Ta-Nehisi Coates: Republican Indiana Senate Candidate Richard Mourdock's Pious Cruelty

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Via The Wire, here is Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock:

I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen….

[I]f you believe that all human life is a gift, and if you believe God is a personal motivating force behind every single conception of human life, then it seems pretty logical to conclude that all pregnancies, even ones induced by rape, are "a gift from God." 

Mourdock of course, by accident of biology, will never have to bear such gifts. But to argue that the female body has the means to "shut that whole thing down," or that the torture of women is somehow divinely sanctioned takes more than just an accident of biology. It takes the ability to speak about things of which you are ignorant as though you are informed. It takes unacknowledged blindness. 

It takes an appetite for cruelty.