-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
Richard Mourdock, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Indiana, made the following statement during a debate: “but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” Mourdock later explained that he doesn’t believe that God “pre-ordains” rape.
Mourdock’s view of God attempts to deal with the conflicting concepts of the goodness of pregnancy and the evil of rape. His view is incoherent.
The conflicting concepts of evil and an omnipotent God have been noted by Epicurus (circa 300 BC):
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Mourdock believes the pregnancy is preordained even if the rape was not the intention of God. How does Mourdock account for the rape and still maintain a belief in God’s omnipotence? Today, a Sophisticated Theologian™ would claim that the rape was an expression of the rapist’s free will. While that argument may let God off the hook as far as the preordination of rape, it raises other problems.
The vicim, by her own free will, may decide to take an emergency contraceptive preventing fertilization or implantation. If the rape was not preordained by God due to the free will of the rapist, then the pregnancy could not have been preordained due to free will of the victim.
The Republican Party’s solution to that problem is to remove all forms of contraception so that women have no other choice but to carry to term. When there are no choices, there is no free will.
While many view the passing of genes to their offspring as a gift, it also fulfills a biological imperative to perpetuate their existence. If a rape victim exercises her free will and decides to reward her rapist by passing along his genes to the next generation, that is her choice. However, the state has no business rewarding the rapist with the gift of a child.
H/T: Mike LaBossiere, Jerry Coyne, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, Sally Quinn.
The problem with Republican extremist thinking is twofold…an inability to recognize the separation between church and state and the ultimate fact in Christianity that G*d does not control us like puppets….G*d gives Free Will….also known as ‘CHOICE’. Rapists are not gods…..or even demi-gods. They are violent criminals. People who have endured attacks by violent criminals are allowed by the G*d of the Bible, and also (if we are not too stupid to recognize the consequences of a different path) by the State to do what is necessary to live. The one who decides is the one with ALL THE PERTINENT FACTS which also include the impact on other people in the mothers life. Economics are a huge part of that. What is unfortunate in this day and age, is that abortion is often necessary.
@Joseph Piazza: “metaphysics” is a made-up term that does not have any actual real meaning. Add to it words like “sacred” and “holy” and “divine.” They are words to paint pictures of things that are not real in the hopes of distracting someone into giving away their rights to the painter.
Your Higher Power is ethically challenged on his best days, and an evil bastard most the rest of the time.
More to the point, none of this made-up hooey gives the government the responsibility to insert its big nosy beak into the medical decisions of its citizens.
Magic-thinking and rock dumb is no way to go through life, Son…
“You seem to want to disprove the existence of God, criticize the Republican party, and justify abortion in cases of rape.”
Yes. And he did it all quite effectively.
Men (including you David) should not comment on pregnancies that are the outcome of rape.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/26/france-free-abortion-bill_n_2023729.html The lower chamber in France votes to make abortions free. The US is so backwards, and the republican party want to turn us back to the days of “Madmen”.
I will go a step further. My niece was raped and refused the morning after pill at the hospital ( for reasons I don’t know). She ended up pregnant with her rapist’s child Her rapist was sentenced to 15 years, but ended up serving only five due to prison overcrowding. When he was released, he petitioned for, AND WON, visitation rights. The whole family court fight was more than my niece could bear and she ended up attempting suicide. Now, her rapist and his family have primary custody of this child. Incredible, but true.
