledged problem with gender selection and they are having to address it as noted here in the Financial Times from last November:

Population growth in China is a concern for policy makers because the working-age population peaked in 2012, so the country faces having fewer workers available to support a growing army of the elderly. That peak has come at an earlier stage than in neighbouring economies, lending weight to the opinion of some observers that “China will become old before it gets rich”.

Demographers consider that to keep the population from falling, each woman, on average, must produce 2.06 babies, or an average of one daughter each. While males slightly outnumber females at birth everywhere, they are more likely to die in infancy.
But women in China would need to produce 2.2 children each to keep population level. That is because the nation’s gender imbalance is among the highest in the world, with 1.17 boys for every girl, a level that demographers have warned could lead to social unrest in years to come. Even China’s neighbours such as South Korea and Japan, which have fertility rates of 1.23 and 1.34 per woman, do not need as high a birth rate to hold the population level.

China and other countries with large and poor populations HAVE had problems with gender selection abortions, but those countries and cultures, with large numbers of poor and uneducated people comprising their populations, as they try to become more industrialized and developed, are addressing those issues and backward beliefs. We don't have the problem here and we should not pass legislation that targets and punishes immigrants from those cultures who come here.

This law represents the worst of what is wrong with the radical right. Those who more genuinely value and support women and girls are found on the left, opposing horrible legislation like this. As we approach the International Day of the Woman, this legislation and the legislation like it, is doubly repugnant and offensive.

Doubling Down on Dumb: Right wing Extremists Deny Facts. Again.

The right wing extremists that Bachmann and Cravaack run with claim a lot of ignorant, hateful things; they are routinely factually deficient, one might better say factually defective, as they seem not only to lack an acquaintance with reality but to be incapable of recognizing it.

As our commenter Minnesota Central noted, the right wingers supported redefining rape as 'real' rape/ forcible rape, 'legitimate' rape as only when it is violent enough.  Drugging a woman wouldn't be rape to them.  Taking advantage of a 12 year old girl, as in statutory rape, or incest, hey -- that's not rape to them, that's just getting a head start "on God's plan", as Sharron Angle describes it. Threatening a woman into sex, without leaving any bruises......nah, they don't want to define THAT as rape either.  Unless you can show blood, bruises, and broken bones, your rape just doesn't count, at least, not ENOUGH for an abortion.

These are prominent members of the party - the GOP, the Tea Party - who have opposed and obstructed the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.  Wow -- how surprising is THAT?

What views they hold seems to change slightly, depending on who is listening, depending on who they are trying to extract donations from, but the far right misogyny is true of Paul Ryan, that is true of Mittens on R-money too,except when he decides that rape ISN'T a justification for abortion EVER, and nor are incest, or saving the life of the mother.

Here is the reality; one assessment from the CDC puts the rate of pregnancy from rape at around 5%, more than 32,000 a year. 
Rape is under-reported, so it could well be much higher. Another study found rape resulting in pregnancy even higher:

"published in 2003, went even further: It found that a single act of rape was more than twice as likely to result in pregnancy than an act of consensual sex.

The study, “Are per-incident rape-pregnancy rates higher than per-incident consensual pregnancy rates?” was published in the journal Human Nature by Jonathan A. Gottschall and Tiffani A. Gottschall, two professors at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. They used data from the federally administered National Violence Against Women survey. There, they found a sample of 405 women between the ages of 12 and 45 who had experienced one incidence of rape that included intercourse.

Of those 405 women included in the sample, 6.4 percent — or 26 women — reported a pregnancy that year. A separate large-scale study showed that, for the general population of women that age, the per-incidence pregnancy rate for a single act of intercourse is 3.1 percent."

