The GOP’s Problem with Sex Could Cost Them in November
The social conservatives in the Republican Party have a problem with sex and it is going to cost the party dearly in November.
I don’t mean they have a problem with contraception, although many do (conservative men, anyway). Nor am I saying that opposition to pornography is politically problematic, or the criticism of using sex in marketing will lose them votes, or denouncing the prevalence of sex and sexual imagery in music, TV, film, and art is necessarily wrong.
All of the above are used by social conservatives to mask the real problem: their outdated, even primitive, critique of human sexuality that denies both the science and the cultural importance of sex and the sex act. Their main target appears to be women, and women’s sex lives, although the act of love itself is also to be placed in a strait jacket. No doubt the right will argue that their criticisms are only meant to help women, and nurture “healthy” attitudes toward sex. Nonsense. First of all, women don’t need that kind of help. They are capable of making their own choices without a bunch of ignorant busybodies telling them how to govern the most intimate and personal aspects of their lives.
Secondly, there is inherent in this critique a 19th century — or earlier — view of sex that seeks to keep the act of love within the confines of the marriage bed, and believes that physical intimacy should be primarily for one reason, and one reason only: procreation. At the very least, sex outside of marriage should be severely proscribed and limited to those who plan a long term relationship or eventual matrimony. Having sex because it’s fun, or because you’re bored, or because you crave physical intimacy, or for any other reason beyond traditional notions of “love” is grounds for disapprobation.
Certainly religion has much to do with this assault on sex. And if the extent of their critique stayed in the pews and pulpits of conservative churches, there would be no problem whatsoever. Christian denominations can tell their adherents how to live their lives, citing chapter and verse from the Bible, and nobody would care.
But when Republican politicians, and others associated with conservatism or the Republican Party, start echoing the various criticisms of contraception, of casual sex, of sex outside of marriage, the perception cannot be dismissed that the imprimatur of the entire party — and consequently, the government if they ever came to power — has been granted and that somebody, somewhere, might want to do something about it. As a voter making a political calculus on how to mark one’s ballot, the GOP is kidding itself if they don’t think this affects the decisions of millions of citizens.
This is especially true of women, although there are plenty of younger Americans who are watching this debate on contraception unfold and no doubt wondering what all the hub-bub is about. According to a CDC study released in 2010, of 89 million American women between the ages of 15-44, 99% had used some form of contraception. That figure includes 82% of American women who used some form of oral contraceptive, Depo-Provera, injections, or the “ring” or the “patch” at some time in their lives.
That’s an awful lot of voters to offend by hinting, as Rick Santorum did, that states should have the right to ban contraceptives. Or that oral contraceptives are more dangerous or harmful than most other drugs on the market. Trying to attach a stigmata to women who use birth control pills — implying that being sexually active is the same as acting licentiously — may fulfill some atavistic desire to apply an outdated code of conduct to women, but it is hardly good politics.
This is not a safety issue, or even a women’s health issue. The issue is sex and the evolving cultural mandate that women should be able to enjoy the sex act as much as men without the fear of pregnancy. This is the real beef that the social conservatives have with the pill. It has revolutionized bedrooms in the U.S., while setting off a a massive change in the mores and morals of men and women.
No doubt some of this change has been harmful, even frightening. The sexualization of children is certainly one of those harmful consequences of freeing sex from the purely procreative. The explosion of teenage pregnancies, and teen sexual activity, is another untoward consequence of the pill. But change is the way of the human animal, and the technological revolution that created the pill 50 years ago couldn’t have been stopped anymore than we could have halted the splitting of the atom, the invention of the integrated circuit, or the spread of the internet. In each case, technology answered a need in society, and if those wonders hadn’t been invented then, they certainly would have been at some point shortly afterward.
Thank you for this article. It straightened me up as far as recognizing this achilles heel in Santorum’s approach – if he doesn’t change the dialogue.
The achilles heel rests in the GOP’s sheer and utter hypocrisy on ALL matters relating to sexuality. Did you hear the latest on rising Republican star and well-known border hawk Sheriff Paul Babeu, who’s now running for Congress in Arizona, was hit Friday night with bombshell accusations from a Mexican immigrant who said he dated the sheriff for years and was threatened with deportation if he ever told anyone about their romance. We got pictures from gay.com and everything!
I bet there was no aspirin between that boys legs …
GOP = hypocrisy
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/arizona_sheriff_rocked_by_accusations_of_alleged_immigrant_ex_boyfriend.php
If Sheriff Babeu had equality, as straight people do, he could have married his boyfriend and given him a path to citizenship, as straight people can. The fact that he does not have equality is where this scandal started.
the nonsense of this article and comments are simple. Gays have always had the same rights as everyone else. what they want are not the same rights but special rights.
Hello, I’m the Constitution.
You’re wrong.
Congratulations to the Obama campaign. As long as they can keep the subject on such matters as the non-issue of the possibility of the states outlawing contraceptives the less time will be devoted to the disastrous record of Obama. Well done.
The fact is you cannot legislate moral or responsible behavior. But you sure as hell can impose government policy that facilitates immorality and irresponsibility. And that is what has been done starting with the Great Society forward. Get out of high school…get knocked-up…the father departs…turn totally to the government with the same indifference as one would in going to get a license plate….and live off the dole. Why not? The government encourages it and everyone else is doing it. End the dependency possibilities and you will see morality and responsibility return.
“And that is what has been done starting with the Great Society forward. Get out of high school…get knocked-up…the father departs…turn totally to the government with the same indifference as one would in going to get a license plate….and live off the dole.”
What exactly does that have to do with women deciding for themselves which healthcare products and services are appropriate for them and their body? There are a lot of professional women (who don’t live on the dole, as you claim) these days, who, for a variety of reasons, do not want children or have decided to put off having children. Most people (men and women) are getting married at a much older age these days, so having a family is also put off. Moreover, many couples simply don’t want children. In either case, it isn’t anyone’s business except theirs. You and your ilk are on the wrong side of this issue and I suspect if you can’t figure it out that women are going to let you all know next November.
But if you choose to have sex with multiple partners (or whomever) the government must compel insurance companies and religious institution to pay for contraception? That’s the real debate here. The left routinely accuses anyone who dares to mention entitlement reform as “assaulting” a certain group. “The GOP wants to kill the elderly by hacking medicare!” “The Catholic Church is assaulting women’s health by refusing Obama’s mandates!” Old news.
I’m not aware of any current and former GOP presidential candidates making a prudish prohibition on casual sex a a signature campaign issue. Santorum apparently wanted to ban contraception, although that might have been taken out of context.
What exactly does that have to do with women deciding for themselves which healthcare products and services are appropriate for them and their body?
Who’s saying they can’t?
There are a lot of professional women (who don’t live on the dole, as you claim) these days, who, for a variety of reasons, do not want children or have decided to put off having children. Most people (men and women) are getting married at a much older age these days, so having a family is also put off. Moreover, many couples simply don’t want children. In either case, it isn’t anyone’s business except theirs.
1. Yooper didn’t make that claim and you know it.
2. If they’re professional women and not on the dole, they can pay for their own contraception.
3. If the rest of us are forced to pay for their contraception, it becomes our business.
A big draw to me of the Tea Party was its stance toward smaller government, more freedom, and personal responsibility. I don’t want the government telling me what kind of car I drive, or subsidzing any car type to promote its use. We do need laws on core items but to decide what kind of light bulb to buy. NO.
I chafe at the Religeous Conservatives as they want to codify their morality but get up in arms when the libtards codify theirs. Neither should probably be laws.
We all pay for our own health care and health insurance. I as an individual self employed has a HSA with a $2,000 deductible so normal care is out of my pocket and only major care is by insurance. I could have bought a low deductible policy but some quick math indicated I paid $3,000 ($250 per month more) per year to have a $500 deductible policy with $25 copays. Only in years where my medical expenses exceeded $20K would I pay less with the full boat plan than the bare bones plan.
Our employers typically pay for the health care. I am sure he looks at the cost to employ you including all your benefits. If health care cost less, he could pay you more or reduce the price of his product. For those of us with Government paid plans, it is you and your neightbor that is paying for it, plus a lot of handling fees, payoffs, pencilheads, reviewers, regulators, and politicians all getting their cut. So our real issue is why in the heck is insurance covering normal maintenance costs of contraception rather than the outrage on forcing a church to pay it.
Long ago Medicare made it illegal for any doctor to treat anyone in Medicare outside of Medicare if he accepts any Medicare money. So if Medicare rejects that procedure for you, you can either die or go to Mexico for it. But your family doctor (“what’s that?”) is a criminal if he does. Soon Ms Sebelus will insist your 14 year old daughter receive an IUD while denying your mom dialisys because she had already lived a good life.
Eve decided for herself.
Eve didn’t exist.
Where exactly is it claimed that professional women live off the dole? Answer: Nowhere.
The author states “All of the above are used by social conservatives to mask the real problem: their outdated, even primitive, critique of human sexuality that denies both the science and the cultural importance of sex and the sex act.”
In other words, the general problem is that conservatives are perceived as a bunch of prudes who want to legislate morality as demonstrated specifically with their opposition to “free” contraception. That’s the author’s problem but it is not conservative’s problem. The fact is that conservatives realize that you can’t legislate morality but, as I point out, you can surely create legislation that effectively institutionalizes immorality as indicated by the example given. That’s what conservatives know.
If Moran is saying that opposition to immoral conduct will cost Santorum lots of votes, yes, it will. If he is saying that Santorum should not tell the truth, he is wrong. God has specifically condemned sex outside of marriage. A society that fails to sanction that sort of behavior is already dead. Tolerance of amorality has brought us to our present desperate state, and fools like Moran will not see it. The family unit is almost destroyed. Promiscuity is rampant, homosexuality endemic, bastardy epidemic.Amorality rips the fabric of society and turns peaceful productivity into slothful chaos. In Noah’s time, God drowned the entire world because men, made in His Image, chose to act like animals. The gay laddies at Sodom and Gomorrah did not learn from Noah’s lesson, and suffered extinction. Time and again Gods chosen people were harshly punished for disobedience. And here are we, killing babies, promoting homosexuality, practicing promiscuity, fornication, and defying God- challenging Him to do something about it!Most of us will refuse to change, and do right. Then, when we find ourselves in Eternity, it will be too late to repent and turn it around. Our fate will be fixed forever. And it will be something we would not have wished on our worst enemy.
I suspect that you have missed the point altogether. The sexual revolution did not usher in much that was or is positive. It has brought moral decay and much despair to society.
The measures taken to suppress her sexuality, are not so much as to ensure her fidelity as it is to ensure his lack of effort for her pleasure. A kind of feel not, want not approach.
It is all about just having selfish male gratification and only for the male.
And it would appear there are a great many men who would go to any extreme to have it all, just for themselves.
If fidelity is a real issure than surely there must be ways to curtail the men, as they are the greater offenders?
Yes, something should be done to tone down the overwheleming dispaly of sexuality today in the media. But this is much for the sake of men, even more so than women.
It is known among the wise that males will have to surrender their strength to women for indulging in mulitple partners. So do men really want to wind up as the weaker gender? The path chosen today by the fools, will lead men there.
Take the advice of those who know and do not follow the fool’s way.
A pro-sex attitude should be expected from anyone who makes a living on the internet. Without porn, there would be no internet. And internet porn is such a positive for society. And now we’re told that the majority of children born to women under 30 are born out of wedlock. Nothing like giving those kids a fighting chance from the beginning. Of course, our children are taught by society that sex is inescapable and that the consequences can be managed. Yes, Rick, we’ve come a long way, baby!
You have this backward; the Internet made widespread porn possible. Porn did not make the Internet.
I agree, scotth.
And I think there’s been a misprint: isn’t the guy who wrote this poppycock really called Rick MORON?
I’m a socially conservative woman, who vehemently disagrees with his shallow analysis, including this drivel: “. . . The issue is sex and the evolving cultural mandate that women should be able to enjoy the sex act as much as men without the fear of pregnancy. This is the real beef that the social conservatives have with the pill. It has revolutionized bedrooms in the U.S., while setting off a massive change in the mores and morals of men and women.”
Yes such a moral revolution that countless women, children, and, yes, men have been severely damaged. I wrote this at another site today:
“When talking about contraception and sexual behaviour (the Charlie Roses of this world want the Santorums to sound like hicks), why don’t people like Santorum talk about ADULT SEXUAL LICENSE AND ITS MULTITUDE OF CHILD VICTIMS? . . .
“E.g., In the contraception trap Rose tried to set up, Santorum did get as far as ‘the whole laundry list’ of bad things of sex outside of marriage—and then didn’t articulate it. There are statistics galore about the multitude of children whose lives have been wrecked by the sexual excesses of the ‘adults’ in their lives. It used to be that such behaviour was considered shameful. Not any more.
