Todd Akin is just another ideologue who thinks it’s OK to make up facts

By David McElroy · August 20, 2012

During the huge Chick-fil-A debate a few weeks back, I encountered someone on the pro-boycott side claiming that women should boycott Chick-fil-A because the company doesn’t want female managers. Since I happen to have known a number of female managers with the company — including the general manager of the store nearest my house — I knew it wasn’t true. So I challenged him.

He pointed to a lawsuit by one female manager at a Georgia Chick-fil-A. She has been a manager for decades, but the lawsuit alleges the she was forced out as a store manager because the chauvinistic upper management had decided she needed to be home with her children. I pointed out to the guy that this was one woman who had made one unsupported allegation, with no proof. I also pointed out that the vast number of female managers in the company make it obvious that there’s something unusual about that particular case, so it’s unfair and dishonest to use that allegation to state something as fact with no evidence.

“Do you think they’re fair to us?” he replied. “Why should I care about the facts when they’re the ones who are wrong?”

That was a snapshot of much of what’s wrong with political debate in this country. Almost nobody cares about facts, honesty or fairness. The latest example is that of U.S. Rep. Todd Akin, who claimed Sunday that a woman who is raped won’t get pregnant.

Akin is the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Missouri. He’s challenging incumbent U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, but I honestly don’t care about the politics of the situation right now. I only care about the facts. Here’s how the conversation unfolded during an interview on a local TV station in Missouri:

“If abortion could be considered in case of, say, a tubal pregnancy [which threatens the mother’s life], what about in the case of rape?” asked KTVI host Charles Jaco. “Should it be legal or not?”

“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Akin said, referring to a woman getting pregnant from being raped. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.” [Emphasis in italics is mine.]

(You can see the video clip of that exchange at the end of this article.)

Anybody with a rudimentary understanding of human biology knows that what Akin is saying is false. It’s convenient to his position. Maybe he’s heard some other person allege it at some point. So he asserts it as fact — instead of being intellectually honest about a difficult issue.

A 1996 study published by the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology estimated that there are roughly 32,101 pregnancies that are the result of rape each year. The study said that approxiately 5 percent of rape victims get pregnant.

In other words, Akin is just flat-out making his facts up. He hasn’t heard this from doctors. He’s either repeating something without verification that someone else has said or he’s inventing it himself. Either way, he’s doing the same thing the anti-Chick-fil-A guy I quoted earlier did. They both had an absolute disregard for the truth. All they cared about was defending what they already believed, not about dealing with facts.

In a statement Sunday afternoon, Akin backpedaled from his line about “legitimate rape,” but he never explicitly acknowledged the error. He merely said that he had “misspoke” and then went back to his talking points.

I don’t want to get into the abortion debate here, because that’s not really the issue. The issue is intellectual honesty. It’s having respect for facts. It’s about telling the truth and even being willing to say “I don’t know” when you don’t have an answer.

This is what happens when people are more committed to destroying their ideological enemies and winning political debates than they are to the truth. If you’ve reached the point that you’re just making things up to win arguments — no matter what your position is — you’ve gotten yourself badly off-track somewhere along the way.

Facts matter. Truth matters. Honesty matters. We can disagree about a lot of things, but we can’t even have adult conversations if we can’t be honest.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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