"Tina Fey Rips ‘Grey-Faced Men with $2 Haircuts’ Defining Rape"

Note the update at the bottom, after the break

Quoting The Raw Story, quoting Tina Fey in part:

“I wish we could have an honest and respectful dialogue about these complicated issues,” the comedienne told the Center for Reproductive Rights Inaugural Gala. “But it seems like we can’t right now. And if I have to listen to one more gray-faced man with a two-dollar haircut explain to me what rape is, I’m gonna lose my mind!”

Last month, Republican Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin had asserted that women could not get pregnant through “legitimate rape.” And then Republican Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock claimed on Tuesday that pregnancy from rape “is something that God intended to happen.

The sad thing is, Akin and Mourdock's stupid comments -- and they are stupid on oh so many levels -- are not as unusual on this subject as we might want to believe. As a poster to MetaFilter pointed out shortly after Aiken's comments were made, the comments were but the latest in a long strong of similar inane comments by folks who oppose abortion, such as former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum saying that a baby born from a rape is a gift from God, Idaho state senator Chuck Winder suggesting that rape is an excuse women use to get abortions, United States district court nominee James Holmes claiming in 1997 that "concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami," California state representative Henry Aldridge claiming that "[Women do not get pregnant when raped because] the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work," Pennsylvania state representative Stephen Freind saying the odds that a woman who is raped will get pregnant are] one in millions and millions and millions," and the Christian Life Resources website arguing through an MD that "[forcible] rape pregnancies are rare" in an article that attempts to define away the issue and does not bother to show what it implies (that it's supposedly harder to get pregnant through rape) because it cannot.

Update: Amy Sullivan has some very thoughtful comments on Mourdoch's views. She speaks about them here on NPR and writes about them here on here on The New Republic. Listening to Mourdoch express his views, I think her interpretation of what he was trying to say is right. I followed his campaign in Indiana against Richard Lugar, and I have to say as a general matter I lost confidence in Mourdoch's integrity as well as disagreeing with most of what he said.  Nonetheless, Sullivan's correction and nuanced view is warranted.