Category: Contraceptive Culture

At War With God and Nature: @AmandaMarcotte’s Darwinian Fate

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“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
— Genesis 1:28 (KJV)

“I don’t want a baby. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . .
“I like not having a giant growth protruding out of my stomach. I hate hospitals and like not having stretch marks. . . .
“This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
— Amanda Marcotte, March 14

Every girl should have a sister, every boy should have a brother, and an ideal family might be two boys and two girls, but things don’t always work out so neatly, which is how my wife and I ended up with six kids: In our quest to provide our eldest daughter Kennedy with a baby sister, we had four boys before Reagan came along.

Despite my joking about the Victory Through Breeding™ program, there wasn’t really an ideology behind our large family. However, by the time our youngest children were born, I was familiar with concerns about demographic decline — the problem of long-term below-replacement fertility rates which had attracted the attention of researchers like Ben Wattenberg (The Birth Dearth, 1989) and others. Low birth rates lead to economic stagnation and other social and political problems, which pro-life activists have been warning about for years.

“In order to turn things around . . . young people getting married have to be thinking of having four or more children.”
— Jim Sedlak, American Life League, 1999

Jonathan V. Last’s recent book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster, is the latest attempt to call attention to this crisis, but because of liberal hegemony in the media and academia, most people don’t even realize there is a crisis. For the past half-century, our elite culture has been dominated by the neo-Malthusian “overpopulation” myth popularized by Paul Ehrlich, a myth fostered by a eugenics cabal led by David Rockefeller (see Donald Critchlow, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America, 2001). Progressive feminists like Amanda Marcotte refuse to acknowledge that their “pro-choice” ideology wasn’t developed with an eye toward the rights of women, but instead originated with a racist billionaire who was worried that poor brown people were having too many babies.

A diminished sense of irony is one of the consequences of progressive ideology. If they had any concern for intellectual integrity and philosophical coherence, they wouldn’t be progressives in the first place, which is why a fanatical commitment to radical egalitarianism requires a remarkable ability to tune out the cognitive dissonance inherent to such counterfactual beliefs. This was evident in the controversy that inspired Amanda Marcotte’s weird anti-baby rant last week, namely that “the atheist/skeptic community is in an uproar on the subject of abortion” even though “nearly all non-believers are pro-choice.” The proximate cause of Marcotte’s anger — although she’s so perpetually angry she does not really need a reason to begin ranting like a lunatic — was a post by “pro-life humanist” Kristine Kruszelnicki offering non-religious reasons for protecting the innocent unborn. Among other things, Kruszelnicki pointed to opinion polls showing that 1-in-5 atheists are pro-life, a percentage that doesn’t quite square with Marcotte’s “nearly all” claims about the pro-abortion views of “non-believers.”

Facts and logic can never persuade the ideologue, and Marcotte’s beliefs are clearly rooted in emotions that are deeply irrational and intensely personal. No one who does not already share her radical feminist ideology could be persuaded by Marcotte’s arguments. She is losing, and she knows it: 50% of Americans are pro-life, compared to 41% who are pro-abortion, and the trend toward a pro-life majority is one of those facts which are incompatible with Marcotte’s worldview. This explains the wrathful vehemence with which Marcotte denounced Kruszelnicki:

[I]f wasting time typing that shit out amuses you, knock yourself out. But don’t pretend that you’re advancing the cause of free thought while doing so. That’s because rational, free discourse is predicated on the understanding that everyone involved in the debate is arguing in good faith, and I can assure you, after years of dealing with this issue, that anti-choicers are not arguing in good faith.

Marcotte describes Kruszelnicki’s arguments as “infamous,” and calls Kruszelnicki a “forced-birther.” The disproportion between Kruszelnicki’s stimulus and Marcotte’s over-the-top response is remarkable, signifying the desperate importance of abortion as the philosophical sine qua non of Marcotte’s feminist sensibility.

If killing babies is wrong, Amanda Marcotte doesn’t want to be right.

Christians may perceive in Marcotte’s wicked depravity confirmation of the Bible’s prophetic truth, for she is “full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity . . . without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful.” But when the mask slips and her ghastly hatefulness is revealed, Marcotte goes off an another deranged rant about “compulsory child-bearing” and “traditional gender roles,” in a transparent effort to distract attention from her own problems.

Ah, “the personal is political,” as the ancient feminist maxim declares, and the psychiatric root of Marcotte’s animosity toward “traditional gender roles” is obviously a sour-grapes rationalization: No man has ever wanted her to become the mother of his children, and the reject pretends to be the one doing the rejection. Her boyfriend/roommate is IT director at the Center for Reproductive Choice. No one is trying to impose “compulsory child-bearing” and “traditional gender roles” on her.

Bitter much, Amanda?

Thus the unacknowledged irony of Marcotte addressing her rant to the Darwinians of “the atheist/skeptic community.” If evolution is about the “survival of the fittest,” Marcotte is manifestly unfit, a reproductive reject, a Darwinian dead end approaching her own extinction. And as Pete Da Tech Guy points out, “By choosing not to have children, she is conceding the future to people like the Dugger family.”

It’s completely irrational, but of course, she’s a feminist.