“. . . I’ve never heard Republican or Conservative [I’m Canadian] politicians grab the sexual license agenda and turn it upside down: ‘Let’s not talk about protecting the SEXUAL DESIRES of adults, but the MOST BASIC NEEDS of our kids.’
Then I posted a Steven Hayward piece at Power Line:
“Charles Murray Vindicated”
“That’s not actually the headline of the lead story in today’s New York Times, but it could be. The actual headline . . . is: ‘Unwed Mothers Now a Majority Before Age of 30.’ But the subhed is where Charles’s thesis comes in: ‘Most Rapid Growth Has Been Among White Women in 20s.’
“And the lede sentence circles back to Charles’s main argument: ‘It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal.’ But as Pat Moynihan warned us almost 50 years ago (and got nothing but attacks for so doing), the society that accepts this as ‘normal’ is asking for lots of trouble.”
And that gets us back to Moron’s drivel:
“But why bring what by any definition is a personal moral judgment into the political arena? Why insist that our politicians address what can only be described as an issue for which government is not equipped to deal, let alone has any business discussing in the context of a presidential campaign?”
So, government should butt out? What about the multitude of social programs and entitlements needed to deal with the human wreckage all around us, caused by sexual license? Responsible taxpayers are paying through the nose for the “massive change in the mores and morals of men and women”, of which, it seems Mr. Moron is fully in favour.
It seems to me that this immature fool needs to both grow up and smarten up.
Read Mike Huckabee’s “A Simple Government” for the manifesto you’ve been wanting.
I have no idea what the author is talking about. Is everyone ignorant of the Constitution? The root of Roe vs. Wade is Griswold vs. Connecticut, which said States can’t ban cotraception. All we are tryign to say is that there is no right to privacy in the FEDERAL CONSTITUTION. You must believe this if you claim to believe in original intent. This has NOTHING to do with whether states should ban or not ban something; it has to do with jusicial tyranny.
No-one is going to ban contraception.
Of the sexual revolution, which was largely about MEN getting their jollies without responsibility, was wonderful. FORTY-ONE percent of children are born out of wedlock, which largely means with no Dad. As Ann Coulter (I guess she’s a guy in disguise, huh?) points out, most of the problems in the US today come from this.
I agree with social conservatives that our culture is hyper-sexualized, but both sides need to be clear about the aims of the opposition. I tried to create a glossary of conflicting ideologies here: http://clarespark.com/2009/12/16/perceptions-of-the-enemy-the-left-looks-at-the-right-and-vice-versa/. “Beware of populism” is the overall message.
I also think that Rick Moran’s article is a timely warning in defense of women.
Oh, so there’s good and bad that accompany the sexual revolution? Well, some people will decide wisely and some won’t. What do you want to do, legislate wisdom? If so, please exit to the left. The LEFT, get it?
Excellent take.
I think more than having all kinds of implied sexual grievances our side is more distressed over a far left wing regime legislating morality on social issues by executive fiat.
It’s far better to let families/churches decide what their sexual mores will be rather than an all encompassing “cradle to grave” far left regime hell bent on ruling our every move whether we like it or not.
Additionally,much of all this pap is about yet another perceived lie-creation by the DNC and issued by Stuffy stephy over at ABC/DNC.
It’s thoroughly amazing how any politicl party can take a clear blue sky and write letters all over it “CONTRACEPTION”– and then claim that our side is against such a basic right. but,They do it over and over. They were just a little bit more overt this time, their slip was showing.
If your viewpoint on the sexual “liberation” is so shaky that you cannot handle critique then you should be critiqued more.
There have been downsides to the advent of modern contraceptives and worldviews related to it and it is worth noting.
There is very little the public sector can do realisticly to combat this (though there are ways) and no one should make this a factor in their campaigns but like it or not So-cons (of which I am) are a factor in elections.
I supervise persons that live paycheck to paycheck, and of the issues that are game changers, RomneyCare will not be one, but “contraception is bad for women” will be. Low information voters ARE the Democratic base, never forget that.
For a change, Mr. Moran is largely on target. Political campaigns should be about what is properly political, not about what is properly private. But then, the great majority of Americans — and the great majority of conservatives — have forgotten what the word Republic means.
I have little doubt that were Rick Santorum to become president, and were he to acquire a compliant Congress, he would try to make his personal beliefs about sex and contraception matters of federal law. His willingness to concede such powers to the state governments — incidentally, a government cannot have rights, only delegated powers — is a dead giveaway that would doom him in November, were he to be the nominee.
Of course, the Main Stream Media will do its damnedest to make the campaign about sex. It’s their most potent weapon against the conservative movement, which it has regularly tarred with the Bluenose Brush ever since the Sixties. Conservatives and Republican politicians should be on notice that whenever the attempt is made, they must counterattack with full power…but sadly, most Republican aspirants to the presidency are too pusillanimous ever to say something cutting to a “gentleman of the press.”
If you and Mr Moran aren’t going to be intellectually honest about our views, don’t be surprised if we think you’re stupid; if you’re saying these things on purpose, then you’re shooting yourselves in the foot since social conservatives are the closest thing to allies you have these days (especially in the future, since…we are the “breeders”). And if you really do believe this nonsense, then you aren’t very well read.
One thing to keep in mind is that liberals who think they have a good idea, will impose it on others with civil laws: seatbelts, smoking, gay marriage, abortion, contraceptives. They (you?) use the courts if necessary to impose their will on us, even when it’s an incredibly stupid idea. Most conservatives will tell you about a good idea and hope you change your mind (if you attempt to retort with the “Personhood” REFERENDUMS as evidence that conservatives impose their views on others then you will deservedly be mocked)
So over the past month, if you had been listening to actual conservative views rather than watching MSNBC or CNN, you would have learned that: in 1968, Pope Paul VI predicted modern Western society in the Section 17, first paragraph of Humanae Vitae and in the second paragraph, he predicted modern China and what the federal administration is doing here today. You would have learned that Social Security is dependent on “other people’s children” to maintain itself, so if you promote fewer children (“Future taxpayers”) at the same time you spend “other people’s money” at a faster rate, you’ll run out of other people’s money pretty quickly. You would have learned that there are quite a few studies that show that long-term use of the Pill is a factor in strokes and breast cancer (not as much as abortion, but there is still a link). You would have learned that fish have been affected; do you want to eat the trout in Colorado that are neither make nor female (kind of scary to me that “other” outnumbered “male” but since I’m from flyover country I guess that makes me practically Neanderthal). I strongly urge people to thoroughly research the potential negatives associated with use of the Pill before using it.
There are people like you describe, I’m sure. No matter the topic, you can always find a nutjob. That you seek them, tells me that you aren’t interested in Truth, only in getting your way. We adults know the difference.
Loved you post Jeannette. Your point that libs always try to force everyone to do their good idea, is a profound point Rick Santorum should make. Here is a link to the harm done to fish! http://www.bu.edu/sjmag/scimag2005/features/drugsinwater.htm
The Constitution is what concedes “such powers” to the states. Do you really think any state would criminalize contraception today?
As our British cousins would say, “Not bloody likely.” But the problem isn’t what any state government is likely to do. Neither is it what Congress is likely to do, however the 2012 elections might eventuate. It’s what the Media can do to whoever we nominate, with adequately nurtured and reinforced suspicions that Republican bluenoses have sexual repression as their covert (sometimes not so covert) intentions. I’d have thought that you, at least, are bright enough to grasp the potential damage from that stroke.
If we want to remove the Obamunists from power, our standard-bearer must refrain from making sex and sex-related matters a major aspect of his campaign. If he refuses to do so, Obama will most likely get another term.
Right-o, Mr. Porretto, let’s not make sex an issue in this campaign.
Let’s just permit the liberal and libertine left to continue its assault on everything decent; let’s just be silent in the face of unrelenting pressure for Americans to abandon anything that even hints of the morality that informed our Founders.
You disappoint me in the extreme, Mr. Porretto. You are embarrassed and ashamed of the traditional morality of our Founders; you have cast your lot with the postmodern and atheistic left, where only those wielding power determine what is right. Frankly, I am ashamed of you.
I’m working my way down the comments and the little marker is waaaayy at the top of my scroll bar.
Francis, I just want to chime in to say that I believe you are right.
I’m sorry, I thought you were a conservative columnist. I cannot believe the gross misrepresentation of the general body of beliefs held by most conservatives that you have given voice to. Is there any reason you feel the need to reinforce this false caricature of the majority of conservatives?
Had I not seen the PJMedia topline, I would literally have thought I was reading straight from the blog of someone such as Debbie Wasserman-Schultz or Barney Frank. The obtuseness and falsehood is that great.
Actually… perhaps this is the work of a troll, an agent saboteur- Despite the demented fantasy (horror?) depiction of conservatives and hole-in-the-sheet sex-hating neo-Fascists, what bothered me most was the claim that Republicans wanted to “attach a stigMATA” to women who use birth control.
Unless you are intending to imply (and sadly, given the tone of the rest of this screed I cannot rule it out) that Republicans would like to nail women to crosses for using birth control, it is time to PROOFREAD BEFORE POSTING.
If everything still looks okay, then it’s time to LERN 2 INGLESH and not use the word for the wounds of Christ for the one referring to public shame, you jackwagon.
Let me do some postpartum correction since there is no “edit” button:
“Actually, perhaps this is the work of a troll, an agent saboteur. Despite…”
“… depiction of conservatives as hole-in-the-sheet…”
Thank you. To forestall the inevitable cry of “Hypocrite! Remove the ellipsis from thine own post before speaking of the stigmata in your brothers’ post!” let me point out that I am merely a simple commenter, not someone who has a byline on PJM. Journalists and journals used to be the gatekeepers of our language, now they are the Basiji: Ignorant or actively hostile to the rule of law (or language, in this case).
And if you really did write this, then you’re still a jackwagon.
i have to concur
there is very little attention, regarding the issues raised by the author, brought forth by the candidates themselves – much cutting and pasting to see here
this “manufactured hysteria” exists in the ether as the most potent smokescreen the left (and santorum bashers) has in their arsenal– the supposedly dreaded “social issues” and the petty connections from a question regarding santorum’s personal beliefs conjured/spun into the mainstream narrative of “republicans will strive to BAN all sex play…”
i have never considered myself a “so-con,” mainly because i dont know what that means (along with the oft blurted “neo-con”), but as all this venom is aimed at santorum, so, i guess i’ve found my new guy to stick up for and support
Wonder no more: Moran is a chronic RINO.
Actually… perhaps this is the work of a troll, an agent saboteur…
No, it’s just Rick Moran. If you become more familiar with his work, you’ll understand.
“I thought you were a conservative columnist…”
Get used to it. PJ Media doesn’t follow party lines. We have social conservatives, libertarians, moderates, etc. We go at each other. Unlike the Left, we critique our own side. If you want the same predictable opinions on everything, read the Huffington Post.
This article is condescending, irritating and generally rude. The sentiments here are not that of conservative values (which is the reason I read PJMedia in the first place) but, rather, are progressive and rather feckless. One can only hope (as EchoAlpha noted) that this somehow is a troll post that got past what is normally a fine editing team.
No one reading this site need read me break down the various glaring fallacies and amoral sentiments that point to a far left-leaning writer and no one that should be associated PJMedia, so I won’t bother.
Yet I have to comment that if this article was published as intended and not as a troll’s handiwork, I’m already reconsidering my daily visit to this site. In the midst of a world that views acts that encompass moral, spiritual, emotional and physical consequences as no more than a casual act, the LAST thing I want to read on one of my favorite conservative-leaning sites is garbage like this.
Mr. Moran is editor of American Thinker, a definitely right-wing but clearly libertarian-leaning blog.
And he’s right.
We’re supposed to be Constitutional originalists. We denounce much of the liberal agenda for going way, way beyond what the Constitution says the Federal Government’s proper responsibilities are.
Well, there is NOTHING in the Constitution that even hints that a President’s job is to hold forth on sexual matters and promise, as Santorum did, to address the nation on proper sexual behavior:
“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.”
— Rick Santorum
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/02/14/rick-santorum-wants-to-fight-the-dangers-of-contraception/
Santorum is NOT running for the job of America’s Chief Preacher or America’s Chief Ideologist. He’s running for the job of Chief Executive, which involves overseeing the Executive Branch, being Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, and taking care to see to it that laws are executed properly. AND THAT’S IT.
I don’t want any American President opening his mouth about “the whole sexual libertine idea.” It’s none of the President’s business how Americans deal with sex.
I’m tired of social conservatives who claim they’re for limited government–but when it comes to moral issues they want the Federal Government to at least tweak our society a little bit to better reflect their own moral values.
Sorry, no. Social conservatives’ promotion of moral values should not in any way depend on the power OR influence of government.
