Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock became the latest Republican to wander into eyebrow-raising territory when it came to the discussion of rape and abortion during a Senate debate Tuesday night.Defending his stance that abortion should be illegal even in the case of rape, Mourdock explained that pregnancy resulting from nonconsensual sex is the will of God.“I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God,” Mourdock said. “And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”In an indication that Mourdock’s grasp of theology isn’t much deeper than his understanding of how to disguise offensive views, he tried post-debate to make a distinction between the idea of God ordaining rape—that would be “sick, twisted,” he said—and the idea of God ordaining the impregnation of rape victims, who must then carry the pregnancy to term under state compulsion in Mourdock’s vision of a good society.

What are you if you think a woman’s right to her own body should be entirely subordinate to the possibility of an hours-old fertilized egg, and thus want to ban emergency contraception, as Akin does? What are you if you essentially render a pregnant woman an an incubator, as Akin did when he described pregnancy as, “All you add is food and climate control, and some time, and the embryo becomes you or me”? What with all of the double-talk, I’ll be plain. You’re a misogynist.For the most part, serious antichoicers try not to discuss in public their ironclad conviction that once sperm meets egg, a woman becomes nothing more than a procreation machine, with not only abortion but most forms of what the rest of us understand to be contraceptives off the table because someone somewhere thinks they might interfere with a fertilized ovum.