 

Death by ‘Choice’: Contraceptive Risk Means ‘Safe Sex’ Can Be Deadly

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Erika Langhart died after using ‘third generation’ birth control.

It’s perfectly harmless — until it kills you:

What friends of Durango [Colorado] native Erika Langhart seemed to love most about her was her humor.
“She had great stories. Ridiculous things always seemed to happen to her,” said Jessica Knutzon, 24, a fellow American University alumni. . . .
Knutzon, like so many who knew her, described Langhart as witty, jovial and incredibly driven. Tall and poised, she was headed to law school at Georgetown University.
Instead, Langhart died on Nov. 24, 2011, at just 24 years old, and her family is blaming a prescription contraceptive whose potentially deadly side effect they say was not adequately disclosed. . . .
The contraceptive she was using, a Nuvaring, a vaginal ring approved by the FDA in 2002, is known as “third generation” because it contains a different cocktail of hormones than previous formulations and is supposed to have fewer side effects.

Maybe the side effects are “fewer,” but one of them — “an elevated risk of venous thromboembolism, or deep vein blood clots” — is potentially fatal. This touches upon a common-sense criticism of birth control that is not addressed often enough: Birth control pills (and other types of hormone-based contraception) require women to add synthetic hormones to their system in sufficient quantities to alter their normal reproductive function. If a woman only uses the pill for a few months, maybe a year or two, the long-term health impact might be minimal. However, most women who use the pill are on it for many years, and it seems just common sense that altering the body’s natural hormonal balance on a long-term basis by adding artificial hormones could have serious ramifications.

“Experts” may dismiss such concerns, and I don’t have any “scientific research” to offer you, but if a known side effect of “third generation” contraceptives is deadly blood clots, I’ll count that as validating my common-sense hunch. Jill Stanek at LifeNews points to an article in Vanity Fair about Nuvaring:

What were young women being told by their doctors? As part of my reporting, I asked two college students to go to clinics in New York, inquire about using NuvaRing, and detail their families’ histories of heart issues.
Planned Parenthood, with its distribution centers all over the country, has been a target sales market for NuvaRing. At a clinic it operates in Brooklyn, one student mentioned to the attending nurse practitioner that she had Googled NuvaRing and was aware of the lawsuits alleging that it can cause blood clots. “I have a history of heart disease and diabetes in my family,” she said. “You yourself have a history of heart disease?” the nurse practitioner asked. “No, but my father has it. And my mother has type 2 diabetes.”
Both facts were indicators of potential problems, but the nurse practitioner did not seem to be alarmed. “Then no. NuvaRing is safe for healthy young women. . . . Of course, with all birth-control methods, there are side effects. . . . Would you like to try it?”

Read the whole thing, including the kicker quote by the lawyer for plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the manufacturer of Nuvaring: “I called my daughters and said, ‘Do not ever use any third- or fourth-generation birth control. It could kill you.’”

 

 


‘Fairness’ and Feminism

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Just to refresh my memory, I’ve spent the past few days re-reading Susan Brownmiller’s feminist memoir In Our Time. You have to be a hard-boiled, strong-minded conservative not to be outraged by Brownmiller’s account of the extreme workplace inequality that once typified her own field, journalism. And the implicit assumption — this is one of those premises that the Left smuggles into arguments, hoping no one will notice — is that inequality is unjust and unfair.

The fact is that, at the time of the feminist revolution, nearly all adults were married. The median age at first marriage in the 1960s was about 21 for women, about 23 for men. The birth rate was high, the average woman had three or four children, and so the normal situation — the circumstance of the typical American adult — was that Mom was home with her children and Dad was working to support the whole family. Dad’s paycheck was the family’s entire income.

It was a man’s world, baby.

From our perspective in 2014, therefore, it seems completely shocking that women in journalism — an “enlightened” field, dominated by liberals — were consigned to subordinate roles, so that Newsweek, for example, mostly employed women as fact-checkers, and NBC News had only one woman as an on-air TV reporter.

This was the perspective of Brownmiller and other female journalists who joined the Women’s Liberation movement in filing discrimination lawsuits against news organizations in the 1970s.

However, the perspective of the unmarried childless career woman was statistically abnormal at the time  and, in point of fact, is still abnormal: Most women will marry and have children and, whether they work outside the home or not, it is in the interest of married mothers and their children that their husbands be able to earn enough to support them — what some have called the “family wage” concept.

If you have read Caroline Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility (and God knows, I have seized every opportunity to encourage people to read it for the past six year), you know that feminism was not really about women vs. men, it was about career professional women — the single and childless — against wives and mothers. In case the underlying significance of this is not clear, I’ll tell you that on page 6 of In Our Time, Brownmiller reveals that by 1968, she had already had “three illegal abortions, one in Cuba and two in Puerto Rico.”

Abortion and contraception — the Contraceptive Culture — are integral to the professional ambitions of a certain percentage of women, a percentage that is certainly larger now than it was in 1968, but it is only feminist ideology that claims the interests of the childless unmarried professional career woman are coterminous with the interests of all women, and which insists that every example of statistical inequality is evidence of discriminatory unfairness.

