In response to Jody’s comment below.

These people believe abortion is wrong under any circumstances, for any reason. This is certainly a defensible moral and religious position, (although I don’t believe it myself). But they also know most people will not accept that position without some exceptions.

It is therefore important to them to minimize or trivialize those situations where most people might think abortion acceptable, such as rape or incest. They are creating a subjective reality that is more consistent with their preconceptions. They will alter their perceptions, and how to interpret them, in order to accomplish this.

If they can convince themselves that raped women can’t get pregnant, then they can claim that pregnant women seeking abortions must be lying about having been raped, (hence the loving use of the Limbaugh characterization “slut” to demonize victims, or even marginalize those who support the victims) so an abortion is always the wrong thing to do, always unjustified.

This explains all this parsing about “legitimate”, “forcible”, “false”, and “assault” rapes; they are trying to establish the idea that rape and incest pregnancies are so rare and so often made up by sluts trying to avoid paying the price for their sin that we need not consider violent rapes a problem. That they don’t matter. You know how wingnuts love to “define” things ultra-rigorously so they can claim they are being precise and logical and their opponents are just fuzzy-headed illogical liberal assholes who don’t know what the hell they are talking about.

If they can then even come into contact with any lie, rumor, myth, fairy tale or propaganda, first or second hand, or total hearsay, about the “female body shutting down” they will grasp onto it and incorporate it into their narrative because it justifies what they already want to believe: “Nice” girls don’t get pregnant outside marriage. The fact that they probably think of sex as dirty and unclean probably leads to considerable ignorance of human reproductive biology as well. Akin wasn’t stupid or misspeaking or even lying when he said this, he actually believes it. He was stupid because he thinks everyone else believes this crap because everyone he hangs out with believes this crap.

Do all conservatives believe this? Do they even approve of this sort of thinking? No, I don’t think so. But I also know they won’t call these people out and denounce their superstitions because they need them as political allies. The enemy of my enemy…etc.

People like Ryan and Romney are intelligent and educated men, OF COURSE they don’t believe these medieval superstitions. But Ryan co-authored HR3 with Akin and Romney picked Ryan as his running mate. They’re only calling Akin out now because he’s bad for the GOPs election chances. And a whole squadron of Republican luminaries, including Rove, Krauthammer, and others, have joined up to help throw him under the bus.

Actually, I hope he runs. We really need to get a better look at these people. They are too high a price to pay for balanced budgets and smaller government.