The federal government has effectively no authority over sexual morality. State governments, until Griswold, did. Santorum’s criticism of Griswold, as has made quite clear, is not so much the results (which he personally disagrees with but has said he does not think the government should mess with), but the methodology. And I would argue that Griswold came to the right result, by the wrong method, and opened up a bunch of serious problems because of it.
Your post explains much about Rick Moran!The more I understand about libertarianism the more the term Libertine applies. They seem to be very heavy on the rights, and quite light on the responsibilities. In his las paragraoh one could replace conservative with liberal and it would be equally coherent.
The best definition of a libertarian that I have come across is: A conservative without principles. Libertine would not be far off, either.
That’s because most people who call themselves libertarians are really just potheads who want the right to smoke themselves into oblivion. They don’t really understand the philosophy.
The true libertarian understands that with freedom comes personal responsibility. So you have the right to do more or less as you please, so long as it violates no one else’s right. However the responsibility for those choices rests with you as well — as do the consequences. Want to drink like a fish? Be my guest, but should you destroy your liver, the cost of replacement should be on your head, not society’s.
“The best definition of a libertarian that I have come across is: A conservative without principles. Libertine would not be far off, either.”
Make that, a Conservative who doesn’t want you to tell me what my moral principles should be.
I don’t care what you teach in your church. I do care when you start telling me I have to adhere to your moral code.
“That’s because most people who call themselves libertarians are really just potheads who want the right to smoke themselves into oblivion. They don’t really understand the philosophy.”
And most social conservatives are really just dupes of TV Evangelists who mistake speaking in tongues and passing snakes around in church for wisdom. They really don’t understand Liberty.
Rick Santorum is the patsy in a Democrat Operation Chaos in Reverse. Most of his votes come from Obama supporters who are trying to sabotage the GOP by foisting this nincompoop on us. Romney is a horrible candidate unless you compare him to Santorum. Rick is the insurance to be sure that if Mitt fails, someone even less likely to beat Obama takes his place.
I can’t believe it, we are about to have a complete economic meltdown, are faced with an out of control police state, and a soon to be nuclear armed Jihad. What is the response of the Social Conservatives, elect us, we’ll use the power of the state to stamp out birth control, porn, the internet, and sex for purposes other than procreation. Wow! Talk about speaking to the issues on everyone mind.
Get ready for four more year of Obama. The GOP is incapable of doing addressing the issues of the day. After watching the primaries, I ask myself, why would anyone in the middle vote for us?
Very good Mr. Richardson.
Heinlein comes to mind here; ” The first principle of freedom is the right to go to hell in your own handbasket.”
The libertarian does believe that, but also that no one has any right to drag others into that handbasket.
Regardless of what anyone here thinks of Mr. Moran and his writings, he is largely correct. Many commenters here are displaying exactly the attitude that is going to drive many voters away from the republican ticket. I had a conversation just yesterday to that effect. A friend of mine finds the moralizing of the right so offensive that he will vote for captain zero. I pleaded with him and tried to explain how much more harmful the left is, but to no avail.
Truth is folks, sanctimony doesnt look any better on the right than on the left.
“And he’s right.”
There you go again, making moral judgments!
Discussing one’s opinions about sexual morality and imposing them by fiat are two completely different things. The Constitution does not discuss the President’s ability to “hold forth” because it doesn’t have to–it would be only words. The President can SAY anything he or she darn well pleases, and lecture us on anything. Any person in this country can do so, actually, the President simply has a more public podium. As citizens, we can then choose to listen or ignore the lectures (or mock them).
The issue is when the executive branch (or any branch) starts DOING things (rather than only saying them) that are not enumerated powers of that branch. Therefore, I have zero problem with Rick Santorum saying whatever he wants about sex and birth control. If a future President Santorum allowed his administration to promulgate rules that were not within the executive branch’s powers, or signed legislation that was not within the legislature’s powers, THEN I would have a problem.
Whether I agree or disagree with the results of the actions is irrelevant; it is paramount that we limit governmental actions to the enumerated powers listed in the Constitution.
Amen Rick! Amen sinz54. I have become more conservative over the past 20 years and have always been a moderate libertarian. I dont want the state or federal goverment in my bedroom or my kids bedrooms. I absolutly refuse to vote for the One in November, but I am not sure I could vote for Santorum and his ridiculs and unconstitutional ideas….I may have to stay home or vote for the latest nutty libertarian…lol
“Well, there is NOTHING in the Constitution that even hints that a President’s job is to hold forth on sexual matters…”
So, for the record, you’re opposed to Obama’s contraception mandate?
Mr. Moran, go at it with a goat tonight…do it for teh GOP!
Troll
Where to begin? Mr. Moran’s “critique” is so full of assumptions straight from the culture that it does read, as a commenter noted earlier, like a press release from Debbie Wasserman Schultz or the head of Planned Parenthood. Here are some of them.
1. Morality is a private matter. Mr. Moran ignores that every law is an imposition of morality; it’s just whose morality is being imposed. The corollary is this: the autonomous self is the highest good. The idolatry of the autonomous self–accountable to no one and ruled by no one–is the moral and spiritual cancer that has apparently consumed Mr. Moran while it consumed our culture and is killing it. True love, the love that is patient and kind, that does not boast, that is not proud, that does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth, that lasts forever, is not found here.
2. We evolved from apes and are evolving to … we don’t know what, but it will involve free sex. Mr. Moran’s statement, “One can guarantee that there is very little sexual imagery we are exposed to today that our primitive ancestors didn’t daydream about in between hunting and gathering forays” gives away the game. Evolution not only did not happen; it could not have happened due to the complexity of DNA and the information it encodes. But living our lives awash in this erroneous belief has immoral consequences, of which Mr. Moran is the living proof.
3. Love is nothing more than sex. Mr. Moran even puts “love” in scare quotes. THAT scares me, that the truth, beauty and goodness inherent in marital love, motherly love, sacrificial fatherly love is reduced to nothing more than sex, sex and more sex, sex in public, sex in private, sex on the church altar, what does it matter as long as it feels good.
4. Technology’s rule is absolute and unquestioned. There should be, and can be, no restraints on the use of technology. Recently, a hybrid of pig and human DNA in a human embryo was allowed to grow until the researchers thought they had gone far enough, and then destroyed it, and then wrote about it. Somewhere there is, even now, a pig-man or a man-pig growing in secret that will not be destroyed. One wonders if this, or a female version of it, will be embraced by Mr. Moran simply because it is technologically spawned. As J. Bottum wrote, “Men and women will mate will with the pig men, if the pig men will have them.” But don’t worry; Mr. Moran will be right there with another helpful essay.
5. The Supreme Court’s rule is absolute and unquestioned. The Supreme Court is performing experiments with the Constitution more unnatural than any wild-eyed, wild-haired experiments ongoing in U.S. genetic labs, and Mr. Moran yawns. He yawns. This is the attitude of a slave, not a freeborn American. I wish there was somewhere we could send him, so we could say with Samuel Adams, “Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!” Since even Britain has not sunk this low, I guess we will have to be content with sending you to the (spit here) Democrats.
6. The few remaining moral boundaries are secure. Mr. Moran writes, “Yes, children should be protected from what are clearly messages and images meant for adults. The fact that government should have a role in safekeeping the innocence of kids isn’t even an argument.” Where has Mr. Moran been? Planned Parenthood, sex education, the gay campaign to lower the age of consent, cross-dressers in schools–they all have government encouragement. There is nothing in Mr. Moran’s legal libertinism that will protect anyone. Not children, not pre-born babies, not young women, not young men, not anyone. Might + desire = right. Mr. Moran is helping to pave the way straight to Sodom, where the end game is gang rape on demand. Thank you, Mr. Moran.
7. Republicans are trampling our sensibilities by bringing up sex in public conversation. Yes, you heard that right, “But for something so individualized and personal to be discussed so publicly…” was something Mr. Moran actually wrote. Sex is, in our culture, “individualized and personal?” Mr. Moran and his cultural bedfellows were all of them deceived.
I could go on, but the point is this: Mr. Moran is like a dying fish, floating downstream in the cultural stream, having done his best to procreate, or whatever. The only thing left is for something large and merciless to eat him. That is what happens to dying societies, you know, those who have lost their transcendent purpose to love. How convenient it is that the Muslims are flooding into the West. They will do the job.
Mr. Moran wasn’t referring to evolution from apes.
He was referring to the fact that archaeologists have found erotic, even pornographic, depictions of sex acts from thousands of years ago:
The Stone Age depictions of sexual organs
The Kama Sutra
The Venus figurines
The murals of Pompeii
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_erotic_depictions
Human beings have been experimenting with every variety of sex since our species first appeared on this planet.
And Americans were no different, not ever.
Careful studies of birth records and marriage records from the 18th century show that in the Colonial era, over one-third of wives gave birth to their first child less than 5 months after their first marriage. Yes, over one-third of Colonial wives were already pregnant when they first got married.
But there’s another issue that’s more important, and that’s female equality.
It is simply impossible for a woman to have a long-term career, and (as is now often the case) get married at a later age if at all–without family planning methods. She has to plan her family life in conjunction with her career planning.
Today, many career women don’t marry till they’re in their thirties. Some (like Condoleeza Rice) never marry at all. To suggest that such unmarried women should remain celibate is just silly.
The religious view of sex–don’t have sex until you’re married–was formulated at a time when human beings got married at much earlier ages. (Again, in the Colonial era, it wasn’t uncommon for parents to marry off their daughters at age 14 or 15!) And at a time when the overwhelming majority of women had no careers other than homemaker.
Today, suggesting that a female CEO of a major corporation should remain celibate until the day she marries and wishes to have children is just silly.
There are stack of problems with these claims. Puritan New England, for example, typically married women off at 18, and men in their early 20s.
One of the reasons that Christianity discouraged loose sexuality as strongly as it did is because the major losers of were girls (for whom pregnancy by creeps taking advantage of them was going to lead to poverty or worse). You might want to read Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity to see the results of pagan classical civilization.
Let me rephrase:
In the New England colonies, either there were no “age of consent” laws at all or the laws had very young ages. Parents could marry off their children whenever they, in their judgment, felt those children were old enough.
Today, many young Americans won’t be getting married till they’re in their thirties–or even later–or even never. To suggest that they should remain celibate till they get married at age 36 or age 40 is silly. To suggest that (if they never marry) they should die virgins is even sillier.
Why is that silly? Hundreds of thousands of Americans, and millions more the world over, have taken vows of celibacy precisely because they have resolved to remain single rather than to marry. Get married and be faithful or remain celibate- it’s perfectly reasonable, and it’s the only way to eradicate STDs.
Marriage ages among peasants were usually mid-twenties for the women and late twenties for the men. Very few of those young people arrived at the altar virgins; on the other hand, out of wedlock births were a disgrace, and discouraged, though (as everyone knows perfectly well) they happened.
It’s a mistake to characterize too much from the American colonial experience, as the sharp drop in the marriage age indicates as much the economic condition of the young people involved as anything else. There are other reasons – it is quite clear to me from my reading that many a young woman forced her parents hands by becoming pregnant.
It should also be noted that forms of contraception have always existed – they simply were not as effective as modern pharmacology and materials technology now provide.
I’m going nowhere near the morality argument, except to venture this: In my 20′s, I’d have been indignant at anyone pointing out the ills associated with a “liberated” sex life. By my 30′s, I noticed the mess that many of my friends lives had become in the wake of the “liberated” sex lives we’d had – and after the 12th funeral for gay friends, I got really, really thoughtful. Now, in my 40′s and closing in on my 50th birthday, I wonder if it might not be a good idea to talk just a bit about how bad free sex has been for everyone.
There’s no need for anyone to preach, but it might be a good idea to take a good hard look at the consequences, and actually discuss them, quietly and rationally.
Thanks for your reply.
Mr. Moran WAS referring to evolution from apes; go back and read the article. The phrases “our primitive ancestors didn’t daydream about in between hunting and gathering forays” and “But change is the way of the human animal” leave no doubt. Indeed, your phrase, “since our species first appeared on this planet” is cut from the same world view. That I connected Mr. Moran’s world view to the immorality that you and he advocate has nothing to do with what he actually wrote. Your willingness to read your own desires and thoughts into what is plainly written is, I would suggest, part of the problem.
I’m aware of the polyperversity of fallen humanity throughout nearly all recorded history. Indeed, the Law given to Moses 3,500 years ago, which included the ten commandments, was given into the context of the rampant idolatry and sexual immorality of the Egyptian and Canaanite cultures. In the case of the Canaanite cultures, it was sex with anything that moved, and death for everything else, including human sacrifice. But you’re confusing the normative with the prescriptive. Just because something exists, even on a large scale, doesn’t mean we should copy it. Human sacrifice has been around throughout recorded history too. It might be present on cave paintings. Does that mean we should copy that too?
