Politics is in the air. Every other commercial, e-mail or snail mail is crying out for our votes.

Surprisingly, one of the biggest topics in this campaign season is rape. Not surprisingly, it is a by-product of a topic that seems to play into every election, abortion.

Americans who are pro-life or pro-choice are scratching their heads over a senate candidate’s gaffe about “legitimate rape.” During a “legitimate rape” a woman’s body automatically “shuts down” the reproductive system so the woman cannot become pregnant, according to Missouri Republican Todd Akin.

Wow! Really?

Rape is rape is rape, and it should be defined as such without caveat.

A pregnancy from a rape is no more or less rare than a pregnancy from a one-night stand, or between a married couple. Egg and sperm meet, greet and the final battle ends with an egg and sperm sharing enough DNA to become another living creature. In that moment a woman becomes a potential incubator for the next nine months and beyond that, a mother. It can be an unintended moment or one that was carefully planned and lovingly executed.

Or it can be spawned violently and viciously by rape.

A woman who survives a rape has scars that often never heal. She has been attacked and violated in a way that no living creature should ever be. Rape is not about sex, it is about control. It is about forcing a woman’s body to submit to someone else’s demands. It is about power. It is a horrifying act of cruelty and destruction regardless of what the stupendously clueless Missouri Republican Todd Akin says.

This year’s political discussions regarding abortion have given voice to some of the nuttiest comments ever made by men running for office. Instead of concentrating on the rape epidemic in this country, some candidates are diminishing the horror the experience. Akin’s comments, taken to their logical extension, say that raped women who become pregnant must have really wanted it since their reproductive system did not shut down. Some of these Neanderthals must have slept through their junior high health classes, if they had one. (Some states don’t even cover sexual anatomy in school, leaving it to politicians to fill in the blanks with their own magical explanations of the birds and the bees.)

Instead of using valuable airtime to say that women could not get pregnant from an unwanted sexual encounter, our leaders should be working to prevent rape. Women are not the only victims of rape. Men and boys make up a smaller percentage of rape survivors in America, but they are also victims. Far too often teenagers and young men preyed upon by older men and women.

Akin and his ilk believe that if rape victims become pregnant they should be forced to carry the child for their attacker. Emotional scars don’t end there. After being raped and impregnated by a violent man she must decide whether to give her own flesh and blood up for adoption or raise this tiny reminder of that horrendous event for the rest of her life.

Akin and his type assist and support rapists when they make brainless comments. Akin and other clueless men need to be sent to the sidelines by voters – half of whom are women.