West Virginia Republican Says Rape Pregnancies Are ‘God Putting One In You’
Charleston, West Virginia — This week West Virginia Delegate Brian Kurcaba (R) made some eyebrows climb in the national media when he said that while “rape is awful” there is a potential upside to it. “What is beautiful is the child that could come from this,” said Kurcaba. The Republican’s comments are alarming to some for how commonplace they have become from within the party. Former Missouri congressman Todd Aiken famously tried to categorize the different forms of rape, infamously referring to it as “legitimate” or not. The party has fought hard against the notion that they are anti-woman, but Kurcaba’s recent commentary would seem to undercut their counter-arguments, and many in the party’s leadership would like their lower-state delegates to ratchet back the rhetoric.
One of Kurcaba’s colleagues in the West Virginia state congress however, came to his defense and offered his own take on the conundrum Republicans face when discussing rape. Delegate Randal Enkelsinne (R) came to Kurcaba’s defense when contacted by The Political Garbage Chute. “Of course the liberal lamestream media is going to pounce all over my colleague’s comments. We Republicans can’t say squat about a lady without getting pounced on.” Enkelsinne insisted that “there has been a fundamental shift in this country” and that “traditionally, men-folk were not only allowed, but encouraged to tell their women-folk what to do with their female who-who-dillies and no one batted an eyelash. Now it’s all ‘War on Women’ this and ‘my body, my choice’ that and ‘don’t lay your theocratic mitts on my uterus you backwards thinking jerkface.’ And I think our country is now lost morally because of it.”
Enkelsinne said that Kurcaba was “trying to convey that every cloud has a silver lining. It’s just that this cloud is a rape. Every rape cloud can have a baby as a silver lining.” When asked why he feels that a pregnancy resulting from the most violent and dehumanizing attack a woman can face in her lifetime could possibly be mitigated by being impregnated by their attacker and being forced by law to carry that baby to full term, Enkelsinne replied, “It’s all a matter of perspective. Sure, if you think of a rape as being only about the rape victim, I could see where you’d get the idea that there is nothing good about it. But women-folk just need to shift their perspective.”
We asked Enkelsinne what he meant by that and he said, “They just need to think of a rape baby as God putting one in you, is all. God works in mysterious, sometimes kinda rapey ways. I mean, it’s not like he asked for Mary’s consent before he put the Baby Jesus in her womb, right?”
In the wake of the 2012 electoral disaster for the Republican Party, the GOP’s top brass commissioned a report that was supposed to serve as a sort of autopsy, pointing to why they lost. One of the factors the report found was that the anti-abortion rhetoric put forth by some of their more ideologically extreme candidates turned-off a large portion of young, female voters. The party had hoped to get away from making commentary on rape as it pertains to abortion laws, and speak more generally about “the sanctity of life.” Kurcaba’s comments — and now Enkelsinne’s defense of Kurcaba’s comments — seems to undercut that hope.
Louisiana Governor and recent portrait pigment reductionist Bobby Jindal said in the wake of the 2012 debacle for his party that they needed stop being the “stupid party.” While it’s unclear whether West Virginia voters will take Kurcaba’s statements as stupid, it’s safe to say these are the kinds of comments Jindal was hoping his Republican counterparts in other states would stop making.
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, who commissioned the Republican autopsy, was not immediately available for comment.
“Look,” Enkelsinne said as he was getting ready to end our phone interview with him, “we’ve tried abortion being legal for over forty years now. And sure, maybe the number of botched back-alley abortions has dropped, and sure maybe if we stopped deluding ourselves about teenage sex and pregnancies and gave them the tools and education to prevent getting pregnant in the first place there’d be an even lesser demand for abortions. But if we don’t live in a country where men can force a victim of rape or incest to carry the rapist’s baby to full term because we assign some mystical, divine constitutional rights to a parasitic life form that has no cognition, no sentient thought and cannot live outside its host organism’s body yet, we don’t live in America anymore.”
The Age of Blasphemy 