Everybody’s favorite malignant baboon of a congressman — Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa — is one of those politician dudes who opposes abortion SO HARD that he even opposes it in cases of rape and incest.
Today, speaking to the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale, Iowa, he offered a defense, of sorts, of this position, by suggesting that if we erased all the children of rape and incest from human history that we wouldn’t have much human history left — and not many humans left at all.
What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled out anyone who was a product of rape or incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?
Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages that happened throughout all these different nations, I know that I can’t say that I was not a part of a product of that.
Huh. The fact that bad shit used to happen all the time in human history doesn’t mean that we should keep doing that bad shit for history’s sake. Countless women in history were re-traumatized by having to raise children conceived in rape and incest. Let’s maybe leave that in the past, huh?
You can watch the whole horrible thing in the video below.
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Curses, I was hoping sack would get around to proving my suspicious he looks like a cross between Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Justin Timberlake. How will I go on?
@ epitome:
That’s what drives me nuts about this whole topic. That the Rethugs have successfully shifted the issue towards rape and incest exceptions rather than forced birthing. It’s like, “If we keep trying to exclude rape and incest exceptions, then people will say, ‘Oh, ok, you can outlaw all the rest, but not that!‘” and everyone fell for it.
We need to keep making that point wherever it comes up. This fight is not about preserving exceptions for rape and incest, but preserving abortion rights, period, because women aren’t incubators. We can’t let them keep framing the issue on their terms.
Speaking of doofusy GOP stuff…
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49367792
Trump wants to buy Greenland. Greenland has told him they are not for sale.
@Victorious Parasol
Well, it makes sense: after all, Greenland is mostly white…
…I’ll show myself out.
David isn’t “my leader” – he’s just someone who for much of the past decade has posted intelligent, insightful and surprisingly hilarious (given the topics) coverage of some of the more worrying trends in contemporary civilisation. I couldn’t care less about his weight, finances or connections, as they’re nobody’s business but his own.
Conversely, every time I see Steve King’s name popping up on the interwebtubes, it’s in the context of him saying something appallingly bigoted and tens of thousands of people pointing out that he’s a loathsome piece of shit, which is why his Wikipedia biog includes an entire headlined section on “racist comments”. I similarly couldn’t care less about his weight, finances or connections.
Put it like this: if I was forced to have dinner with one of them, it wouldn’t be the hardest choice that I’ve ever had to make. And I’d be happy to foot the bill, too.
@Victorious Parasol:
I think I’ve figured it out. This “Donald Trump” character is actually a disguise and the man beneath the orange mask is none other than … LEX LUTHOR!
It’s Luthor’s classic plot: buy some worthless land somewhere, then cause some large-scale catastrophe that makes it valuable. In this case, buy a giant glacier and then ensure that climate change turns it into prime arable land (with a diamond mine or two, even) while everyone starts starving as the tropics and Midwest dry up and blow away on the wind.
(In fact, I read somewhere recently that in his earliest comic book appearances Superman’s usual villain nemeses were slumlords, operators of unsafe mines, and other commercial crooks. Luthor must have grown from starting as another such villain. And guess who was a New York slumlord before he became national and worldwide bad news? Trump. And his father before him.)
On top of that, there’s not even a logistical way to allow for the ‘in cases of rape’ exception. How are women supposed to prove that they’re actually rape victims? Anti-abortion assholes aren’t going to be happy with a woman being able to go “I was raped” and get an abortion, oh no no no. There has to be proof! And it can’t just be issuing an accusation of rape, because what if later the courts find the man not guilty and then a fetus that didn’t “deserve” to be aborted got aborted? Nope, women will need to wait for their rapist to be convicted of rape before being able to get an abortion. Oh, and look at that, the courts will take too long to convict and now the timeframe for which abortion is allowed has passed. Too bad, I suppose she’ll just have to have that baby.
“Abortion would be acceptable in the case of rape” has always been a lie, and its one that the discourse is way too easily distracted by.
Victorious: Trump is too stupid to know how offensive his suggestion is, but holy shit. It’s just about the most colonialist shit you could come up with.
