So the first part of Akin’s comment is not the product of his unique imagination. It’s still being repeated all over the country, perhaps out of veneration for the thoughts of the founding fathers.

Part two was Akin’s mention of “legitimate rape.” This is the piece that had every mainstream Republican honcho in the country calling on Akin to drop out of the race. Karl Rove pulled the plug on his money. Paul Ryan reportedly got on the phone and begged Akin to go away for the good of the team. (The team, or at least the Paul Ryan part of it, had once sponsored anti-abortion legislation with Akin that referred to “forcible rape” in the same cringe-inducing fashion.)

But it’s the third point in Akin’s comment that’s really important for this election. Before he got sidetracked into colonial-era biology, the veteran House member was trying to explain why he opposes abortion even in the case of rape. “But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something,” Akin said, referring to the miraculous female shutdown mechanism that he’d discovered. The rapist, he continued, should be punished, but not “the child.”

This is a perfectly consistent theological doctrine. If you believe that every fertilized egg is a human being, with the same sacred rights as a newborn baby, then, obviously, you are not going to want it to be aborted, no matter how it came into the world.

Politicians who say they oppose all abortions are making perfect sense, except for the part where they try to impose their doctrinal beliefs on the vast majority of the country, which does not share that particular religious conviction. It’s the abortion-except-for-rape-and-incest position that doesn’t compute. Rape victims, yes, but not a 14-year-old who was impregnated by her 15-year-old boyfriend? The impoverished mother of six kids whose birth control method failed? There’s no way to set the worthy-of-compassion bar unless you trust women to set it for themselves.

Maybe Akin’s real sin is that he exposed the phoniness of the rape-and-incest exception, which is just an attempt to make radical extremism look moderate. That and the theory of the delighted womb.