The Good Rapist

There are some ideas that are really, really important to other people that I just don't understand.

Not in the "Gee, I can see you're upset about that but I just don't see it the same way..." sort of don't-understand but the "What the fuck did you just say...are you speaking English?" sort of don't-understand.

Kid beauty pageants. Most country music. Medical marijuana. Arguments about great bands of the Sixties.

Stuff like that fall under the "WTF?"-don't-understand category for me.

The obsessive concern about abortions - who has one, who does one, and preventing both - is another one.

First, I start from the position of being a callous bastard. In my opinion there's an assload of people out there fucking up the landscape and wasting perfectly good oxygen. Most of these oxygen-thieves are fairly harmless and so in my mind constitute nothing more than a nuisance.

I mean, damn, people, I was a soldier for 22 years. You don't do that sort of thing for a living because you love people like fuzzy-bunny-wuffies. So the notion that some proto-human might get flushed down the crapper like somebody's discarded baby alligator doesn't exactly fill me with horror and revulsion to a greater degree than the notion of any other human being turned into inert biomass.

Less; in my personal evolutionary scale once someone's actually born they begin to acquire more humanness every day. Up to that point we're all sort of like internal organs with lungs. Born people trump pre-born people in my mind.

And, second, I'm a great believer in leaving other people alone.

And that means that, to me, that if you get pregnant what happens is up to you and the person you did the hard work getting pregnant with. Since I don't have a DSL connection to the Big Sky Daddy I'm not going to pretend that I know better than you what you should do if you get pregnant or your lover gets pregnant.

Come to that, the BSD might not know better, either. Here's that well-known theologian Doghouse Riley on the subject:

"My own concern, though, is with God. What's up with Him, now? Fer chrissakes, the man had 66 books, at least three versions of the Ten Commandments, not counting the twenty or so that follow those and are generally ignored even more fully. He's got Seven Deadly Sins, an equal number of Virtues, thousands of historical exemplars, untold thousands more ahistorical exemplars, and the world's biggest sales force; He Himself gets to choose who becomes a writer, a painter, a composer, a scientist, a dialectician, plus he's fucking tax exempt. He Personally chose Al Gore to invent the internet, yet the internet is just a global porn factory. So I'm told.

Yet He never just came out and said "No abortions, ever. My will. Oh, except to save the life of the mother, once I allow the general acceptance of antiseptics, sometime in the 19th century. Got it?" For the sacred life of me, I can't understand why the central tenet of Christianity remained impenetrable for 19th centuries, especially with all those hair-splitters, pinhead-dancers, and secret coders poring over every Word. I mean, the Man's a fucking loon."

But here's the part about this entire conniption that I do agree with; if you believe, as this guy Mourdock and his supporters and about 69.8% of the GOP circa 2012 seem to believe, that Every Sperm Is Sacred, that life begins at conception, and that Jesus Loves Every Little Fetus...why should you agree that the mother's life...or the circumstances of the conception, for that matter...should make a difference?

The whole business of rape-exceptions and incest-exceptions and mother's-life-exceptions are really a farrago, aren't they? They're sort of an Enlightenment wallpaper over the cold stone walls of Solomon's Temple, a facade to hide the hard Biblical rules from the shrinking sensibilities of modern Westerners unused to notions like presenting your fiancee' with the foreskins of 200 dead Philistines as an engagement present.

So I don't have a problem with Mourdock and his ilk.

I get it.

They're pre-civilized Biblical savages, the direct intellectual descendents of the desert-wandering Jehovah-pesterers that descended on the innocent peoples of the eastern Levant like homicidal locusts and killed everything they didn't rape, carry away, or sacrifice.

I've said this before; I don't love the God of the Hebrews, the God of the Torah, but I can respect Him and his followers. They're at least philosophically consistent. Their God is a desert patriarch and they are His Tribe. What's good for them is Good, and if that's Bad for you?

Too fucking bad for you. Sucks to be you, eh?

So the idea of a happy little rapey family, rape-daddy, raped-mommy, and little rape-baby frolicking around?

Perfectly in keeping with the entire framework that this approach to life brings with it. Hell, in this context even married sex is, well...as Fred Clarke puts it, "kinda rapey":

"When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us."

(This being a quote from someone named Douglas Wilson, who apparently has written a book for devout Christians entitled: Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man)

"In other words (Wilson continues), however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed."

Um. Gee. Well.

Eeeeeeewwwwwwww!!!!!

Ick! Ick!

Okay, I'm going to have to go shower my brain to get THAT image out.

Colonizes? Plants? Suddenly my entire sex life history feels like the chronicle of the existence of the Borg. Next time I have sex with the wife maybe I should start the pillow-talk with "Resistance is Futile. You will be Assimilated."

Gak.

But, anyway, this is It. This is how these people think. This is what they want YOU to think. Or, at the very least, this is how they want you to behave.

Not surprisingly, most modern humans don't WANT to behave that way. There's a reason we no longer wander around deserts living in tents and collect people's foreskins for gifts. The sorts of people who DO still want to do this have probably figured this out.

So if they want to place themselves in a position where they can make the other people, all those other people who DON'T want this to DO this, they will have to...

...lie.

So while I don't doubt that they really feel all warm and lovey about little unborn babies, I suspect the main reason they most of them don't come right out and say, like their idiot pal Mourdock said, that they believe that little unborn rape-babies are as precious and special as ALL little unborn babies is because they understand that the rest of us will look at them like their heads had just spun all the way around like the creepy little girl in the old Exorcist movie.

But they DO believe that.

And because they believe that their God is the one that makes them believe it they want you and me and everyone else to live your life like that, too.

And that tells me everything I need to know about where I want to see them in the political life of my country.

Update 10/27: As always, The Rude Pundit says it better and more filthily:

"The ideologically inconsistent icing on this cake of religion and politics and the well-being of women? If that pregnant rape victim's life is in danger, then, according to Mourdock, she should be able to abort the fetus, God's rape gift be damned. If you point this out to Mourdock or any of the Jesus's wound-lickers of the evangelical right, they would say that we cannot know the ways of God or that everything is part of God's plan or some such shit. And then you might say that if we cannot know God's ways, then how do they know that the rape baby is a gift. And then they'll just give you that look that says they think you're crazy, and it just makes you wanna kick 'em in the taint. Hard."

Yep. What he said.