Emotional Issues

I've been called out more than a few times over the past couple of weeks with respect to my views on the upcoming Presidential election in the States.  My responses are going to be too long for FaceBook, so I'll detail them here between now and November 6th.

I'm going to start with what my good friend Michael Marzolini calls "emotional issues".  Michael is the chairman of Pollara, a market research and public opinion company in Toronto.  For years, he was the polling company of record for the Liberal Party of Canada.

At any rate, he categorized moral issues such as abortion and capital punishment as "emotional". 

These issues, he said, divided the elctorate right down the middle and it was political suicide to dwell on them.  I have no reason to believe he was wrong in this assessment.  If your party is polling at around the 40% mark in Canada, you're on your way to a majority government.  If you go in and piss off your share of electorate by harping on an emotional issue - even one that people *want* to hear about - you're going to see your share drop.  Best to have an innocuous blanket statement sitting in the back of the party's policy book and deflect any mention of the issue when asked.

From wikipdeia:

In an August 19, 2012 interview aired on St. Louis television station KTVI-TV, [Missouri Rep. Todd] Akin was asked his views on whether women who became pregnant due to rape should have the option of abortion. He replied:

Well you know, people always want to try to make that as one of those things, well how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.
 

He was immediately - and correctly - villified for his ignorance.

Wiki also says "Medical experts say there is no evidence to support the assertion that women are less likely to get pregnant from rape compared with consensual sex" .

Right.

I'm not going to get into the abortion issue in the post - that'll be later on.  What I am going to do, though, is give a little perspective on this man because I've met people like him in the past who have said the same thing.  And say what you will about Rush Limbaugh - I think he had the right take on Rep. Akin, and it's worth sharing:

"There are people who hang around only like-minded people, and there are people who hang around and expose themselves to people that disagree with them on things. I think Akin may be one of these people who hangs around with people who only think the way he does about things.

"If you strip this down, what Akin was trying to say was something very simple. ' I don't think abortion should even happen in rape'. That's what he was trying to say. Let's just strip away all the other stuff. There are a group of pro-lifers who profoundly believe that, and they talk to each other, and they try to come up with ways of persuading other people to agree with them on this. Because their view is, it's not the baby's fault. Why are we gonna kill the baby? Why should there be an exception? The baby is the essence of innocence in every act of conception. The baby is entirely innocent, is what they believe, and so an exception to them weakens the entire argument.

"So they sit around amongst themselves -- I'm not being critical of 'em; don't misunderstand my choice of words or tone, and they try to think of ways to persuade other people who agree with them. So Akin goes on TV with Charles Jaco, which is mistake number one, but he goes on with Charles Jaco on local St. Louis TV. And this whole business of a woman's body shuts down in rape, there's no evidence for that. But this is the kind of thing that people who do nothing but talk amongst themselves will conjure up, a belief system like that, and they'll grab on to anything they can to support what their empirical belief is because their ultimate aim is to save life.

"Their ultimate aim is to protect the baby no matter what circumstance the conception occurs in. And I think that's just who the guy is, but he doesn't know how to explain it. He has no clue how to make his case for it. And so he hangs around people who are like-minded and they've devised this belief. He's not the first guy to say this. I've had people tell me that a woman's body shuts down in rape. There's no evidence for this. I mean it's absolutely absurd. This leads to the second problem. This is absurd. That belief that a woman's body shuts down and the whole notion of "legitimate"/"illegitimate" rape, that's the thing that bothers me about it."

Ok, a bit long winded, but the gist of it was that Akin wasn't properly informed.

Somehow I get the feeling this is going to be a recurring theme between now and election day.