By Katie Halper • @kthalps • 11 years ago

Surprise! Another Republican says something offensive about rape (and there’s something you can do about it)

What is it in the Republicans’ drinking water that makes it so hard for them to refrain from making offensive and ignorant comments about rape? And what is it that makes a party, which largely disavows science, think it can speak with any authority about anything related to science. Perhaps, we’ll never know.

What we do know is that the head of the California Republican Assembly, Celeste Greig,  joined the impressive ranks of Republicans saying inane shit about rape earlier this month when she suggested that pregnancies resulting from rape are rare:

“Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized…. I don’t know what percentage of pregnancies are due to the violence of rape. Because of the trauma the body goes through, I don’t know what percentage of pregnancy results from the act.”

Reminder: the actual science shows that a woman raped without a contraceptive is just as likely to become pregnant as a woman who has consensual sex without a contraceptive.

Today, a progressive organization, the Courage Campaign, is going to deliver signatures collected from  moveon.org’s petition website, calling on Greig to resign. The petition reads:

Celeste Greig, resign immediately as head of the California Republican Assembly. Rape is indeed traumatic, but it can produce pregnancy. That’s biology. Your suggestion that the chance of pregnancy is lower is offensive and denies scientific reality….Everyone is welcome to their own opinion, but not to their own facts. Rapes cause pregnancy. Celeste Greig (and other factually challenged politicians) need to resign from their high profile political positions so policy can be made based on science, not ideology.

Sign the petition here. I just did.

nyc

Born and raised on the mean streets of New York City’s Upper West Side, Katie Halper is a comic, writer, blogger, satirist and filmmaker based in New York. Katie graduated from The Dalton School (where she teaches history) and Wesleyan University (where she learned that labels are for jars.) A director of Living Liberally and co-founder/performer in Laughing Liberally, Katie has performed at Town Hall, Symphony Space, The Culture Project, D.C. Comedy Festival, all five Netroots Nations, and The Nation Magazine Cruise, where she made Howard Dean laugh! and has appeared with Lizz Winstead, Markos Moulitsas, The Yes Men, Cynthia Nixon and Jim Hightower. Her writing and videos have appeared in The New York Times, Comedy Central, The Nation Magazine, Gawker, Nerve, Jezebel, the Huffington Post, Alternet and Katie has been featured in/on NY Magazine, LA Times, In These Times, Gawker,Jezebel, MSNBC, Air America, GritTV, the Alan Colmes Show, Sirius radio (which hung up on her once) and the National Review, which called Katie “cute and some what brainy.” Katie co-produced Tim Robbins’s film Embedded, (Venice Film Festival, Sundance Channel); Estela Bravo’s Free to Fly (Havana Film Festival, LA Latino Film Festival); was outreach director for The Take, Naomi Klein/Avi Lewis documentary about Argentine workers (Toronto & Venice Film Festivals, Film Forum); co-directed New Yorkers Remember the Spanish Civil War, a video for Museum of the City of NY exhibit, and wrote/directed viral satiric videos including Jews/ Women/ Gays for McCain.

Katie is a writer, comedian, filmmaker, and New Yorker.

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