GOP Rep. Steve King: “I’ve Never Heard of a Girl Getting Pregnant From Statutory Rape or i****t”

It seems that there are just no limits to abject stupidity in the Republican Party. The roiling controversy over the past few days has been over GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin’s comment that “legitimate” rape, whatever that is, does not result in pregnancy.

Now, Rep. King  is in hot water because he told an Iowa reporter that he’d never heard of a circumstance where a child got pregnant from statutory rape or i****t.

“Well I just haven’t heard of that being a circumstance that’s been brought to me in any personal way,” King told KMEG-TV Monday, “and I’d be open to discussion about that subject matter.”

But according to Talking Points Memo, “A 1996 review by the Guttmacher Institute found at least half of all babies born to minor women are fathered by adult men.”

When TPM contacted King’s office, his spokesperson said he did not mean that a girl cannot get pregnant from statutory rape or i****t, just that he was not personally aware of such a circumstance.

“What he was saying was, he personally does not know a girl who was raped,” Brittany Lesser, a spokesperson for King said. “He never says, ‘I’ve never heard of that.’ There’s a fine line between ‘I’ve never heard of that’ and ‘I don’t know personally anybody who’s been raped. There’s a difference. There is a difference.”

What this demonstrates is that Todd Akin is not some sort of outlier in the Republican Party. Much of the base of the right wing believes in the same sorts of quackery that Akin spewed during his interview. The only real difference here is that both Akin and King were caught with their foots in their mouths, whereas other members vote along these same lines, but never express their true beliefs among mixed company.

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