So a woman is MORE likely to become pregnant from rape, NOT LESS.  If there are any hormone activity going on, it is on the male side of rape, and it is encouraging not discouraging pregnancy. From Popular Science:
I called Gordon Gallup for his perspective on rape-related pregnancy. Last year, during a conversation about the antidepressant effects of semen, he mentioned a theory that the nature of a rapist's ejaculate has something to do with his reproductive success. When I asked him to elaborate on that, he told me that semen contains follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH), which trigger ovulation during the female menstrual cycle. FSH is needed for sperm production, but the presence of LH in high levels is more mysterious because it's not important for male fertility. It's possible, Gallup says, that seminal fluid released during forced sex contains higher-than-normal levels of these hormones -- LH in particular -- which may trigger ovulation in the victim.
There's no direct evidence yet of sex-induced ovulation in humans, although there's some very new research hinting at the possibility. The LH in semen has been shown to trigger ovulation in camels, alpacas and llamas. Semen also makes female koalas ovulate, although LH hasn't been identified as the active ingredient in that species' semen yet. A 1973 study found that 70 percent of conceptions from rape occurred outside a woman's most fertile time. And a 1949 study cited seven women who reported becoming pregnant due to rape, despite having not had a period for up to two years leading up to the assault.
The idea that semen produced during rape is especially primed to promote pregnancy seems less far-fetched considering the well-established evidence that what a man is doing when he ejaculates affects the chemical makeup of his semen. Studies on artificial insemination show that semen collected from a man who used his imagination to become aroused and ejaculate is much less likely to result in conception than a sample collected from a man watching porn, Gallup says. Even more potent is semen collected after coitus interupptus, i.e. pulling out during actual sex. The conditions under which a man becomes aroused and ejaculates has been shown to affect factors like sperm count, shape and mobility.
If semen changes based on context, it's plausible, Gallup asserts, that participating in a rape can affect its chemical makeup. Ovulation-inducing semen would be especially useful during rape, which is usually a one-time encounter. As sinister as it is, the ability to unconsciously adjust semen to make it more potent during rape could be one reproductive strategy that evolved in men to increase their reproductive success.
In addition to the devastating physical and emotional consequences of rape for the victim, things are also grim from the evolutionary perspective. "The problem with rape if conception occurs, is that it precludes making an informed mate choice, which is the principal means by which females maximize their fitness," Gallup says. "And it means that the female is not going to be subject to protection and provisioning by the child's father. Women are left holding the bag, so to speak."
Women appear to have evolved mechanisms to counteract these tactics and control their fertility. I've written about these kinds of dueling reproductive forces, known as antagonist coevolution, before. Some quick examples in human females: Research shows that women engage in less sexually risky behavior around ovulation, when they're likely to get pregnant, and their hand-grip strength, a measure of physical resistance, is enhanced during ovulation if they read a sexual-assault scenario, a mechanism that may have evolved to enable the female to more effectively resist rape when they're fertile.
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Clearly a slight increase in hand strength is not sufficient to prevent rape, or to alter the outcome of conception.  However the following, continuing from the Popular Science Article, does suggest women's bodies might be having more spontaneous abortions.  Continuing from the article:
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In saying that women "shut down" pregnancy after rape, Rep. Akin unwittingly stumbled upon the concept that women's bodies reject unfamiliar sperm. In 2006, Gallup and his co-author Jennifer Davis published their theory that preeclampsia, a common pregnancy complication that can result in spontaneous abortion, evolved as an adaptive response to unfamiliar semen. (I say unwittingly because Akin was more likely referring to a theory that the fear and trauma of rape causes a woman's fallopian tubes to tighten, thus preventing pregnancy. This idea, proposed by John C. Willke, a physician and a former president of the National Right to Life Committee, has been lambasted by other doctors.)
Psychologist and writer Jesse Bering explained the preeclampsia idea in his excellent post, which I highly recommend you read in its entirety: "By the early 1980s, scientists had started to notice that preeclampsia was more likely to occur in pregnancies resulting from "one-night stands," artificial insemination and rape than in pregnancies that were the product of long-term sexual cohabitation. That it was the woman's prior exposure to the male's semen that was responsible for this pattern was evident by the fact that couples who'd been using barrier contraceptives (such as condoms), or who practiced coitus interruptus (in which the man withdraws prior to ejaculation) before they began trying to conceive also had higher rates of preeclampsia than those who'd been engaging in unprotected sex for some time."
Bering continued, ""It may be useful to think about preeclampsia not simply as a medical anomaly," reason the authors, "but as an adaptation that may have evolved to terminate pregnancies where future paternal investment was questionable or unlikely."
Now, none of this means that rape-related pregnancies are rare, or that biology should be trusted to ward off these pregnancies. The sheer numbers of pregnancies from rape tell us that it's happening -- a lot. And, obviously, preeclampsia is not the solution. Having the right to choose what to do about it is.
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I see where Akin has checked out the facts subsequent to his horrific gaffe.

Here is my problem -- shouldn't Akin have checked out all these facts a long time ago, including well before he co-sponsored legislation on rape and abortion?  His checking out the facts now is laudable, but it is still too little too late.

