Chicago:
A Wisconsin state representative was under fire on Thursday for doubling down on his assertion that "some girls, they rape so easy."
The controversial comments from the freshman Republican come weeks after a Republican congressman from Missouri drew widespread condemnation for declaring that a woman's body can prevent conception in cases of "legitimate rape."
Wisconsin Representative Roger Rivard first made the statement when discussing the case of a local high school student who'd been charged with sexual assault for having sex with an underage girl.
The Chetek Alert paper quoted him in December as saying that his father had warned him "some girls rape easy" -- meaning that some girls could decide later that sex wasn't consensual.
He doubled down on the comments in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Wednesday, saying that he took his father's warnings about the dangers of premarital sex seriously.
"He also told me one thing, 'If you do (have premarital sex), just remember, consensual sex can turn into rape in an awful hurry,'" Mr Rivard told the paper.
"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.'
About three hours after speaking to the paper, Mr Rivard -- who is engaged in a tight reelection race -- sent a statement to the Sentinel in which he said he hoped his comments would not be "misunderstood" and acknowledged that "rape is a horrible act of violence."
Republican vice presidential hopeful Paul Ryan -- a Wisconsin congressman -- has withdrawn his endorsement of Mr Rivard due to the comments, his campaign said on Thursday.