Rape: the work of God or crime committed by a man?

Was it a Freudian slip or what Republican  Richard Mourdock really thinks  when he asserted in a recent debate in Indiana that, after struggling for a long time he came to realize that life is a gift from God. Therefore, “I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

That was almost as revealing as the infamous comment by Missouri Republican Senate hopeful Todd Akin: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut (pregnancy) down.”

What does Republican candidate Mitt Romney think about the issue? He went out of his way to say he did not share Mourdock’s views, but politics is politics and the Republican Party has a many of its roots and some of its branches in ultra-conservative notions springing from evangelicals and the “Tea Party.”

Do ultra conservative (?) politicians and “pro-lifers,” who adamantly oppose abortion, really think that everything that happens on earth is a result of God’s will? Are wars the result of God’s will? What about earthquakes, tidal waves, tornados, contamination?

Are conservative fundamentalists insinuating something even more sinister and pathetic: that God’s will is behind acts of rape? Is that the real reason they oppose abortion, even in the case of rape?

A woman is walking down the street, she is grabbed by a rapist, pushed into a vacant lot, slapped, hit, cut with a knife, her clothes are torn off, the man violently deposits his semen in her vagina, she stumbles home and a short time later the doctor says she is pregnant. Was that God’s will? What a strange and contradictory code of ethics maintains that she must give birth and raise the child?

Well, just after Mourdock made that statement during the Indiana debate he apparently had second thoughts about his position. Did he change his attitude because of politics or religious belief? God does not preordain rape, he asserted in a self correction statement, “anyone who would suggest that is just sick and twisted. No that’s not even close to what I said.”

Suppose for a moment that he was missquoted, what does he really think about this issue? What do conservatives, the Republicans and presidential candidate Romney think about it?

The Bible—the wikipedia of the evangelicals—is filled with machista and war-mongering statements, with vivid descriptions of acts of perversion, along with admonishment for love, peace, understanding and brotherhood.

Religious beliefs are obviously not scientific. They are based on faith. But that by no means prevents believers from participating in cruel acts of violents. History is filled with blatant violations of basic human rights in the name of religion.

True. Romney is not evangelical. He does not believe in “the second birth.” He does not believe in the literal truth of the New Testament. He is Morman, a religious group that used to allow and permit a man to have several wives. Apparently that practice has been abandoned.

Nevertheless, there is and has been a disconcerting mixture of religion and politics for decades, for centuries, in the West especially since the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

There is clearly a mix of religion, politics and economics in the way U.S. society operates. Did former President George Bush, an evangelical, invade Iraq because of the desire to do away with a dictatorship? Or get keep the oil lines gushing towards the U.S., or to allow McDonalds to gain a foothold in the Arabic culture, or to plant the seed for the “westernization” (capitalism plus cristianism) in the country?

True. The Democratic candidate, Barrack Obama puts religion into the background. But his statements (and actions) in defense of the so-called American Way of Life, sublime praise of the “free enterprize system” and continuation of the war against terrorism—initiated by Bush—seem to merely sugar up the more violent positions of the fundamentalists.

True. The situation of women in countries such as Afghanistan is appauling. But also appauling is the view shared by Republicans and Democrats alike that such practices can be modified by force, militarily.