By now, we’ve all heard the story: A candidate for major federal office has put his foot in his mouth, making a comment that exploited centuries of hateful prejudices against an historically oppressed class of citizens, and which made light of their sufferings.

Todd Akin? No, think Joe Biden: At a campaign stop in Danville, Va., the vice president told the crowd, “[Romney] said in the first 100 days [of his presidency], he's going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. ‘Unchain Wall Street!’” Biden told his audience. Then he pointed to the crowd and said, “They're gonna put y'all back in chains!”

Does Joe Biden hate black people? Probably not. Was his lame attempt at humor racially motivated? Hard to tell. Danville was the last capital of the Confederate States of America, but the city is pretty evenly split between whites and blacks, and it isn’t clear whether his audience was predominantly black.

But if not malicious, Biden’s remarks were certainly buffoonish and insensitive. But to this writer’s knowledge, the only leftstream media outlet to offer any public criticism of the remarks was the Boston Globe, which went so far as to urge the vice president to make an apology. Naturally, none has been forthcoming.

And yet, barely a week later the same press that gave Biden a pass is in a fake uproar over comments by Rep. Todd Akin, Republican U.S. Senate nominee for the state of Missouri. Akin, we are told, believes some rapes are “legitimate,” and that women who are raped can never get pregnant.

But that’s not what Akin said at all. Read for yourself. Answering a question about whether women who are raped should have legal recourse to an abortion, the congressman replied:

“[F]rom 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.”

This is what’s causing all the controversy? This is a controversy that merits its own page on Wikipedia (while Biden’s, not surprisingly, doesn’t)?

It’s obvious to anyone with two brain cells and a synapse that, though his choice of words was poor (and which of us hasn’t committed the occasional nomenclative faux-pas when speaking off-the-cuff?), Akin was not suggesting that there existed such a thing as morally legitimate rape. What he meant to say was something along the lines of “rape properly speaking” or “forcible rape”.

And leftist hysterics withstanding, there is a moral and legal difference between forcible rape and, say, statutory rape, and even between statutory rape and outright pedophilia (i.e., sex with a pre-pubescent child). Every sane person (at least in the Judeo-Christian world) agrees that forcible sexual intercourse is gravely immoral, but at what age after the onset of puberty a person has the psychological wherewithal to engage in consensual sexual activity is a very grey area. Our laws in this arena are determined largely by social convention and public sentiment, and no uniformity exists in this area even among the United States. One jurisdiction’s illicit relationship is another’s potential marriage. It does not take a sex pervert or a misogynist to know that pedophilia and forcible rape are not in the exact same moral category as, say, consensual sexual relations between a 17- and a 24-year old.

So those who claim that even to make the distinction between different kinds of rape is somehow oppressive of women are being disingenuous.

And it’s clear why Akin made the distinction he did. Without pronouncing dogmatically on the matter (note his language: “from what I understand ...”), but merely referring to what he had heard from doctors he’s associated with, he suggested that women have innate biological mechanisms that mitigate the possibility of pregnancy in the case of rape. He did not even remotely suggest that rape victims never get pregnant, which is how many leftist commentators have represented his remarks.

As it happens, Akin’s impressions on both the relative rarity of rape-pregnancies and the supposed biological mechanisms that militate against it both appear to be outdated, though at least some informed minority opinion exists to the contrary as to the latter.

But so what? The moral case against abortion legalization has never depended on these distinctions, but on the conviction, formed by centuries of Judeo-Christian humanism, that every human being possesses innate dignity, that it is never morally permissible to directly kill another human being except in self-defense (or defense of another innocent person), and that one of the basic functions of any civilized society’s government is to protect the lives of its citizens, especially its most defenseless. And the “pro-life” position that all human beings are persons at least does not rely on voodooistic metaphysics that posit an arbitrary distinction between biologically unique humans and “persons.”

Akin’s conviction that every human person, like every mammal, begins his unique, individual existence as a conceptus is about as scientifically sane as it gets; and it’s utterly pro-woman, too, as in many countries, and some parts of the United States, female feti make up a disproportionate number of abortion victims.

And rape-pregnancies are indeed “rare” in at least one respect: less than 1.5 percent of abortions are sought for reasons of rape or incest. Those are not my numbers, they’re those of the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute.

Akin’s critics are right about one thing, however: the congressman should heed the advice of even his fellow conservatives, and bow out of this race. That he hasn’t done so illustrates a sad trend most conservatives are seemingly oblivious to: most of their “pro-life” heroes are “pro-themselves-and-their-careers” first. It’s as true for Akin as it was for former Penn senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who, while primary campaigning in Michigan earlier this year, bragged about his Senate votes to fund Planned Parenthood.

The abortion debate in our country is so longstanding that there’s no excuse for an elected official, let alone one running for higher office, not to have his talking points memorized and internalized. Failure to do so evinces a sloppiness the center-right cause can ill afford in such a volatile political season. Akin’s remarks were bone-headed, they are threatening what very thin chance Republicans have of retaking the Senate in November, and neither conservatism generally nor the pro-life cause in particular have anything to gain by his remaining in the race.

If his convictions are as sincere and faith-driven as he and his supporters say they are, let Akin see his political martyrdom to its final and dignified conclusion.


Reach Eric Giunta at egiunta@sunshinestatenews or at (850) 727-0859.