Bizarre, Politics, Religion, Society

GOP Senatorial Candidate: God Intended Rape Victims To Get Pregnant

Honestly, what is the problem with rape and Republican candidates this year? First, Rep. Todd Akin loses a lock on a Senate seat by holding forth on “legitimate rape” and how women possess some magic ability to prevent pregnancies by rapists. Now, Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock (who defeated respected Senator Richard Lugar) has proclaimed with only a few weeks to go in the election that the impregnation of women in rape is part of God’s plan. What happened to the good old day when GOP candidates primarily followed a formula campaign based on lower taxes and longer criminal sentences?

Mourdock was asked in the final minutes of his debate with his opponent Joe Donnelly about abortions in cases of rape and proclaimed that when a woman is impregnated during a rape, it is all part of God’s plan — a type of divine family plan via sexual assault. Mourdock proclaimed: “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that’s something God intended to happen.”

Donnelly promptly after the debate took the position that such pregnancies through rape are not part of what “my God, or any God, would intend that to happen.” Mourdock soon realized that he had pulled an Akin and may have aborted his campaign. He clarified that he did not believe God intended the rape: “Are you trying to suggest somehow that God preordained rape, no I don’t think that. Anyone who would suggest that is just sick and twisted. No, that’s not even close to what I said.” Really? Here is what you said: “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that’s something God intended to happen.” Sounds a lot like God intended the rape victim to get pregnant. The best that Mourdock could claim is that God did not intend for the rape to occur, but, once it did, decided that it was important for the woman to become pregnant by her rapist.

I am also unclear on why God preordains the pregnancy but not the rape that caused it. This is often a matter of theological debate when people insist that prayer caused God to spare their lives in a tornado but that he decided not to spare the lives of their neighbors or their own home from the tornado. It is the tension that arises from a view that God controls all events as part of a divine plan as opposed to a divine plan that allows free will and/or fate to govern events.

Pat Robertson recently insisted that God does not send tornados but that victims would still have been spared if they prayed more:

However, Robertson does believe that God at times sends natural disasters to punish us as with Hurricane Katrina. That may reflect the more nuanced view of Mourdock that God may not have sent the rapist but did want you to become pregnant by your rapist. The question is whether, if God micromanages such events, did he intend GOP Senatorial campaigns to implode across the country?

Source: Big Story

94 thoughts on “GOP Senatorial Candidate: God Intended Rape Victims To Get Pregnant”

  1. I think everything wrote made a bunch of sense. However, what about this?
    what if you were to create a killer headline? I ain’t saying your content isn’t solid, but suppose you added a title that makes people want more?

    I mean GOP Senatorial Candidate: God Intended Rape Victims To Get Pregnant | JONATHAN TURLEY is a little vanilla.
    You could glance at Yahoo’s front page and see how they create article titles to get viewers to click. You might try adding a video or a related picture or two to get people excited about everything’ve got to say.

    In my opinion, it could bring your website a little bit more interesting.

  2. pat robertson also said that GOD is a republican. that’s impossible! GOD would have to be a man wouldn’t HE. the antichrist say that I am a nut job. so I must have THE SON.

    the clergy votes against GOD and censors GOD on other sites.

    they claim that GOD will destroy the world and they won’t tell you why. do you think I want to hear a lot more empty prayers from people that are going to hell. pat tells you I do.

    JESUS said that when HE comes again HE would be the true SON OF GOD. there is only one way that that is possible, and was done. Just think, the place of the Immaculate Conception should be known by now but the anticrist says to destroy everything I’VE made. so if some body got the wrong recipe they did it not get from ME.

    do you know that some people love to see people kneel in front of them. just look what it did to benny hinn, and billy graham, who payed people to start to come down from their seats. you don’t know exactly where I am for that reason even though The BIBLE says to kneel before GOD.

    some wives of clergy will actually smile when they see the congregation kneel in front of their husbands.

