* * Rewarding ignorance

The bumper sticker goes something like this, “Ignorance can be cured but stupidity is forever.” It’s likely the psychiatrists would add, “Ignorance can only be cured if the ignoramus wants to be cured.” Which brings us to Missouri Senatorial candidate and current congressman Todd Akin (R).

 Last week, Akin showed monumental ignorance when he claimed that victims of “legitimate rape” are able to naturally prevent pregnancy. Then he later claimed he misspoke. Akin has thus dramatically illustrated both his ignorance and his stupidity.

Let’s be clear: rape is neither legitimate nor illegitimate; rape is rape. Rape is an act of terrorism, aggression, intimidation, and dominance. Rape is an expression of male dominance over female. Rape is a frequent spoil of war, used by the victors to punish the vanquished. Legitimacy has no bearing.

 It takes no special knowledge of human reproduction to know that an egg has no ability to determine whether a sperm in its proximity was deposited in an act of love or terrorism. Suggesting this is pure ignorance. That a senatorial candidate would fail to understand elementary human reproduction is abhorrent and inexcusable. Millions of women have carried fetuses and given birth to babies when impregnated against their will. One or more of the women in Akin’s life – and we must assume he has some – should slap him.

 Making matters worse was his claim that he’d misspoken. Mitt Romney introducing Paul Ryan as, “the next president of the United States,” is a mistake, because he meant “the next vice-president…”. Akin’s statement is not a mistake, it was what he believed to be factual. Calling it a mistake proves his stupidity.

 So Akin is both stupid and ignorant. Which would be bad enough.

 Sadly, Akin isn’t alone. Our own senatorial candidate George Allen illustrated his own ignorance in a similar lack of the grasp of the same issue of human reproduction in a recent debate with challenger Tim Kaine. Allen, who graduated at what I once considered one of our state’s premier universities (with apparently with a degree in Footballogy), failed to understand why a Personhood Amendment that he advocated would make many common forms of contraception illegal. (Watch him trip over himself, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTkfRV9bc2U)

Deferring to Kaine’s obvious intellectual superiority, Allen actually referred to him twice as “Dr. Kaine.” A better bet for Allen, especially with his aspiration to return to a seat he once held in the Senate, would have been to actually learn what he was talking about. Anyone so motivated could learn the basics of human reproduction in an hour. Instead, Allen remains willfully ignorant. Kaine is intelligent, informed, nuanced, and sincere, while Allen flies blind, relying on sound-bite and rigid ideology.

 Not to be outdone in the ignorance department is our terminally clueless congressman Morgan Griffith. His energy policy, which he proudly and often states, is based upon “drill, dig, discover, and deregulate.”

 This pretty much sums up our national energy policy in the past 100 years. And while it has fueled significant economic progress, it has also allowed for horrific environmental abuses, mining disasters, oil spills, and similar ills. Further, it completely ignores two essential natural facts: the reality of the terminal decline of natural resources on a finite planet and the looming threat of global warming.

 Of more profound regional impact, consider coal which has been actively mined in his district for over a century. It is a fact that the counties that have produced the most are now among the poorest. If coal was so important to our economies, where’s the money? It has risen to the top of the economic food chain by enhancing the rich. Morgan “big money” Griffith knows this only too well, and he might as well say so. Deregulation invariably results in activities that hurt most the people Griffith was elected to serve.

 Here’s the tragic part and the subject of this essay: millions of voters consistently reward this ignorance at the polls. I’m not implying that Republicans have a lock on ignorance, but they have shown increasing willingness to let the most radical and ignorant members of the party define their policies. The Condoleezza Rices and Colin Powells are overshadowed by the Todd Akins, the George Allens and the Morgan Griffiths who have come to dominate the Republican agenda.

There seems to be no level of ignorance that precludes a candidate’s viability. I’m waiting for one to exhibit brutal honesty by saying, “I am stupid and willfully ignorant. I am completely owned by wealthy special interests. If elected, I will work to disenfranchise voters likely to vote against me, eviscerate human rights, eliminate women’s reproductive rights, marginalize all religions other than my own, suppress the power of labor unions, de-fund arts and education, decimate our nation’s natural resources, and channel more of our resources and money to the top of the economic food chain.” And he’d probably still get at least 45% of the vote.

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said the Republican Party was “callous and insensitive,” and was waging a “war on women.” At the time she was derided as exaggerating. It seems now that she is entirely accurate. As the sign says, “It’s only a war if we fight back.”