I'll say one thing for Kurt Bills, the Republican party's inept and cash-strapped candidate for U.S. Senate here in Minnesota: so far, he hasn't delivered himself of any bizarre-o views on the rape-pregnancy nexus. The Republican candidate in Missouri is most famous for having denied that rape can cause pregnancy:
Well you know, people always want to try to make that as one of those things, well how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.
Now the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Indiana has divulged how he "slices" this dicey question:
I struggled with it myself for a long time, 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, uh, something that God intended to happen.
Is it funny, or discouraging, to conceive of a grown man and candidate for the Senate, after great struggles of thought, finally arriving at a conclusion that is more or less in line with the ready opinions of all the top pupils in the Sunday school? It requires an outsider, apparently, to point out that his God appears to be the sole proprietor of a bumbling, privatized 9-1-1 service--too slow to the scene to prevent the rape but sufficiently punctual to help those little swimmers navigate upstream to their destination. Not a woman is raped without Him knowing--and yet, the woman is raped. Her pregnancy is His way of making it up to her, and it is the work of God's senators to make sure she can't have an abortion.
It'll be really great if these guys get to interrogate Romney's Supreme Court nominees.