That brings me to my next point, situational ethics. You articulate it beautifully: the relevance of a moral requirement depends on one’s situation, and one’s convenience. As a moral system, this view is bankrupt, and results in the landscape of broken families, broken lives, broken minds and broken bodies that we see in contemporary America. Which brings me to my third point.
Your assertion that sexual promiscuity has always been as rampant in America as it is today is so ridiculous that it barely deserves a defense. If that were true, what did the sexual revolution revolt against? Even in my lifetime, and that of my parents and grandparents, what our own eyes have observed gives this the lie. Attempting to rewrite history to support one’s view, now THAT has been around a while.
There is a well-known phrase, “follow the money” to decode strange or unexplained behavior of organizations. I use a similar rule of thumb when reading carefully constructed apologies for immorality, that of “follow the conscience.” This was best articulated in J. Budziszewski’s seminal essay The Revenge of Conscience (http://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/12/001-the-revenge-of-conscience-38). When people have disregarded their conscience, it doesn’t die or rest, but becomes a cancerous factory for more evil deeds. Eventually, that person will go to any length to tilt the world to bring the rest of humanity in line with his or her sin, to avoid encountering any external reminder of what the conscience already says. I won’t make any assumptions about your or Mr. Moran’s defense of immorality, but if the shoe fits, wear it.
Regarding your comment that celibacy until marriage is silly, I give you my own experience and that of my family. I remained celibate until marriage in my 30s and so did my wife. Any my parents. And her parents. Self-control, with God’s help (and I needed a great deal of that!), has no shelf life. It’s not silly; it is true, beautiful and good, just as it was on the day when God created the first man and the first woman for each other. You and Mr. Moran were created for something better than animal behavior. God would like a chance to introduce it to you; just ask him.
Dean from Ohio, thank you for articulating the Christian philosophical world-view so eloquently and cogently. I am not surprised to see that you are familiar with J. Budziszewski’s brilliant logic.
You’re welcome. We can only give what we have received.
Dean from Ohio: (Apparently I am not the only darcy on this board — I did not write comment #32)
Your comments are the best I’ve read anywhere on the web. Especially well do you describe the liberal and libertarian mind, “When people have disregarded their conscience, it doesn’t die or rest, but becomes a cancerous factory for more evil deeds. Eventually, that person will go to any length to tilt the world to bring the rest of humanity in line with his or her sin, to avoid encountering any external reminder of what the conscience already says.”
This is why the only people today who may use the state to impose their worldview on the rest of us are the people on the left who through the courts and our laws make strides small and large to overturn traditional morality, the morality of our Founders. See CA prop. 8 and homosexual indoctrination of public school children as recent examples. These efforts come from people who have “disregarded their conscience.”
Another point that needs making is that “moral squalor and fiscal immorality go hand in hand,” as stated by a reader over at TAS last August. We wail and moan about the critical fiscal condition of our country, a $15 Trillion (and counting) deficit and hundreds of trillions in unfunded liabilities, but REFUSE to face the fact, as a nation and among most of our political class, that only a people without proper moral bearings could enslave themselves so to such debt. The left will USE Jesus and ask, “What would Jesus do”? to alleviate poverty, then quickly answer that Jesus would cause the state to intervene — when the right answer is that Jesus would oblige INDIVIDUALS to be charitable as they saw fit. I notice that the left NEVER asks what Jesus would do when it comes to murdering unborn children for the sake of a woman’s right to sleep around and a man’s right to have as many women as he can without bearing any responsibility for the potential human life he is creating.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s didn’t revolt against American sexuality, which had always been lusty. It was entirely a revolution of FEMALE empowerment. What made the sexual revolution of the 1960s different from what had come before is that this time, women were going to make choices about sex for themselves.
I am NOT a proponent of situational ethics.
You have it backwards. The religious taboos against various sexual practices WERE an example of situational ethics: They represented sincere attempts to cope with the difficulties of running a society with primitive medicine, no understanding of hygiene or the germ theory of disease or heredity, no effective means of birth control, and limited career choices (especially for women). Societies where accurately determining a man’s true heirs (his biological sons) was very difficult without strict control of procreation. (No paternity testing in Biblical times.)
“Today, many career women don’t marry till they’re in their thirties. Some (like Condoleeza Rice) never marry at all. To suggest that such unmarried women should remain celibate is just silly.”
“I am NOT a proponent of situational ethics.”
In addition to situational ethics, you are, I would suggest, experiencing cognitive dissonance. The career woman’s situation determines the sexual morality & ethics she should follow.
(my comment fragment above also)
Here are some other examples of situational ethics you could consider while you’re at it:
1. Young women in some careers, such as Hollywood, have a very low probability of success due to the large numbers of beautiful young women in the same race. It really is necessary, to get ahead, to offer sex in exchange for roles.
2. Young women going to college are poor. Men are willing to pay for sex. Sex can be made safe. Charging tuition money for sex really is necessary to provide a college education, which no young woman can be without.
3. Children are more mature than they used to be, especially pre-teen girls. They need someone to teach them about sexual matters. What better a teacher than a middle-aged man who knows all about it, and has seen lots of graphic material about teaching young girls about it, and is really necessary to help them before they run into someone really creepy or even dangerous.
Situational ethics always “sits” on the slippery slope. It also contributes greatly to self-deception, which our current convers ation, I think, amply demonstrates.
BRAVO, Dean of Ohio!
To sinz54 : I agree with your argument about moralistic issues injected into political campaign.Eric Hoffer said many years back that “PEOPLE MIND THEIR OWN BUSINESS IF THEY HAVE BUSINESS TO MIND.IF NOT,THEY MIND OTHER PEOPLES BUSINESS”
(1)There are more important issues that have to be taken care of;sexual conduct is a small time issue compared to some of the problems we have that are much more important.
(2)If sexual behavior is the top of Rick Santorum’s agenda than he has a very limited strategic grasp of what this country needs from it’s president.If he wants to run a moral crusade,be another Billy Graham,thats fine with me!But he shouldn’t do it from the White House.
(3)Most important for the campaign,moralizing about sex,abortion,Gays-Lesbians etc. may end up giving the election to Obama & his left wing clowns.These issues will scare away many voters.The simple of mind can latch onto these sort of issues negatively & vote for the Democrats.How many times have I heard outraged women talk about their fears that right wing yahoo’s will interfere with their sexual & biological lives?How many times have I had to explain to irate women (relatives) that if elected the Republicans won’t outlaw abortion or birth control?Voters on the bottom levels of sophistication & knowledgeability get their misinformation from the MSM & what they hear is what they believe!Democracy may be nothing more than mob rule,but that is what we have!What we must deal with!
Ignoramuses vote along with the rest of us & there are millions of them.They can supply enough votes to keep Obama in the White House.
PS: I agree with many of Santorums points about morals,honor,integrity,and more but what does that have to do with the price of beans?We have to get the leftists out of power,we can reform the world a week after the elections.
Alright, let’s follow that logic a bit further: how many shotgun marriages do you see today? How many boys (I refuse to call them men) get their girlfriends pregnant and then either demand she abort their child, leave, or stick around but continue to be boys rather than becoming men? This is nothing new- the Torah addresses this matter: If you had sex with a woman, you were legally obligated to marry her unless she and her family released you from that obligation. Furthermore, while divorce was ordinarily permitted, a man who married his wife this way was prohibited from divorcing her- ever, for any reason. We’re all fallen, and we’ll all stumble in one way or another. Even some very devout Christians will give in to the temptation to fornicate, but the solution is not to normalize fornication, but rather to call it out as disordered and then to say, “If you have already done it, own up to it. Confess what you have done, and then get married. No one is telling you to stop having sex, but you have to get married.”
“Yes, over one-third of Colonial wives were already pregnant when they first got married.”
You rightly emphasize the claim, albeit without realizing the message. Clearly, wives, not single mothers.
Yes!
Back then, if a young man got a young woman pregnant, society assumed he was obligated to marry her. (And that was typically enforced by the outraged father of the woman.)
What’s changed today is an abdication of RESPONSIBILITY. Young people today are having sex just like they had sex throughout American history.
My own mom, who as a girl came of age in the 1930s, told me that most of her female classmates in JUNIOR high school had “been in the back seat of a car with a boy”. I have no reason to believe she was making this up.
But unfortunately, today’s culture is more permissive of “knock her up and leave.”
And it’s NOT because of ready access to abortion–because a lot of these young women don’t abort and end up as unwed mothers. Among the working class, as the New York Times just reported, a majority of children are now born out of wedlock. Which is sad.
What we have here, to use a Rush Limbaughism, is the voice of the new castrati. What duplicitous claptrap we have on display here. In one sentence you accuse conservative men use that are in opposition to pornography, criticism of hyper sexualized marketing, and criticism of overt sexuality in music, TV, film, and art are just masking their outdated, even primitive, view of human sexuality. I’m sorry, wasn’t it radical feminist groups that have been the a-number-one critic of pornography and hyper sexualized advertising, even going so far as to criticize women’s magazines; made for. and bought by women. of having a male driven agenda of portraying unrealistic body imagery. I don’t’ remember conservative men attacking Cosmopolitan during my lifetime.
What you called outdated and primitive, I call civilized. You want primitive, go to a rave, a gay rights parade, or an occupy gathering where men are openly defecating on police cars. That’s primitive on display. Then later in your uniformed screed, you attempt to backtrack saying, “No doubt some of this change has been harmful,(bluster bluster) even frightening. The sexualization of children (and trafficking thereof) is certainly one of those harmful consequences of freeing sex from the purely procreative.” Which in itself is a red herring, because it has nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with sex as purely procreative. Are you still living in the 60s?
As you said we would claim, conservative men desire sex like any other men, but we attempt to maintain some civility –some dignity about it. And technology doesn’t answer the needs of society, it answers their desires. Semantics, maybe, but to me there is a difference. Giving the insatiable human appetite everything it wants is a sure fire way to destroy a culture in the same way that giving into a child’s every whim is not going to produce a productive adult. The social liberal libertarians think you can divorce extreme social license from good governance, ignoring how pervasive the former is to the latter. What’s strange is that the very women you seek to pander too are the ones voting democrat. “Now that we’ve shaken off the patriarchy, who is going to provide us security? Oh, yes, the government.”
I’m not advocating for the government to mandate social morals to the populace, but I’m also not to happy with the current administrations attempt to overstep its authority. Obviously it’s a concern to many Americans, or they wouldn’t be anyone to pander too.
“The lady doth protest too much methinks”
The sexual revolution has been ongoing for several hundred thousand years…humans are sexual creatures and ignoring or suppressing this only forces it out somewhere else, sometimes with terrible results.
It is always suspicious when people act horrified discussing sex, or demand their morals be adhered too by the rest of society, its never going to happen. Those quickest to reference the Constitution and Declaration of Independence to illustrate their points regarding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the same ones demanding everyone follow their very narrow vision of what these three items actually mean. The irony escaping them.
And before bringing Bible and religion into the equation remember some of the main individuals committed murder so they could sleep with widows of their innocent victims, and or had multiple wives and concubines, mistresses and worse.
It is Pauline theology, created hundreds of years after the death of Christ, mainly responsible for Modern (800 – 1900′s) puritanical perspectives regarding sex and ensuing impact, good and bad.
If someone chooses a particular lifestyle, fantastic. Demanding that everyone follow their choice, is antithetical to the establishment of this nation. There are freedoms and responsibilities that go hand in hand, as long as i meet them both equally, it is really none of anyone’s business.
Making Sex a political statement is a mistake, one that will come back to haunt those making it.
You’re sawing off the branch you’re sitting on. Invariably, if people can do whatever they want, someone will include preying on the weak as part of what they want. If there are enough of them, then might makes right.
Having no external reference to truth, coupled with the lack of self-control that the “people will do it anyway” crowd have as a primary assumption, always results in tyranny of the strong over the weak.
Your assumption that non-Christians have no moral frame of reference, a belief evidently shared by most of the social conservatives posting here, is the political problem here.
In this republic you have the right to think that way and teach it to your children. But it’s no basis for a political party that claims to champion liberty and republicanism. The government has Powers over us all, Christian & non-Christian alike, and the Bill of Rights likewise applies to us all, Christian & non-Christian alike.
If you want to take all the credit for anything that’s worthwhile in society, it’s fine with me. Knock yourselves out. But like it or not you have to share the nation with everyone else.
Precisely how the GOP will lose in November. Allowing the idiots of the Left, the Right and all most moderate folks diverting attention to issues that don’t make a spit’s worth of difference. Again, you’ve let them define the narrative. You’re all hopeless. Time for the GOP to go off and write their orbit.
If you want to discuss sex, simply say you oppose killing any kid regardless of age. Period. If you want to talk about making kids, say you’re pro-choice by giving individuals, companies, etc., the choice of what to do. Called freedom.
