Republicans and Rape: Can't Stop the Nonsense (with Religious Right at the Wheel)

At Talk to Action, Bruce Wilson notes that the inability of Republicans to stop talking (and talking and talking further) about rape in ways many sane folks find ludicrous represents the "now-almost complete dominance of the religious right over the political party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Teddy Roosevelt."  Wilson points out (and I feel sure he's not ridiculing people with Tourette's syndrome in saying this),

"Rape Tourettes" now afflicts large swaths of the GOP, whose politicians apparently can't help themselves from blurting out jaw-droppingly insensitive statements, like Koster's, which is begging for savage parody (consider the song "Wild Thing", by Eric Burdon and The Animals...)

The three-column Republican Rape Advisory Chart I've used as the graphic here is likely to become a four-column one soon, Wilson surmises, if the GOP can't-stop-talking-stupid-about-rape continues.  As he notes, it originated with brainwrap at Daily Kos and a text-version of it can be found at the Days Without a GOP Rape Mention website, inspired but not sponsored by Stephen Colbert.  Click on the chart above, and it should expand for better viewing.

As I said earlier this week, this nonsense is what happens when you take a single moral principle and try to force real life, with all its ambiguity and mess, into your tiny box of moral thinking, so that it conforms to that single, solitary moral principle you've elevated to the status of a solve-all-problems absolute.  While every other moral principle in the book is ignored . . . . 

As I also said, this premoral approach to moral thinking is characteristic of children and pre-adolescents.  The fact that it now dominates the thinking of large sectors of the American population, due to the enormous influence of the leaders of the religious right, is hardly a credit to the intelligence and education levels of the American public.

And this one-principle thinking designed to put liberals (and women) into an iron cage comes right out of the playbook of the Catholic magisterium, which has crafted the iron cage as a trap to entrap the modern world and restore the Catholic hierarchy to some resplendent place of magical moral authority it has lost with the demise of the Constantinean arrangement.  Cheerleaders for the hierarchy like Michael Sean Winters of National Catholic Reporter with his preposterous get-His-Eminence-on-the-line fantasy about the White House (and about the deference political leaders presumably owe to his religious quarterbacks) don't seem to have gotten yet how badly they've been misled by the men ruling the church, who never intended anything moral at all as they constructed the iron cage for liberals (and women). 

They intended only politics--their self-aggrandizement and their right to keep shoving others around--even as their moral authority vanished and more than vanished when the world began to see what they were doing with the abuse crisis inside their church.

So that now the iron cage they've constructed to entrap others has resoundingly shut on them, the men ruling the Catholic church--and on anyone addle-pated enough to continue thinking of these men as credible moral leaders.  When they're not in the least, the vast majority of them.

They're all about politics and self-interest.  And this presidential campaign in the U.S. is proving that in a decisive, unavoidable way for anyone with eyes to see, as the Catholic hierarchical quarterbacks carry the ball for GOP candidates who no longer even stand for absolutely rigid Catholic principles about abortion and contraception--even as the Catholic hierarchy herds voters to the polls to vote for them as "pro-life" candidates.