You have to be blind or brainwashed not to see the fraudulence of this argument, the claim that women benefit collectively from the privileges that feminist “fairness” provides to elite women. The truck driver’s wife has no stake in this game of “discrimination” played by professional career women. That is a self-interested game played for the benefit of the college-educated career elite, and the vast majority of American women don’t give a damn what percentage of Fortune 500 executives are female.

Once you recognize feminism as the attempt of an elite group of women to advance their own narrow interests by representing them as the collective interests of all women, the claims of “unfairness” and “discrimination” appear in a different light. Most women are not trying to climb the corporate ladder at a Fortune 500 company and yet the grievances of such career women are the engine that drives the constant reiteration of the formula “inequality = injustice.”

And this is where the Marxist origin of feminist ideology becomes highly relevant. When I describe feminism as the ideology of man-hating socialist lesbians, I’m not joking. Sure, there are heterosexual capitalist women who call themselves “feminists,” but if you examine the biographies and ideas of the women who contributed most to the development of feminist ideology, you cannot help noticing the preponderance of Communists and lesbians. For example, feminist “consciousness-raising” was directly borrowed from Marxism by two “Red Diaper babies” (i.e., children of Communist Party members), Kathie Amatniek and Anne Forer, the latter of whom explained to Brownmiller:

“In the Old Left, they used to say the workers don’t know they’re oppressed so we have to raise their consciousness. One night at a meeting I said, ‘Would everybody please give me an example from their o0wn life on how they experienced oppression as a woman? I need to hear it raise my own consciousness.’ Kathie was sitting behind me and the words rang in her mind. From then on she sort of made it an institution and called it consciousness-raising.”

This idea that every misfortune and disappointment experienced by women can be attributed to “oppression” by men is an analog of the Marxist concept that every problem of industrial workers — the proletariat — was the fault of the capitalist bourgeosie.

In other words, there are no coincidental, individual or random problems, but rather every problem is viewed as the result of deliberate, collective, systematic oppression — “class struggle,” in the Marxist idiom — and the challenge of the revolutionary vanguard is to inform the oppressed that they are, indeed, oppressed. That is to say, the oppressed must have their consciousness raised, which is what the entire academic field of Women’s Studies is about.

Conservatives recognize that the Marxist viewpoint in economics is an error, based on the false assumption that economic activity is a coercive zero-sum game, where the wealth of the rich is derived by imposing poverty on the exploited toiling masses. “We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one,” as Ronald Reagan famously said.

Yet in recent years, it seems to me, conservatives have ceded the premise of feminism’s quite similar argument, so that people calling themselves conservatives are eager to make a “me, too” claim that they’re also in favor of equality, without bothering to examine the meaning or consequences of “equality” in this context.

Marriage is, or at least it should be, based on voluntary cooperation between men and women. If mothers wish to raise their own children, rather than outsourcing the care and education of their offspring to others, then their husbands must be able to earn an income sufficient to provide for the whole family. In such a family-oriented economy, men will be more likely than women to participate in the wage-earning work force; the consequence of this will be that men, on average, will have more years of continuous job experience; as a result, men will, on average, earn more than women and be more numerous in the ranks of management; and the resulting statistical inequality is not systemic unfairness, but a consequence of choices made by individuals.

In the past half-century, the “family wage” system has broken down even as divorce has become widespread and more than 40 percent of children are now born to unmarried women. Are these unrelated phenomena? Is this coincidental? I think not, and neither does Helen Smith, whose book Men on Strike is all about how social changes have harmed men.

All of this is mere preamble, however, to the latest zany ideological excursion by the woman Maetenloch calls “Everyone’s Favorite RadFeminist.” Yes, Radical Wind — she of “PIV is always rape, OK?” fame — has graced us again with her enlightened views:

That’s because the central cause of women’s impoverishment isn’t impersonal and institutional, but comes from men individually stealing from women in their individual homes. The owner, husband, master, stealing from the woman’s own pocket. I only realised how literal it was quite recently. This is the primary pattern of women’s crippling poverty. It became clear to me after hearing story after story of women being ransacked to the bone by their own husbands or boyfriends, it was typical of every abuse story I’ve heard of – these men systematically stealing their salary, signing credits, debts or mortgages in the woman’s name, binding women in suicidal financial situations or reckless business plans, stealing women’s property, flats or houses by signing it in their (the man’s) name, taking siege of the woman’s flat or house and refusing to move out, spending women’s income on drugs, cars, expensive restaurants, gambling, prostitution or whatever their pet fetish is, controlling access to their bank account, or systematically sabotaging their access to work, income or property in any form, by moving her far away from her work, wrecking her chances to find employment in any way possible, sabotaging her relationship with her employer, or finding ways to cut her benefits for childcare, preventing her from using the money she has for herself, etc, etc. The list is endless.

You can read the whole thing. Ask yourself: What kind of men is she hanging out with? This is the simplest explanation for why feminism is a left-wing phenomenon. Left-wing women hang out with left-wing men and left-wing men are selfish jerks.

Sic semper hoc.

By the way: Planned Parenthood will spend $16 million in the 2014 election cycle, because . . . equality!





 

So I Guess @PaulWaldman1’s Basic Message Is: ‘Vote Democrat, You Sluts!’

