Todd Akin, a Republican Representative from Missouri, said over the weekend he believes that a woman who is “legitimately raped” cannot become pregnant – according to science. “First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”It should go without saying that there is precisely no scientific basis for this idea. There are over 36,000 pregnancies that result from rape every year; one scientific study seemed to show that rape actually increases the chance of conception. (Akin has recanted his quote, saying he misspoke, and is now being asked to resign.)But hey, science is complicated—there’s just so much information out there, and one time a doctor said that getting raped makes it difficult for women to have successful pregnancies, because of all the emotional trauma. There’s tons of garbage like that out there masquerading as truth.The crucial difference here is that this clueless gentleman is a member of the committee in Congress that addresses America’s scientific goals. Mr. Akin, who has demonstrated a failed understanding of the human reproductive process, is a prominent member of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee. It’s a committee that holds some serious power, too—the Science committee has jurisdiction over NASA, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Science Foundation.It would be one thing if Akin were the lone anti-science science expert on the committee. But he’s not alone. The governing body in charge of many of our most important scientific institutions currently includes a cadre of ideologues with views that disregard actual science as violently as Akin’s, at a time when science funding and public understanding of science are hitting new lows.Read the rest over at Motherboard.