This Akins guy, I just don't know what to say. I'd never heard of him before. I thought it had to do with the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback, who has had his own personal problems, or maybe the currently higher profile country singer busted for being drunk and nekkid on the...
Well damn, my mistake. That was Randy Travis. But all these young country singers look the same anyway (RACIST!).
Once I had gotten my identtiies lined up. , I went to troll for - not actual facts, y'know, but facty-feeling things, and found that the poor dumb sombitch had some basis for what he said.
Let's look at what he thought he was saying:
The big thing is "Legitimate Rape". What I think he meant to say, and what I would have meant to say using those words is: "Forcible Rape Under Threat Of Harm", as understood by most people. This is in distinction to "staturoty rape" where both parties are willing coinjugants, or "date rape" which is often defined as "buyer's remorse", or any one of the greatly expanding definitions of "rape" being promolugated by various factions. What Whoopie Goldberg called "Rape-rape". What is legitimately called rape.
If he'd said "legitimate cases of rape" (leaving the manufactured cases out of the issue), there would have been much less of a problem. I really so don't want to get into this. The stories that I could tell you might believe, but you don't want to hear them from me. Go to any women's shelter and ask. You'll find some who have been beaten. by their boyfriends. You'll find lots more that were beaten by their not-really-my-boyfriends, and blamed it on their boyfriends. I'm not calling them out on this. People lie. People can be stupid beyond imagining. People have reasons that I cannot ken.
So, by "legitimate rape" the man meant "forcible rape under threat of personal violence". This is, incidentely, the one form of rape which is actually under-reported, due to the perceived stigma.
So the guy commited an infelicitous phrasing. Now comes the big thing: The percentage of :"legitimate rapes" resulting in pregnancy. I just don't know. The recent hullabloo has muddied the waters to the extent that even my Google-fu is hampered. The Magic Eight Ball says "no clear answer".
Best guess I can come up with is a factor of 3 - that stress and trauma can treble the probability of a spontaneous abortion (miscarriage). Forcible rape has this effect on a woman.The normal rate (assuming that such a thing as "normal" exists) is about 15 to 20 per cent. Again, this may be colored by the recent search patterns reflected by Google, but I went many pages into the search, with Boolians and everything. This accords with my anecdotal evidence. The guy was basically right. Not completely, but ballpark.
So is the dude a complete idiot? Fuck if I know, I'm not in his state. Is he being crucified for what he said? Oh hell yes. Is what he said wrong? Consult Magic Eight Ball (supra), but give him the benefit of the doubt. Will he ever work in this town again? Probably no.
This really is a shame. The man mis-spoke himself in one phrase: "legitimate rape". Then he stepped on his dick by not knowing SCIENCE (a fault he shares with Nobel Prize Winner Al Gore), and being unable to cite current references (all of mine are less than 10 years old, to the best of my knowledge).
Is he smart enough to be a Senator? I dunno. Joe Biden set the bar pretty damn low. I've know livestock brighter. And some were squealing pigs.
The problem is that the Party of Stupid is eating its own, and not carrying the battle to the enemy.
Fuck it, I've said enough.
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