Colorado's conservative talk-radio hosts are unified in denouncing of Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin's statement that the female body has a natural ability to repel the sperm of rapists.
But they've been a bit more iffy on the question of how serious it was for Akin, who's vowing not to drop out of the Missouri Senate race, to distinguish between "legitimate" rape from other kinds.
"If you're a guy, and you throw the word 'legitimate' in front of rape, you're in trouble," KLZ radio host Jason Worley told listeners Monday. "You're already in trouble."
In trouble? As if you were asked to take out the trash by your wife and you forgot?
Is Worley saying that if Akin had been a woman, she could have thrown out the phrase "legitimate rape" without much backlash?
All you women, send me an email if you agree with that one.
Worley has a decent sense of humor, and let's hope he was trying to make a man joke, but he certainly wasn't joking when he started to speculate about how Akin could have better articulated his position on "legitimate rape."
What would have been the proper adjective for Akin to use to modify the word "rape?" Here's what Akin should have said, according to Worley:
If [saying "legitimate rape"] was all he did, he could actually come back, and he honestly could, and say, what I meant was 'actual' rape cases, like when there was a crime committed...He may have been able to come back from it."
Now you understand what he means, right? It's simple. Rape needs an adjective like "actual" before it.
So that means other crimes need modifiers too? Actual murder? Actual burglary? Actual theft?
We need the word "actual" to distinguish these crimes from the fake ones?
Denver talk-show host Mike Rosen, on Denver's KOA Tuesday, also sort of defended Akin:
"He had a very ill-phrased remark, put his foot in the mouth, talking about whether abortion should be allowed in cases, as he put it, of 'legitimate' rape. What he meant to say was in the case of very clear forcible rape. In any event, this is an area into which he should not have gone."
Take a close look and you'll see that Rosen, like Worley, has developed a new category of rape.
It's the "very clear forcible" rape.
By adding the adverbs "very clear," Rosen is one-upping Rep. Mike Coffman, Rep. Cory Gardner, Rep. Doug Lamborn, and Rep. Scott Tipton, who all voted to redefine the definition of rape so that federal funding would only be available for "forcible" rape, not other kinds.
For Rosen, it looks like only the "very forcible" kind of rape counts?
I didn't get a chance to listen to all Colorado radio hosts, but one can only imagine all the other categories of rape that they might come up with.
Please send me any and all new rape categories you hear from those creative conservative radio hosts -- and from anyone else for that matter.
I'm working on a comprehensive list of rape categories, which I'm hoping to pair up with other crimes, so we can wordsmith the entire criminal code of Colorado.