Breaking News: “Pro-Life” really means “Anti-Sex”

You don’t say:

Many Christians who are active in the evolving anti-birth-control arena state frankly that what links their efforts is a religious commitment to altering the moral landscape of the country. In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they want to change the way Americans have sex. Dr. Stanford, the F.D.A. adviser on reproductive-health drugs, proclaimed himself "fully committed to promoting an understanding of human sexuality and procreation radically at odds with the prevailing views and practices of our contemporary culture." Focus on the Family posts a kind of contraceptive warning label on its Web site: "Modern contraceptive inventions have given many an exaggerated sense of safety and prompted more people than ever before to move sexual expression outside the marriage boundary." Contraception, by this logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality) and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage.

It may be news to many people that contraception as a matter of right and public health is no longer a given, but politicians and those in the public health profession know it well. "The linking of abortion and contraception is indicative of a larger agenda, which is putting sex back into the box, as something that happens only within marriage," says William Smith, vice president for public policy for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. Siecus has been around since 1964, and as a group that supports abortion rights, it is natural enemies with many organizations on the right, but its mission has changed in recent years, from doing things like promoting condoms as a way to combat AIDS to, now, fighting to maintain the very idea of birth control as a social good. "Whether it's emergency contraception, sex education or abortion, anything that might be seen as facilitating sex outside a marital context is what they'd like to see obliterated," Smith says.

No shit. And very specifically, sex—even within a marital context—that is exclusively for pleasure and not for childbearing. It’s that very rigid definition of acceptable sex from whence springs their incessant screeching about homosexuality being “deviant,” in spite of the fact that a healthy attitude about sexuality between consenting adults would regard same-sex attraction as legitimate a desire as a penchant for redheads. But no babies can be made! The horror! When was the last time you heard any of these retrofucks show any concern about the truly deviant sexuality of rapists? The only time they even mention the word “rape” is when they’re saying it shouldn’t be an exception to abortion bans. And that tells you everything about the “pro-life” crew that you need to know: They find rape more acceptable and less worthy of prevention measures than homosexuality because at least it could produce a baby.

The abovementioned Focus on the Family has a massive website, and when “rape prevention” is put in as a search term, the most relevant result (buried after a bunch of unrelated drug prevention crap) is an article about how abortion doesn’t make the pain of rape go away. When “homosexuality prevention” is put in, however, the results provide a plethora of information about how homosexuality is “preventable and treatable,” links to conversion conferences like Love Won Out, how to help children who struggle with “homosexual feelings,” etc.

These are the priorities of the “pro-life” movement, plain and simple. They have dedicated millions of dollars, and seemingly limitless time and effort, to eradicating the scourge of homosexuality, but provide nary a word on rape prevention. To them, a man who has consenting sex with another man is an atrocity deserving of endless resources, but a man who forces himself on a woman isn’t worthy of mention.

They can claim from here to eternity that their primary interest is “a religious commitment to altering the moral landscape of the country” (which, from my perspective, they’re doing, since I consider prioritizing babymaking sex over AIDS prevention, for example, a decidedly amoral position radically diverging from the moral landscape currently hanging on by a thread), but what this is really about is the subjugation of women, who by any measure will have less freedom and opportunity if control over their own reproduction is taken away from them. (That’s not to minimize the additional strain on men who would also become fathers against their will, but fathering 7 kids doesn’t have quite the same affect career-wise, for instance, as carrying and bearing them does.) While little girls are being targeted with purity balls by Focus on the Family, to try to indoctrinate against extra-marital sex early, a search on prostitution—to which, historically, men turned to get their jollies when “nice girls” were locked up in chastity belts and wives who didn’t want to get pregnant again simply refused sex—just turns up yet more information on homosexuality. Though prostitution flourishes in sex-restricted cultures that don’t provide women with reproductive choices, the pro-lifers don’t seem to care much about preventing it even as they try to lock down women again.

Their “morality” is one in which boys will be boys, girls will be virginal until marriage, at which time they will submit to becoming babymaking machines, and rapists are more tolerable than gays. I’m sure that’s precisely what Jesus had in mind.