Beyond that, any time spent playing narrative games with the Dems is utter foolishness. Talk pocket book, talk doubled gasoline per gallon, talk stimulus failure after stimulus failure, talk about no longer can the working folk pay for all that redistributing to folks that major in puppetry. Especially talk about energy, prosperity and security.
You’ve lost your way and simply do not know how to get back on the path.
This is great in theory, but the reality is that the ultra-liberal MSM controls the narrative. They harp on the points that make conservatives look bad and hide the stuff that makes liberals look bad. That’s the reason Obama is in office now. They hid his total lack of experience and radical ties. They continue to hide the scandals and failures in office. We don’t control the airwaves, so we can’t control the narrative. Our best hope is that Americans will actually pay attention this time.
Thus, why we lose.
A story only has legs if one keeps it running. A simple “speaking about the gasoline prices”, etc., Using Newt’s retort would be good as well. One does not win wars by conceding the battlefield. The narrative IS the battlefield.
Rick Moran is nothing more than another GOP moderate that blurs the lines between right and left, conservative and commie, GOP and dhimmicrat. Anyone who questions that the extreme normalizing of the worst sexual impulses of mankind has made society better is a fool plain and simple. Are women more free than before? Not really, now they are incapable of not working before they were incapable of working, that isn’t freedom it’s just slavery to a different master, a master that is far less sympathetic and caring. Sexual liberation has led to an objectifying of women far beyond anything that the most radical puritans ever wanted. Not to mention we speak of primitive views of sexuality, but last I checked unrestrained sexual impulses, wide spread prostitution, large scale adultery and the like is all far far more ancient than any Christian teachings on the matter. Self control goes hand in hand with civilization. Complete, unrestrained sexual license in all matters is about as close as you can get to pre-civilized as anything we’re ever likely to see. Articles completely lambasting social conservatives when they form the heart and conscience of the political right is not only counterproductive but sublimely progressive. The thing I’ve just read seems to have more place in the NYT than any website claiming to be right winged.
Hmm not sure why that was a reply to this that post; I meant for it to be a reply to the actual article directly
. My bad.
“last I checked unrestrained sexual impulses, wide spread prostitution, large scale adultery and the like is all far far more ancient than any Christian teachings on the matter. Self control goes hand in hand with civilization.”
Then according to you, we have never had civilization!
So when in the history of “civilization” was there very little prostitution? When in the history of “civilization” was there very little adultery?
In Giacomo Casanova’s time (the 18th century), wasn’t debauchery widespread among the upper classes? Didn’t Casanova himself claim to have had sex with over a hundred different women?
In our own Revolutionary War, among the Continental soldiers fighting the British RedCoats, “the French disease” was being widely spread by camp followers. And camp followers also serviced soldiers fighting in America’s Civil War. And in subsequent wars too. Here’s an American propaganda poster from World War II:
http://assets.flavorwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/syphillis.jpg
Why did many saloons in the Wild West have an upstairs second floor? What was going on up there?
During the Gold Rush in 1830, when a prospector struck gold, what did he spend the gold on? (HINT: Every madam in that part of California knew how to do a gold assay by herself.)
By the 19th century, venereal disease had become an epidemic in both America and Europe.
Right now, in Nevada, state law allows LEGAL brothels to ply their trade in rural areas far from cities. And they do. (The women must undergo medical checks, which is why very little if any STDs have been traced back to those brothels.) Are you saying that Nevadans are uncivilized? That Nevada is an uncivilized state?
Somehow, Western civilization has survived prostitution, adultery, gambling, alcohol, illicit drugs. They’ve always existed and they still all exist. And yet our civilization has accomplished amazing things.
Or maybe Western civilization has thrived BECAUSE folks understand that–properly constrained and managed–letting one’s hair down and raising a little hell is a part of what makes us human.
America is not Sodom and Gomorrah, and neither is Europe. We’re a decent, generous, hard-working people. And a people who know how to raise a little hell.
In reply to sinz54:
“Are you saying that Nevadans are uncivilized? That Nevada is an uncivilized state?”
Yes, I am.
And since you mentioned WWII, let us review the sexual immorality and final state of each major combatant:
France – mistresses galore, and rampant immorality shot through the culture. Result: a country without the will to live; some considerable bravery unit-by-unit, but surrendered and collaborated with the enemy
Italy – mistresses galore, and rampant immorality shot through the culture Result: a country without the will to live; some considerable bravery unit-by-unit, but failed miserably on the battlefield
Germany – Families more intact than France & Italy; soldiers often immoral and violent toward women, especially Russians and Ukranians. Result: will to dominate, and a dangerous enemy, but weaknesses & false ideology led to defeat in the end.
Japan – As in Germany, families more intact than Franc & Italy; mistresses common. Soldiers very often immoral and violent toward women, especially Chinese, Filipino & Korean. Result: will to dominate, and a dangerous enemy, but weaknesses & false ideology led to defeat in the end.
Russia – A conundrum. Mostly peasant armies, soldiers often behaved like animals, drinking and raping and destroying. Defeated for two years, then came back to crush the Germans on the Russian front. Without the assistance of the U.S. and Britain, they would have been swallowed up. Defeated in Afghanistan and the Cold War.
Britain – Families largely intact, although fraying. Still a Christian, churchgoing country in large part; held national prayer services during the darkest hours of the war, as at Dunkirk. In the “miracle of Dunkirk” the commanding general signaled three words at the start back to Britain: “But if not”, an allusion to the words of Daniel’s three friends to King Nebuchadnezzar: “Our God is able to deliver us from your hand, O King [and from the fiery furnace. But if not, know this, that we are not going to bow down to the image you have set up.” A Biblical prayer of defiance, made possible only by the Christian faith still in the hearts of the British. Result: the British endured and conquered Naziism and Bushido with the United States.
United States – still a Christian, largely faithful people with intact families and churches. Faults (segregation) and some immorality, but the cultural norm was monogamy outside of marriage and faithfulness in marriage. Soldiers did engage in some immoral behavior, but for every brothel there was a Y.M.C.A. or other alternative with a positive outlet for those soldiers who desired it. Furthermore, no combatant treated the nations it conquered with more respect, compassion and help. Result: the sleeping giant awoke, as Adm Yamamoto said, filled with a terrible resolve to bring justice to the Germans and the Japanese. Despite this, after the war, the American G.I. was the symbol of freedom, goodness and kindess throughout the world.
You can read a number of books by Stephen Ambrose on the uniqueness of the American G.I. The largest part of what made him who he was, was his faith and the Christian culture of faithfulness in all things despite circumstances.
Among the major combatants of WWII, the qualities of faithfulness and self-control embedded and observed in the culture led to victory. Conversely, the qualities of unfaithfulness, living for pleasure and the strong preying on the weak led to defeat and destruction.
I find it interesting that Mr. Moran finds it unthinkable that the conservative candidate should discuss contraception (where is the Federal role?) when the Democrat President just announced that there is a Constitutional right to “free contraceptives and free abortions”. So, now we are supposed to stand idly by while this newly counterfeit right of “free sex” is granted authenticity by the likes of Mr. Moran, because he is too cowardly to defend the idea of freedom. Freedom has no rights that place a requirement on others to work in servitude in order for the right to exist. Free contraception requires the responsible citizens to pay for licentiousnesss of the irresponsible. I guess that includes Mr. Moran. And at what price? How about most kids these says not having a real mother and father. Most kids being the product of cheap one night stands like Mr. Moran apparently enjoys. Well, he has the right to have sex with whatever adult or animal he chooses, but Mr. Moran does not have the right to force me to subsidize his animal lust. And I am about at the point of disgust with this entire country where I must quit my job so I pay no more taxes to support the unending list of invented rights Mr. Moran insists on including unlimited free sex, free cell phones, free big screen TVs, free houses, free drugs, free doctors. Mr. Moran can find his own funding for all this. I quit! I am headed to the unemployment office to implement my own Coward Piven strategy.
WOW! This is just the sort of enlightened stuff I LOVE to come across after a few hours spent drooling all over my keyboard at the 1 million+ pornography websites to be viewed at any public library…I have my rights, you know…an’ it’sa great way to meet like-minded swingin’ cats!…
OVER HERE, GOODLOOKIN’!! WANNA DO IT IN THE ROAD?!!!
*SLAP!!!*
HEY HOT STUFF!!!! WANNA…..
*SLAP!!!*
HEY THERE YOU HUNK’A BURNIN’ LUV…WANNA PICK UP ONE OR MORE OF APPROXIMATELY 50 SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES, AND SPEND THE REST OF YOUR LIFE TRYING TO CONTROL THEIR OUTBREAKS?
*SLAP!!!*
Gee, this all seemed like such a great idea…maybe that’s why the Bible forbids a practice that has been proven for centuries to destroy families and civilizations: fornication.
Hebrews 13:4: ”marriage is honourable in all, and the (marriage) bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.” Well, golly…does that mean a man and his wife can have sex simply to enjoy themselves?
Who woulda’ thunk it…
You are right on. There is a reason that previous societies and cultures created rules of behavior concerning morality in general and sexual behavior in particular. These rules made up the moral standard. With a moral standard in place, societies are more orderly and more safe. This is the difference between conservatives and liberals. Liberals, not believing in Natural Law or human nature, eschew a moral standard: if you want to do it, it’s OK. Conservatives, who do believe in Natural Law and human nature, understand that humans are flawed and often succumb to temptation. However, conservatives maintain a committment to a moral standard and strive to become better people, in spite of their flawed natures. In other words, at least conservatives have something to try to live up to. Conservatives enjoy sex as much as liberals do; we just don’t want to blab it to the whole world. We think it should be private.
Look at all the social ills that have resulted because of the sexual revolution and the tossing out of the moral standard: kids having sex at 12 or 13, teen pregnancies, women electing to be single mothers (which is so bad for kids), abortions, rise in STDs, and on and on. And yes, these things surely happened in all societies in the past, but they were things that were shameful. They were aberrations from the moral standard. Moran seems to be saying that nothing should be shameful or discouraged anymore. It’s a free-for-all.
And the worst thing is that you get sex shoved in your face on every TV show, in every print ad, in newspaper and magazine articles, and everywhere else. Are we really a society now that has elevated our genitals and what we do with them to a place (excepting procreation) above everything else? We used to be a dignified society. No more. Our culture is undignified, tasteless and crude, and that shouldn’t make anyone feel good.
The problem is simple– I do not want to pay for it. When I say I do not want to pay for it, leftists hear “he wants to limit women’s reproductive choice”. The media amplifies what leftists hear, and it becomes truth to political “independents” who are really just people who don’t pay attention until the last minute.
Then pundits like Mr. Moran say that, if I don’t stop having outmoded ideas about sex, I will lose the independents.
I can tell you why Republicans lose, but I don’t think you’ll listen.
I don’t want to pay for it either. Watch this great Bill Whittle video. He addresses what you speak of.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lvLZ-M_HS-w
I definitely don’t want to pay for straight people’s birth control. Nor do I believe you guys should be having sex without producing children. So, with all of us being in agreement that we don’t want to pay for other people’s birth control, and will need to get Obama out of office, why are you championing Santorum? As a former leftist (as my name implies), I can tell you he’s exactly how we use to paint those on the Right. By selecting someone like Santorum, who had a lackluster record on fiscal issues (please do your research, people), but has been all about talking about what he thinks about this moral issue and that moral issue, you’re playing right into the Left’s hands. I was educated in the 80s in the DODDS school system. Much better than what you had here stateside back then and multiple times better than what you have in current times. I bought into it but followed politics as I got older and learned otherwise. Your kids today buy into it lock, stock and barrel. No questions asked. No analysis. I’ve been to parties where the subject of the less intelligent younger people comes up out of no where. A Santorum presidential run is toast. You’ll have people who never voted before come out and vote for Obama.
The Left has been trying to redefine the deinition of marriage to the point where marriage will no longer exist. Two men, two women, brother/sister, two brothers, who cares if they like having sex together. Who are we to judge? We elect a president that is so fanatically pro abortion that he fought to make sure that infants who survived an abortion procedure where left to die on a table and then thrown into the trash. His wife has attacked anybody that opposes stabbing infants in the skull moments before birth and sucking their brains out because this is a “legitimate medical procedure”. I’m glad she’s not my Doctor. Under Obamacare should probably could be theory. Are kids are forcibly taught that homosexualty is merely a differnt lifestyle. They are given condoms to put on wooden penises and bananas. If you disagree with any of this you can be expelled, lose your job, and even ultimately be imprisoned.
And Mr. Moran thinks Santorum is a problem.
Our country is finished. We no longer have a Constitution nor or we capable of abiding by and living under the one bestowed upon us by our Founders. John Adams was correct when he said that our Constitution would only work for a moral and religious people. We are no longer moral nor are we a religious people, ergo, our Constitution can not and does not work and we are being consigned to the dustbin of history.
