The GOP’s Moral Knuckle Dragging: Glorifying Rape and Incest as Biological Necessities

Sometimes you wonder how deep the bottom of the barrel can really get. For the GOP, it seems to go all the way to the lower circles of perdition. Imagine a male politician, a member in good standing of the obnoxious toxic patriarchy, defending an anti-abortion bill he sponsored in Congress that makes no exceptions for rape and incest. What could this moral majoritarian bully possibly say that would make any moral sense about that bill?

The Des Moines Register reported that Iowa Congressman Steve King told a partisan crowd, “What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape and incest? Would there be any population of the world if we did that?”

King’s remarks are so repugnant and absurd that they have even been denounced by the chair of the Iowa Republican Party, who called them “outrageous.” But we don’t need to brush them aside. We need to comprehend what they actually mean.

First off, they mean that King believes that the majority of the world’s people have been sired by rapists and incestual child molesters, that there’s virtually no consensual sex in the human family tree.

His “outrageous” remarks imply that he thinks it’s OK to be a club-wielding misogynist subduing sex partners and dragging them off by the hair. Could it also be that the heinous is the normal for him and the norm for much of the extremist right wing of his extremist right-wing political party? Does Steve King implicitly espouse a kind of initiation to masculine sexuality in which men are only proven fit to dominate if they “spread their seed” through force and family horror?

It’s amazing what King’s remarks might say about the thinking of perhaps millions of right-wing American males who likely agree with him: that what the law often considers a capital crime — and what is surely among darkest terrors in everyone’s heart who loves their daughters, their sons, their spouses — is considered something appropriate to virtually condone in a rhetorical toss-away remark to prove some mean-hearted point opposing abortion.

It seems clear as a stump speech now that the Republican Party, run by the Grabber-in-Chief, has so embraced misogyny that no woman or man would associate themselves, in good conscience, with the GOP. Absent a full-throated repudiation of King’s remarks by top GOP leaders and an immediate call to withdraw his repugnant bill, isn’t calling yourself a Republican now very much like saying, “Well, boys will be boys, and it’s a man’s world. Don’t forget it; let’s go grab some…..”

Of all the taboos across the board in human cultures, incest is the oldest and deepest and most ubiquitous. And because of its innate repugnance, it is also associated with rape, child rape. This is true for actual incest and also symbolic incest — forcing sex on underage children. Sex trafficking of minors, as a term, doesn’t quite get at the traumatizing reality. What the late Jeffery Epstein was alleged to have masterminded was an elite underground system of symbolic incest, child rape, for currying political favor.

As a feminist male, I’m a pro-choice absolutist. Pro-choice is not only about “abortion.” It’s also about having the complete and absolute right to refuse sexual advances and to conduct one’s life free of coercion based on patriarchal pretensions and gender hatreds. To refuse a woman the right to terminate a pregnancy caused by rape or incest is to say unequivocally that the “rights” of a male sexual criminal trump the inherent freedoms of any woman, and often the inherent freedoms of any female child.

Can this possibly be what the Republican Party of the 21^st century actually believes? When you put Steve King’s anti-abortion bill in the context of the fundamentalist and maniacally conservative tone of the GOP, the answer appears strongly to be yes.

I’m sure Republicans would ferociously deny that they are in favor of date rape, or gang rape, or any kind of rape (except perhaps spousal rape), but when you privilege the offspring of rapists over the rights of a free person who is a woman to refuse to bear the progeny that results from a crime against her person, then you are saying that a male rapist has more value than his female victim. This is the only conclusion one can draw. And it is a horrendous and shameful one, unworthy of any American political party.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

(Image derived from photo by Gage Skidmore)