Annnnnd take 45! Honestly, this shit would be hilarious if it weren’t so depressing.
Last Friday, Celeste Greig, the head of the California Republican Assembly, told the media that pregnancies by rape are rare “because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized.”* The best/saddest part is, she said this when criticizing former Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin’s legitimate rape comments. I’ll pause while you shake your head forever.
These Republicans just can’t get it right. It’s like one of them said, “When babies are born, they come out of the woman’s right ear,” and then another one goes, “That’s absurd, they come out of the left ear.”
Further, it can also read as racist on top of being sexist. Not only does the Republican party’s inability to stop saying idiotic things about rape further alienate women, but all this talk about victims of rape also denies the history of slavery in America, and the ancestry of millions of Americans.
It is believed that some of the thirty percent of black Americans — including first lady Michelle Obama — have white male ancestors, in part because white men often raped back slaves. The fact these people — these GOP leaders — can say these things with a straight face while the descendants of raped slaves stand around them is disgusting on so many levels.
Unsurprisingly, Greig recently (as in, today) called the American Civil Liberties Union a “communist organization,” and is slamming Harmeet Dhillon — an Indian American who’s running for vice chair of the California Republican Party — for being too liberal.
*Thanks to commenters fugit, T_Beermonster, and OpressedWhiteMan for providing sources in case you need to shout down your Republican grandparents at the next family reunion picnic.
- If we set aside issues of contraceptive use then conception rates from rape are about 5%.
- One study that attempted to control for contraceptive use found conception rates for rape of 8%, this is significantly higher than for consensual intercourse.
- “In some countries where abortion is illegal even after rape and incest, over 90% of pregnancies in children 15 and under are due to rape by family members.” —
O’Toole, Laura L.; Schiffman, Jessica R., eds. (1997). Gender Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. p. 235. ISBN 978-0-8147-8041-1. - And yet, some sources make this more interesting, if a murkier issue, due to rape statistics serving any number of political ends.
- According to the U.S. Department of Justice in 2005, the number of pregnancies from rape victims were around 5%.
[SF Gate]