gracchusdixit

Republican legislators throughout the land are passing laws designed to prevent women from ending unwanted or dangerous pregnancies.  Many of these legislators aren’t content to impede or stop abortions.  They want to criminalize the women who seek them as well as the physicians who provide them.  Even worse,  many of their laws also attack contraception, inarguably the most effective way of preventing the very abortions they claim to deplore.

Such people invoke “family values” and call themselves “pro-life”.  But their assault on women has nothing whatever to do with preserving families or protecting life itself.  If Republican lawmakers and their constituents really cared about the lives of women and their children, they would champion decent healthcare and daycare, sufficient nutrition, and robust public education.  They would care as much for those who are already in the world as for those who have yet to enter it.  The truth is, protecting “life” isn’t what obsesses these people.  What obsesses them is sex—and, in particular, the desire to control the sexual and reproductive choices of women.

No one ever revealed this more clearly (and unapologetically) than Rick Santorum during his ill-fated run for the Republican Presidential nomination a couple of years ago:

“One of the things I will talk about that no President has talked about before is, I think, the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. Many in the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception’s okay.  It’s not okay, because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Although Santorum’s view of “how things are supposed to be” reflects a particularly bizarre stew of Catholic and evangelical attitudes, all the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—have, to one degree or another, always been obsessed by the “sexual realm.”  The Christian obsession, however, may be the most grotesque.

The obsession didn’t begin with Christ himself, who had remarkably little to say on the subject.  It began with Saint Paul.  A lifelong bachelor, Paul advocated celibacy, railed against  “fornication,” denounced the idea of men even “touching” women, and tolerated marriage solely because he realized that total abstinence was, to put it mildly, a “reach” for anyone less tied up in psychological knots than himself.  This concession certainly didn’t come about because he believed that Christians, or anyone else, needed to propagate.  Paul imagined that Armageddon was just around the corner at which point all earthly life would come to an abrupt end.  For him, the procreative function of sex was an irrelevance.

Then, of course, there was Saint Augustine, the most famous of the Early Church Fathers, who was infamously tortured by his own sexual urges.  His personal experience  of those urges caused him to worry that, in any contest between sexual desire and God, sex just might win.   We have Augustine to thank for the lamentable notion that sex is “original sin”.  Worse yet, it was Augustine who decided that Eve was to blame, by bringing sin into the world and tempting Adam.  Adam, poor bastard, was simply the innocent victim of Eve’s sluttish duplicity—an interpretation that Rick Santorum would undoubtedly find congenial.

After Augustine, things went steadily downhill, in ways that even he did not intend.  Other Church Fathers—Ambrose and Jerome among them—were so tormented by the sin of sex that, for them, even the containing bounds of marriage were inadequate.  Nothing less than total abstinence would do.  This was not something that Augustine had advocated.  But it was too late.  The genie was already out of the bottle.

And that genie is still with us, spreading its mischief in one “red,” evangelical state after another.  In the name of “protecting life,” sex-obsessed Republicans are determined to stamp out the sin of sex by controlling and punishing the original sinners—women.

What such people refuse to recognize is that sex is a perfectly natural part of life.  It doesn’t require procreation or even marriage for its justification.  It simply exists, like life itself. Those who deny this aren’t “pro-life” at all.  They are life-deniers.  We should deny them the chance to impose their obsession on the rest of us.