Andrew Sanders
Roger Rivard: ‘Some girls rape easy’
Over the course of the summer, in a spectacularly misjudged act of support for his friend, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Respect member of parliament for Bradford West, and former Glasgow Hillhead MP, George Galloway suggested that Assange, accused of sexual assault in Sweden, was guilty of little more than ‘bad sexual ettiquette’. It was a clumsy attempt to justify Assange’s campaign to evade the Swedish authorities and one that cost Galloway politically and financially.
Inexplicably, Galloway’s comments on rape are not the most outlandish made by a politician this year. Across the Atlantic, with 33 seats in the United States Senate up for grabs, the issue of rape has become one of the most prominent of the entire election campaign, even drawing comment from the presidential candidates.
The reason that the issue of rape has become such a topic of discussion in the United States is nothing to do with rape as a legal or legislative matter; it is because of the abortion issue. The issue of abortion has been a highly contentious one in the United States since January 1973 and the landmark Roe vs Wade case. In it, Norma McCorvey, who had been arrested after falsely claiming that her third pregnancy was the result of a rape and therefore legal under the existing laws in Texas, won her case that individual states’ laws against abortion were unconstitutional. Significantly, McCorvey later became active in pro-life causes.
Essentially, in the contemporary context, the Republican Party is opposed to Roe vs Wade and the Democratic Party supportive, although there are minority views on either side.
Since 1973, although the debate goes much deeper, the United States has been divided over whether or not abortion should be allowed at all, or whether it should only be legal in cases of rape or incest. Few politicians oppose abortions which are medically necessary. There is no significant ‘abortion as birth control’ movement, even though it is often presented as such by conservatives. Many conservatives strongly believe that life begins at conception and that the circumstances of the conception should not factor into decisions over abortion. Unfortunately for the Republican Party in 2012, a handful of their candidates have provided answers to questions on abortion which range from the awkward to the highly offensive.
On 19 August, Missouri Representative Todd Akin was asked a question about abortion and commented ‘if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down’. Aside from a worrying lack of understanding of basic human biology, the concept of such a thing as ‘legitimate’ rape existing implied that there was such as thing as ‘illegitimate’ rape. This prompted both Mitt Romney, who has spoken in favour of abortion rights in the past, and Paul Ryan to criticise Akin and call for him to step down.
In an attempt to offer Akin some support, Iowa representative Steve King then claimed that he had never heard of a rape-induced pregnancy. King quickly attempted to backtrack from that statement, but he did so by making the following statement: ‘if there is a sexual predator out there who has impregnated a young girl, say a 13-year-old girl – and it happens in America more times than you and I would like to think – that sexual predator can pick that girl up off the playground at the middle school and haul her across a state line and force her to get an abortion to eradicate the evidence of his crime and bring her back and drop her off at the swing set and that’s not against the law in the United States of America’.
Few would argue that the United States of this dystopic vision would be a frightening place to live. Soon after this, Pennsylvania Senate candidate Tom Smith was questioned about the issue of conception through rape. Smith claimed that ‘I had something similar to that with my own family…having a baby out of wedlock…put yourself in a father’s situation, yes, it is similar’. Smith’s answer may have been little more than clumsy, but one cannot imagine how offensive rape victims would have found his statement.
Of course, they probably would not have found it as offensive as Wisconsin Representative Roger Rivard’s recent assertion that, in the words of his father, ‘some girls rape easy’. Rivard’s statement was quickly followed by the most recent mis-speak on the issue, when Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, during a debate, suggested that a pregnancy resulting from rape was ‘something that God intended to happen’.
The relevance of these comments to the future governance of the United States is evident when one examines the likely results of the Senate elections. The Republicans are now facing the possibility of losing seats in Massachusetts and Maine, which will leave them in desperate need of retaining three other seats where the Democrats represent a serious challenge. In Missouri, Akin was considered an expected victor over incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill, who now appears set to retain her seat. Calls from leading Republicans for Akin to step aside, aimed at retaining the Republican ascendancy in a state which has voted Republican since the Clinton presidency, have been unsuccessful.
In Indiana, where Mourdock famously beat six-term Senator Richard Lugar for the Republican nomination, the Democrats now have an opportunity to reclaim a seat they have not held since 1977. Some reports suggest that the pool of undecided voters in Indiana is roughly two-thirds female. Problematic for Democrats, however, is the fact that Mourdock’s opponent, Joe Donnelly, co-sponsored a Todd Akin-led bill which would have barred federal funding for abortion in cases of statutory rape and incest.
The possibility of a Republican-held Senate to go along with the House of Representatives, where the Republicans regained control in the 2010 mid-term elections, would have played into the hands of the Romney-Ryan campaign who could have implemented many of their policies unencumbered by Senate or House opposition or filibuster. In particular, a President Romney would plan to repeal the so-called Obamacare, something which may no longer be possible.
Given that many of the criticisms levelled at the Obama presidency by Republicans concern policies which the president has been unable to implement because of the loss of the House, Democrats may be able to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of undecided voters; a situation which would likely not have occurred if politicians had learned the lessons of Galloway and Akin and figured out that debating and theorising about rape is, at best, inadvisable.
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