By Jeffrey Page

Who can forget the weird Todd Akin running for the Senate (loser) from Missouri as he declared during the never-ending debate on abortion: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

And who can forget Richard Mourdock, running for the Senate (loser) from Indiana with a new interpretation of the wishes of the Almighty: “. . . even if life begins in that horrible situation of rape…it is something that God intended to happen.” (Incidentally, I don’t think Mourdock ever answered the question: If a rape is intended by God, isn’t it a little presumptuous for ordinary humans to try the rapist in a criminal trial?)

Some candidates and office holders just never know to keep their mouths shut.

Nowadays, Ken Cuccinelli, the attorney general of Virginia, is running for governor. Recently he came along with a position he held 10 years ago when he was in the state legislature. His bold initiative: It is time, he said, to reinstate the anti-sodomy laws, but he began with a false assumption.

“My view is that homosexual acts – not homosexuality, but homosexual acts – are wrong. They’re intrinsically wrong,” he has said.

No question Cuccinelli can kiss the gay vote goodbye, but after that business about homosexual acts, he seems to forget that there’s another group of people out there who would be affected by enactment and enforcement of anti-sodomy laws. That would be the estimated 96 percent of the population who are not gay but who nevertheless might enjoy anal or oral sex.

Cuccinelli also conveniently forgets that 10 years ago, the Supreme Court found Texas’s anti-sodomy law unconstitutional because it deprived some people of their rights to such constitutional guarantees as equal protection and due process.

In another remarkable lapse of memory, he fails to remember that the Supreme Court ruled in 1965 that government cannot and must not intrude itself into the bedrooms of Americans. It ruled so while striking down a Connecticut law that forbade the use of contraceptives. That law violated an American “right to marital privacy,” the court said.

Speaking of Texas, one of its congressional representatives, Michael Burgess, says that abortion should be outlawed because boy fetuses like to masturbate.

“Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful. They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to think that they could feel pain?” Burgess said.

The question of an abortion’s inflicting pain on a fetus has been discussed for years but never proved one way or the other. And the question of whether those little in-utero guys manage to make themselves happy with a well-placed hand is just too bizarre.

And what of little girl fetuses? Surely their little hands occasionally wind up between their little legs, just like the little boys. Does that bring them a little pleasure? Or is Burgess telling us that girls are not part of his sexual pleasure-and-pain theorem?

Science is not on Burgess’ side. “We certainly can see a movement of a fetus during that time, but in terms of any knowledge about pleasure or pain – there are no data to assess,” Jeanne Conry, the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told U.S. News and World Report.

So where does Burgess, who identifies himself as a “former” obstetrician and gynecologist, get his information? From watching X-rated sonograms?