Social conservatives have generated quite the backlash recently with ads that slam date rape drugs along with marijuana. One unintended effect has been to identify abortion as a prime defense against the unintended pregnancies caused by chemical attacks.

Same time, just under 1% of pregnant girls think that they are still virgins. They have no memory of the attack. Similarly, pharmaceutical birth control is seen now as a defensive tool.

This combination of date rape drugs and Republican propaganda has produced unintended consequences. Legal abortion is the “tough” response to these rapes.

Where an abortion is considered “necessary,” self-identified social conservatives want it available and completely safe. Abortion, itself, is admittedly unpleasant.

A majority of self-identified Republican voters in a recent face-to-face interview sequence agreed with this poster.

Avoiding unplanned pregnancies is how you reduce abortions.

Extremism in defense of wack-job dogma ??? The party has not adapted. GOP candidates continue to ally themselves with unending streams of embarrassment:

“In the emergency room they have what’s called rape kits where a woman can get cleaned out.”

— State Representative Jodie Laubenberg, Texas

“…Cleaned out!” A girl can get “cleaned out.” No one on the democratic side says anything like that.

Abortion has been a good issue to GOP candidates. After Nixon and Watergate in the 1970s, they were able to use the Christian Right for manpower so that money from Adolph Coors and the Kochs could let them rebuild.

Now, apparently, that core issue has become stale.

The next two or three years will be critical: an emotional counterattack on the abortion issue can move precious votes away from the GOP. The Big GOPers are having none of it. Legislatures in Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, Ohio, North Dakota, and Wisconsin have gone wild and passed laws that apply various tricks to undermine legal abortion.

Nobody asked the broad range of Republican voters what they thought of this. Fundie voters constituted no more than 12% to 15% of the voting population. That is a minority of their own party.

Republican statements could all have come from clones of Michele Bachmann:

“It’s Jessica who’s having to have her body live with the ravages of this vaccine.”
—Representative Michele Bachmann, Minnesota. Inventing dangers for the HPV vaccine

“Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and… if they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. …they feel pleasure….”
— Representative Michael Burgess

“But on the rape thing, it’s like, how does putting more violence onto a woman’s body and taking the life of an innocent child that’s a consequence of this crime, how does that make it better?”
— John Koster, Washington State

“As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
— Clayton Williams, Texas. He did say that with a microphone in front of him.

“One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country…. Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
—Rick Santorum, then a Senator from Pennsylvania

“I struggled with it myself for a long time, and I realized that life is a gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something God intended to happen.”
—Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock

“I would hope that when a woman goes into a physician with a rape issue, that that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage, or was it truly caused by a rape.”
—Chuck Winder, Idaho state senator

“These Planned Parenthood women, the Code Pink women, and all of these women have been neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness…We are not going to have our men become subservient.”
— Representative Allen West, Florida

“Ethel Waters, for example, was the result of forcible rape.”
—Mike Huckabee, former Governor of Arkansas, as part of an extended rejection of rape as a reason for abortion

“The method of conception doesn’t change the idea of life.”
—Paul Ryan, vice-presidential nominee, rejecting rape as a reason for abortion

Abortions make up “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.”
—Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona. Off by 87% of their budget.

“The executive director of Planned Parenthood in Illinois said they want to become the LensCrafter of big abortion in Illinois.”
— Representative Michele Bachmann, Minnesota

“Put yourself in the father’s [rapist’s] situation.”
—Tom Smith, Pennsylvania

“The facts show that people who are raped —who are truly raped—the juices don’t flow, the body functions don’t work and they don’t get pregnant. Medical authorities agree that this is a rarity, if ever.”
—Representative Henry Aldridge, North Carolina

Spoil yourself with one more Bachmannism:

“There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design.”
— Michelle Bachmann

“Intelligence design,” yes. That’s for cars and planes and phones.

And there are no practical responses for today’s Republicans, other than to repeat their usual swill. Going into 2014 election season we have Obama virtually winning the War on Terror with 10 terrorism deaths of Americans in 5 years, a recovering economy, and Chris Christie echoing Nixon’s V.P. Spiro Agnew — the Corruption Kid.

Add to that the possibility of vaporizing abortion as a GOP vote-generator. One other statement might surprise you, that it gets majority agreement from voting Republicans:

“The dismaying truth is that Birtherism is part of a larger pattern of rejection of reality that has taken hold of intimidating segments of one of the two political parties that alternate in power in our governing institutions. It is akin to the view that global warming is a hoax, or that the budget can be balanced through spending cuts alone, or that contraception causes abortion, or that evolution is just another theory, on a par with the theory that the earth is six thousand years old.”
? Hendrik Hertzberg

Ignoring their own “Base” voters, GOP candidates insist on supporting wack-job dogma.

American voters will make them pay for it. The country’s very low information voters… don’t vote. Increasingly these Big Republicans are dead to the rest of us.