Sex Type Thing

Shorter batshit-crazy culture warriors: contraception is just another word for abortion, and making sex fun has sent society into a tailspin.

For the past 33 years — since, as they see it, the wanton era of the 1960's culminated in the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 — American social conservatives have been on an unyielding campaign against abortion. But recently, as the conservative tide has continued to swell, this campaign has taken on a broader scope. Its true beginning point may not be Roe but Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that had the effect of legalizing contraception. "We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion," says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. "The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set," she told me. "So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception."

It's bizarre that all these self-styled conservatives fall all over themselves praising the good sense and judgement of the fine American people when it suits them -- like when they want another tax cut for themselves. But when it comes to personal, private matters, well, apparently you people are too stupid to know what the right thing is to do in a morally permissive culture. Therefore we must step up and save you heathen bastards from yourselves. You can thank us later, like during the rapture or something.

Dr. Joseph B. Stanford, who was appointed by President Bush in 2002 to the F.D.A.'s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee despite (or perhaps because of) his opposition to contraception, sounded not a little like Daniel Defoe in a 1999 essay he wrote: "Sexual union in marriage ought to be a complete giving of each spouse to the other, and when fertility (or potential fertility) is deliberately excluded from that giving I am convinced that something valuable is lost. A husband will sometimes begin to see his wife as an object of sexual pleasure who should always be available for gratification."

Yes, and? Okay, seriously, where to begin with this nonsense? First is the rather obvious corollary that apparently people who are infertile or past child-bearing years should not have sex, because they will always just be doing it for the fun of it, and that leads to objectification of the partner. Next is the other obvious fact that people who objectify their partners like that are pathological by definition, and very likely were to some degree long before they got the message from the eeeeevil secular culture that it's okay to enjoy a booty call once in a while.

Really, it's the morons who persist in concocting these ridiculous circumlocutions who are pathological. Well, good luck with flipping Griswold, retards. Even in socially-conservative (relatively speaking) America, 93% (and 90% of American Catholics, mind you) are in favor of contraception. If they want to waste their time and think-tank dollars chipping at this one, they're in for a long haul, not that that's ever stopped zealots. I imagine they'll chip at it the way they've chipped at Roe -- in many smaller states, there might only be one clinic in the entire state that performs abortions. In the infamous case of South Dakota, there's exactly one such clinic, and they have to fly the doctor in anonymously from Minneapolis. There's your freedom of choice, ladies.

This slow, steady campaign has made an impact on the country at large: polls show that while most people still support Roe, they have deep misgivings about abortion and tend to support restrictions on it, like parental consent and late-term (or partial-birth) bans. One threat to this strategy, according to some on the right, is South Dakota's passage of an abortion ban, which is meant as a direct challenge to Roe.

I'm one of those people described in the above paragraph, and I think most people are as well. No one in their right mind likes abortion, and there's not a lot to like about allowing the state to subvert parental consent when it's convenient (but, you know, not if the kid takes the family car out joyriding and kills someone; then Mom & Dad are civilly and possibly criminally liable). But while I'm for parental consent laws in principle, I think most of us recognize that these laws are slippery-slope wedges contrived by the activist fringe.

And that's what these people are -- the lunatic fringe. You want to talk about the decline of American culture, how far has it fallen when what used to be marginal becomes mainstream? The sociological discussion of emotional distancing caused by promiscuity is worth having (for some) in that context and that context only; it is not worth legislating, and it is certainly not worth using as some backdoor to overturn Griswold. It is ridiculous that these people have gotten as much coverage as they have.

They worry so much about the commodification of sexual relationships and the trivialization of life, but they pay short shrift to the flip side, that fertility technologies have also contributed to a certain commodification of life. Oh, they mention that it would be horrible if parents started eliminating blastocysts in their quest for a perfect blue-eyed offspring, which is certainly true enough, but how about the fabled gay gene, if it exists? How does that square with their philosophy of life, if a parent decided to "spare" their prospective fetus the "deviant unchristian lifestyle" nature had programmed into its DNA? (And who are we kidding, it would just be the parents sparing themselves from having to explain shit to their co-workers and neighbors, as if it was anybody's goddamned business anyway.)

And to listen to these fools, one might get the impression that all was perfectly well pre-pill, pre-Griswold, that if it hadn't been for a few activist judges and some hairy-armpit womyn's studies lesbos at Wellesley or wherever, the nucular family wouldn't be in this jam. Because apparently before 1968, there was no adultery, no oral sex, no fornication, no promiscuity, no homosexuality, nothing but sweet procreative connubial bliss in the missionary position. And we liked it that way, even as we walked five miles in the snow uphill both ways to the one-room schoolhouse in Everytown, USA. And pussy smelled just like fresh-baked apple pie. Jesus, are these people for real?