Yeah, now the reward for rapists will grow because once the rapist gets custody he also gets child support. This is all part of a continuum meant to return us to a new, improved form of feudalism. Furthermore, I can predict cases where the woman’s attempt to charge the man with rape and/or her attempt to get an abortion so as not to give birth to the rapist’s progeny will result in almost automatic pre-birth loss of custody and a form of “civil contempt imprisonment” to prevent the mother from removing the father’s child from the jurisdiction. They already started this in Indiana in the late 90s with orders preventing pregnant women from leaving the state because the fathers were lodging complaints against the mothers (for being unfit for custody) before the children were born. In one case it appeared to be a sort of “surrogacy” scheme. Anyway, the woman who cries “rape” will be seen as a hysteric, a malicious misandrist b*tch, or the like, and she will be considered unfit even before social services has a chance to document anything wrong on her part. I see it coming. The purpose of it, of course, would be to both prevent “false allegations of rape” and to make sure women pay their child support. It would also make adoption a lot easier. The letter to the Republican candidates in the link provided by OS fails to mention one more benefit to the rapist: HIS CONSENT is needed for adoption. If he decides not to allow his victim to give up HIS baby for adoption, she will be forced to keep the baby and fight a custody battle with him OR give the baby up to him and have her parental rights terminated. If, however, he chooses to not adopt the baby (thus legally terminating her rights) but simply to assume custody of the baby because mom’s so unfit she doesn’t want to raise the child, he can get at least 18 years of child support from the mother. It’s pretty close to the system that existed in this country before 1865 if a white master raped a Black slave woman and then obviously owned her child. And all perfectly legal.
O.S., I’ll second the recommendation to Scalzi’s article. I spent two hours last night between the original blog post and the comments.
I’m gonna tell you the story of a little girl who was once a “newly conceived child.” Her mother had gone out with her father and he had date-raped the mother. This was long enough ago that when the mother went to report the rape, the police wouldn’t even draw charges against him because she admitted having had dinner with him first, even though (1) the mother went to the police immediately after going to the hospital and there was a rape kit and (2) the mother had a black eye and a deep gouge from a belt buckle in addition to physical evidence of the rape itself. The mother was pregnant, which she did not find out until over a month later. She raised the child herself, partly on welfare, and the father never contributed anything. She put his name on the birth certificate and she did call him and tell him about his daughter and she told him, also, that she had tried to charge him with rape, and he said he heard and he laughed at her. When the child was seven the father sued for custody. He was very wealthy, had recently married, owned a beautiful home in Vermont, wanted a child, and his wife did not want stretch marks. He won the custody battle and denied the mother all visitation because she was so angry about what had happened he convinced the judge that the child visiting her mother would make her turn against her new family and resent her beautiful step-mother. This story is true. I was in court with this mother in Vermont; the mother had no lawyer; the judge seemed to have an i.q. of about 100 IF THAT. Whenever the mother brought up the date-rape, the father’s well heeled lawyer would jump up and yell OBJECTION! and then would give a little speech that included the totally unproven (because he did not even adduce evidence about it) allegation that the mother had been trying to get pregnant for years before the date so that she could get on welfare. Then the fact that the mother admitted to getting welfare seemed to be proof of her nefarious plan, showing she seduced the man. So this girl was raised by a violent rapist/liar. Hmmmm.
The mother had worked in retail until she had the baby but there was no maternity leave on her job and when she returned to work she couldn’t get more than a minimum wage job and needed welfare to feed her baby, whose life was precious but whose rights were not.
I think each and every legislator who would vote for any law that would require any woman to give birth to any baby under circumstances like this should have to personally support, in very high style, at least ten women AND ALL THEIR CHILDREN who have been subjected to this kind of treatment. For 18 years each. With no contact and no information about who gets their money and what they do with it. Because that’s what we, the taxpayers, do for them, the legislators, who come up with this kind of amoral bullsh*t that no normal non-psychotic person would ever even think of.
Joseph Piazza and other like minded persons:
Science fiction writer John Scalzi wrote a “letter” to Mr. Mourdock the other day that you might want to read. I posted this link the other night, but due to timing it did not get many eyeballs.
CAVEAT: This is a trigger warning. John Scalzi is brutal in speaking the honest truth in his “letter.” As someone who has done psychological profiles on hundreds of criminal defendants, Mr. Scalzi captures how they think in brutal honesty and detail. Victims of sex crimes will find it disturbing, so be careful before clicking the link.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/10/25/a-fan-letter-to-certain-conservative-politicians/
It was likely a Freudian slip … these guys have been raping America and saying it is the will of the storm gods.
Lunatics.
