The one thing that makes me sure no Republican official or polemicist will agitate for the return of slavery is that the institution requires some responsibility on the part of slave owners. Indentured servitude is probably on the table somewhere; perhaps we can reintroduce the welfare state with the money going directly to employers.

Republicans are fixated on ownership of others. Nothing is more invasive than torture, and the Bush administration continue to assert their right to implement it. Invading another country and killing many of its citizens in order to achieve one’s own goals is an equally bold assertion of ownership; few statements of political or strategic philosophy are more repugnant than the president’s “flypaper” strategy, in which he asserts the right to expose Iraqis to terrorists so that the terrorists won’t come here.

Anti-choice advocates have made increasingly clear that for them, outlawing abortion is a matter of exercising control over the bodies and behavior of women. South Dakota today made law a bill aimed at forcing women to carry unwanted pregnanices to term regardless their circumstances. The legislators and the governor insist it’s about the right of blastocysts to become human beings, but it isn’t: it’s about punishment and control. If the rights of cells and children were an issue, the law would make provision for the medical and social care of those children born from unwanted pregnancies; it doesn’t.

And the only thing that separates the law from state sanctioned torture is that although it enshrines the near absolute right of rapists and child molesters to fatherhood, it doesn’t officially legitimate rape and incest. Even that gracious ommission may prove largely illusory: in an American culture where female sexuality is more or less criminalized, gaining convictions against rapists and perpetrators of incest may become as difficult as it is in other cultures where religious law prevails.

Among the most consistently eloquent writers on abortion rights and the general culture of moral and physical violence embraced by Republicans in recent years is Hullabaloo proprietor Digby. He recently highlighted remarks from a South Dakota state legislator regarding what circumstances would warrant permitting a woman access to her own uterus. The comments sound as though they’re coming from someone with a severe psychiatric sexual disorder. They probably are; it’s just that the sexual sicko in question, Bill Napoli, makes the law in South Dakota.

A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

And here’s Digby exploring the chamber of horrors Napoli carries around in his head.

Do you suppose all these elements have to be present for it to be sufficiently psychologically damaging for her to be forced to bear her rapists child, or just some of them? I wonder if it would be ok if the woman wasn’t religious but she was a virgin who had been brutally, savagely raped and “sodomized as bad as you can make it?” Or if she were a virgin and religious but the brutal savage sodomy wasn’t “as bad” as it could have been?

Certainly, we know that if she wasn’t a virgin, she was asking for it, so she should be punished with forced childbirth. No lazy “convenient” abortion for her, the little whore. It goes without saying that the victim who was saving it for her marriage is a good girl who didn’t ask to be brutally raped and sodomized like the sluts who didn’t hold out. But even that wouldn’t be quite enough by itself. The woman must be sufficiently destroyed psychologically by the savage brutality that the forced childbirth would drive her to suicide (the presumed scenario in which this pregnancy could conceivably “threaten her life.”)

Someone should ask this man about this. He seems to have given it a good deal of thought. I suspect many hours have been spent luridly contemplating the brutal, savage rape and sodomy (as bad as it can be) of a religious virgin and how terrible it would be for her. It seems quite clear in his mind.

The link between war, torture, ownership of women and the punitive approach to poverty that distinguishes Republicans isn’t a casual one, and the consequences are demonstrably horrible across the board. The current New York Review of Books carries a Garry Wills review of Jimmy Carter’s recent book, “Our Endangered Values,” in which Wills highlights some of the fallout from conservative rage. On abortion:

.. the anti-life movement that calls itself pro-life protects ignorance by opposing family planning, sex education, and informed use of contraceptives, tactics that not only increase the likelihood of abortion but tragedies like AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The rigid system of the “pro-life” movement makes poverty harsher as well, with low minimum wages, opposition to maternity leaves, and lack of health services and insurance. In combination, these policies make ideal conditions for promoting abortion, as one can see from the contrast with countries that do have sex education and medical insurance. Carter writes:

“Canadian and European young people are about equally active sexually, but, deprived of proper sex education, American girls are five times as likely to have a baby as French girls, seven times as likely to have an abortion, and seventy times as likely to have gonorrhea as girls in the Netherlands. Also, the incidence of HIV/ AIDS among American teenagers is five times that of the same age group in Germany…. It has long been known that there are fewer abortions in nations where prospective mothers have access to contraceptives, the assurance that they and their babies will have good health care, and at least enough income to meet their basic needs.”

The result of a rigid fundamentalism combined with poverty and ignorance can be seen where the law forbids abortion:

“In some predominantly Roman Catholic countries where all abortions are illegal and few social services are available, such as Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, the abortion rate is fifty per thousand. According to the World Health Organization, this is the highest ratio of unsafe abortions [in the world].”

In other words, the result of depriving women of access to decent healthcare, good sex education and legal abortions is an increase in abortion, teen pregnancies, children born into poverty, sexually transmitted disease and abortion-related deaths.

Right on.

There really is no more descriptive term for Republican positions on abortion, war, torture and poverty — including the allergy to providing health care for the working poor and middle class — than “barbaric.” On the issues of war and torture, the primary rationalization is that our actions aren’t as barbaric as those of the people with whom we’re in conflict. While that may be true in some sense, the sheer scale of our efforts puts Osama and every other barbarian to shame.

If an individual behaved as this country at war does, and as South Dakota now is, the chances are good they’d be diagnosed as suffering from a serious personality disorder characterized by an inability to distinguish personal boundaries. It’s not much of a stretch to wonder whether the South Dakota legislator cited by Digby isn’t suffering from that sort of illness, or whether Bush, with his inability to comprehend the moral dimensions of sacrificing tens of thousands of Iraqis and Americans to his own ends, isn’t as well. And of course neither Napoli nor Bush is alone; although the pool of Bush cultists is slowly diminishing, tens of millions of Americans still either support him or think he hasn’t gone far enough in “taking off the gloves,” and the South Dakota law is garnering cheers from vaginaphobes across the country.

The lust for power over other people is, I think, a factor in the warrantless wiretapping program as well. To this point no one, including the various administration officials defending the practice, has made much of a case that the program has proved useful at anything other than extending the reach of the federal government into the lives of US citizens. And there’s no reason at all to think that the government aren’t involved in other, even less savory and productive adventures here.

This is what you get when you entrust government to sadists, control freaks and voyeurs.

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