You must check out Katha Pollitt's latest in The Nation, Virginity or Death. (And not just because it has to do with my favorite subject.)
Pollitt argues that conservative efforts to keep a vaccine for HPV away from women—much like emergency contraception—has to do with nothing more than keeping us chaste. I couldn't agree more.
A snippet:
As they flex their political muscle, right-wing Christians increasingly reveal their condescending view of women as moral children who need to be kept in line sexually by fear. That's why antichoicers will never answer the call of prochoicers to join them in reducing abortions by making birth control more widely available: They want it to be less available. Their real interest goes way beyond protecting fetuses--it's in keeping sex tied to reproduction to keep women in their place. If preventing abortion was what they cared about, they'd be giving birth control and emergency contraception away on street corners instead of supporting pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions and hospitals that don't tell rape victims about the existence of EC...How sexist is denial of Plan B? Antichoicers may pooh-pooh the effectiveness of condoms, but they aren't calling to restrict their sale in order to keep boys chaste.
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I'm for a total banning of all contraceptives, be they for males or females.
It's called equality. :)
MC,
You are seriously wearing on my nerves.
Jessica
How so? I'm a persons with strong convictions and I believe in advancing those convictions in the form of meaningful achievements as political policies.
If I had strong beliefs but didn't fight for them and lobby for them, I'd be nothing but a weakling and a coward.
An accomplished journalist and newspaper editor once said...
"He who knows the truth and does not speak itis a miserable coward."
I think they yearn for an America that never really existed.
Sexual repression? Been there, done that. Weird things happen when a society is repressed. Very weird things.
Yeah, wierd things like the germans. Ya ever notice how on the HBO series its always the germans who are doing the really freaky things? Is that bigotry to think germans are sex freaks? Is HBO a bigoted network for portraying them that way?
In the same week that pro-choicers handed out birth control(condoms) to 10-11 year olds (without their parents being notified that they were going to be doing it) at a drug and alchohol awareness function, you have the nerve to accuse the religious right of wanting impose standards of behavior. Those people were hypocrites.
As for the use of birth control, most reasonable people are all for it. They just don't want it given to their kids willy nilly on the playground without the parents aproval and without some good moral guidance to go along with the age appropriate presentation (not 10-11 for goodness sake).
A very vocal minority on the right has got you people spun into making sweeping generalities like "That's why antichoicers will never answer the call of prochoicers to join them in reducing abortions by making birth control more widely available"
Lets look at the recent progress the middle of the road people in america have made recently (I consider myself such)
1. Legalized EC - still meeting resistance from hard core right wingers.
2. Parental Notification Laws - currently being passed but still meeting resistance from hard core left wingers.
In case some of you haven't noticed, the majority of America(middle) is passing the laws the way they want to, and the extreme left and extreme right is being left out of the debate. I'm not trying to say I told you so, but............
I don't see what the big deal is about hard-core Christians and contraceptives. The only passage I can think of that even comes close to referring to such a thing is
On a thorough reading of the passage, you see that the sin of Onan is not spilling his seed at all.
You see, in those days (as the passage clearly states) it was a brother's duty to marry his brother's widow in cases where the marriage had produced no males. The first born son of the new relationship would be, by law and in the eyes of God, the child of the deceased brother, thereby providing him an heir.
This is known as levirite law. Such marriages are rare today, but they do occur, particularly in underdeveloped Asian and Middle Eastern countries.
Why Onan pulled out is unclear, but the reasons could range from bringing shame upon his dead brother to not wanting to split the inheritence with the new son.
A kind suggestion to religious folks: reading and attempting to actually understand your holy book, especially with a sense of chronal and societal context, really would be to your own benefit.