Obscure Missouri state Rep. Barry Hovis stands in a long line of backward, misogynist Rethuglican pols and their enablers in believing that raped women were just "asking for it." In the debate over the state's new anti-choice law, Hovis, a former police officer, launched into a largely fact-free discourse on rape, unleashing this foul crap:
“Let’s just say someone goes out and they’re raped or they’re sexually assaulted one night after a college party — because most of my rapes were not the gentleman jumping out of the bushes that nobody had ever met,” Hovis said. “That was one or two times out of a hundred. Most of them were date rapes or consensual rapes, which were all terrible."Imagine being a woman and having this twisted clown be the cop that arrives after you report being raped. Imagine voters in Missouri electing this cretin and you have the answer to why we can't have nice things in America. We imagine Hovis earned his Master of Rapes degree at the Todd Akin School for Understandin' Wimmen, where professor Todd Akin, once a candidate for U.S. Senate against Sen. Claire McCaskill in 2012, propounded his theory that a woman could "shut down" a pregnancy in the case of "legitimate rape." Also... "the gentleman."
The enduring union of the "corporate conservative" movement and the theocratic far-right has produced this dangerous nonsense. Their beliefs that women are not equal citizens with equal rights -- importantly the right to decide what happens in their own bodies -- permeate every corner of their policies, from rejection of equal pay and employment opportunities for women, to their new attacks on Roe v. Wade. As it has before, their overreach will boomerang against them at the polls, as women and men understand their end game: taking women back to a patriarchal, 19th century world. Not going to happen.
3 comments:
Republicans never learn. Every time they start talking about rape, it's a dive into the deepest and darkest depths of cringe.
Let's hope that a few more of these guys' candidacies get shut down in the next legitimate election, the way Aikin's was.
Infidel -- it seems to be deeply embedded in their DNA, doesn't it? That party has become a collection of yahoos of every grotesque pathological bent, both known and as yet undiscovered.
Republicans are a party of victim blamers and domineering misogynists. It all falls on them to be judges and critics of those who are not in their group. Much of it stems from their religious beliefs, but some of it is simply loathing of women and fear of equality.
We need a new descriptor for them. They hide behind the Bible, but it is not the word of Jesus they espouse. They are as cruel as the Old Testament and are blind and heartless. They are not Christians. I know true Christians, kind, giving people, and they are not like these hateful ones.
Faux Christians? Pretenders? whatever you call them, they are not who they think they are.
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