WASHINGTON – It’s hard to not go back to what drove my brother from the Republican Party and caused his political troubles in Missouri when I look at the Todd Akin rape victim, spastic tubes, “legitimate” versus “forcible” versus “non-forcible” phenomenon, which stipulates that women are expected to be incubators for rapists, which by the way, is a view Paul Ryan shares. Ryan even doubled down this week by saying he was “proud” of his “pro life” record, never wincing at that description, because it obviously makes a woman’s life counts less than an unborn egg. So, we’re on the cusp of the GOP Akin convention, when the only hope Mitt Romney has of winning in November is by focusing on the economy. Good luck with that, because the Democrats have no intention of allowing this to happen.

But at least Ryan wasn’t stupid enough to vocalize his shared Akin philosophy on camera, because Romney believes there should be exceptions for rape and incest, the only humane stance for abortion rights opponents. However, Mitt Romney has said he’d sign “personhood” legislation, which excludes womanhood involved in birth in the first place. So the political party that allowed my brother to co-sponsor the ERA bill in the Missouri state senate, as well as support abortion rights as well, is now a fundamentalist hot bed of extremists who will be allowed to take the entire country off the one subject that’s most important: how we get this country back to a We Build Things society again.

While a recent PPP poll is depressing, Survey USA, while revealing the hot bed fundamentalism across Missouri, also reveals some hope there. What’s even better is that Republicans are now going rogue in Missouri, replicating what happened in Alaska when Lisa Murkowski did the same thing.

Ann Coulter said it best this week in “MISSOURI: THE ‘SHOW ME ANOTHER G.O.P. CANDIDATE’ STATE.” Being a former Miss Missouri, I know a little bit about this “show me” stuff and my former home state just might be able to pull this off.

And yet, the Republican Party now has cemented the Akin-Paul Ryan platform in to their convention purpose. Their “human life amendment that excludes the woman” is now a reality. If you’re raped or a victim of incest, as far as the Republican Party is concerned, as a woman you’re now an incubator.

It’s the 21st century everywhere except inside the Grand Old Party, emphasis on old.

Conservatism is a philosophy that once was moored in not involving government and politics in people’s lives too directly, certainly not with a purpose of controlling them. But today’s Republican Party thinks they have that right, with Missouri a leading light in that backward view, which will never win in the end. It’s just too bad there aren’t any Republicans willing to start a coalition inside that party to push back on what’s taking way too much energy out of the political conversation.

What’s the matter with Todd Akin is the same thing that’s wrong with the Republican Party today, which is drawing the Democratic Party further right as well, because they’re trying to sop up people offended by the current Republican stance on women’s freedom, which is founded on the notion that women aren’t equal to men when it comes to self-determination. That a woman’s womb makes her hostage to government fiat.

The result is more people on the left and right who won’t vote and who can blame them?

So, with Republican fundamentalism ruling, Pres. Obama and the Democrats are embracing fiscal conservatives in order to cobble together just enough to tilt elections in their direction, while not making the progressive economic argument that is powerful at a time when building a new American economic engine should be everyone’s focus.

Here’s a news flash for religious conservatives, wherever they reside in the political pantheon, because Democrats have also embraced politicians with these views; see Stupak-Pitts and Pres. Obama’s gratuitous executive order. A woman finding herself in the throes of an unplanned pregnancy that she can’t abide will always find a way to get an abortion. Even if it puts her own life in danger.

In this Roman Catholic stronghold, where abortion is deeply stigmatized, reproductive health providers tell stories of women going to pharmacies across the border in Mexico, in search of a drug they hope will terminate unwanted pregnancies. […] In a 2010 study he published in the journal Reproductive Health Matters, a 30-year-old Texas woman reported that she started taking misoprostol in her 13th week of pregnancy. She bled so badly that she had to be admitted to a hospital. The woman said cost was the factor behind her decision to try misoprostol instead of visiting a clinic. But she had no regrets. “If I was put in the exact situation all over again,” she was quoted as saying, “I’d probably do it again.” [Texas Tribune]

What Todd Akin represents, which is why Mitt Romney and Republicans want him out of the race so badly and why Paul Ryan called him himself, is the callousness and controlling fundamentalism embedded in today’s Republican Party whose “big tent” fantasy doesn’t include women who demand what men have inherently, which is the civil and human rights to have control over our own body. He also is a reminder that Paul Ryan was one of the co-sponsors to a bill in January 2011 that intended to redefine rape as “forcible,” as if there is any other kind. Ryan’s flip flopped on the “forcible” part in interviews this week, but he’s also said he’s “proud” of his “pro life” record and you can’t have both.

Compared to what Republicans are intending for women at least Pres. Obama has put the largest expansion of power in U.S. history in women’s hands by making contraception free, as well as a host of other reproductive health care options. Of course, he also chose politics over science on Plan B, as well as codified the Hyde Amendment for all time in Obamacare, but that’s picking gnat crap out of pepper, right. These are inconvenient facts that are ignored when looking at Romney-Ryan in the White House. But it’s part of why women continue on this tread mill of individual freedoms.

Until a strong Republican pro women’s freedom and self-determination coalition develops inside that party our country will remain unable to solve the larger issues facing us.

Until Democrats refuse to compromise and coddle their own religious conservatives on matters of women’s fundamental rights of freedoms we’ll keep talking about this subject election after election.

When are political fundamentalists who want government out of food stamps, but expect that same government to police a woman’s body, going to be ostracized and made the pariahs they deserve to be?

Todd Akin is the poster boy this election that should be about the economy.

Partisan voters may care about social issues, but I don’t know anyone who is an undecided voter, and there are very few of them, who’ll vote on them.

Taylor Marsh, a veteran political analyst and former Huffington Post contributor, is the author of The Hillary Effect, available at Barnes and Noble and on Amazon. Her new-media blog www.taylormarsh.com covers national politics, women and power.

Note: The title is a take off on “What’s the Matter with Kansas?,” a book by Thomas Frank.

Photo credit: unknown graphic circulating new-media sites.