While it's unlikely that this election is going to have any effect as regards our national enthusiasm for flying death robots (predictable Decepticon apologetics here), I am wanly hopeful that an Obama victory may have the salutary effect of getting Democrats to finally -- after going on a third of century now -- get off their plump (male) asses and forcefully defend a woman's right to choose.
Yes, this is to do with Mourdock (sometimes Dickens gets to give names to politicians, apparently) being a shit. But it goes past that.
Here for example is Amy Sullivan doing her patented whingeing.
I was just shocked that anyone was shocked. Lots of Republican politicians oppose rape exceptions. Paul Ryan, for one, opposes abortion in the case of rape. Rarely does anyone bother to offer an explanation for why he holds that position. (Todd Akin famously did earlier this year, and that didn’t go so well for him.) I’m not sure what justifications people had imagined for opposing a rape exception that would be more acceptable than Mourdock’s.
Yes, well, the fact that a lot of people were shocked would be the fucking point. There is a reason why the Official GOP (the "stickies"? First person who explains that joke in the comments gets a free lifetime WF subscription!) has soft-pedaled the abortion issue in any general election, while simultaneously trying to dog-whistle to the fundie crazies. It's because the "pro-life" position only sounds like it makes moral sense, when in fact it gets deeply nutty the farther you push it. Sullivan:
Despite the assertions of many liberal writers I read and otherwise admire, I don’t think that politicians like Mourdock oppose rape exceptions because they hate women or want to control women. I think they’re totally oblivious and insensitive and can’t for a moment place themselves in the shoes of a woman who becomes pregnant from a rape.
This is crap -- they certainly do want to "control women" if they wish to deny women by force of law certain choices. It's that blunt.
And moreover -- let's accept that Mourdock is sincere, and believes this, in Sullivan's words:
But if Mourdock believes that God creates all life and that to end a life created by God is murder, then all abortion is murder, regardless of the circumstances in which a pregnancy came about.
Fine. So, therefore, Mourdock believes that if you are a woman, and you are raped, and you conceive a child, and you abort that child, you are guilty of murder. Under our wise American system of justice, murderers may be themselves put to death...
So, if you are a woman who is raped, and you conceive, and you have an abortion, you should be killed by lethal injection, hanged, or sent to the electric chair.
You killed a baby, after all.
That's the logic.
If you abort a baby conceived by rape, you are a murderer who hates God, and according to Standard American Morality, can be executed.
Have the Democrats finally discovered that they can run against that rather vicious, sanctimonious, authoritarian logic? The logic that is totally there but that "pro-lifers" will never, ever discuss?
Who knows! They're such wobbly shits, our Ds...
But first, they should, because fuck that shit.
But second... smell the panic.
Hell, maybe in the next decade, we'll have a movie where a woman gets an abortion, and it won't be like she's Satan's Bride or some shit!
I doubt it myself, because we, the Indomitable Irishry, don't believe in anything good happening ever. But it is pleasant to dream.