MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT



Portraying a woman who is raped not as a victim, but rather as the bounty of the male has a long history in the United States. It was something that was done regularly to slaves, Native-American women, and now to helpless women lured into sex-trafficking.

It also has long been tolerated in certain male dominated environments such as the Armed Forces, where we are currently seeing situations where rapes and sexual harassment are being less than vigorously prosecuted.

There are a lot of origins of this male justification of rape in the US, but the current incarnation is religious. First of all, you have the conservative Opus Dei Catholics who value the "divinity" of conception over the violent assault on a woman.

Then you have Evangelical movements such as "Quiverfull." I interviewed Kathryn Joyce, author of a book on the movement, several years ago for BuzzFlash. She wrote an engrossing account of women who vow a life of submission to their husbands, primarily for the purpose of being a vessel for bearing children.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book: "The movement, which takes its name from a verse in Psalm 127, advocates a retreat from society and a rejection of government policies that encourage equal rights for women, pregnancy prevention and an individualistic ethic. Quiverfull families share with more mainline Protestant groups, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, a belief that wives should submit to their husbands. But the group goes further by insisting that children be home schooled and daughters forgo a college education in favor of early marriage and childbearing."

Michelle Goldberg, author of "Kingdom Coming" (who BuzzFlash also interviewed), writes about "Quiverfull": "Riveting and deeply disturbing. This important book shines a light on a corner of the Christian right that has taken misogyny to sadomasochistic extremes, and reveals the sexual anxieties so often underlying modern fundamentalism."

Rape has traditionally been a white male right in the US as long as it didn't violate relatives or community wives. Of course, a minority sexually assaulting a white woman in the South, in years gone by, resulted in a lynching. If a black man rapes a white woman, there is no debate about rape. (A black man even looking at a white woman directly could sometimes get him killed.)

Of course, the more basic issue here – taking away the veneer of religion – is what the impassioned critics of the war on women decry: the most vocal advocates of controlling the insemination and child bearing of women are white men such as Paul Ryan and Todd Akin. They may talk religious "justification" for forcing a woman to bear the child of a rapist; but what they are protecting is the power of men over the bodies of women, and the "sacredness" and potency of their sperm.

Human history, to this day, is largely about the usurpation of power of one group of people over another: class, ethnicity, religion and in the case of the "definition" of rape, gender.

President Obama was bluntly on target when he decried those who would classify "degrees" of rape. "You can't parse rape," Obama said.

Virtually all surveys indicate that a very high number of rapes never go reported. There are many reasons why, but the stigma of being considered somehow a participating party in the act combined with the police and legal process in many areas that force the woman into feeling more like a criminal than a victim adds to that underreporting.

People such as Akin, Ryan and their cohorts in electoral government around the land enable rape and victimize women when they trivialize acts of heinous violence based on gender politics and masculine power trips.

The rape "parsers" would certainly have a different legal standard if men who were anally raped became pregnant.

That may be shocking, but just think about it.