In recent days, the Left has pumped up the volume with scare tactics about the new majority in the House of Representatives. Republicans are back and they want to take over your personal lives! Ironic, of course, given the whole Obamacare incident. And the image of Speaker John Boehner asking Chris Wallace to leave him and his bad smoking habit alone is a little bit in conflict with that contention, too.
The latest attempt at scaring and misleading the public is the recent claim that Republicans, in some kind of supposedly radical ban on federal taxpayer funding of abortion — a ban along the lines of what the pro-choice Left has claimed has been law all along — are trying to redefine rape.
Redefining rape?!
They’re not.
In particular, abortion activists* are taking aim at H.R. 3, “The No Funding for Abortion Act,” which everyone from John Boehner to Republican Study Committee chairman Jim Jordan, to Democrat Dan Lipinski has explicitly and vocally supported for about a year now. On their radar is also “The Protect Life Act,” which Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.) introduced along with Lipinski the morning after January’s Obamacare repeal vote (the same day Smith joined Boehner to introduce H.R. 3).
A Mother Jones piece that ABCNews’s website republished yesterday as what appeared to be a news story (and later removed) insists that Republicans are on some kind of rape campaign: “Rape is only really rape if it involves force. So says the new House Republican majority as it now moves to change abortion law.”
“The Hyde Amendment does permit federal funding of abortions for women who are impregnated through assaults, regardless of age, which of course includes drug-assisted rape and rape of unconscious women, to cite just two of the more ludicrous examples invented by pro-abortion propagandists in recent days,” Douglas Johnson, of the National Right to Life Committee, counters. “And so do the bills.”
Johnson explains further:
In our view, on this matter, H.R. 3 and H.R. 358 would codify the substance of the policy that was in place from 1993 on (which rape/incest exceptions were added to the Hyde Amendment). We do not believe that the Hyde Amendment has ever been construed to permit federal funding of abortion based merely on the youth of the mother (“statutory rape”), nor are we aware of evidence that federal funding of abortion in such cases has ever been the practice. It is true that the new bills would not allow general federal funding of abortion on all under-age pregnant girls — but this is no change in policy. In falsely claiming that it is a change in policy, the pro-abortion advocacy groups really are engaged in a brazen effort greatly expand federal funding for abortion. They want to federally fund the abortion of tens of thousands of healthy babies of healthy moms, based solely on the age of their mothers. We would oppose such an expansion of federal funding of abortion.
You can read the FBI’s own longstanding definition of “forcible rape,” which explicitly excludes statutory rape, here. Michael New took a critical look at some of the nonsense the New York Times was peddling this weekend here.
* Would it be redundant to include the media here? I’ll stop asking the question when I see more coverage of the senseless violence that is such a mainstream part our culture today. Planned Parenthood, for instance, is painfully mainstream, a recipient of taxpayer funding and leading politicians’ support. I’ll stop asking the question if I see more coverage and action in response to this new video from New Jersey.