Up here, at least. Up in the Great White North, we’re pretty lucky.

For, if the U.S. election cycle has shown us anything, it is that our politics is strikingly different, and better. Take gender politics, for instance.
In the U.S., several conservative politicians have made statements about women, and women’s issues, that are impossible to imagine happening in Canada.

There has been a Republican who mused out loud about how some rapes are “legitimate.” There was another GOP stalwart who stated that pregnancies that result from rape are God’s “intention.”

And there have been several pronouncements about birth control, too. Some Republicans want to ban birth control, because they think it is contrary to God’s will.

To a Canadian observing U.S. politics, all of this is beyond crazy. While we have had our fair share of nutbars, it is hard to imagine many of them ever proclaiming rape as divinely ordained, or working to render birth control pills a controlled substance.

This is Globe “unlimited”? Unlimited what, exactly?

You know, it being the new century and 2012 and all. Us being civilized and advanced and whatnot.

Up to now, there’s been things like reaching the moon, the Internet, air flight, the works of Shakespeare and Da Vinci, the Pythagorean Theorem, Beethoven’s Seventh, antibiotics, circumnavigation, civil rights, the Bible and the Qur’an, the Magna Carta, and so on. So many achievements, we humans have had, with more presumably to come. Not bad.

And, then, after all that achievement, after all those things that suggest to you that we’re advancing as a civilization, along come Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin.

Mourdock and Akin are alleged to be human, but you’d actually never know it. In the press, the pair is most often described as U.S. senatorial candidates for Indiana and Missouri, respectively. Being candidates for high office, you’d think they’d be impressive, too.