Indiana enacted a near total ban on abortion last week. It does, however, provide the sort of exceptions that many anti-choicers once supported: rape, incest, and the life of the mother.
The bill was not pure enough for some Republican state legislators including Rep. John Jacob who uttered one of the most ignorant and bone-chilling quotes imaginable on the floor of the state lege. And that is why Indiana State Rep John Jacob is malaka of the week.
Jacob is an accountant and auditor by trade. Most accountants I’ve known tend to be moderate and on the dull side. Not John Jacob, he’s a bomb thrower:
“The body inside of the mom’s body is not her body. Let me repeat that: The body inside of the mom’s body is not her body. Not her body, not her choice,” said Jacob, a staunch abortion opponent who supported removing exceptions including for rape.
“Trying to end all abortion is not forced birth, but rather it is trying to end murdering children,” he said on the floor.
I don’t know quite what to do with such a dangerously sexist, idiotic, and unscientific quote. Jacob believes that a woman is just a vessel or, worse, a baby factory whose sole purpose is to reproduce. One would have hoped that such thinking would be restricted to the Warren Jeffs of the world but it is not.
If there’s a retrograde, radical, or reactionary position on an issue, John Jacob supports it:
Jacob claims to be for “religious freedom” but he’s such a notorious Islamophobe that he’s been admonished for his bigoted Facebook posts by the Speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives. One would think that an “abortion abolitionist” would work closely with Catholic anti-abortion groups but you’d be wrong. The Catholic League itself a right-wing group has collected some of Jacob’s greatest anti-papist hits:
The Ku Klux Klan dominated Indiana politics in the early 1920’s. Its grip on the state was only broken when KKK leader D.C. Stephenson was convicted of rape and murder in 1925. The Hoosier Klan were rabidly anti-Catholic as well as racist to the core. That makes John Jacob a neo-Klansman as well as a Christian Nationalist malaka. He’s the hater’s hater.
There’s some good news on the John Jacob front. He’s a lame duck who lost his reelection bid in the Republican primary last May. That’s right, John Jacob is too extreme for the Trump dominated GOP in Mike Pence’s home state. And that is why John Jacob is malaka of the week.
The last word goes to R. Dean Taylor with a song about a murderer on the lam:
I wonder if John Jacob, a man with two first names (Harry Chapin reference), would admit that a woman has a right to stand her ground in the face of a potentially lethal threat from inside her own body?