War on Sex gets mainstream notice
The _New York Times_ has noticed that the anti-choice crowd has become more and more the “anti-sex crowd”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07contraception.html.
bq. Many Christians who are active in the evolving anti-birth-control arena state frankly that what links their efforts is a religious commitment to altering the moral landscape of the country. In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they want to change the way Americans have sex.
It’s good to have this kind of awareness, but they still don’t go deep enough; the Times still characterizes the goal of the radical right-wing conservatives as “limiting sex to marriage,” but that’s clearly not the extent of their concerns. What they want is not sanctioned sex; what they want is forced child-bearing. To a small group of very vocal people, it’s improper for anyone — married or not — to have sex without the possibility of having children. And they want to see that option are taken away.
And, just as some radical islamic fundamentalists insist that the burkha is intended to “force respect for and empower women”:http://www.allaahuakbar.net/womens/burka_vs_bikini.htm by protecting them from the attentions of males, Christian fundamentalists insist that withholding birth control is intended to empower and force resepect for women — not to control them:
bq. 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.”
The real goal is clearly now what it has probably always been: a return to a pre birth-control era, where rely on the finances, protection, and good will of men. That’s why these jokers oppose Plan B; it’s why they oppose vaccinations for sexual disease and preventive treatment for HIV. It has nothing to do with the so-called “culture of life,” it has everything to do with the “culture of do-what-we-say.”