Silly me. I dared to feel a moment of hope this week, after the idiotic Missouri congressman and senatorial candidate Todd Akin, while discussing abortion rights and why nobody should have them, insisted that "legitimate rape", as he put it, rarely leads to pregnancy.

His fellow Republicans remarkably hastened to distance themselves from the ignoramus, and urged him to drop out of the senate race. The Republican National Committee went so far as to pull funding from his campaign. I dared hope Akin would prove the darkness before the dawn, the moment America's right wing would collectively snap out of it and cry: "What happened? We've hit rock bottom! Republicans are supposed to be the party of small government, personal liberty and fiscal responsibility, remember? Not the haven for theocrats, science deniers and constant smouldering outrage at the thought of consenting adults engaging in non-procreative sexual activity!"

Nope. Turns out Republicans don't disagree with Akin's abortion views so much as deplore his discussing them in public. The first rule of the Medieval-Flavored Misogyny Club is don't talk about the Medieval-Flavored Misogyny Club, especially not a couple of days before GOP conventioneers announce their extremist anti-abortion plank in this year's campaign platform.

As James Hohmann reported for Politico:

"Even as Mitt Romney sought to quash the furor surrounding Todd Akin's 'legitimate' rape comments, the Republican platform committee [in Tampa, Florida] approved an abortion plank that includes no exemptions for rape, incest or even to save the life of the mother.

"The platform committee instead approved draft language Tuesday, calling for a 'Human Life Amendment' that gives legal protection to the unborn."

Even to save the life of the mother. The anti-abortion brigades need to quit calling themselves "pro-life" when they're clearly "pro-forced gestation", because there's nothing remotely pro-life about telling a pregnant woman, "better you die in childbirth than live childfree". Don't mistake me for some bleeding-heart liberal, here. I've no inherent objection to the death penalty; I concur that certain actions are so evil that whoever commits them deserves death by command of the state. I just don't think being a woman with an ectopic pregnancy qualifies.

Forced-gestation supporters never explicitly say, "I want to control women's sexuality". Their justification for urging pregnant rape victims to give birth, or ordering women with life-threatening pregnancies to literally drop dead, is that once the sperm hits the ovum, the resulting zygote is equal to you and me and has a right not to be aborted identical to our right not to be murdered.

And suppose the forced gestationists are correct, and a microscopic zygote really does deserve the same legal rights as us. Would that justify banning abortions for pregnancies that can be carried to term without killing the mother? No. Even if embryos have rights identical to yours and mine, we don't have the right to demand another person's body or biological functions be used to sustain our own. Imagine you need a bone marrow or liver transplant and only one person is a compatible donor for you. Have you the right to force her to donate against her will? Can you compel another to suffer pain for your benefit? Demand a woman submit to invasive procedures on her body, if necessary to keep yours alive? Commandeer the use of all her biological systems for the greater part of a year? Of course not. You can't even force your own mother to do this. But the GOP thinks you should – at least until the umbilical cord is cut.

Do Republicans really think this will win them the election? I'm only half-joking when I wonder if the GOP's been commandeered by secret-agent Democrats aiming to make Obama the lesser of two evils, no matter how terrible a president he is. Many Americans like me, who voted for Obama in 2008, were soon dismayed to see that on multiple civil liberties issues (TSA, government transparency, whistleblower punishment, drug war, drone wars, warrantless surveillance et al), he's measurably worse than Bush. Obama makes me yearn for the freedom I enjoyed under vice president Cheney and before 2009, I figured only powerful hallucinogens could ever do that. Had the GOP nominated some sane, moderate, pro-liberty candidates – Jon Huntsman or Gary Johnson, perhaps – they might've had a real chance of overcoming Obama's incumbent's advantage and retaking the White House this November.

Instead, they gave us candidates identical to Obama on every major civil liberty issue, save the two issues where they're even worse: "You know what's really wrong with America? Too many gay people getting married, and too many straight women having sex. Vote Republican. We'll fix them."