It's About Dishonor

So, here was an absolute gem of an interview exchange featuring the Republican candidate for the United States Senate in Pennsylvania, Tom Smith:

Interviewer: How would you tell a daughter or a granddaughter who, God forbid, would be the victim of a rape, to keep the child against her own will? Do you have a way to explain that?

Smith: I lived something similar to that with my own family. She chose life, and I commend her for that. She knew my views. But, fortunately for me, I didn't have to.. she chose they way I thought. No don't get me wrong, it wasn't rape.

Interviewer: Similar how?

Smith: Uh, having a baby out of wedlock.

Interviewer: That's similar to rape?

Smith: No, no, no, but… put yourself in a father's situation, yes. It is similar. But, back to the original, I'm pro-life, period.

Here's his spokesperson trying to explain these comments:

"Tom Smith is committed to protecting the sanctity of life and believes it begins at conception," she said in a statement. "While his answers to some of the questions he faced at the Pennsylvania Press club may have been less than artful, at no time did he draw the comparison that some have inferred. When questioned if he was drawing that comparison, Tom's answer was clear, 'no, no, no.' Tom was speaking to the difficult decision faced by his family, not the nature of his daughters conception.”

Sorry, but that's not good enough. Yes, it's true that Smith wasn't actually saying the extramarital sex his daughter had that resulted, accidentally or otherwise, in a pregnancy was akin to rape. (Pun really not intended, at least not until after I typed it.) But let's analyze that last comment. It confirms what I said in my previous sentence, because he's not talking from his daughter's perspective. He's talking from "a father's situation." Now, you might hope that a father would, in that situation, adopt a more or less wholly empathetic view, and be trying to view the situation from his daughter's perspective. Tom Smith, it's clear, doesn't want us to do that, so what other view of the situation does he have in mind? Well, it's hard to avoid thinking that he's thinking about questions of honor.

I suppose it's not exactly news that lots of people think out-of-wedlock pregnancy is dishonorable, and that having one's daughter get so situated is dishonorable for a father. And I suppose it's also not news that some people, at least, aren't willing to make an exception for this judgment of dishonorableness when the pregnancy is the result not of anything your daughter did but of something that was done to her. But at this late hour in human history I think it's a bit past time we still had candidates for U.S. Senate hawking the view that premarital sex is shameful, which, let's be clear, Tom Smith did in this interview, even though he didn't actually say that it's the same as rape. And one also doesn't typically think of the whole "being raped is dishonorable" thing being prevalent in this country, but rather in various Islamic countries with which the whole "honor killing" thing is generally associated. It's edifying, I suppose, to learn that respectable (well, almost respectable) political candidates hold a very similar worldview right in our own nation.

So let's be clear about what Tom Smith said: no, he didn't say that having premarital sex is like being raped. He just said that having premarital sex, especially if you get pregnant, is shameful, and that being raped shares that shamefulness.

Gee, I wonder why so few rapes get reported.