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Before addressing Paul Waldman’s partisan nonsense, let’s first briefly discuss chlamydia. This is one of the lesser-known sexually transmitted diseases, not one of the big-name celebrity STDs like syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes and HIV. Despite its comparative obscurity, however, chlamydia is potentially devastating to women. The disease can lead to infertility, ectopic pregnancy, and pelvic inflammatory disease (PID):

Pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) refers to infection of the uterus (womb), fallopian tubes (tubes that carry eggs from the ovaries to the uterus) and other reproductive organs that causes symptoms such as lower abdominal pain. It is a serious complication of some sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), especially chlamydia and gonorrhea. PID can damage the fallopian tubes and tissues in and near the uterus and ovaries. PID can lead to serious consequences including infertility, ectopic pregnancy (a pregnancy in the fallopian tube or elsewhere outside of the womb), abscess formation, and chronic pelvic pain. . . .
Each year in the United States, it is estimated that more than 750,000 women experience an episode of acute PID. Up to 10-15% of these women may become infertile as a result of PID. A large proportion of the ectopic pregnancies occurring every year are due to the consequences of PID.

That’s from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which, the last time I checked, was not run by right-wing extremists.

Well, why am I bringing up chlamydia, you ask? About 15 years ago, researchers found the disease to be surprisingly prevalent:

Almost one in 10 female U.S. Army recruits are infected with chlamydia . . . Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine tested urine samples from 13,204 recruits at Ft. Jackson, S.C. They found that 9.2% of the recruits — women between the ages of 17 and 25 — tested positive for chlamydia. But among 17-year-olds, the percentage jumped to 12.2%.
In women from five southern states — South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi — the rate for chlamydia was higher than 15%. Among recruits from states such as Washington, Oregon and Idaho, which have made aggressive efforts to control the disease, the rate of infection dropped to less than 5%. The medical team found that the risk of having the disease was highest among sexually active young recruits and African American women.

Are female Army recruits disproportionately sluttier than other young women? I don’t know, but the Army seems  a bit worried:

Results showed that the adjusted incidence of gonorrhea and chlamydia among Fort Bragg soldiers remained higher overall than comparable state and national rates during the period of analyses. The 1996 adjusted chlamydia rates for male and female active duty soldiers were 3-fold to 6-fold higher than rates for males and females in North Carolina and in the United States as a whole.

This problem was brought to my attention in an amusing way recently. My son completed Airborne School at Fort Benning, and then was put on a bus that delivered him to Fort Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne Division and U.S. Special Forces Command. Upon arrival there, he had to attend a mandatory briefing on the risks of chlamydia — evidently the problem is serious enough that every new arrival at Fort Bragg must go through this. But my son was tired after the bus ride and fell asleep during the briefing, and when the instructor saw him nod off, my son was required to stand at attention for the remainder of the session.

Since then, every time my son starts to talk about his girlfriends, my response is automatic: “Chlamydia! Wake up, soldier!”

Promiscuity is not without actual risks, and condoms are not a guarantee of protection. Despite all the idiotic clamor about “safe sex,” condoms are not 100% effective, and it helps to ponder the question, “If you knew for a fact that someone was infected with an STD, would you still have sex with them, even with a condom?”

If your answer is “no,” and you then consider that a significant percentage of sexually active young people are infected with one or another STD, isn’t this a persuasive argument against promiscuity?

Facts and logic are utterly wasted on liberals, however, and so the enthusiastic embrace of sluttishness is the theme of a deliberately insulting column by Paul Waldman at The American Prospect, in which he attributes Republican anti-slut messages to the “ignorance” of “older conservative men who have no idea how ladyparts work, and really don’t want to know.” Really?

The obvious temptation is to go ad hominem here, to raise the question of whether Paul Waldman is so superior in his knowledge of the workings of “ladyparts” that he is fit to issue pronouncements on Republican men’s “ignorance” thereof. But let’s resist that temptation and instead ask: Is it really true that Mike Huckabee’s comments were rooted in “ignorance” and that, by implication, female voters prefer Democrats for their greater gynecological knowledge?

Excuse my skepticism. Exit polls show the “gender gap” advantage for Democrats among women is almost entirely a function of lower marriage rates for Democrat women. Barack Obama got 67% of the vote of unmarried women in 2012, while Mitt Romney got 53% of the vote of married women. If a woman’s romantic experiences are of the “happily ever after” variety, she’s probably a Republican, whereas women who are bitter because they have been used and discarded vote Democrat.

Anyone care to speculate what we might learn if we could correlate women’s votes with the incidence of chlamydia infection?

Democrats advocate and endorse promiscuity, going so far as to distribute “Sluts Vote” pins at their national convention. Knowing the harm to women caused by such behavior, why are Democrats so enthusiastically in favor of it? It’s the Worse-Is-Better logic borrowed from Marxist-Leninist radical theory: The more poverty, crime, disease and unhappiness there is, the more people become alienated from, and hostile toward,  mainstream society. This alienation and hostility can then be organized into political support for the kind of radicalism that proposes “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Happy, successful people aren’t interested in radical transformation, and so Democrats want more people to become miserable failures. And this is what “SlutWalk” is all about:

When I bring up “Marxist-Leninist radical theory” in discussing feminism, I’m not kidding around. Take a look at these photos from the 2012 San Francisco Bay SlutWalk:


The first photo shows a woman whose sign promotes Radical Women, an organization founded by avowed Marxists, including Susan Stern of the Weather Underground/Seattle Liberation Front. The second photo shows a SlutWalk flyer issued by Women Organized to Resist and Defend (WORD) which is actually a front for the Workers World Party, a Marxist group that led anti-Iraq War protests through its International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition.

