Sex

Okay, now that I have your attention....

Actually, I want to delve a little more in detail on a subject that I touched on a few posts ago. Namely, why is sex such a big issue among right-wingers?

I mentioned that several members of the Family Research Council had proclaimed that making the HPV vaccine mandatory was "sending teens the wrong message."

We're talking about a pro-life, pro-family organization which has it's knickers in a twist over a vaccine which could potentially protect the lives and fertility of thousands of women in the US alone every single year; for the simple reason that HPV is (in 92% of cases) sexually transmitted (those who object to the vaccine tend to studiously ignore the other 8%). They're particularly fond of parading HPV horror stories in front of Teenagers to terrorize them into the "Abstinence is the only option" message because unlike HIV or VD, Condoms are less effective in preventing it (to use baseball parlance; you don't need a home run; first base will do).

Give a Christian Conservative the choice between sex and death, and they'll choose death every single time. No sex for unmarried people, no HPV vaccines, no condoms for gays ('cause it's obviously better for them to get AIDS than to use a condom; God obviously never liked them anyway), no emergency contraception, no birth control pills, no abortions for anyone. When a 13-year-old girl in Florida (identified in the newspapers only as L.G.) was pregnant and wanted to terminate the pregnancy (at her doctor's suggestion), Christian soldiers rose to, quite literally, drag the girl kicking and screaming into the delivery room, tie her to the table and force her to undergo what I understand is an extremely painful process; and yes, I realize that there wouldn't have been much actual dragging, kicking or screaming involved, but I don't think I'm exaggerating by much here. Even when it was proven and accepted by the court that carrying the child to term had a threefold greater chance of killing both her and the child than the abortion would, they still insisted that the child had to be born. Pro-life my ass. Fortunately, a federal judge disagreed and allowed the abortion to proceed. The judge, specifically chosen for his conservative views, was labeled as an activist.

I think we can pretty much give up on the idea that the Pro-life, Pro-family end of the political spectrum has anything to do with the "life of the unborn" (setting aside, for the moment, whether the unborn actually is life). This is about sex; and more specifically, keeping sex firmly coupled to reproduction, at least as far as women are concerned. If they were truly protecting "the life of the unborn," they'd be handing out condoms at street corners, they'd be dishing out birth control pills and morning after pills en masse. They'd actually listen when more "liberal" (if you use the term loosely) elements of society suggest that the way to reduce the number of abortions is to educate people on making sex safer. Instead of making emergency contraception available right next to the toothpaste (which, I can pretty much guarantee, would reduce the occurrence of abortion), they applaud pharmacists who refuse to fill out prescriptions, and doctors who don't tell rape victims about emergency contraceptives. And yet interestingly enough, while they may offer lip service to the "low" (actually over 95%, if used properly) effectiveness of condoms; for some reason they're not interested in reducing their availability in order to keep the boys chaste.

This isn't about abortion. This isn't even about reducing the number of abortions, this is about the possibility that (horror of horrors) sex could be fun. That's why they object to abortion, to any form of contraception other than abstinence, to same sex marriage, and to just about anything that could make sex less risky. If word got out that there are reasons for having sex that have nothing whatsoever to do with producing spawn, women could no longer be forced to assume the role that Christian conservatives seem to believe that they should: a brood mare for the state.

Now, I admit that I don't have much in the way of solid data to back this up. At best, this is a hypothesis; but you have to admit that there is a certain internal consistency in the suggestion that maybe this has less to do with abortion than it does forcing women to produce babies.