Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Rep. Todd Aiken is some kind of outlier or “knuckle dragger,” as Boehner might put it. He represents the core of where the Republican party is on women’s reproductive rights today. The tea party-fueled G.O.P. has been on a mission about abortion since they took power in January of last year, advancing radical anti-abortion legislation on both on the federal and the state level. The 2011 “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion” act – HR3 on the docket, meaning this is literally the third bill they got to since taking power – included in its original form a redefinition of rape that established the somewhat dubiously defined category of “forcible rape”. The final version would ban federal funding of abortions in cases of “statutory rape”, meaning that rape victims would have to undergo some kind of audit to avoid bringing the child of their rapist to term.

The motivation behind this is pretty obvious. Attempts to ban abortion have always run into three exceptions that block an outright ban – rape, incest, and saving the life of the mother. Of these three categories, anti-abortion fanatics see rape as the least problematic to game. They keep trying to find ways around that exception, resorting to narrowing the definition of “legitimate” rape, junk science theories about female reproductive biology, and so on. Aiken got his theory from a crackpot preacher that served as a surrogate for Romney during the last election.  This same guy has met with both Romney and Ryan this year.

The Republicans do not want to have this conversation. But the simple truth is that they are committed to this notion of no abortion, no exceptions. They are becoming the American / Christian version of the taliban, adding a “no exceptions for rape or incest” anti-abortion plank to their national party platform just this past week. They are running away from it, but it is not going anywhere, and if you dig deep enough, you will find plenty of true believers like Aiken who will say what they believe, no matter how extreme. And this is an extreme position by any measure – the most extreme advocated by a national party on the subject of abortion since it became a national issue in the 1970s.

Extremism has gone mainstream. This should be an interesting convention, if it doesn’t get washed out by that hurricane.

luv u,

jp