At a time when birth control has become so much a part of the fabric of daily life that there are commercials for contraceptives on TV, why have so many Republicans vested their hopes in Rick Santorum? Santorum believes that non-procreative sex is "deeply, morally wrong"; he is so opposed to birth control that he paradoxically blames it for teen pregnancy. Obama -- who believes in infanticide, according to Newt Gingrich -- has become the lightning rod in this newest and possibly the weirdest outbreak in the culture war.
"This was an unexpected gift," Ralph Reed, Chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said of the controversy set off by Obamacare's family planning policies. But a gift to whom? Santorum decisively lost the Catholic vote in Michigan. You'd think that Evangelicals who wear their religion on their sleeves would be more mindful of seeming Pharisaical; Jesus did not look kindly on hypocrites, after all.
But hypocrisy, it seems to me, is what this is all about -- or to put it more charitably, cognitive dissonance, the feeling of discomfort you get when you try to hold two or more contradictory beliefs in your mind at the same time. Believing that it is intolerable when government intrudes in financial matters but not the most intimate spheres of life can't but chafe the brain; it is mentally and spiritually irritating to listen to the thrice-married Newt Gingrich defend marriage -- or for that matter, warn that America is on the road to becoming "a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists." Mitt Romney has been tasked both to protect the prerogatives of the very rich and to appear "ordinary"; Ron Paul is a libertarian on every issue except reproductive freedom. The pronouncements of people who live in a state of perpetual cognitive dissonance often have a distinctly hysterical edge.
"I don't think we've seen in the history of this country the kind of attack on religious conscience, religious freedom, religious tolerance that we've seen under Barack Obama," Romney declared in the Republican debate last Wednesday. If he had been talking about the so-called anti-Jihadist movement in his own party (the people who are leading the charge to ban Shariah law from American courtrooms and prevent Islamic communities from building mosques in American cities), he might not have been too far from the mark, though the anti-Mormon attitudes that led his own family to cross the border into Mexico a century ago were surely worse.
But it has ever been thus. I saw this kind of thing time and again when I was researching The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right. It didn't matter whether the hysteria was inspired by Masons, Mormons, Abolitionists, Catholics, Jews, blacks, gays, immigrants, or women; the same totalizing, absolutist condemnations were heard.
And there's nothing new about the obsessive focus on sex, either. You don't have to be a Freudian to recognize that prudery and prurience go hand in glove. Nineteenth-century Nativists avidly read sensational accounts of libidinous priests and their harems of cloistered nuns; one writer about the "Mormon Seraglio" declared that "forgery, perjury, theft, robbery, burglary, arson, treason, and murder, are very little things in the eyes of the Mormons."
"We should recall," the historian David Brion Davis wrote of stories like those, "that this literature was written in a period of increasing anxiety and uncertainty over sexual values and the proper role of women. As ministers and journalists pointed with alarm at the spread of prostitution, the incidence of divorce, and the lax and hypocritical morality of the growing cities, a discussion of licentious subversives offered a convenient means for the projection of guilt as well as desire. The sins of individuals, or of the nation as a whole, could be pushed off upon the shoulders of the enemy and there punished in righteous anger."
To say that we live in a time of economic uncertainty and changing mores ourselves is to state the obvious. And clearly, the values-driven right is feeling increasingly frustrated. Griswold v Connecticut was decided almost half a century ago; Roe v Wade will celebrate its fortieth anniversary next year. It's been two decades since Dan Quayle delivered his Murphy Brown speech and now more than half of American women under thirty who give birth are unwed. Only about 20 percent of American households consist of married parents with children under 18; almost half (49 percent) of U.S. adults are single.
Gays haven't imperiled marriage; heterosexuals have done the job all by themselves. A generation ago, embattled conservatives could deplore the immorality of the underclass and blame it on welfare or gays or the Hollywood elites. More and more today, they are passing judgments on their own families and communities.
It must come as a profound relief to them -- indeed, as an "unexpected gift" -- that, at least for the next eight months, they can shovel all the blame onto Barack Obama.
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What about the following statements is untrue?
1. Children of unwed mothers are statistically more likely to do less well in school and live in poverty than children who live with their biological mother and father.
2. The incidence of STDs is higher than in 1962.
3. The cause of both pregnancy and STDs is sexual activity.
4. Abstinence is the only thing which is 100% effective in preventing both pregnancy and STDs.
5. The least expensive form of birth control is abstinence.
It is not mindless religious ideology which is driving the Republican position on birth control. It is the five statements above. I am an Atheist and can certainly see the validity of their point of view.
Yes, birth control is 99.5% effective, not 100%. You see that as a reason to abandon it entirely. That's a wacky way to look at it by any standard, and is the textbook definition of "mindless religious ideology".
It is interesting how we can read the same post and come to such radically different conclusions from the same words. Why?
It seems to me that you are seeking something inflammatory to attack, and I simply read the words and didn't acribe an agenda other than what was said.
He didn't say that abstinence was the preferred solution; just that it is 100% effective in preventing both pregnancy and STD's - and the least expensive form of birth control. He mentioned that the rate of STD's is up so all the BC that has been available since 1962 hasn't alleviated that problem. All of which are TRUE statements.
He didn't "reject" birth control. I don't know where you got that from the words that were written.
And really, it is hard to argue that our culture HAS become dysfunctional....
Re-look at the words he wrote and tell me where I go wrong.
On point 4 - I think you can probably come up with 1 example of a pregnancy occuring out of wed-lock and it didn't require sex.
On point 5, unwanted pregnancy seems to be significantly more expensive than the pill or condoms.
But my all time favorite was the Arab world hailing their hero Osama Bin Ladin for taking out the twin towers on 9/11 while blaming the whole thing on a Mossad conspiracy.
I certainly don't, and I am a Conservative female. We oppose the idea that birth control is an inalienable right linked to the happiness of pursuit, for which the entire tax paying public should pay. I would hope homo sapiens has more self-restraint than other mammals. Otherwise it doesn't augur well for our species.
No wife, or wife past childbearing years - no viagra.
You do realize you just lost any chance of an Award from Zero Population Growth?
Who needs sex when you have lots of money /
We can't get laid-why should you? /
Sex today, Transvaginal tomorrow /
Thank God for Divine conception /
2012, feels like 1412 /
We 1% have 99% less sex /
Just because you aren't able to see reality doesn't make it less real!
Yes, THAT Bible.
Look up the Song of Solomon......the Bible "book" (supposedly) written by King Solomon.
It talks about the PLEASURES of sex.
Go read it for yourself and make up your own mind about it.