A remarkable story has been developing about Christian Right pol, Missouri GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin's roots in antiabortion militancy. Investigations by, among othrs, RightWingWatch and Salon.com found that Akin was arrested with Operation Rescue activists in the late 80s, and had political connections with a local militia group in the 90s.

As it happens, the focus of these stories is one Tim Dreste, who epitomized the profound overlap between the then-nascent militia movement, and advocates of antiabortion violence -- a connection originally documented by my colleagues at Planned Parenthood Federation of America and I in the mid 90s. I later detailed this convergence in a pair of stories for Intelligence Report, the magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Center. These articles have been cited as sources in several stories on the growing scandal.

Two things stand out for me about this story. It is not so much the buzz of political excitement about the latest revelations about Akin -- but that a pol like Akin, a senior member of the House of Representatives, could have come so far, and no one had previously noticed all this. I think this is part of the way that as as a culture -- political, journalistic, scholarly -- we tend to drop the ball and lose track of these things. Anyone who now thinks it is important to know that Rep. Todd Akin has disturbing ties to the militia movement and proponents of anti-abortion violence, really should consider the role of research and deeper understandings of the history, players, and ideology of the political and religious right.