This connection between Marxism and feminism is neither coincidental nor insignificant. “Taking Feminism Seriously“:

[University of California-Santa Cruz Women’s Studies] Professor Bettina Aptheker is the daughter of a famous American Communist, the late Herbert Aptheker . . .
Professor Bettina Aptheker is by her own proud admission both a Communist and a self-described “lesbian activist.” . . . Aptheker’s course syllabus describes lesbianism as the “highest state of feminism” . . . In other words, change in sexual orientation is an inevitable final stage in the development of the socially conscious individual.
Allison Jaggar is professor of philosophy and a former chair of the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder  . . . Integrating Marxism and feminist theory, Jaggar describes herself as a “socialist feminist” and “activist,” who seeks to combat “the male-dominant structure of everyday life.” . . .
“The political economy of socialist feminism,” writes Jaggar, “establishes that, in contemporary society, women suffer a special form of exploitation and expression. . . . The distinctive social experience of women generates insights that are incompatible with men’s interpretations of reality . . . The validity of these insights . . . must be tested in political struggle . . .”

Understanding feminism’s Marxist worldview solves what is to many women a mystery: Why are feminists embracing the “slut” label? Don’t they understand that promiscuity is degrading to women? Shouldn’t feminism be upholding women’s dignity?

If you ask questions like that, you haven’t studied Marxism, which has always scorned “bourgeois morality” as an expression of “false consciousness” that Marxists attribute to religion, “the opiate of the masses.” Haven’t you been paying attention?

Popular culture has been so corrupt for so long that many young people are incapable of making any distinction between vice and virtue, categories that sophisticated people are expected to reject as old-fashioned, if not altogether obsolete or, indeed, hatefully oppressive.  . . .
“Deviant” is a word we don’t hear much anymore, for the simple reason that its meaning has become invalid or irrelevant or, as any Democrat would say, an expression of hate. America has in recent years gradually lost its vocabulary of moral judgment. “Deviant,” “abnormal,” “perverse,” “immoral” — each of these terms for sexual behavior that is wrong and bad implies the existence of an antonym for what is right and good. . . . Politically correctness forbids us to assert that any form of sexual behavior is more wholesome or more normal than any other.

A synonym for “political correctness” is cultural Marxism, and the elimination of traditional morality is essential to this radical idea, so that advocating promiscuity is now a feminist imperative, even though women will suffer most as a result.

There is no good and bad, no right and wrong, no true and false or — to express Marxist doctrine more accurately — no one should prefer that which is good, right and true, if that which is bad, wrong and false is more conducive to socialism. Anything that assists in subverting the capitalist order is “good” by Marxist standards, no matter how much hardship, suffering and death may result.

Feminists and Democrats want women to be sluts, because the more women are lonely and miserable, the better for Democrats.

Of course, after these sluts become infected with diseases that render them incapable of reproducing, they won’t need birth control.

“Chlamydia! Wake up, soldier!”

“What we are witnessing is the abolition of common sense
and its replacement by a political ideology.”





 

 


‘Helpless and Hopeless Creatures’

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“Nobody cares about ‘social issues’ anymore, we have been told. Democrats have become the Pervert Party . . . and Republicans are now the Party That Dare Not Disagree. Morality is no longer a matter of the divine ‘thou shalt not’ that Jehovah declared to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. Nowadays, moral authority is determined by Hollywood, Harvard University and the New York Times. In post-Christian America, we have reverted to a sort of neo-heathenism, depending on guidance from secular wizards and a priestly caste of experts who gaze at poll numbers the way ancient astrologers looked for omens in the stars.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “The New Abnormal,” The American Spectator, July 31, 2013

Mike Huckabee gave a speech yesterday at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting that has been treated as scandalously controversial. Chris Moody of Yahoo News provided the full context of Huckabee’s remarks:

“I think it’s time for Republicans to no longer accept listening to Democrats talk about a war on women. Because the fact is, the Republicans don’t have a war on women. They have a war for women. For them to be empowered; to be something other than victims of their gender.
“Women I know are outraged that Democrats think that women are nothing more than helpless and hopeless creatures whose only goal in life is to have a government provide for them birth control medication.
“Women I know are smart, educated, intelligent, capable of doing anything anyone else can do. Our party stands for the recognition of the equality of women and the capacity of women. That’s not a war on women, it’s a war for them. And if the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government, then so be it — let’s take that discussion all across America, because women are far more than Democrats have made them to be. And women across America have to stand up and say, enough of that nonsense.”

Huckabee’s use of the word “libido” — a quaintly Freudian term for “sex drive” — was the specific button-pusher here, but let’s face reality: No one can say anything about women that deviates from Official Feminist Dogma without committing Thought Crime and, because Democrats control the terms of what is accepted as Official Feminist Dogma, the Thought Police are always more vigilant in scrutinizing Republicans for deviations from the script. Allahpundit:

Does it really matter what he said? The liberal thought process on this works this way, I think: “Known social conservative + something about women + something about sex and birth control = outrage.” Right? It’s basically Pavlovian.

