Topic: Media Research Center
When the provision in an anti-abortion bill that redefined a rape exception as limited only to "forcible rape" became public, Republicans wouldn't defend it -- heck, even NewsBusters had to dance around it -- and Republicans ultimately vowed to remove it.
Now, the MRC's Tim Graham is admitting what his right-wing fellow travelers wouldn't -- that the provision was an attempt to further restrict abortion.
Graham uses a Feb. 8 NewsBusters post to attack some random Daily Kos blogger for calling the Republican Party the "Rapeublican Party." Graham writes that the "forcible rape" provision was an attempt to "deny taxpayer subsidies for abortion in cases of statutory rape." Not in so many words, of course; he doesn't use the term "forcible rape," and he doesn't quite concede that that the term would constitute as a narrowing of current law regarding restrictions on federal funding of abortions.
Nor does Graham quite concede (beyond a block quote of the Kos blogger he's attacking) that the "forcible rape" construct would go way beyond statutory rape to rape of a physically or mentally incapacitated person. Graham distrcts from what his admission by attacking the Kos blogger for supposedly claiming that "taxpayers who aren't committing statutory rape should lend a helping financial hand to those who are, and women who aren't 'daring to have sex' until they get in trouble should be subsidizing those women who do."
Graham's attack mode doesn't change the fact that he broke the GOP's anti-abortion omerta by essentially admitting what the "forcible rape" gambit was really about. His telling the truth may be bad news within his little activist conclave, but it's good news for the rest of us.
