Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan has withdrawn his endorsement of a Wisconsin state lawmaker who has come under fire for controversial comments he made about rape.
Late last year, while discussing an alleged rape at a high school in his district, Rep. Roger Rivard told a local newspaper that his father taught him "some girls rape easy."
"State Rep. Rivard's comments are outrageous and offensive," Kevin Seifert, the manager of Ryan's congressional campaign, said in a statement on Thursday.
"Congressman Ryan believes there is no place in our discourse for rhetoric such as this. Congressman Ryan cannot support Mr. Rivard or his indefensible comments."
On Wednesday, Rivard told Milwaukee's Journal Sentinel that his comments to the Chetek Alert newspaper in December were taken out of context:
''"[My father] also told me one thing, 'If you do [have premarital sex], just remember, consensual sex can turn into rape in an awful hurry.'
Because all of a sudden a young lady gets pregnant and the parents are madder than a wet hen and she's not going to say, 'Oh, yeah, I was part of the program.' All that she has to say or the parents have to say is it was rape because she's underage.
And he just said, 'Remember, Roger, if you go down that road, some girls,' he said, 'they rape so easy."''
"What the whole genesis of it was, it was advice to me, telling me, 'If you're going to go down that road, you may have consensual sex that night and then the next morning it may be rape.' So the way he said it was, 'Just remember, Roger, some girls, they rape so easy. It may be rape the next morning."
"So it's been kind of taken out of context."
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