Allah links Ace’s rant against social conservatives:

The elevation of strictly personal decisions . . . into a major political issue is childish and tribalist.
Yes we all have a preferred mode of living. News at 11. The law is not about preferred modes of living, and neither should we make “political issues” about it.

The problem, of course, is that it was feminists and their Democrat allies who decided that “the personal is political,” so that radical messages about How We Should Live are the constant theme of propaganda from the news media, Hollywood and academia.

Children are being indoctrinated in public schools, at taxpayer expense, about How We Should Live. If you are a parent who doesn’t want your daughters living the Disney Starlet Lifestyle — or if you don’t want your sons performing in “bareback orgy” videos — who is on your side?

Well, certainly not the Republican Party, I guess, because if any Republican so much as mentions the Culture War nowadays, he or she will be denounced not only by the Left, but also by conservative pundits who insist that the GOP must cede the field to Democrats on social issues and never say a word about how The Pervert Party benefits from America’s descent into decadence.

This position of pre-emptive surrender in the Culture War seems to have begun in 1992, when the GOP ran for cover rather than to defend Dan Quayle’s critique of “Murphy Brown.” It seems to have escaped the notice of most Republicans when, a year after that controversy, Dr. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead declared in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, “Dan Quayle Was Right.”

Whitehead developed that article into a fascinating book, The Divorce Culture, but apparently I’m the only conservative blogger who read that book, because I never see Ace or Allah or anyone else acknowledge Whitehead’s critique of the “Love Family” ideology which “liberates sexual, compassionate, and parental love from its institutional and cultural moorings in marriage.” For that matter, have you ever seen any conservative blogger mention Carolyn Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism or Dana Mack’s The Assault on Parenthood?

My point is that social conservatism is more intellectually respectable than most people imagine, but for 20 years, those who are serious about fighting the Culture War have been shunted aside and told to be quiet, lest they cause Republicans to lose elections.

Oddly, however, the GOP’s active suppression of social conservatism has not translated to Republican electoral dominance. The nomination of John McCain — whose profound contempt for social conservatives is no secret — did not produce a GOP triumph, nor was the Massachusetts moderate Mitt Romney able to dodge the remarkably counterfactual Democrat propaganda that painted him as an extremist Trojan Horse, an agent of the Republican Taliban.

The fundamental problem here is probably too large to be reduced to a blog post, and I’m not in a mood to tackle the whole problem today, but let’s say this: Systemic incentives encourage conservative writers to devote themselves to the day-to-day political headlines, and to identify as “important” only those issues which directly and immediately affect the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, liberals — who comprise 80%-90% of journalists and academics — are writing about Everything Else, including sexuality, marriage and parenthood. So it is that, outside of whatever issues bear directly on the daily R-vs.-D political battle, nearly everything you read is written by liberals. This explains how the cultural “mainstream” is dragged steadily leftward, and most people don’t even notice the shift until Phil Robertson creates a firestorm by quoting the Bible, or one day you click an Internet link and find people arguing that high-school boys getting bareback butt-humped in porn videos is no cause for concern.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, says Glenn Beck.

Almost unnoticed, a posture of enlightened non-judgmentalism has become compulsory, because liberal dominance of the intelligentsia means that nearly every articulate person has been indoctrinated in the Egalitarian Orthodoxy, and no critic of the Left’s social agenda has access to a vocabulary of rational dissent.

One afternoon last August, I found myself amid a crowd of feminists marching down the street and chanting about rape, and I was denounced as a misogynist for noticing that several of the marchers were displaying their bare breasts during this political parade.

“Nice tits” is now hate speech, even if the aforesaid tits are brandished naked in broad daylight in downtown D.C. By the same token, a Republican may not suggest a connection between “libido” and the demand for taxpayer-funded contraception.

What we are witnessing is the abolition of common sense and its replacement by a political ideology. Common sense tells us that it is unusual — indeed, the word abnormal is appropriate — for women to parade bare-breasted through the streets. Common sense likewise tells us that the Contraceptive Culture is directly related to the prevalence of licentiousness and promiscuity in society.

Has it been only 10 years since Lawrence v. Texas? Has it been only 15 years since Nina Burleigh said she would cheerfully give Bill Clinton a blow job to thank him for keeping abortion legal?

Am I the only one who has noticed how rapidly the “Emerging Awareness” doctrine has gained a death-grip on our culture?

Huckabee’s use of the word “libido” caught my attention for reasons entirely different than the reasons that made him the object of a leftist Two-Minute Hate. Huckabee is 58 years old. He graduated from Ouchita State University in the mid-1970s, and is therefore old enough to remember when Freudian ideas about “libido” were entirely respectable. Nowadays, Freud’s categories are mocked as obsolete, and neurobiology is made to explain what was once attributed to “Oedipal complexes,” repressed impulses and so forth. Whatever way you are, we’re now told, you were Born That Way, and never mind if this biological determinism is vaguely redolent of Nazi race doctrine.

This is Science with a capital “s,” and Progress with a capital “p,” and no enlightened person is ever supposed to question whether today’s ideas of Scientific Progress are really any more valid than the discarded ideas of yesterday’s Scientific Progress.