Deborah S.,
I’ve been reading articles about Angie Epifano, a rape victim, and her experience at Amherst College. Here’s a link to one of the articles:
Amherst Severely Mishandles Rape Charge. Amherst’s Female Students Are Not Surprised.
By Virginia Choi
Oct. 25, 2012
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/10/25/after_angie_epifano_amherst_rape_victims_speak_out_no_wonder_college_students.html
Excerpt:
Amherst College administrators have been scrambling to repair their sexual misconduct policies after former student Angie Epifano wrote a widely shared op-ed last week in the student paper about her campus rape experience. After nearly a year of trying to deal on her own with the trauma of being raped in a dorm room, Epifano reached out for help:
Eventually I reached a dangerously low point, and, in my despondency, began going to the campus’ sexual assault counselor. In short I was told: No you can’t change dorms, there are too many students right now. Pressing charges would be useless, he’s about to graduate, there’s not much we can do. Are you SURE it was rape? It might have just been a bad hookup…You should forgive and forget.
The counseling center and deans continued to neglect Epifano’s report of rape and instead focused on how unstable she seemed. Eventually, the school placed her in a psychiatric ward and then restricted her academic options. Fed up, she transferred.
Since the Amherst Student published Epifano’s grueling account, several students have come forward with their own experiences of rape. This Tuesday, Dana Bolger, a senior at Amherst, shared photos on an Amherst student blog of sexually assaulted students holding up signs with the comments they received from the Amherst community after their assaults. The signs quote deans saying, “You never took your case to trial, so you don’t actually count as a rape survivor” and “Take a year off, get a job at Starbucks, and come back after he’s graduated.”
Thanks for the link Elaine. This is a terrible example of why women delay reporting rape. One of my daughters had a similar experience at a college in Texas.
Elaine, Or Romney Ryan, the leaders of the party of rape and racism.
David,
You seem to want to disprove the existence of God, criticize the Republican party, and justify abortion in cases of rape. It seems a bit much for one post. But, I will attempt to respond coherently and briefly.
First, it is no feat of greatness to use linear deductive logic to make a case that there is no God. But such an argument doesn’t prove anything related to the metaphysical, which by it’s nature is out of the explainable reality. God is many things to many people and words can be insufficient to describe God. Not everyone that believes in God, believes in an embodied Euro looking older male. Some believe that God is the untouchable goodness that is common between you and me, regardless of our intellectual decisions (moral or amoral).
We know that our democratic process does not bring the best and the brightest to the front of the line. Additionally, we have created a public dialogue environment where any discussion of a Higher Power related to the personal values that help us form our public opinion is demonized (pun intended) and criticized. So it is not surprising that someone who may want to express their belief in having public policy reflect the value of the Spirit common to all people (by their belief albeit) trips over their tongue in attempting to articulate it well. (Of course, I am not referring to the disingenuous.) This can be such a case.
Finally, and I am guessing the point attempted by Senator Mourdock, and poorly executed, is that the new life however formed has value. I work with children each day who were fertilized under difficult, dubious and clearly wrong circumstances. They have value, and have had value since their conception. It is the law of our country that a pregnancy can be terminated by the choice of the mother. It is certainly understandable why a woman would want a pregnancy terminated that was derived from a rape. The legal and possible logical justification does not, however, remove the human or Spiritual value of the newly conceived child.
“but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”
***********************
So was Jeffrey Dahmer’s. Anti-theodicy anyone?
I certainly hope that God didn’t preordain his winning a seat in the U. S. Senate.
Excellent post! Rape happens more frequently than the statistics show. It is under reported by women because of attitudes like this republican politician. Until men accept that a woman’s body is hers to make decisions about…whether to have sex or not…whether to take contraception or not…and yes whether to continue a pregnancy or not…then women will continue to be second class citizens.
God intended the Holocaust and Dog intended the RepubliCon Party.
Well said, David.
Surprise…I heard he is in a statistical tie in a heavy republican state…… Hopefully this will send a message if he looses…..