[QUOTE="SirWander"]
[QUOTE="Tokugawa77"]Which is my point. Except it is quite easy to tell, given the quote's context, that he meant "real".Tokugawa77
Ha, that's true, but it's easy to misinterpret (out of context).
People are going to attack him because he made such ridiculous, and quite frankly sexist, claims. I will agree with you in that labeling him a misogynist only detracts from his sheer and obvious stupidity, but Akin's statement only puts the blame of the pregnancy on the woman. And you've said in this thread that it was a way to "demonize abortion," you've conceded that it's a statement of malcontent meant to deride a woman's right to choose. To label Akin a misogynist is not that far fetched, by publicly making that statement he invited scrutiny.
What I want to know is what in Akin's character makes him worthy of defense? One misogynistic statement doesn't make a person a misogynist, does it? But why else would he be saying something so stupid. Why else would he say that the female body can tell the difference between a real rape and one that isn't?
I'm not defending him or his political views, but his statment, which people have been using as evidence of mysogyny, which it most clearly is not. An indicator? maybe, that id subjective, but in no way does he say that rape is in any form permissable. And yes, his motivation for the comment was to support his argument that rape was not a legitimate (:P) reason to abort. Once again, I just take issue with the way that his comment has been portrayed by news articles. I actually had to do some digging to find the whole quote, which all articles I read conviniently left out, leaving some people who did not take the time to research the issue to believe that he was going as far as to say that some forms of rape are permissable. I am not defending Akin, just attacking the articles that have this bias.
The thing is though that whether he meant "real" or "justified" when he said Legitimate doesn't really matter. Both lead to the exact same argument put forward by the groups your accusing of taking it out of context.
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