Lost somewhere in all this is the old-fashioned understanding that humans are creatures of habit, and that if one gets into the habit of indulging certain unruly appetites, those habits may become the shackles of lifelong slavery, impairing the individual’s capacity for happiness, and inflicting various forms of misery on society at large.

Where did Kathryn Camille Murray get the idea that having sex with a 15-year-old boy was a pleasant and harmless amusement?

Perhaps the answer is to be found somewhere among the penumbras and emanations where Justice Douglas found a “right to privacy” in Griswold v. Connecticut, a few decades before Justice Kennedy invoked the hitherto unknown doctrine of “emerging awareness” in striking down the Texas sodomy statute. And who knows whither the emerging awareness shall henceforth emerge?

 

 


Contraceptive Culture: Normalizing the Abnormal and, Also, Vice-Versa

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Sex is about reproduction. This is the natural function of sex, biologically speaking, and it’s odd how the same liberal fanatics who enjoy endlessly lecturing us about Darwinism and global warming — “The science is settled!” — are so unscientific about sex. Instead, the sexual enthusiasms of liberals tend toward sterile non-procreative acts, while they react with horror at the idea that someone might engage in the normal act of reproduction with the expected result. If they can’t prevent pregnancy, liberals want to kill the resulting baby, apparently believing that motherhood itself is a weapon of patriarchal oppression.

This mentality is what I call “The Contraceptive Culture.” I’ve written about the subject occasionally for years (see “The Pill at 50: Unhappy Un-Birthday,” May 8, 2010) and my emphatic pro-life stance has sometimes led to readers mistaking me for Catholic.

Proudly Protestant, I nevertheless recognize that the encyclical Humane Vitae identified the fundamental problem with artificial contraception: It separates functions that naturally belong together. Whereas love, sex, marriage and parenthood are normally part of the same bundle, The Contraceptive Culture divides them up in a decidedly abnormal way, and once this strange way of thinking takes hold, it becomes difficult for people to understand what’s wrong with it.

My wife and I have six children, so we’ve heard all the anti-“breeder” jokes that are common to The Contraceptive Culture. Sometimes, however, you encounter truly hateful expressions of the anti-natal mindset, as when someone posted a photo of the Duggar family’s appearance at a Ken Cuccinelli gubernatorial campaign event in Virginia:

“Expansive meat tarp”? Such vicious and perverted comments are a product of the hostility to normal sex that has entrenched itself in liberal rhetoric. Democrats are now the party of sodomy and abortion, and outright hatred of normal people — especially, hatred toward Christian families — is considered entirely acceptable to so-called “progressives.” Consider a question Time magazine recently asked an NFL player:

Six kids? Regardless of your profession, it’s impossible to
be a good parent to six kids. Not enough hours in the day.

Really? Are you saying that my wife and I are bad parents? Do you have any idea how healthy, happy and successful our kids are? Molly Hemingway has an excellent take on this subject:

Since when did having kids become something that Americans irrationally fear and loathe?
The media remind us regularly that the most important cultural value relative to family life is what’s euphemistically called “choice.” The choice of whether to have kids or not is held so sacrosanct that our laws permit the decision to be made many months after a new human life begins. Some even advocate extending the choice to a period of time after birth. So why the weird reaction to people receiving children as a blessing instead of fighting them tooth and nail with hormones, chemicals, surgery and scissors? Do we need some remedial courses in how babies are made? It’s entirely natural, of course, for babies to be conceived when men and women have sex. Treating the entirely expected procreation of children as something to be avoided at all costs — and an unspeakable atrocity if one has, say, three children already — would be weird even if our culture weren’t obsessed with sex at all times, in all places, in every context, at every moment. . . .

Please read the whole thing.

 

 


Divorced Woman Becomes Victim of Patriarchal Oppression and Biology …

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. . . but, yeah, mainly it’s the biology:

[A] 38-year-old woman . . . is a client of Ronald G. Lieberman, a family law attorney in Haddonfield, N.J. Mr. Lieberman is asking his client’s soon-to-be-former husband of eight years to pay $20,000 to cover her egg-freezing procedure, medication costs and several years of egg storage. “When they got married, the expectation was they would start a family,” he told me. “Now she might not have the chance much longer.” . . .
In the New Jersey couple’s case, they decided to divorce after undergoing several failed attempts at in vitro fertilization. Mr. Lieberman’s argument is that since fertility treatments were part of the marriage, they should be considered part of the marital lifestyle, which should be maintained as much as possible post-divorce. The only difference is, in the future, she’ll use another man’s sperm.

Ann Althouse:

It’s not just a matter of a man taking up the best fertility years of a woman’s life and somehow owing her the nearest thing to giving back her youth.

Professor Althouse, “the best fertility years of a woman’s life,” from a strictly scientific view, are ages 18-24. After age 27, fertility begins to decline and, in your 30s, that decline accelerates. So by the time Lieberman’s client married at 30, she was past her prime.