    I don’t go to the presidents, they will come to ME like The BIBLE says. so let them go to the anticrist on sunday. they ask for help from the antichrist. the antichrist will force there mark upon you. I don’t care! they chose to claim to serve GOD and they can’t. for some reason they are serving JESUS. GOD said, thou shall have no other Gods before ME! a simple recipe, don’t you think? I am not trying to impress anybody with MY Name, which is The Living God. I would be known by many names, but to set the record straight, means that there are still going to be tornadoes that will eat you up.

    did you know that just a few years ago they used to teach that sickness would be cured by Jesus. all antichrist had different versions of the story depending on the antichrist preference of the antichrist.

    so it’s friday, and hauf brau time, so have a good night.

  4. God doesn’t send tornadoes? Air masses “sporn tornadoes”?

    Wait, wait. God sends “tournedoes.” If you make them with beef, they’re delicious but lots of calories. But God sends them, yes indeed. Probably what happened was that people were hungry, they prayed for tournedoes, and they had speech defects (not sent by God!), and God thought they were praying for tornadoes. DON’T be UNGODLY and build your house in a place apt to get confused about what’s for dinner. Dummy. OK?

    OMG OMG OMG HELP ME! Somebody got the recipe wrong and…owwwwwwwwww…

  5. You know, what “God intended” has nothing to do with our government and if we have senators who are voting in our legislature to legally back up God’s intentions, they all have conflicts of interest. YOU CANNOT SERVE TWO MASTERS. Book of Matthew VI:24.

    Legislators voting the will of their Gods rather than their constituents must be removed from office. We could see this so easily if we weren’t constantly being confused by their blah-blah-blah. When we hear, “God intended it” from a legislator, our immediate response should be: “Irrelevant, Immaterial and Incompetent!” This guy is not just an amusing bozo; he’s an infiltrator.

  6. I say let them talk about rape all they like.

    That way we can spot ‘em just like that. -Gene H.

    They won’t stop talking about it — they can’t help themselves.

  7. Elaine M, OMG, an astonishing coincidence occurred! Every single one of the pro-rape legislators looks exactly like a white man! They even all kinda look alike! They look like…like…well… 😈

  8. Gene,
    great scene from a wild movie! You are right that we can see them coming when they make outrageous statements like this.
    Elaine,
    Love the rape advisory chart!

  10. OS, Cruz in Texas is on the list. He is just coming into the government as the replacement for Kay Hutchinson. The republicans here are still getting worse.

  11. Here’s a website for you: Republicans for Rape:
    http://www.republicansforrape.org/legislators/

    Excerpt:
    Below is the list of thirty legislators who were brave enough to stand up in defense of rape and vote against Senator Al Franken’s anti-rape amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill. We applaud these courageous men! Roll over the portraits with your mouse to see the Senator’s phone number, or click on a portrait to visit the Senator’s contact page. We encourage you to send your kind words to these gentlemen!

  13. Lt. Aldo Raine: [to Wicki] Ask him what he is gonna do with his uniform when he gets home.
    Pvt. Butz: [through an interperter] Not only do I intend to take off my uniform, I intend to burn it.
    Lt. Aldo Raine: Nah, see, we don’t like that. We like our Nazis in uniform. That way we can spot ’em just like that. We’re gonna give you a little something you can’t take off.

    ***********

    I say let them talk about rape all they like.

    That way we can spot ’em just like that.

  14. “The real Republican rape platform”

    “It’s no accident GOP candidates can’t stop talking about rape: the party view is women are mere vessels subject to men’s will”

    by Jill Filipovic

    guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 October 2012 12.30 BS

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/25/real-republican-party-rape-platform

    “Dear GOP candidates and party members,

    I’m going to give you some free campaign advice: stop talking about rape.

    The latest Republican rape commentary comes from Romney-endorsed Indiana senatorial candidate Richard Mourdock, who tells us:

    “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

    Cue outrage, then cue “apology” from Mourdock – not for his comments, but for “any interpretation other than what I intended”. National Republican senatorial committee chairman John Cornyn voiced his support for Mourdock and added that he also believes “life is a gift from God.”

    I would hate for Mr Mourdock to think I’m misinterpreting him here, so let’s be clear about what he said: he did not say that rape is a gift from God. He did say that an unwanted pregnancy is a post-rape goodie bag from the Lord. And that the Lord intended it to happen that way.

    Perhaps God should rethink his delivery system. And perhaps Mourdock should rethink his interpretation of divine will.

