Todd Akin is a man unfit for the U.S. Senate, all sides seemed
to agree this week, whipping themselves up into a sanctimonious
fury over his foolish aside about female biology. We heard this
week a lot about “insensitivity” to violence from establishment
elites who blithely accept violence in the womb. We heard gasps
about dangerously narrow definitions of “rape” from defenders of
Bill Clinton (who surely appreciated Akin’s “legitimate”
distinction if no one else did) and from apologists for Roman
Polanski, who, as Whoopi Goldberg once asserted, never engaged in
“rape-rape.”
And let’s not forget that Barack Obama hired as one of his top
Department of Education officials a gay-rights activist named Kevin
Jennings, who once glibly counseled a “15-year-old” student thought
to have been statutorily raped by an older man: “I hope you knew to
use a condom.” Jennings is also known for having been “inspired” by
Harry Hay, a supporter of the North American Man Boy Love
Association.
Don’t expect Obama to receive any questions from the press about
these views of his first “Safe Schools Czar.” No, outrage in this
culture is restricted to those deemed unenlightened in the nuances
of avant-garde morality. According to its porous scorecard,
Christianity is bad for women while Islam is good for them.
Pro-life countries receive scoldings from Hillary Clinton, while
the one-child policy of China, which kills female infants, isn’t
“second-guessed” by this administration, as Joe Biden put it on a
visit.
In a culture that panders to pro-abortion feminists like Sandra
Fluke, thought crimes always rank higher than real ones. Words, not
deeds, drive pols from public life. So Akin has to go. He simply
harbors the wrong thoughts and no apology will be sufficient from
him until he changes his position on abortion. Beneath all the
hysterical extrapolations from his remark, which grew wilder and
wilder as the days passed, lay that essential demand: approve of
killing unborn children conceived under circumstances of rape or be
deemed “anti-woman.”
This culture of hectoring explains why Mitt Romney rushed to the
cameras upon hearing Akin’s remark to pronounce abortion in those
cases “appropriate.” In a rotten culture, proof of one’s
“civilized” bona fides comes from such shameless pandering.
An authentically conservative party would find Romney’s
unprincipled position far more chilling than Akin’s gaffe. If
unborn children gain or lose their right to life depending upon the
circumstances of their conception, then the party has already
conceded that that right doesn’t exist. Ronald Reagan understood
the implications of that concession and never wavered in his
defense of the right to life of all unborn children, not just some
of them.
Instead of rejecting this media-determined culture of empty and
opportunistic outrage, which rests on nothing more than poisonous
Planned Parenthood-style propaganda, panicky GOP officials
reinforced it this week by treating Akin as a monstrous leper. His
stupid remark was thereby turned into a supposedly wicked one and
treated as a great crisis for the party.
A party less cowed by political correctness and less in thrall
to conventional wisdom wouldn’t have cannibalized its own so
quickly. Even from a narrowly strategic standpoint, the frothing
made little sense. Without even bothering to consult grassroots
Missouri conservatives who elected him or even find out if they had
a viable plan B, RNC officials called for Akin to be obliterated
and ruled out any future money to him. Didn’t it occur to anybody
that he might stay in the race, in which case these fulminations
would simply serve to hand victory to the Dems before the race even
began? For all the talk about “pragmatism” and “diplomacy” this
week from country club Republicans, they didn’t display any towards
a candidate who won a primary fair and square. Is this how the
Romney administration plans to conduct diplomacy?
Making a bad situation worse, party bosses joined the media mob
in brutalizing Aiken not for any high crime but for a single dumb
remark. The same country club Republicans who rallied around Arnold
Schwarzenegger after he was credibly accused of assaulting women
demanded that the Missouri congressman leave the race immediately
for a mere comment. If social conservatives had any doubt as to
their disposable status in the party — which they shouldn’t ,
since they have been treated like fodder for years — they can add
the hair-trigger purging of Akin to their list of complaints.
In Romney’s GOP, moderates can make any number of mistakes
(starting at the top of the ticket) but conservatives are called to
perfection. Should they fail, GOP officials will waste no time
sacrificing them to the gods of political correctness.
