Akin, rape, and sovereignty over self

For more than twenty years, I kept it a secret. I was 17 when it happened. My sense of self changed forever. Over the course of six days, the tastes, the tightness of the phone cord that bound my hands, and the violence of their exertions, and especially the smells of those young men that raped me repeatedly in a squalid apartment, were seared into my memory. They introduced me to evil, embodied evil incarnate quite literally, and it is through them that my dialogue with evil began. This experience brought about my first unforced prayers to God…

The sanctity of our womb and the struggle to balance laws for people of many faiths and no faith makes for labrynthine political discourse. If we lived in the perfect world where every pregnancy was a blessing, I would stand shoulder to shoulder with Akin. But we don’t. We live in a world where rape is one of the most under reported crimes, because women fear the shame will define them.

I have seen evil, experienced evil, and been delivered through the fire by God’s mercy. No man who shares Akin’s view of my womb, no woman who wishes to replace his zealotry with her own, deserves to be seen as a mainstream representative of any political party or as a spokesperson for God.