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.
