The passage yesterday of South Dakota’s sweeping abortion ban, deliberately designed to prompt a challenge to Roe v. Wade and which provides no exceptions save abortions necessary to save the life of the mother, has popularized this PBS video clip of SD State Senator Bill Napoli, explaining the circumstances under which he’d be willing to grant an abortion: “A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.” The “Sodomized Religious Virgin Exception,” as Napoli’s earnest soundbite has been dubbed around the blogosphere, leaves little doubt about the motivations of the bill’s backers: not protecting fetal life so much as punishing women who willingly had — and maybe even enjoyed — sex. As Napoli further explains, the ideal is getting back to the “Wild West” shot-gun weddings of his childhood, where no couple engaged in premarital sex without “the whole darn neighborhood” forcing them into wedlock. “You just didn’t allow that sort of thing” — that would be extra-marital sex going unpunished by the community — “to happen…And I happen to believe that can happen again. I don’t think we’re so far beyond that that we can’t go back to that.” We’re a little closer already this week.