Lauren

A SYTYCB entry

The great Republican party bus has yet to pull into Tampa but progressives and lady-part owners everywhere are already bracing themselves for the fallout from this brotastic, beachside blowout of free market masturbation, embryo rights, and hurricane force winds. The party platform wouldn’t be official until Monday but drafts indicate the GOP is holding strongly and stubbornly to its “human life amendment,” a provision that brandishes the 14th Amendment and “the sanctity of human life” to prohibit abortions in all cases, no exceptions.

This promise of an airtight banning of abortion is hardly a new development for the right’s cadre of self-righteous Fetus Warriors. The provision has appeared in every Republican platform since the heady Reagan days of 1980. John McCain called unsuccessfully for the inclusion in the platform of explicit exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother in 2000 but caved to the party’s more fervent embryo lovers during his own 2008 run. The plank is only newsworthy now, the ninth time it has been featured in the Republican campaign program, because loudmouth Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin let the woman-hating cat out of the big bag of moral dudgeon last weekend.

Akin, of course, claimed that, in his professional opinion as a misogynist, women could not get pregnant from “legitimate rapes.” If the Republican party feigned outrage and called for Akin to exit the race it’s not because they found ...