    What this umpteenth rape comment tells us isn’t that the Republican party has a handful of unhinged members who sometimes flub their talking points. It reveals the real agendas and beliefs of the GOP as a whole.

    These incidents aren’t isolated, and they aren’t rare. Sharron Angle, who ran for a US Senate seat out of Nevada, said she would tell a young girl wanting an abortion after being raped and impregnated by her father that “two wrongs don’t make a right” and that she should make a “lemon situation into lemonade”. Todd Akin said victims of “legitimate rape” don’t get pregnant – an especially confusing talking point, if God is giving rape victims the gift of pregnancy. Maybe God only gives that gift to victims of illegitimate rape?

    Wisconsin state representative Roger Rivard asserted:

    “Some girls rape easy.”

    Douglas Henry, a Tennessee state senator, told his colleagues:

    “Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse.”

    Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly declared that marital rape doesn’t exist, because when you get married you sign up to be sexually available to your husband at all times. And when asked a few years back about what kind of rape victim should be allowed to have an abortion, South Dakota Republican Bill Napoli answered:

    “A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.”

    Rape lemonade. Legitimate rape. The sodomized virgin exception. A rape gift from God.

    Some Republicans, like Mitt Romney, have tried to distance themselves from their party’s rhetorical obsession with sexual violation. What they’re hoping we won’t notice is the fact that their party is politically committed to sexual violation.

    Opposition to abortion in all cases – rape, incest, even to save the pregnant woman’s life or health – is written into the Republican party platform. Realizing they can’t make abortion illegal overnight, conservatives instead rally around smaller initiatives like mandatory waiting periods, transvaginal ultrasounds and mandated lectures about “life” to make abortion as expensive, difficult and humiliating as possible.

    Republicans bow to the demands of “pro-life” organizations, not a single one of which supports even birth control, and the GOP now routinely opposes any effort to make birth control or sexual education available and accessible. They propose laws that would require women to tell their employers what they’re using birth control for, so that employers could determine which women don’t deserve coverage (the slutty ones who use birth control to avoid unwanted pregnancy) and which women do (the OK ones who use it for other medical reasons).

    Mainstream GOP leaders, including Mitt Romney, campaign with conservative activists who lament the fact that women today no longer fully submit to the authority of their husbands and fathers, mourn a better time when you could legally beat your wife, and celebrate the laws of places like Saudi Arabia where men are properly in charge. Senate Republicans, including Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan and “legitimate rape” Todd Akin, blocked the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. And Ryan and Akin joined forces again to propose “personhood” legislation in Washington, DC that would define a fertilized egg as a person from the moment sperm meets egg, outlawing abortion in all cases and many forms of contraception, and raising some serious questions about how, exactly, such a law would be enforced.

    Underlying the Republican rape comments and actual Republican political goals are a few fundamental convictions: first, women are vessels for childbearing and care-taking; second, women cannot be trusted; and third, women are the property of men.

    Mourdock’s statement that conceiving from rape is a gift positions women as receptacles, not as autonomous human beings. This view of women as vessels – vessels for sex with their husbands, vessels for carrying a pregnancy, vessels for God’s plan – is a necessary component of the kind of extreme anti-abortion legislation most Republican politicians support.

    So is the idea that women are both fundamentally unintelligent and dishonest. Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment and Rivard’s contention that “some girls rape easy” rely on the idea that women routinely lie about rape and shouldn’t be believed; blocking VAWA relied partly on similar logic put forward by men’s rights activists, that women lie about being abused in order to secure citizenship and other benefits. Hostility to abortion rights similarly positions rightwing lawmakers as the best people to determine whether or not any particular woman should be legally compelled to carry a pregnancy to term.

    Women, they seem to think, don’t know their own bodies or their own lives, and cannot be trusted to determine for themselves whether continuing a pregnancy is a good idea.

    Rape treats women as vessels, disregarding our autonomy and our right to control what happens to us physically and sexually. The Republican position is that women are not entitled to make fundamental decisions about our own bodies and our own sexual and reproductive health. When that position is written into the GOP platform and is a legislative priority, can we really be surprised when it’s further reflected in Republican legislators’ comments on rape?

    These aren’t a few errant remarks from insensitive politicians. They’re at the heart of the Republican party’s agenda.”

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