And it appears to be more than many other Republicans and Tea Partiers have bothered to do; but then there is so much less point for them to check out facts.  They would just replace them immediately with religious superstition and self-serving political ideology anyway.

Todd Akin ISN'T the ONLY Republican Who Believes Factually Wrong Things about Women, Rape, and Pregnancy

The first time I heard or read the completely false statement that women couldn't become pregnant by rape, as a justification for the assertion that women would lie about being raped to get an abortion was not from Todd Akin. It is not unique to him, it is not unique among Republicans.

We wrote about it here, documenting some of the sources.  Freind circulated his claim that a woman couldn't get pregnant from 'real' rape, way back in 1988.  It has been circulating in the ignorance only/anti-abortion circles for a long, long time.  It had been embraced by the more extreme right throughout the 20th century; it is common in ignorant red states with poor educational standards, and apparently low professional standards.  It is what you get with red states - poor education results, low education funding, religion dominating science (specifically Christianity, either Roman Catholicism or fundamental evangelical versions), and support male dominance over women. These are the same people who want to remove anti-gender discrimination and to remove guarantees of equal pay for equal work for women.

It was said relatively recently by conservative State Senator Chuck Winder, who straight up claimed he thought women would lie about being raped, earlier this year, as a rebuttal to objections regarding forced, medically unnecessary ultrasound as a condition of receiving an abortion.

From the Buzz Feed:

Federal Judge James Leon Holmes made a similar claim back in 1997, and had written a letter in 1980 claiming that concern for rape victims was a red herring because the frequency of women being raped was similar to the frequency of snowfall in Miami.  It complicated his 2003 appointment to the federal bench by George W. Bush.  There was an attempt made to justify his claims about biology under the heading of religion, arguing that by faulting his lack of factual accuracy it was an assault on his religious beliefs.

The inherent assault on women's equality, and reproductive rights, and factual science was ignored.  It was one more instance of belief being given more value and legitimacy by Republicans than the issue of believing something factually verifiable over ideology.

And, appallingly from anyone with a medical degree who ought to know better before being allowed near anyone in a professional capacity, per the Columbus Dispatch (Ohio):

"I think that life begins when the chromosomes of the sperm and egg line up," said Dr. Richard Dobbins, who works in the emergency department at Hardin Memorial Hospital in Kenton.

Dobbins also questioned the need for emergency contraception in rape cases, saying that most women either are not fertile during assault or do not become pregnant because the trauma prompts a hormonal response that prevents ovulation.
The furthest back I had traced this before was a complete misrepresentation of recognized medical journals and other sources by another M.D., John C. Wilke, another anti-abortion nut, who opined more extensively about rape and conception inaccurately, in detail.  I can only wonder if they were educated at some crackpot Christian Medical School with dodgy accreditation like the law school that graduated Michele Bachmann.  Wilke, as of Monday (8/20/'12) was still doubling down on his medical fallacy.

There was similar false statements, circa 1995, made in the North Carolina Legislature, to the Appropriations Committee, by Rep. Henry Aldridge, a dentist by profession, to justify eliminating an abortion fund for poor women.  From the San Francisco Chronicle:

"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," said Aldridge, a 71-year-old periodontist. "Medical authorities agree that this is a rarity, if ever."

"It's really common for rape victims to be blamed for being raped," said Margaret Henderson, president of the North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

"But this is the first time I've heard of rape victims being blamed for becoming pregnant. I am both flabbergasted and offended by this man's remarks."

Aldridge had the floor during the committee meeting as he was trying to apologize for earlier remarks implying that victims of rape or incest are sexually promiscuous.

"I would invite the representative from Pitt to ask any woman who is the victim of rape or incest if she is being sexually promiscuous," Democratic Representative Dan Blue told him at the time.

Later, Aldridge defended his comments.

"To get pregnant, it takes a little cooperation. And there ain't much cooperation in a rape," he said.

A subcommittee had recommended cutting the fund from $1.2 million to $50,000 next year. Abortions would have been limited to cases of rape, incest or pregnancies that put the mother's life at risk.

But I think the instance of someone using this factually false argument that is the most offensive, the most egregious, the most appalling was this one, reported by the New York Times:

During a 1998 Senate campaign in Arkansas, the Republican candidate Dr. Fay Boozman claimed that hormones generated by fear usually prevented rape victims from getting pregnant, according to the doctor’s remarks in a report in The Times that year:

His reasoning: Pregnancy rarely occurs after rape because the stress of the assault triggers a biochemical reaction in the victim that makes conception unlikely. The Senator, who also is an ophthalmologist, said he knew this to be the case from anecdotal information he had picked up over the years and from his own medical residency in the 1970’s at the University of Arkansas Medical Center.

