Psychopathic Tea Party Misogyny
by digby
I wrote before about creepy Tea Party candidate Ken Buck’s harsh views on abortion in case of rape or incest and his bizarre implication that “saving the life of the mother” is open to interpretation:
I am pro-life, and I’ll answer the next question. I don’t believe in the exceptions of rape or incest. I believe that the only exception, I guess, is life of the mother. And that is only if it’s truly life of the mother.
Hey, if a few sperm receptacles have to die, it’s a price that’s well worth paying to avoid even one fetus being aborted. Plenty more vessels where that came from.
He has a little problem with this sort of thing. (You’ll recall that during the primary he said “why should you vote for me? Because I do not wear high heels.”) But McJoan finds evidence today that this is just the tip of the misogynistic iceberg:
A 2005 rape case that Ken Buck refused to prosecute indicates that maybe his threshold for what is really rape makes him less pro-life than anti-woman.
When Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck refused to prosecute a rape case five years ago, he probably had no idea that anyone beyond a small circle of people would care. He learned otherwise quickly enough as the victim demanded a meeting with him (which she secretly – but legally – taped), organized a protest and made sure the media knew all about her plight….
The alleged rape victim is back and determined to be heard. She told her story to the Colorado Independent and provided the tape of their meeting, in which Buck appears to all but blame her for the rape and tells her that her case would never fly with a Weld County jury….
He said the facts in the case didn’t warrant prosecution. “A jury could very well conclude that this is a case of buyer’s remorse,” he told the Greeley Tribune in March 2006. He went on to publicly call the facts in the case “pitiful.”
[…]
“That comment made me feel horrible,” she told the Colorado Independent last week. “The offender admitted he did it, but Ken Buck said I was to blame. Had he (Buck) not attacked me, I might have let it go. But he put the blame on me, and I was furious. I still am furious,” she said.
It wasn’t just his public remarks that infuriated the woman. In the private meeting, which she recorded, he told her, “It appears to me … that you invited him over to have sex with him.”
He also said he thought she might have a motive to file rape charges as a way of retaliating against the man for some ill will left over from when they had been lovers more than a year earlier. Buck also comes off on this tape as being at least as concerned with the woman’s sexual history and alcohol consumption as he is with other facts of the case.
There’s more at the link. It’s really sickening. But with the ascension of Tea Party values, despite their affinity for certain right wing female politicians, this attitude is becoming more prevalent in mainstream political discourse. The Christian Reconstructionist teabagger Sharron Angle is on record against requiring maternity coverage and is pro-incest and rape forced childbirth. Rand Paul too. It’s part of their philosophy.
Not that this is particularly new but it’s getting a whole lot more acceptable to say it. Here’s Limbaugh today:
“Mammograms are the convenant, the sacred covenant of feminazism”
If mammograms are now considered a leftist plot and are on the menu for derision and ridicule, then basically they just don’t care if women die. I don’t see how else you can interpret this stuff.
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