My “favorite” bit of anti-abortion propaganda has always been the “Do you want to flush away this fetus? Yes? Guess what, you just flushed away Beethoven!” one. I’m constantly amazed that they think this is such a great argument, when it’s so easily refuted by “How do you know it wasn’t Stalin?” Which is an equally idiotic argument, to be sure, but does leave them sputtering and going “Uh… Because Jesus?”
@Surplus:
Well, that would explain his insistence on wearing that nest on his head. Of course, Ivanka’s let out the secret that he’s actually bald, so the suspicion that he’s Luthor might grow.
@Gaebolga
I thought the population was like 90% Inuit? Or were you referring to the color of the ice sheets?
I was wondering myself if he was thinking he was trying to buy a white country and just mistaken, or knew he was speculating about buying people of color and how bad it looked from that perspective, or like if he even had a brain at all. The latter possibility seemed the most likely; just nothing in his skull at all. Random farts of air pretending to be thoughts going through.
The idiocy of Luthor’s scheme in Donner’s Superman movie is one of the many things I loathe about that film. Most of it comes down to Mario Puzo being an okay writer at best and an absolutely incompetent screenwriter.
Did you know that when Puzo was hired to write screenplays for Superman and Superman II, his fist draft came out to 500 pages? That’s not two movies, that’s four EPIC movies.
If Puzo had understood anything at all about screenplays as a medium, you would think that when he got to page 50 (midpoint of a normal screenplay) and Clark was still a little kid, that he would have thought hey, MAYBE I should reconsider my approach. When he got to page 110 (end of any normal screenplay) and Clark had JUST put on the costume, he might have thought “this is a complete mess, I should stop writing and try that ‘outlining and breakdown’ process that all those professional screenwriters talk about.”
But no, he kept going to 500 pages. And then, he was so incompetent that, having created a completely unfilmable brick, he TURNED IT IN to his employers. And they, being as incompetent as Puzo, did not immediately fire him, throw the screenplay out, and hire someone who understood the basic mechanics of the medium. Nope, they went “Eh, well just cut out… 300 pages of it, it will be fine.”
Which helps explain how we got a series of films whose only good points were Christopher Reeve’s performance and John Williams’ score – the latter of which they stopped using after one movie.
BTD sez:
I think he may have had a vague awareness that there are some not-European people there, which to him means the place is “uninhabited,” in the same way that North America was “uninhabited” when the Euros showed up. Also, he appears to think Denmark is the sole owner of it, so any government or population that happens to be there has no say in the matter.
Next he’ll be asking Norway to sell us Iceland. It’s so much smaller it ought to be more affordable, right? /s
(to be clear, I know Norway doesn’t own Iceland, and that its most recent ties prior to independence were actually with Denmark. But I’ll bet Trump thinks Icelanders are all Norwegians that emigrated.)
…aren’t they? Well, Norse, so same geographical area but not the same nation-state, and it was several centuries ago, and there has been immigration since, but the population is all interrelated enough that they have a genealogical database to prevent accidental incest… er, what was my point again.
The second one; I have an embarrassing affinity for puns that involve literal misinterpretations.
As for the whys of Drumpf’s desire to buy Greenland, honestly, who cares? The only thing we can know for certain is that it wasn’t part of a coherent or workable strategy of any kind.
@Ariblester
Well, according to Wikipedia, Greenland is 88% Inuit – including Inuit/Danish mixed – and 12% Danes and other Europeans, so…no?
I’m just waiting for the day when he tries to buy Scotland, citing his Scottish roots as a reason.
Obviously, he’ll fail, but the reaction from the Scots should be glorious.
Er, @Prith kDar was talking about Iceland, which is majority Icelandic, who descend from Vikings from the Faroe Islands, what is now Norway and potentially the British Isles. I know that Greenland is majority Inuit.
@Ariblester
Oops! Reading fail; my bad, and my apologies!
No big, just didn’t want to be taken for a smart Alec. God knows there’s enough (i.e. one) in the other thread ?
Frith and Inle, I get busy for a couple of days and I miss bag being banned, as well as all the Watership Down content. Best thing I have to add there: my daughter likes to tease me by telling me about all the tatoos she is going to get when turns 18. The other day, she was trying to convince me we should get complimentary tatoos in the style of the mythic stuff from the 1978 Watership Down.