After he lost that election, Dr. Boozman was appointed to run the Arkansas Department of Health by the governor at the time, Mike Huckabee.

Now to be fair, Dr. Boozman DID at some later point, admit that his belief was 'not statistically based', but as wikipedia noted, "Dr. Boozman was also a former medical advisor to a crisis pregnancy center."

Pregnancy centers exist solely to persuade women not to have abortions; as an ophthalmologist, Dr. Boozman would not have been qualified to provide gynecological medical advice to women.  I have to wonder how many women met Dr. Boozman in that crisis pregnancy center believing he was a different kind of doctor.

This is pertinent because the whole premise that women can't get pregnant from rape is part of the larger pattern of deliberate misinformation, and the intentional substitution of faith and ideology for science that is part of the right wing political agenda.

Crisis Pregnancy centers are notorious for providing women false or factually inaccurate medical information. 

I include it here because at issue is not only that the far right, which has become the majority of the current Republican party, appears to be intentionally ill informed on matters of sex and reproduction, but they insist on making their factually false beliefs replace factual knowledge, including in sex education curricula and in reproductive-related law.  This is in significant measure an attempt to make Christianity a state-sponsored religion, part of the effort by the religious right wing to make the U.S. a Christian theocracy, not a democracy.  This represents a war on women, a war against sex, a war against science, but most of all it represents a war on the fundamental premise of the United States not having a state religion.

From Wikipedia:

CPCs that qualify as medical clinics may also provide pregnancy testing, sonograms, and other services; however, the vast majority are not licensed and provide no medical services.^[1] CPCs have been reported to disseminate false medical information, usually but not exclusively about the supposed health risks and mental health risks of abortion.^[11][12]
CPCs are typically run by pro-life Christians according to a conservative Christian philosophy,^[13] and they often operate in affiliation with one of three non-profit organizations: Care Net, Heartbeat International, and Birthright International. There are over 4,000 CPCs in the United States, as compared with well under 750 abortion clinics. Canada has roughly 200 CPCs and about 25 abortion clinics.^[14

At least 20 U.S. states provide funding for CPCs,^[5] and from from 2001 to 2005, 50 CPCs received $30 million in funding from the U.S. federal government.^[1] By 2006, U.S. CPCs had received more than $60 million dollars of federal funding, including some funding earmarked for abstinence-only programs.^[16]

