Jay Sekulow Backs Trump: “Rape Victims Who Want Abortions Should Be Publicly Spanked”

When Donald Trump said this week that, if abortion is recriminalized, women who have abortions should face “some form of punishment,” the anti-choice movement went into damage control mode and Trump quickly attempted to walk back his comments. But not every abortion rights opponent got the memo about not touching the third rail of anti-abortion politics. Jay Sekulow, the chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, the Religious Right legal group founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, similarly seemed to have not gotten the memo.

Speaking on his radio program recently, Sekulow stated that “it is appalling what women these days are being allowed to get away with,” as well as that “Donald Trump is right when it comes to our relationship with women. They should be loved, respected and treated as equals most of the time, but every now and then, they deserve a good spanking and a show of who’s boss.” “Because there is really no other way that we can rectify the situation we’re in today. We are in this position because we as men were too lenient out of respect for women, and now they’re becoming murderers. We can’t have that.”

“Let me put it this way – I will follow Trump’s position on abortion, and raise him a public spanking for every rape victim in the country who gets pregnant and goes in for an abortion,” Sekulow argued. “That seems like a fair enough way of changing their mind and making them realize that the life they’re carrying inside of them shouldn’t be killed for no reason. I literally think we should take pregnant rape victims, bring them out on the street, strip them and spank them on because they decided they wanted an abortion. That’s not right.”

He continued, “At the same time, we can’t force them to back out of their decision, because this is a free society. We’re not the Soviets or the Cubans or the Chinese. All we can do is influence their decision and help them understand the size of the sin they are preparing to commit.”

Sekulow also added, “And I don’t want to hear any objection about that, because there is a thousand other ways we could be handling this, and every single one of them is more invasive and traumatic. Peer pressure is one of the most underestimated weapons of modern society, just like public shaming. We need to exploit that more effectively, which is why I think abortion provides the perfect opportunity for that. The thing about this method of persuasion is, even though they probably won’t know it at the time, they will definitely be thanking us later. So, we’ll have to explain to them that they shouldn’t resist. At the end of the day, giving birth to new life is always a miracle, regardless of how the actual conception took place. That’s what both we and the mothers themselves should really be focusing on. Unless they were raped by Mexicans or refugees. Then abortion is ok.”