Of course, most healthy women can get pregnant at age 30, but the problem is that many sexually active women are not actually in good reproductive health, often as a result of damage to their fallopian tubes caused by sexually transmitted infections:

Chlamydia infection is the most common sexually transmitted disease, responsible for a record 1.1 million cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2007, and experts there estimate that twice that many cases go undetected. Left untreated, chlamydia can cause infertility or potentially fatal ectopic pregnancies. But many women aren’t even aware that they were exposed to it—possibly years ago — until they try to have a baby and can’t. . . .
Chlamydia is especially prevalent among women ages 15 to 19 and African-Americans, but sample studies have found the infection in nearly 10% of all female Army recruits, 10% of female college freshmen and 14% of women in managed-care plans. . . .
[E]ven when a woman no longer tests positive for an active infection, the chlamydia bacteria may have moved into her upper genital tract and set off pelvic inflammatory disease. PID can cause pelvic pain—or it can be asymptomatic—but it often leaves inflammation and scar tissue that blocks a woman’s fallopian tubes, preventing fertilization. PID is also the most common cause of ectopic pregnancy, which can be fatal. “It’s not the infection itself but the body’s response to get rid of the bacteria that causes the scarring,” says Dr. Toth. “And even if just some fragments of the bacteria remain, the immune system thinks an active infection is still present.”

At least one in 10 sexually active young women are infected with this disease that can effectively destroy her reproductive system and, as with all such diseases, the greater your number of partners — and the greater the number of your partners’ partners — the greater your risk of infection. Many women are ill-informed about the reality of this and other infertilty risks because of political correctness.

In 2001, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine decided to run a public awareness campaign with ads that stated plainly, “Advancing Age Decreases Your Ability to Have Children.” This is simply a fact — the science is settled — but because it contradicts feminist ideology, the NSRM ads were controversial:

Cindy O’Keefe, 28, who is single and wants to have kids, had a visceral reaction to the ad. “That’s pressuring women in their 20s and 30s to conceive,” she said, shouting over the lounge music at a trendy New York City bar. “That’s sick!”

Seattle Weekly reported that “women’s advocacy groups” denounced the “alarmist ads,” but since when are scientific facts “alarmist”? And isn’t a little factually-informed alarmism preferable to an ignorant indifference that results in desperate 30-something women shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for fertility treatments that, alas, often ultimately prove futile? I wrote about this issue a couple of years ago:

Postponing marriage until you are 30, and then imagining that you have plenty of time to wait around deciding when you want to become a mother, is not a natural way of thinking. To a greater extent than Rachel Birnbaum or her young readers may understand, this way of thinking is an artifact — or perhaps we might call it a side-effect — of the Contraceptive Culture, which fosters the belief that the procreative process is infinitely subject to human control. Yet while it is true that childbirth can always be prevented, by contraception or abortion, the logical obverse is not equally true: Pregnancy and childbirth cannot be magically conjured up in compliance to human will.

People really need to wake the hell up. The real world is not infinitely malleable, and biology does not conform to ideology.

 

 


Stop the Killing. Stop the Crying.

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Trang Bang, South Vietnam, June 8, 1972 (Photo: Nick Ut, Associated Press)

Did I ever mention that I can’t stand to hear children cry? It’s rather odd, considering I’m a father of six, that I can’t stand the sound of a crying child. When my kids were babies, I’d take them for long walks, rocking them in my arms until they fell asleep, rather than hear them cry.

As they got older — and this was especially true with the twin boys, who would beat each other up for fun — my trick for dealing with this problem was to strike a pose of callous indifference to their pain: “Is it bleeding? Are there any broken bones? No? Then shut up or go to your room.”

The thought of my children actually being injured horrifies me, and seeing them suffer the inevitable dings and bruises of childhood — the stumble on the playground, the cut or scrape — was so traumatic that I can’t actually recall any specific incident. Evidently, I’ve blocked these psychic wounds from memory. And the fact that one of my sons is now a 20-year-old Army private in training to become a front-line warrior involves risks I prefer not to think about.

Ever.

All this is as a preamble to quoting Megan McArdle’s reflection on her admitted role in the media’s Gosnell blackout:

[T]he MSM has barely covered a story that could plausibly be named “The Trial of the Century”. And that demands explanation. So I’ll tell you why I haven’t covered it.
To start, it makes me ill. I haven’t been able to bring myself to read the grand jury inquiry. I am someone who cringes when I hear a description of a sprained ankle.
But I understand why my readers suspect me, and other pro-choice mainstream journalists, of being selective—of not wanting to cover the story because it showcased the ugliest possibilities of abortion rights. The truth is that most of us tend to be less interested in sick-making stories—if the sick-making was done by “our side.”
Of course, I’m not saying that I identify with criminal abortionists who kill infants and grievously wound their patients. But I am pro-choice.
What Gosnell did was not some inevitable result of legal abortion.

Except that it is, just as legal abortion is the inevitable result of the Contraceptive Culture, which was sanctioned by the “penumbras, formed by emanations” that Justice Douglas miraculously discovered in 1965, and if you are “someone who cringes when [you] hear a description of a sprained ankle,” you really ought to think about why these results are inevitable, including The Law of Large Numbers.

Having spent many years thinking this through, and unwilling to deliver a sermon on the topic, I am content to let others think through it for themselves, if only I could get them to pay attention to what is actually happening — “What ‘Choice’ Really Means” — and trace these horrors back to their philosophical and historical origins. Continue reading Stop the Killing. Stop the Crying. →