Maine Rep. Larry Lockman Finds It’s Hard to Live Down Pro-Rape Comments

A state lawmaker in Maine is having a hard election season after
some comments he made about rape decades ago resurfaced. “If a
woman has the right to abortion, why shouldn’t a man be free to use
his superior strength to force himself on a woman?” asked Rep.
Larry Lockman (R-Amherst) in 1990. Now that phrase features
prominently
in a new anti-Lockman mailing from the Maine Democatic
Party. 

Apparently Lockman’s political career has been dotted with
controversial commentary. In February, Bangor Daily News
writer
Mike Tipping noted that Lockman—a first-term representative who
has “quickly established himself as a vocal leader” of the Maine
GOP’s tea party wing—was once active in campaigning against income
taxes but switched focus in the mid-1980s to HIV fearmongering and
denouncing gay men. In one 1987 letter to the Lewiston Sun
Journal, Lockman wrote:

In the overwhelming majority of cases, people are dying because
of their addiction to sodomy. They are dying because progressive,
enlightened, tolerant people in politics and in medicine have
assured the public that the practice of sodomy is a legitimate
alternative lifestyle, rather than a perverted, depraved crime
against humanity.

He also called anal sex “biologically-insane” and the
“normalization of homosexuality” one of the most pressing moral
issues of our time. In the early 1990s, Lockman became highly
concerned with protesting abortion. A letter-to-the-editor of the
Lewiston Sun Journal
quotes Lockman saying the following: 

If a woman has (the right to abortion), why shouldn’t a man be
free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman? At
least the rapist’s pursuit of sexual freedom doesn’t (in most
cases) result in anyone’s death. 

A woman’s bodily autonomy comes second to either an embryo’s
or a man’s claims on it, but certainly somebody other than the
woman herself has a right to it, of that much Lockman is
certain! (And can we just pause to recognize the utter
creepiness of the phrase “the rapist’s pursuit of sexual
freedom”?) 

After the Bangor Daily News column came out,
Lockman released a statment saying “I have always been
passionate about my beliefs, and years ago I said things that I
regret. … today I am focused on ensuring freedom and economic
prosperity for all Mainers.”