This morning, the Indianapolis Star ran an article suggesting that the FDA might retreat from its insistence that access to “Plan B”—the morning-after pill—be only by prescription. The agency “might” allow women over 18 to purchase it over the counter, despite deep concerns that its ready availability might “encourage promiscuity.”
And I thought the Food and Drug Administration was supposed to decide whether food and drugs were safe—not whether their use was moral. Silly me!
A feminist blogger I often read says it’s a mistake to look at the right-wing “family values” attacks on gays, abortion, “pornography,” “non-traditional” families and the like as separate issues; at base, she says, what these people are against is sex, sexuality, and anything that smacks of acceptance of the role sex plays in human existence. The fight over Plan B would sure seem to support that analysis.
The blogger’s explanation for this war on sex (she calls it a War on Fucking) is that those waging it are people who have terrible difficulty controlling their own urges, and so they assume that everyone else is having an equally difficult time controlling theirs. (As I’ve noted elsewhere, this theory may or may not be true, but it sure would help to explain all those child molesting cases involving pastors and choir directors…….). As a result, they live in a state of fear, and they cling tightly to the “eternal verities” provided by highly restrictive religious doctrines and punitive laws, which they see as the only alternative to social disintegration.
This is the real root of support for “abstinence education” rather than accurate and effective sex education, of the campaign against Plan B, and more recently (and incredibly) the opposition to inoculation against cervical cancer. In case you haven’t read about this latter controversy, medical scientists have developed a highly effective immunization against cervical cancer. But it must be given to girls before puberty. As the Washington Post recently reported:
“A new vaccine that protects against cervical cancer has set up a clash between health advocates who want to use the shots aggressively to prevent thousands of malignancies and social conservatives who say immunizing teenagers could encourage sexual activity…
Groups working to reduce the toll of the cancer are eagerly awaiting the vaccine and want it to become part of the standard roster of shots that children, especially girls, receive just before puberty. But because the vaccine protects against a sexually transmitted virus, many conservatives oppose making it mandatory, citing fears that it could send a subtle message condoning sexual activity before marriage.”
This “fear of fucking,” is the larger context within which we must understand the ferocious resistance to "legitimizing" gay relationships by allowing same-sex adoptions, marriage or civil unions, even laws protecting gays against discrimination.
To the folks on the far Right, moral issues are always sexual issues; political honesty, business ethics, charitable works and the like aren’t what they mean when they talk about “morality.” To them, “morality” means proper sexual behavior (and “proper” sexual behavior usually means no sexual behavior.) Because of their single-minded preoccupation with sex, social conservatives don’t see the full scope of a human relationship; instead they equate any legal recognition of gays, or any approval of next-day contraception or prepubescent vaccination, with an endorsement of sex for pleasure, rather than for procreation–an endorsement that threatens their most fundamental beliefs. (Pun unintended, but appropriate.)
An official recognition that people have sex—just because they like it—would be terrifying.