Once again, the meddlesome Christian Right opens its big mouth and puts both feet in. Many of the founding fathers engaged in pre-marital or extra-marital sex, Benjamin Franklin being notorious on this score. And who are you to define what “religious people” means?
Until the Republican Party muzzles the bible-thumpers, it’s doomed. These fanatics are not content with following their own religion; they want everyone else to be forced to follow it too.
Homosexuals do not threaten the survival of the country. Who cares if they aren’t sexually attracted to the opposite sex, and ARE attracted to their own? What possible business is it of yours what consenting adults do if it isn’t harmful? Who cares of homosexuals get married to one another? How does this in any way harm you or your family?
You are allowing your religious beliefs to spill over into the political arena to the detriment of everyone else. Most of us out here have better things to do than to worry about juxtaposed penises or demonic old Jehovah throwing fits over people doing what biology has set them up to do. You remind me the old ladies who have fits because cats catch birds and demand laws prohibiting cats from being cats.
Homosexuality as an orientation, not just an occasional experience, is common in many species, including cats, dogs, and especially apes and monkeys. Many homosexual animals mate for life. You can keep telling yourself it’s a choice, but it’s only a choice if you happen to be bisexual. Are you?
You know this article was rancid when Flaming Lib is singing its praises – truly worthy of KKKos. People like the Lib are a measuring stick – the more he and his ilk approve, the worse and perverted the idea.
However, we are ignorant to let “sex” even become part of the reelection equation. There are issues of discussion (birth control being one) and issues of division (unsustainable debt, infringement on the 1st Amendment), and our entire emphasis through November 2012 should be on those issues of division that appeal to moderate and conservative alike. Because Obama is weak and the media know he is weak, and we have no excuse not to wipe the floor with this ingrate in November.
———-
Now, as for you Mr. Moran. Let me tell you what you are. A beta male. Nah, you don’t rate Beta. Gamma. You’re one of the last guys on earth than need to be critiquing manhood and sex.
Thousands of years ago, you’re the one hanging curtains in the cave for the women while the men hunted. Put a sock in it.
Florida totally ignores my comments and goes off on a tangent about extra marital affairs. What does that have to do with the redefinition of the building block of our society -the family? What does that have to do with indoctrinating our children with your perverted lifestyles with our tax dollars? What does it have to do with infanticide? What does it have to do with the loss of our liberty to practice religion? What does that have to do with our freedom of speech? Read my post.
When the Founders refer to “religion” they are speaking about Christianity. When they refer to God or the Creator they are referring to the Judeo-Christian God or the God of the Bible. They are not referring to allah or some other pagan deity that had nothing to do with our foundation. We as John Adams foretold are incapable of living under the Constitution that they created because our lack of religiousity and immorality as a lot of these post confirm.
wind·bag
windbag /ˈwɪndˌbæg/
noun
1.
Informal: An empty, voluble, pretentious talker.
2.
The bag of a bagpipe.
Origin:
1425–75; late Middle English.
Synonyms: Gunner57, Leatherneck
Florida’s made an ad hominem attack: “(of an argument) characterized by an attack on the person rather than their argument; appealing to the emotions and not to reason.” (Canadian Oxford Dictionary)
Ad hominems are cowardly, disingenuous, and unworthy of a person of integrity. (Scoundrels use ad hominems as a matter of course.)
Smarten up, Florida.
Lookout (below), read Gunner’s crackpot comments before jumping in, please. How about this line: “What does that have to do with indoctrinating our children with your perverted lifestyles with our tax dollars? What does it have to do with infanticide?” Say what? Did I or anybody else mention infanticide? And what is this about “indoctrinating our children with your perverted lifestyle?” What perverted lifestyle? What children? What indoctrination, and with what tax dollars?
I know what ad hominem means, and I getting pretty tired of conservatives throwing the term up to hide behind while they themselves engage is endless slurs and personal attacks. Gunner57 must spend hours a day posting his inane comments to conservative Web sites. He’s a common pest at American Thinker. You can’t argue facts with him, because he doesn’t know the difference between fact and religious fantasy, and he’s incapable of logical thinking. Read my original post, then his reply. He couldn’t even write one paragraph before flying off into his dream world of alleged persecuted bible-thumpers and alleged born again Christian Constitution writers. I think Thomas Jefferson, if he came back, would simply beat the crap out of him, assuming there wasn’t an infinite supply.
I once saw a puppy from a litter try to mount another male dog only to have the adult male bark at him and nudge him off. Funny, in 40 years of existence I’ve never seen a cat or a dog engage in homosexual relations. Dogs and cats don’t engage in hetrosexual relations. The f**k. That’s it. When the female is in heat, a male mounts her (period). Stop trying to anthropomorphize animals to fit your world view.
You might want to share your omniscience with the world’s veterinarians, animal behaviorists, and zoo-keepers, who for decades have studied and written about animal homosexuality. Lucky for them that you can categorically state it does not exist because you once saw a dog repel a puppy trying to hump it.
I guess heterosexuality doesn’t exist among human females either, since many women rebuff men trying to hump them.
Thank heaven you came along to set everyone straight.
Bravo! I agree with you 100 percent. We have lost our moral compass and when that’s gone, so is the society and the country.
Do people of today NOT know any history? Read history and you will see what happens to societies that lose their way morally.
Sex is being turned into a campaign issue because the Democrats WANT it to be a campaign issue. Obama has a lousy record and nothing to run on, so he has to talk about something else, like contraception and “A woman’s right to choose.” Bunk. No Republican is disputing any of this. I have not heard one serious Republican candidate say that they wanted to ban either contraception OR Roe vs. Wade.
But I see no problems at all for the government NOT having to PAY for abortions or contraceptives for everybody. Isn’t that what Planned Parenthood was supposed to be all about? But for the government now to fund all abortions, even though Obama signed an Executive Order stating that the government would not do that (remember Bart Stupak), is simply terrible. Women have a right to choose and people have a right to contraceptives, but not on my dime. Why is that such a bad message? I’m sure everybody would agree to that. But now since insurance companies are being forced to cover all abortions (and the “morning after pill,” which is a form of abortion), and since the government is subsidizing the insurance companies for doing so, then we are, in effect, funding abortion with public money. So not only is Obama a liar and his Executive Order a lie, but we get stuck with the bill.
Only a Liberal could come up with something so evil as that and THAT is why Obama and as many of his minions need to be thrown out in November.
Does this mean I don’t need to pay for bombs dropped on the heads of whomever conservatives tell me are my enemies?
Goody!
The issue I see here is the extent to which, if any, the Constitution authorizes the Federal Government to require churches and their affiliated organizations to provide, subsidize or otherwise to facilitate activities condemned by their religious doctrines. The Roman Catholic Church and others have long maintained that contraception and abortion are condemned by their religious doctrines.
To find a “right” to free, subsidized or otherwise facilitated contraception, which is neither expressed nor implied in the Constitution, and to insist that it supersedes the guarantee of free exercise of religion clearly expressed in the First Amendment, is pernicious. I have written about it at greater length here
I disagree with your characterization of the moral issue–be that as it may—but I agree with you entirely on the issue of freighting the ticket with too much that is controversial and divisive.
In a two-party system, the fundamental trick is to galvanize support around a single, compelling issue. We have such an issue: the president is destroying the economy. That one issue is sufficient to win; everything else is a drag on the ticket.
The Frankfurt School has finally worked its “magic,” folks.
You need to be a hell of a lot more specific than that for your comment to be useful here. The “Frankfurt School” covers a whole lot of ground that could be applied and argued here.
It would be better if individuals that have a problem with Christianty would divide the Universal Church from Christianty. One follows human doctrine, and the other follows Christ the word made flesh.
Christ did not murder the women accused of adultry, but Christ did stand for morality. Christ did state his return would be when things are as they were during the time of Noah.
A time lacking in morality, increase in murder, a lack of love, homosexuality, an increase in wars, and earthquakes.
I defend anyone’s right to worship themselves as G-d, and being of the world. I expect the same support should I believe in a G-d who died for his creation, and gave said creation the blueprint in which to live within the world system, but not of the world system.
Human wisdom is foolishness next to G-d’s plan for his human creation.
The Bible plainly states that Communion is nothing short of the Flesh and Blood of Christ. Most Christian denominations deny this truth. Who is following human teaching and who is following Scripture?
Those who pray to G-d the Father in Christ’s name, and not praying to the Queen of Heaven or any other dead person. Saul tried that with the witch of Endor, and the Queen of Heaven whom Israel baked bread to was once the mother and wife of Nimrod.
When Christ was murdered on the cross, he died once, not over, and over…
G-d the Father died for his creation, not asking his creation to murder for him. Never did G-d the Father tell some man to wage war, and murder Muslims, and Jews. Just because someone does not believe in Christ as the word of G-d does not give the Universal Church the right to burn them.
Infants are innocent, they do not need to Babtised, but it helps control the parents. It is the same with all the Pagan Holidays made into Christian Holidays. One is going on in New Orleans right now.
The Universal Church is not Christian. Some within that Church are. It misleads millions.
I hope that answered your question.
Leatherneck states – “Never did G-d the Father tell some man to wage war, and murder Muslims, and Jews”.
No, but allah did. Its over 10 years since 9-11 and you along with 90% of Americans know absolutely nothing about what Muhammad commands all Muslims to do. That is whenever possible to convert, kill, subjugate or enslave all non believers. Try reading the Islamic texts, if you even know what they are let alone what they say.
Meanwhile, the Muslims are commiting genocide against every Christian in the Middle East [whenever possible] and North Africa and beyond. Communities dating back to the Apostles are being murdered or forced to flee for their lives. Its happening in Iraq, Egypt, Libya Kenya, next up Syria and on and on. I don’t think that I need to elaborate about the ongoing jihad against the Jews especially the Israeli’s. These are not radical Muslims. They are simply Muslims following their Islamic texts. As Turkish PM Erogan so eloquently stated “Islam is Islam”. How nice. Its a shame most of our Generals never seemed to have bothered to read the Koran for themselves.
BTW, God does not have a problem with people defending themselves. You mentioned murder that is different. Do you think God had a problem with Charles Martel in 732 A.D.? Or with King Jan Sobienski in 1684 A.D.? Do you even know what happened in those pivitol years?
Gunner57,
Thank you for your service to our nation. I was not writing about Muhammad, and moon god worship. I agree with everything you wrote about Islam.
Charles Martel, as you know, defeated the moon god worshipers in France. He did make a lot of people convert to Christianty or elce. I was not there, and I may have been killed for telling Charles that is not what Christ taught.
I agree murder, and being killed are not the same. Thou shall not murder. The Marine Corp keeps heaven filled with fresh souls. They killed them. Sometimes, there may be a few souls murdered by a Marine that went ape sh## watching his friends get blown up by a IED. Not good, but war is hell.
What you teach is contrary to everything taught by the fathers. Christ Himself said, “Unless you eat My Flesh and drink My Blood, you have no life within you.” Paul warned that those who partake of Communion unworthily shall answer for the Body and Blood of the Lord. You boast of sola scriptura, but you do not abide by it. You instead heed the teachings of men, claiming that Scripture does not mean what it says when it says that Communion is the Flesh and Blood of Christ. Furthermore, Christ is not re-sacrificed, but rather we partake of that same sacrifice eternally. What Christ did at the Last Supper was part of the Passion, and Communion at Mass today is the same Sacrifice that occurred at the Last Supper and Calvary.
Concerning baptism, the new invention is refusing to baptize infants. From the Apostolic days believers always had their children baptized, even from infancy. “Let the children come to Me,” says the Lord. But you think you know better than the Apostles, don’t you? Tell me Leatherneck, does baptism save you, according to Scripture? I think you’ll be shocked by the answer.
As if we don’t find enough to fight about, now we’re fighting about whether the Catholic (Universal) Church is Christian. You people are effin’ nuts; you deserve to be enslaved to the communists – I DON’T!
Since you refused to respond to my question, I’ll answer it for you: According to 1 Peter 3:21, baptism saves us.
Technically, according to Catholic teachings, infants DO need to be baptized. Baptism remove “original sin.”
The 60s fashion of sex, drugs and rock and roll has become an epidemic of AIDS, crack/meth and rap.
2000 yrs ago Christianity gave an adaptive way out of decadent horror of the pagan world and created Christian Civilization.
America was founded on Christian values.
The 60s reverted to the pagan lifestyle-if it feels good–do it.
Santorum makes the compelling case for rebuilding Christian Civilization in America–he is right-it is our only hope
This is an important article which social conservatives especially should take to heart, but likely won’t based on the comments.
I don’t think Moran is arguing that the changes in society broadly known as the sexual revolution are a “good thing”; rather, that they exist and cannot be legislated away.