Anyway, the real crux of the biscuit may be here:

Last month, Senators Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton — an anti-abortion Democrat and an abortion rights Democrat — introduced legislation that would require insurance companies to cover contraceptives. In part, the idea is to force Republicans to support contraception or be branded as reactionaries. The conservative counter was that giving even more government backing to emergency contraception and other escape hatches from unwanted pregnancy will lead to a new wave of sexual promiscuity. An editorial in the conservative magazine Human Events characterized the effect of such legislation as "enabling more low-income women to have consequence-free sex."

There you have it, and it's such an easy issue to demagogue. Who wants their tax dollars going to support more crack babies born to shiftless welfare mothers, right? Except that's not the way it really plays out. It's really about the working mother who already has two children she can't feed on her measly Walmart paycheck, and gets knocked up again because her no-account boyfriend swore he'd pull out. It's really a control issue, and a class issue, and it needs to be framed as such. I couldn't give two shits what Fred The Pharmacist For Jeebus believes about abortifacent hormones, in the face of science, it's not his right to impose his belief on other adults.

And with their strange little rituals, the Purity Balls and the virginity pledges, you can't help but think those chickens will be coming home to roost soon enough.

Virginity pledges, in which young people vow to abstain from sex until marriage, have little staying power among those who take them, a Harvard study has found.

More than half of the adolescents who make the signed public promises give up on their pledges within a year, according to the study released last week.

Imagine that, teenagers letting their hormones get the best of them, and overcome their solemn oath and commemorative ring. I, for one, am shocked. I know that when I was 16, a promise ring would have kept me on the straight-and-narrow, let me tell you. Hell, when you're 16 you're supposed to tell your parents what they want to hear so they leave you the hell alone. Trouble is, these kids haven't been armed with anything but "say no". And when their hormones overcome that small hurdle, they're....well, they're screwed.

Maybe in more ways than one.

It seems that for a sizable number of young men, the fact that they can get sex whenever they want may have created a situation where, in fact, they're unable to have sex. According to surveys, young women are now as likely as young men to have sex and by countless reports are also as likely to initiate sex, taking away from males the age-old, erotic power of the chase.

On the one hand, every guy out there can sympathize to at least a small extent with a fellow man who may have experienced performance anxiety at least once in his life. (It's never happened to me, of course, but I know other people who have. Heard rumors, anyway.) On the other hand, a straight male in college complaining about women chasing him? Bullshit. Jesus Christ, half of college is spent trying to get laid. Any pressure they're feeling is purely sociological; perhaps because everyone in their clique is fucking everyone else, they know for sure that at some point they will be measured up against one another by these women. So what? Throw your back into it, Junior, and don't worry about it. It's just sex. There's always more where that came from. Indeed, all this article proves to me is that it's not sex that's the problem, it's the hang-ups surrounding it, leads people to all sorts of crazy shit.

Like Cell Block D's new trick ho, the Dukestir:

Cunningham, who is married with grown children, has admitted to romantic, loving relationships with men, both during his Vietnam military service and as a civilian. That was the remarkable story that this publication reported two years ago, when Elizabeth Birch, the former Human Rights Campaign leader, inadvertently outed Cunningham at a gay rights forum.

Birch never mentioned Cunningham’s name, but she talked about a rabidly anti-gay congressman who asked to meet privately with her in the midst of a controversy over his use in a speech on the floor of the House the term “homos” to describe gays who have served in the military.

Alone with Birch and an HRC staffer, the unnamed congressman shared that he had loved men during his life. In telling the story, Birch offered up a few too many details about the closeted congressman.

I dunno. I think a person's private life oughta be just that. But a public figure who has made a career out of demagoguing and taunting homosexuals deserves whatever they get; at the very least one figures that outing them is a public service. All these hang-ups about sex -- about controlling even the intent of the act, as well as the direction and deciding on what sort of partners are approved by the self-appointed moral arbiters, is literally pathological.

Forget the "hate the sin, love the sinner" bullshit, these people are obsessed, and the sooner the conflicted people among them start being honest with themselves and their loved ones about who they really are, the better off they -- and by extension, the rest of us -- will be by finally being rid of their constant meddling. I remember when these same goofballs used to rant about the "social engineering" attempts of the bien pensant lefties of the day, but social engineering is precisely what these people are hellbent on doing.