False medical information
Journalists, medical researchers, congressional investigators, prospective CPC clients, and pro-choice advocates have routinely found that CPCs disseminate false medical information.^[12] In a few cases, such information may be based on decades-old studies that have been discredited by more recent research.^[13] In others, CPCs claim an existing scientific consensus in favor of such information.^[1] The information is usually about the supposed health risks of abortion; centers fail to mention that abortion is 11 to 12 times safer than childbirth.^[13][27] Some centers even say that "terminating a pregnancy is far more dangerous than carrying a baby to term", although the opposite is the case.^[11]
One common piece of medical misinformation is the assertion of a link between abortion and breast cancer.^{[12][1][4][11][13][22][27][33][34][35][36][37][38]} One crisis pregnancy center counselor is reported to have told a client that "50 percent of women who have an abortion get breast cancer and 30 percent die within a year of the procedure";^[36] others have claimed a 50% increase,^[1]:8 an 80% increase,^[1]:8,^[11][35] a doubled increase,^[1]:8[37] a quadrupled increase,^[39] or said that a client with breast cancer in her family would certainly get cancer and die if she had an abortion.^[35] Major medical bodies (including the National Cancer Institute^[40]) say that there is no link between abortion and breast cancer.^{[13][22][33][34][35]}
Another is the assertion of a link between abortion and mental health problems. CPC counselors are reported to have conveyed various supposed psychological consequences of abortion, including high rates of depression, "post-abortion syndrome", post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide, substance abuse, sexual and relationship dysfunction, propensity to child abuse, and other emotional problems.^{[1][5][11][13][22][34][35][38][39][41][42][43]} Figures included a 50% chance of long-term emotional problems^[34] or trauma,^[1] nine in ten women suffering "post-abortion syndrome",^[1] and a sevenfold increase in the suicide rate;^[1] one center said that anyone who had had an abortion was certain to experience mental health problems like those suffered by Vietnam veterans.^[1] Neither the American Psychiatric Association nor the American Psychological Association recognizes the existence of "post-abortion syndrome", and an American Psychological Association review of relevant studies found that "abortion is usually psychologically benign."^{[1][22][34][35]}
CPCs may also claim that surgical abortion is a dangerous procedure, with a high risk of perforation or infection.^{[5][13][34][35][37][39][41][43]} One CPC counselor is reported to have told an undercover investigator that a patient was left needing a colostomy bag after her bowel was perforated;^[39] several reports mention that a CPC described or depicted a woman dying as a result of the procedure.^[35][37][44] However, fewer than 0.3% of women who have abortions experience complications that necessitate hospitalization.^[34]
The alleged risk of perforation and infection is also part of the assertion that abortion negatively impacts future childbearing, by increasing the risk of infertility, miscarriages, complications, ectopic pregnancy, or fetal health problems.^{[1][11][13][34][35][38][39][41][42][43]} One center claimed that there was a one in four chance of not being able to carry another pregnancy.^[43] These claims are not supported by medical data.^[1][34][43]
Besides false information about health risks of abortion, CPCs have also been found to disseminate misinformation about birth control methods, in particular the idea that contraception and condoms do not work or have harmful effects.^{[13][21][22][34][35][39][44]} Some counselors said that "all condoms are defective and have slots and holes in them"^[13] or that they fail "something like 40 percent of the time."^[22] Other centers said that condoms were permeable to HIV or other diseases,^[21] or that hormonal contraceptives had abortifacient effects and did long-term harm to women's health, such as causing infertility and cancer,^[34][35] while one said that condoms caused cancer.^[39]
Other false information may concern the methodology of pregnancy tests,^[44] the advisability of STI testing on pregnant women,^[35] the comparative risk, availability, and advisability of abortion at different stages of pregnancy,^{[37][39][43][45]} descriptions of female anatomy,^[43] the rate of postpartum depression among women who carry to term,^[1] the progression of fetal development,^[37][39] fetal pain,^[37] the possibility of getting pregnant from rape,^[39] the progression of pregnancy,^[21] and the number of pregnancies that end in natural miscarriages.^[21]
Pro-choice organizations like Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation, and Choice Ireland have criticized CPCs' dissemination of false medical information.^[4][45][46] Care Net denounces "any form of deception in its corporate advertising or individual conversations with its clients", though they also say of their promotion of an abortion–breast cancer link that their "role is clearly to include this possible risk when [they] educate clients about all the risks of abortions."^[27]

This is in the larger context this year of efforts by the right in trying to redefine rape to eliminate statutory rape, or rape where the victim is drugged by date-rape drugs, or otherwise rendered incapable of giving consent.  The attempt was to only define rape if it was violent enough, not if it was simply under threat of violence or coercion of immediate personal harm, or other fear.  Rape should be defined as sex without consent, and against the wishes of one of the parties.  (Although this IS true, sort of, of ducks being able to avoid conception from some kinds of forced sexual penetration in certain select species of waterfowl, but it has to do with an adaptation of vaginal position, and length, not hormones or secretions.)

This is in the larger context of the right to eliminate both contraception and abortion rights and to gut health care for women, which drastically erodes women's capacity to determine their own lives and to be independent human beings. It is reflected as well in the failures of abstinence only sex education that provides false and inaccurate information on pregnancy, and which provides ignorance in place of education.  It is part of an attack on women and an attempt to regress human sexuality back to the darkest of the dark ages.

Specifically, in addressing the issue of rape, as if some rape is more acceptable than others, the New York Times noted:

On Monday, Mr. Akin appeared on Mike Huckabee’s radio program and said, “I was talking about forcible rape.” As Slate blogger David Weigel explains, the use of that term in a bill introduced by House Republicans last year — and the apparent effort to create tiers of rape in federal law — provoked controversy. While the term was eventually dropped from the legislation, Mr. Akin, and Representative Paul Ryan, were among the co-sponsors of the original bill.

What this really amounts to is an attempt to minimize the crime of rape, to shift the blame and responsibility for rape from men to women, and to try to justify denying abortions to women who have been raped.  There are some 32,000 rapes a year that result in pregnancy, according to the CDC; and because rape is so under-reported, the number is certainly much higher.