The issue many, many Americans have with social conservatives, especially evangelical/fundamentalist Protestants and ultramontane Catholics, is that based on historical precedent, they suspect that they will try, if they have sufficient control of Congress and the White House, to enact their views into law. The historical precedents are not encouraging: whether in the example of Prohibition (which the Progressives embraced for their own purposes of social control, but which had its origins and greatest popular support among populist fundamentalist Christian conservatives) or in Catholic countries’ laws against divorce and birth control (illegal in Ireland until 1980) even well into the modern era.
No one who is not a social con thinks this is a good idea. The assurances of the social cons that they won’t do it ring hollow to far too many other conservatives and libertarians, let alone moderates and independents.
I agree, as a personal matter of morality, with many socially conservative positions and critiques of the sexual revolution. Where I, and many others, disagree is in whether there is any role for the federal, or even the state, governments in legally prohibiting those behaviors.
What social conservatives have to do to avoid being tarred with the “blue nose” and “Comstock” brush is to:
1. Emphasize that under our Constitution, the role of the government is very limited in matters of morality, and that those dismayed with popular morality should not look to government to solve the problem.
2. Educate people on the consequences of bad choices — the new book by Charles Murray Coming Apart should help here — and on how better choices lead to better lives.
3. Educate people on the role of the “republican virtues” which the Founders and early writers on America like de Tocqueville emphasized, including the people’s personal religiousness.
4. Emphasize, in talking about the sexualization of children, how Christianity (and to a lesser extent, Judaism before it) played an absolutely crucial role in reducing (though never completely eliminating) the sexual exploitation of children that was so common in the ancient world.
5. Most importantly, live the morality they preach. No one likes hypocrites or Elmer Gantry-like preachers.
The sexual revolution – that is the availability of safe birth control and the changed attitudes towards women’s sexuality that it engendered – is simply not going away. It may have been Pandora’s box, but things cannot be stuffed back into the box. The world will never return to the status quo ante, which had its own faults for so many.
In the face of this revolution, the most important thing is for parents to model and to teach their children the moral basis to make good decisions for themselves and their lives and future children. Religion can provide this foundation, but only as a personal and voluntary community matter.
The difficulty with the “just go ahead and model this to your children” is that the left’s control of the mass media and public education systems means that there is a much stronger model being actively subsidized.
The point should be primarily to get it out of the schools, rather than have the government weigh in on ‘our’ side. Emphasis on local government, local control of schools removing all of the government mandates that sex education be taught (and taught certain ways), and on parental responsibility for what children are taught about morals and what children do and see.
Remove the state subsidies for the consequences of bad behavior! Let those who make those bad choices live with the consequences!
The reason Americans used to (be more likely to) be virtuous was that they would personally – and their families – suffer the consequences of making choices for what used to be called “vice:” drunkenness or drugs, immorality and diseases, illegitimacy, sloth, dishonesty, etc.
You have some good points here, but they are getting lost in your utter disdain for religious conservatives.
Look, I consider myself a libertarian. I do not like social conservatism, even though I’m a devout Christian myself. I don’t like Santorum and I don’t want him for my president, though he’d still be better than Obama. I don’t believe in legislating morality–it will never work.
But don’t tell me that the Christian view of sexuality morality is inferior to the “sexual revolution” morality. It’s not. And nothing can say will make it be.
Yes, people can be perfectly happy living by the liberal morality system of sex outside marriage, living together before marriage, never getting marriage, etc. I am pro gay freedom. People make their choices and they should be allowed to make their own choices, and their own mistakes.
But you can’t tell me that sexual liberality is better for individuals and society than the conservative preference of monogamous marriage and sex (not necessarily only for procreation–the conservative Christians I know also enjoy sex for other reasons). There is too much evidence out there of the harm that sexual liberality does, pregnancies out of wedlock, abortions, kids growing up in difficult circumstances abandoned by a parent, etc. I only have to look around me to my own community and my own extended family to see the harm that this does.
Meanwhile, conservative families continue to be strong and loving and the foundation of society. This is irrefutable and you will never convince me otherwise.
Until there is a contraception that works 100% of the time, in all cases, everywhere (and there isn’t), sex will always have a dangerous side. Even with perfect use of condoms, they still fail 2% of the time. That may be acceptable to most people, but not to me. That’s 2% of sexual liaisons that may end in unwanted pregnancy or venereal disease. And with all the sexual liaisons going on, that’s a lot of women (and men) put in situations they never thought they’d have to deal with. They will feel betrayed and lied to, desperate and afraid and alone, and that is unacceptable.
Until there is a contraception that works 100% of the time in all cases and everywhere, those who choose should have sex should be aware that there is a chance, however small, of pregnancy or disease, and they must be willing to deal with that. People need to be informed about what they’re getting into.
If conservatives can carry that message, I’m all for it. Yeah, it gets buried in the politics and obfuscations, but it’s still important for people to understand. Sex is fun and intimate and enjoyable and good for people. It can also, in many, many cases, be very dangerous. Let’s just TELL people what they’re getting into. And then they make their own choices and mistakes as they please, and deal with them on their own, without expecting society to bail them out.
I don’t want to pay for something that doesn’t work, not for myself or for anyone else. Not with my wallet, not with my taxes, not with my sense of morality and religion.
Keep your liberality off my morality.
Instead murdering babies is so modern, and cool.
The only way we win is to not let leftists make the election about sexuality, because, regardless of the societal problems promiscuity leads to, we will never get that Genie back in the bottle.
We have to have an appeal to individual responsibility while being autonomous, and not pretend that we can pass some laws and make everything better. Contraception is NOT the hill to die on. That battle has been long lost.
Which is why the press colluded with Obama to inject it into the primary debates, as well as battle prep space for his un-Constitutional attack on religious institutions. Note that they aren’t telling the truth in that they are framing it as a denial of access if someone has to pay for their own contraceptives.
Note they didn’t use abortion, as the public is turning against it, primarily due to the extremism on the left over the issue.
And when I hear a Presidential Candidate repeatedly calling for State control of contraceptives, I turn them off. Because that is not a Conservative speaking; thats a Moral Authoritarian tell us that we cannot handle libery.
At a more basic level, it is none of tany politicians damn business what adults to between the sheets. None whatsoever. That candidate may get my vote, come Novemeber, but I will be holding my nose the entire way and I will not trust him to not be a statist authoritarian.
And no one is proposing to restrict contraception. Even Santorum is careful to emphasize that his personal objection to contraception should not be the subject of either federal or state law. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/post/rick-santorum-the-idea-im-coming-after-your-birth-control-is-absurd/2012/01/06/gIQAOVy0fP_blog.html
No, but the right to obey God most certainly is a hill to die on, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions (their true number is known only to God) of martyrs have done so for thousands of years.
One of the best articles I have seen in my limited time at PJM. It describes the idiocy and hubris of some candidates and face it the Republican Party in trying to legislate what goes on between two consenting adults in privacy.
Look at the Republican Parties opposition to gay marriage. They say they oppose it because it threatens traditional marriage as if all those traditional married people are suddenly going to switch (well maybe Larry Craig). That’s just crazy talk. Oh wait there is a better reason – the bible says it’s an abomination – well who gives a horses rear what your bible or religion says. It’s going to happen as all social progress happens without the support of conservatives. I can’t think of to many conservatives who supported women’s right to vote yet we can always count on conservatives braying how women shouldn’t be able to do this or that – heck how many conservatives have ever supported the equal rights amendment?
I’m excited about this idiocy about wanting to prevent birth control for women as it just reinforces the picture many people have of what the Republicans are all about – an collection of jesus freaks, homophobes, bigots, and racists (hey didn’t CPAC just welcome with open arms a White Nationalist and just said no to the log cabin folks). Now many here will say it’s about religious freedom and to that I say – BULL. The Church has exemptions and the Catholic Hospitals and Colleges and Catholic Law Schools have been offering this coverage for years with Bishops being silent yet the Republicans get behind the Bishops this time (because usually the Republican oppose most of what the Catholic Bishops support) because it lends nicely into their war on women and their ability to control their own vagina.
Please I beg of you to make Santorum your nominee.
Then we have the fight on abortion as if that will ever be outlawed like the Republicans want. Santorum wants to put these doctors in jail. He’s a nutcase and that he is leading in the polls just reinforces what independents think about the social aspects of what the Republicans stand for – just look at Newt and his family values as he has lead your party as well – then we have Herman Cain and his women issues. How about one of your leaders Rush and his family values of being married four times, never having any kids (thankfully), avoiding the draft because of a boil on his butt, meeting his third wife in a chat room, what a values man. Most of the conservative base is in the South and just look at what their values are and where they put their money (certainly not education) and their focus on the family (how’s leading in divorces going for y’all) or even paying your share of federal taxes as most of those states are welfare queen’s getting more back than they pay in and yet they still scream.
The Republicans scream about sex and yet they vote into office Vitter in LA. A guy who wanted prostitutes to spank him with a diaper on before he did the nasty and he’s OK. Larry Craig needed to go but wouldn’t and that got you upset but Ensign was fine until he had to testify.
The hypocrisy flowing from the conservative base is like a fine effluent stinking up the back yard. Keep the bible thumpers screaming and the war on women going as it’s going to be a great November.
“Most of the conservative base is in the South and just look at what their values are and where they put their money (certainly not education) and their focus on the family (how’s leading in divorces going for y’all) or even paying your share of federal taxes as most of those states are welfare queen’s getting more back than they pay in and yet they still scream.”
Take a couple of large Democrat constituencies out of the South and the other Red States and the demographics look very different, but you guys like their support so much, it is only fair that the Blue States pay for that support.
We conservatives will resolve these issues without your friendly advice.
“all social progress happens without the support of conservatives”
Which is why further appointments of conservative justices to the appellate courts must absolutely be blocked.
The courts are what drags our society kicking and screaming into modernity. Legislators can’t do it, because they answer to the fear, ignorance and bigotry of the voters.
The only reason why state prohibition against contraceptives is no longer an “issue” is because of the majority decision in Griswold. But the mechanism of progress which Griswold represents most assuredly IS an issue in this and every election.
I think you have your reasoning completely backwards. No collectivist movement ever moved a society towards modernity. Next subject, please.
Mr. Moran accurately captures the Liberal narrative of the Establishment but misses the point badly. I don’t care if Mr. Moran engages in sex with a man, woman, multiple men, multiple women or “goes at with a goat” as was suggested above. I do care, however, when the results of those assignations become a burden to society and the costs are shifted from Mr. Moran to me. It doesn’t take more than a few keystrokes to find that the percentage of “single parent households” has increased sharply in the last 50 years. That increase stems from “marriage advocates” who “modernized” marriage causing the divorce rate to skyrocket and from the sexual revolution that Mr. Moran gushes over. I don’t care if you’re divorced, I don’t care if you want to impregnate nubile females, but I do care if those actions place a financial burden on me.
In the past being an unwed mother brought shame on the family. Why? Was it because the sex wasn’t sanctioned by old men wearing bathrobes? Yes, if you believe Mr. Moran. If you live in the real world though, you’d understand that the shaming arose because the new baby placed a serious financial burden on the family. What Mr. Moran and his “enlightened friends” don’t want to admit is that historically before one married and engaged in sex one had to demonstrate that they could financially support any and all offspring. But Mr. Moran now says “piffle”, the taxpayer shall supply sex aides, the taxpayer shall rear the children, the taxpayer shall educate the children, the taxpayer shall provide college educations to all, the taxpayer shall provide jobs, the taxpayer shall provide housing, and the taxpayer will provide for retirement. What Mr. Moran fails to mention is who would want to be a taxpayer under his scenario.
No Mr. Moran, the contraception flap isn’t about sex, it’s about personal responsibility. I’ll tell you again Mr. Moran, I don’t care if you have sex, I don’t care if you divorce, I don’t care is you do drugs (as this article clearly suggests you do), I don’t care what you do in your personal life as long as it doesn’t place a burden on me. Perhaps if you’d put down the crack pipe for a minute you’d realize that all those entitlements that stem from “let the taxpayer pay” are bankrupting the country. Here I was thinking that Libertarians and Conservatives believed that one should be responsible for what one did and then Mr. Moran comes along and says no, “if it feels good then do it and let the taxpayer pay, and pay, and pay some more”.
You make an excellent point, consistent with Mr. Moran really, that the conservative narrative should not be about the government interfering in the moral choices people make, but rather in the government – which means everyone else including those of us who do not agree with the choices – bearing the burden of the consequences.
The way to change behavior and morality if for those who make bad choices to suffer the consequences – the very individual responsibility we say we are for.
Don’t do away with the safety net for what were traditionally called the “deserving poor” (though ultimately I’d like to see it privatized to nongovernmental charitable organizations, rather than being a government ‘entitlement’), rather attack the notion of ‘entitlement’ and do not support or provide medical care for those whose poverty or illness is the result of their life style choices about drugs and sex. Take any children born into such circumstances out of them, and let the parents live (or not) with their choices.
