Conservative War on Sexuality

 Conservatives love to talk about abortion being murder. They talk about baby's skulls being ripped out. Well, scientist made the "morning after pill" so that an egg wont be fertilized, even if sex occured few days before.

But would the Radical Right celebrate the "morning after pill"? After all, less skulls would be ripped out.

But nope, the issue isn't baby skulls, the issue is sexuality.

And now there's talk about the HPV (an STD different from HIV) vaccine.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050530&s=pollitt

Wonderful, you are probably thinking, all we need to do is vaccinate girls (and boys too for good measure) before they become sexually active, around puberty, and HPV--and, in thirty or forty years, seven in ten cases of cervical cancer--goes poof.

[skip sentences]

The Christian right doesn't like the sound of this vaccine at all. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful," Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, "because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.

Raise your hand if you think that what is keeping girls virgins now is the threat of getting cervical cancer when they are 60 from a disease they've probably never heard of.

So if we have the "morning after pill" to prevent pregnancies and a possible vaccine to prevent an STD, why should we be pee-ing in our pants about promiscuous sex? Hmm? Hmmm?

To the Radical Right, the issue isn't teenage pregnancy or STDs, the issue is having them tell us how to run our lives.

Christian conservatives have a special reason to be less than thrilled about the HPV vaccine. Although not as famous as chlamydia or herpes, HPV has the distinction of not being preventable by condoms. It's Exhibit A in those gory high school slide shows that try to scare kids away from sex, and it is also useful for undermining the case for rubbers generally--why bother when you could get HPV anyway?

So that means they dont mind having "sinners" (those who participate in non-marital sex) getting a horrible disease, just so they can say "we told you so".

What next, banning of football helmets

With HPV potentially eliminated, the antisex brigade will lose a card it has regarded as a trump unless it can persuade parents that vaccinating their daughters will turn them into tramps, and that sex today is worse than cancer tomorrow. According to New Scientist, 80 percent of parents want the vaccine for their daughters--but their priests and pastors haven't worked them over yet.

On the 13-year old girl in the homeless shelter who wanted an abortion

She was too young to have sex, too young to know her own mind about abortion--but not too young to be forced onto the delivery table for one of the most painful experiences human beings endure, in which the risk of death for her was three times as great as in abortion

And back to the abortion example?

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.

Conclusion

"It all comes down to the evils of sex," says Trussell. "That's an ideological position impervious to empirical evidence

Blacks and Rednecks

 Both the Far Left and the Far Right love to pit African Americans against rural Southern whites. After all, history tell us that both groups were on the opposite side of Jim Crow. Plus, African Americans support Democrats, Southern whites support Republicans.

But both groups share some cultural similarities.

Religiously, many in both groups are Baptists. The reverends are very expressive, and the followers are very devout.

The sport of American tackle football is very popular among Southern Whites and African Americans, more so than other groups in America.

I thought about those similarities before I ever heard about the book "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Thomas Sowell.

Sowell says that African American culture is heavily influenced by the Southern Whites commonly reffered to as "rednecks".

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20050505.shtml

Black identity has become a hot item in the movies, on television, and in the schools and colleges. But few people are aware of how much of what passes as black identity today, including "black English," has its roots in the history of those whites who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" centuries ago in Britain, before they ever crossed the Atlantic and settled in the South.

[skip paragraphs]

Violence was far more common in the South -- and in those parts of Britain from which Southerners came. So was illegitimacy, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. All of this would become part of the cultural legacy of blacks, who lived for centuries in the midst of the redneck culture of the South.

I put the comments about religious oratory in bold, because you would notice when you listen to white conservative preachers from the South, and from black preachers (ie. Martin Luther King, etc.) they are very expressive and dramatic with a touch of sincerity to go along with it.

Of course, Sowell's comments about violence & "illigetimacy" (babies born to unmarried parents) are very controversial. But let's remember that more whites than blacks are on welfare. It's just that low-income blacks outside of the South tend to live in inner cities and therefore more visible to the media and city dwellers, whereas low-income whites tend to live in rural areas far from big cities, and therefore less visible to the media and city dwellers.

While the national conversation on African Americans focus on those living in urban ghettoes, there is also a large number of low-income African Americans living in rural areas in the South. But even in the South, there is a growing African American middle class, especially in Atlanta.

And while some Northern liberals love to stereotype Southern whites as "uneducated", "racist" rednecks who like to shoot guns and get drunk, a lot of Southern whites don't fit that stereotype. Some are very well educated, and not all Southern whites are in the KKK.