Breitbart Is Anything But Bright - or Honest

Andrew Breitbart had to back away from his protege James O'Keefe when it became apparent that O'Keefe had altered and changed and misrepresented the coverage of ACORN.  He has become no more honest, no more factually accurate, and certainly no more civil or clever since then.

While I usually find the following source to be heavily biased, in this case it appears that Keith Olbermann has soundly and factually called out Breitbart for the lying ass that he is.  Sadly, the right is so enamored of being lied to so long a it is a lie they find palatable, that it doesn't care if Breitbart, or the rest of the right wing media and blogosphere is any more accurate. 

Breitbart is deplorable and he deserves condemnation for this. 

Sadly the right is NOT willing to be against rape, unless they think they can find a way to exploit it against a political opponent.  It is the right that is trying to redefine rape as only violent events, not as non-consensual sex.  That would rule out rape of a woman who was incapacitated by a date rape drug, it would rule out the inability of a child to fully consent in statutory rape cases, it would rule out so many instances where rape is the coercion of  non-consensual sex, that the Republicans and the other conservatives who support this should be ASHAMED.  They are the aiders and abetters of rape, not the Occupy movement.

And double-shame on them for doing their best to deny women an abortion for rape, incest or to save the life of the mother as well.

From Current TV:

and  and

A Second Supplemental Post on the GOP Culture War on Women - Bobby Franklin

Not at the federal level this time, in the state of Georgia, a Republican legislator is trying to change a different part of the definitions relating to rape.  No, he's not going after the term forcible; he's trying to remove the word victim from the term rape victim - and he's throwing in the crimes of domestic violence and stalking as bonus crimes for which you aren't a victim if the crime happens to you, you're an 'accuser'. If you're a victim of any other crime, you're still referred to as the crime victim. These are the only crime exceptions.

47 More Sexual Assault Victims of Halliburton and KBR

"The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life."
Theodore Roosevelt
26th President of the United States
1858 - 1919

“There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.”
James Thurber
American Writer
1894-1961

Update:

Forty seven more women have reported similar experiences to those of Jamie Leigh Jones. I had previously indicated the number was eleven, from an earlier research source. I have contacted the Jamie Leigh Jones Foundation directly for further information, so I hope to provide continuing updates. At least two of the women already have had similar court cases challenging the enforcement of arbitration clauses which was the subject of the Franken Amendment. They are mentioned in the May 9, 2008 decision of the Jamie Leigh Jones case in the United States District Court, Southern District of Texas, Houston Division. That decision mentions the similarity of the sexual assault in Cravetz v. Halliburton (Southern District of Florida Court), and the sexual assault in the case of Barker v. Halliburton (Southern District of Texas).

While looking into what I could find on the allegations of sexual assault related to Halliburton and KBR, I also came across a reference to a criminal conviction of David Charles Breda Jr. for the sexual assault of a woman while employed by a KBR subsidiary in Iraq. There is a wonderful web site hosted by the Project on Government Oversight, "POGO", which maintains a Federal Contractor Misconduct Database that is fascinating reading at http://www.pogo.org/.

The political fall out for those Senators who voted against the "Franken Amendment" has begun, with the first Senator, Vitters from Louisiana (R), to be confronted by a rape victim in his home state, following a public meeting on health care reform in Baton Rouge on Halloween.

Here is the link to the YouTube video of the encounter:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6YZ1wP1978

It could be said that the real life confrontation was potentially far scarier for Vitters, at least politically, than any holiday monsters. It should be interesting to see if this vote against the Franken Amendment is more damaging to Vitters' re-election hopes in 2010 than the fall out from his prostitution scandal.

Vitters earned a certain notoriety for his use of a prostitutes, including apparently being phoned by the prostitution ring to set up appointments for their services while he was on the Senate Floor during actual votes, according to correlations between phone records and Senate vote records. Apparently the Senator has an interesting way of mixing business with pleasure, or at least the business of pleasure.

It has been the recent pattern when asked to explain their vote against the Franken Amendment, for the nay-voting Senators to state their opposition to the intent of the Amendment, while misstating the position of the Obama White House which supported the intent, and worked with the Senators sponsoring the Amendment to make it more enforceable and broader.

There is every possibility that there are more victims than the 11 who have now come forward in addition to Jamie Leigh Jones. It will be interesting to see how this plays out between now and the 2010 elections for those Senators, and with the Department of Justice.