What is going on?  It’s 2012 and politicians on both sides of the pond are confused about what exactly the difference is between sex and rape.  Is it time that along with GCSEs, children are given a multiple-choice paper on sexual consent?  If you fail, you remain at school?

George Galloway would still be there, looking ludicrous in a school uniform but in fairness not nearly as ludicrous as he looked dressed as a cat.  Last week he jumped into the Assange debate, saying that “Even taken at its worst, if the allegations made by these two women were true, 100% true, and even if a camera in the room captured them, they don’t constitute rape.  At least not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it.”

By extension this means that Gorgeous was calling the President of the Queens Bench Division of the High Court of England and Wales, along with Mr. Justice Ouseley, senseless.  (Their judgment at paragraph 109: “In our view on this basis, what was described in the EAW was rape.”)  I’d love to see them call him on that.

He also described nonconsensual sex as “bad manners.”  Ladies, do not invite George Galloway to dinner.  He doesn’t know the difference between failing to bring a bottle of wine and rape.

Across the pond, Todd Akin revealed his belief that women’s bodies have an automatic fright-related spermicide, and that women can’t get pregnant through “legitimate rape.”  In other words, a rape victim who is pregnant must be lying because otherwise her body would have zapped the rapesperm.  What a good way to tell!  Eliminates the need for a ducking stool!

With slightly less media attention, Paul Ryan managed to describe rape as a “method of conception” and Tom Smith said that forcing a woman to remain pregnant if she’s raped is no different to forcing her to remain pregnant if she conceives outside marriage, and suggested that he did this to his own daughter.  Wow.

Have I missed a memo about the workings of time and space, and we’re actually back in Deuteronomy?  That sexual violence against women should be so casual a thing, and that political leaders appear not  to understand the value of consent, in 2012, beggars belief.