Getting a little tired of the bashing the “sexual revolution” has taken here. It’s time someone stood up for it. Might as well be me.
I don’t think anyone would argue that the sexual revolution hasn’t had some negative consequences, but in the grand scheme of things it has been a positive in the empowerment of women. How? Let me explain.
For thousands of years, men had almost all of the power, be it physical, financial, military or whatnot. They were dominant in most (though by no means all) areas of every society. One of the few powers that women had, and often the only power they had, was sexual (and even that was not total, as most men had the physical strength to overpower women). And in most societies they were supposed to restrict that power as well, through marriage and other institutions.
I don’t agree with the feminist criticism of marriage as sexist adn an institution of male domination, but I can understand it.
The sexual revolution was a recognition by women that they had this power and could show it. Using that newly-recognized power (i.e. having sex) too much has had negative consequences, but recognizing they have it and showing it (dressing in an alluring fashion, for instance) is not the problem. After all, men showed their power for thousands of years. You can argue that many women have abused that power to the detriment of all, but it is still their power. Not recognizing it, not respecting it is not an option.
As Rick Moran says, social conservatives do seem to have a problem with sex outside procreation. They seem to believe that sex is ONLY for procreation and nothing else. The pleasurable experience of sex and the emotional intimacy it can create suggests otherwise. But in reducing sex to purely a utilitarian function in procreation and nothing more, it is social conservatives who objectify women by making them nothiong more than baby factories.
One more thing: might want to be careful about bashing “divorce.” The surge in divorce is actually a good thing inasmuch as it is because it is becoming more accepted in our society, as it should. Again, for thousands of years women in abusive or loveless marriages had no way out because divorce was frowned upon and, again, men had all the power. There is no reason whatsoever to force them to stay in such arrangements merely to “preserve the sanctity of marriage.” If a mariage is abusive or loveless, it has no sanctity to preserve. The problem is not divorce, but bad marriages.
If you want to REALLY alienate independent voters more than you already have, keep bashing divorce and insult all the divorcees out there.
Republicans who ignore this good advice will be losers in November.
During this time of economic pain-unemployment, inflation, rising gas prices, losing homes, burdensome regulations etc, etc you seriously believe that Democrat’s campaign plan to pound away the topic of Sex and Condoms for the next nine months will win elections?
All this stupid hysteria about “republicans taking away our sex” won’t last longer than Rick Moran’s three minutes it takes him to climax to his porn tv.
There is so much wrong with this article.
Santorum explicitly rejects the idea that the government, at any level, should prohibit contraception. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/post/rick-santorum-the-idea-im-coming-after-your-birth-control-is-absurd/2012/01/06/gIQAOVy0fP_blog.html
There are Catholics who follow Church doctrine about sex is only for procreation, such as Santorum. This is not the view of any Protestant church, to my knowledge, and it is a view utterly rejected by every social conservative that I know (and that would include me).
Smart, sensible people can certainly work well in your “if it feels good, do it” world, but a big chunk of Americans have been pretty seriously damaged by this model: Girls of 13 and 14 who are pregnant because they are desperate to be loved, and there are plenty of boys (and even more worrisome, men) who are quite prepared to take advantage of this.
STDs are a major problem as well–and some of the STDs are lifetime problems. More disturbing, antibiotic immune gonorrhea is growing rapidly as a part of the gene pool. http://claytonecramer.blogspot.com/2012/02/dont-be-stupid.html We are fighting with strains that CAN’T be cured with current medications.
Of course Democrats would focus on the sexual titillation to persuade the dumbdowned masses to overlook economic disaster and foolishly unwise Rick Moran would then blame the GOP.
Mark Steyn says it best:
“the Democrats shriek, ooh, Republican prudes who can’t get any action want to shut down your sex life! According to CBO projections, by midcentury mere interest payments on the debt will exceed federal revenues.
For purposes of comparison, by 1788 Louis XVI’s government in France was spending a mere 60% of revenues on debt service, and we know how that worked out for His Majesty shortly thereafter.
Not to worry, says Barry Antoinette. Let them eat condoms.”
Whoa, Rick. You said that “personal moral judgment(s)” should be kept out of the political arena, then turn right around and accuse social conservatives of being “stiff-necked, blue-nosed, anti-sex bigots.” Sounds like a personal moral judgment to me. Physician, heal thyself.
Oh, shut up. Santorum was starting to get on my nerves with his so-con stuff, but after reading this obnoxious little serving of condescending claptrap I’m starting to warm up to him. “Libertarian” is not the same thing as “conervative,” and Rick Moron, wou’re no Aristotle.
So it would appear we dare not discuss states rights or the separation of church and state because voters will think it is merely code for “women should not enjoy sex.” If that is truly where we are at, we might as well give up now and surrender our souls to an ever-expanding centralized government. Yes, there is no issue, no thing too personal that cannot be defined by a bureaucrat.
Please provide a source to back up this claim. I see that something like 98% of American women use birth control of some sort. About 25% of Americans qualify as social conservatives (and that includes a lot of women). Do you see a potential conflict between this and your claim?
This is one of the most ignorant articles ever to appear on Pajamas Media. Moran digs up a host of strawmen and half-truths. Apparently he doesn’t want to talk about the many single parents in this country and epidemic of diseases which we are reminded of that stem from his apparent attitude favoring casual sex.
Clayton – I suspect the majority of Taliban women wear burkas so what’s your point? Do you think they like wearing burkas? Many people classify themselves in many ways by issue. I’m a social liberal but a fiscal conservative but every issue is different. I doubt many socially conservative women want the state to be able to outlaw birth control like little Ricky says they should.
Except Santorum didn’t say that the state should outlaw contraception any more than Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house, but that doesn’t stop you useful idiots from parrotting the lines.
Santorum did say something equivalent to the states COULD outlaw it were there anything like a textual and historical interpretation of the 14th Am and the penumbras and emanations of Douglas having recently married a much younger and presumably fertile new wife. I’m a long way from a SoCon, Hell, I’m batting less than .100 on the Ten Commandments – never killed anyone but it wasn’t for lack of wanting to and in a couple of cases trying to – but I, too, agree with the SoCons and most other brands of conservative that Griswold and Roe are very bad law.
All the emphasis especially from the Left’s fever swamp is on what someone might use to government to prohibit in the bedroom, but I think there is general agreement that there are things that can be prohibited even if there is a right to privacy in the federal Constitution. The test of a narrowly tailored law that specifically serves a demonstrated compelling state interest is pretty well established.
What is more important, I think, to most who aren’t mind-numbed lefty robots is some restraint on what the government encourages. Since the ’60s a plethora of government programs have actively if sometimes unintentionally encouraged the breakdown of the family and nowhere is that more apparent than in the dramatic increase of illigitimacy and single mothers. The government makes the “baby momma” and the worthless, absent sperm donor possible, and liberal political correctness has completely removed the social stigma that once attached to that behavior. While I think it is a very bad life choice, the career woman who is sexually active but delays marriage and children until her thirties or even forties is not a problem for me because I don’t have to pay for her choices. I and all other productive members of society have to pay for the teenagers abortion of to support her and her spawn absent that abortion that so many of us find reprehensible. And the child raised by that single mother is almost guaranteed to require special education resources, social welfare resources, and, ultimately, law enforcement resources, all paid for by someone else. Even the young and foolish who get married and try to raise a kid with a HS education or less are highly likely to be a burden on society because they cannot manage their own lives well enough to properly care for and socialize a child and the productive members of society have to pay for the medical care they can’t afford, the special education programs that their poor parenting necessitates, and all too often the social services and law enforcement intervention. The government and, especially, the government run education system encourages and forces the rest of us to pay for these horrible life choices.
Historically, sex as play has been reserved to the upper classes WHO COULD AFFORD IT. Even the notoriously licentious college-aged kids of the ’60s were almost exclusively middle and upper-middle class who through their own or their parents’ resources could afford any “accidents.” Now those “accidents” have no consequences for either party because the government is compelling the rest of us to pay for those consequences and the entrenched interests controlling the government schools and popular culture are at war with those of us who’d like to do something about the poison they pour out. The Left loves to howl about lack of parental responsibility, but that is simple a red herring; the government schools and popular, leftist controlled, culture constantly attacks parental authority and parents lose most control over their children the moment they enter a government school. What the anti-parent attitudes and teachings of the teachers doesn’t damage or destroy, exposure to the spawn of the irresponsible, ignorant, and essentially feral populations that government social programs have produced finishes the job and results in the whine of “everybody else dresses like that,” or “everybody else is dating at twelve,” or “all my friends can have boys/girls in their room.”
Santorum specifically rejects governments prohibiting contraception.
Flaming Liberal writes, “I’m a social liberal but a fiscal conservative.” That’s an oxymoron–and sheer stupidity.
What is wrong with people like this? Are they completely ignorant of the HUGE COST of social liberalism to the taxpayer?
“First of all, women don’t need that kind of help. They are capable of making their own choices without a bunch of ignorant busybodies telling them how to govern the most intimate and personal aspects of their lives.”
I always laugh when I see instant feminism libraging like this – always from a liberal guy raging against the ‘bigots’. Of course that statement is laughably stupid and has no relation whatsoever to the way people live their lives in the real world. Traditional sexual morality protects the weak from the strong. Take away this morality and human nature will take over and the weak will be dominated by the strong. Anyone familiar with the lives of poor women, particular those with limited educations or IQ, would notice this obvious fact. Poor women, in the real world, have little control over their sex lives and have everyone telling them how they ought to live (few of these voices will have their best interests in mind). Of course mindlessly repeating slogans that would sound stale coming from the mouth of a Berkely sophmore so everyone can feel better about the way they want to live their own lives feels better – and if it feels good do it right?
Damn, I had to make sure I typed in the right address. I thought I’d been redirected to the Freedom from Religion website for a moment. This smug, patronizing bigot is part of American Thinker? That’s got to be a misprint.
If emasculated manhood is what is passing for clear thinking anymore in Republican circles, I think I’ll go rogue and take on the Obama dupes and rubes while they are genuflecting and wetting their pants in front of the Greek Styrofoam Temple.
At least I’ll go down with my pride intact.
The charge by Moran: “All of the above are used by social conservatives to mask the real problem: their outdated, even primitive, critique of human sexuality that denies both the science and the cultural importance of sex and the sex act. Their main target appears to be women, and women’s sex lives, although the act of love itself is also to be placed in a strait jacket.’
The evidence? The…I don’t see any evidence, do you?
Instead we get this:
“It seems that most of the right is oblivious to the perception that some of their candidates would involve government in the most intimate reaches of Americans’ lives. It is probably not true. It is doubtful that any GOP candidate if elected president could follow through and have contraception banned by the states, or pornography outlawed, or gay sex criminalized again, or racy women’s clothing taken off the racks.
But for something so individualized and personal to be discussed so publicly only feeds the notion that Republican presidential candidates want to regulate what shouldn’t be regulated and proscribe behavior based on nothing more than their own moral preferences.”
So, by Rick Moran discusssing a “perception” publicly, Rick Moran helps cause the very problemlematic problem he is complaining about, i.e., a false perception. Fred scratches his head in wonderment.
There are a lot of criticisms of this article for good reason, but the author does have a good point, we need to focus on the problems from a constitutional perpective. As a libertarian I believe that nobody has the right to get involved in the bedrooms of their neighbors, the same is also true for their kitchens, lunch boxes, lightbulbs, and conscious. If you have a problem with television or the internet, then turn it off. Some things however can’t be turned off, we should focus only on the coercive forms of exposure, such as mandatory sex ed programs that encourage early sexualization. Should the government have the right to dictate what our children learn even if it opposes our personal values? It is not that social issues don’t have their place in politics, they do when they are being forced unwillingly from either side, they don’t when they violate the liberty of others. My neighbors have every right under the sun to have sex, use birth control, eat sugar, drive whatever size car they want; but they don’t have the right to indoctrinate my children with the “values” that they think are best even if mine seem outdated to them. Perhaps it is time to reconsider the constitutionality of the public school system.
Perhaps it is time to realize that a centralized, top down, one sized fits all approach to government is outdated. It never has and never will be able to please everybody without crushing the liberties of some. It will always cater to the interest of some at the expense of others. It will never bring peace and it is destroying our prosperity. The only way forward is to agree to disagree. Turn to your Churches for moral guidance, turn to your government to protect your liberties.
The problem with libertarianism, like democracy, is that it works in the long term only with a moral and virtuous people. Libertarianism, however, explicitly denies the link between private corruption and public trust. There is no firewall between them that the passing of one generation will not remove.
In fact, this has already happened, in the U.S., since WWII. Let libertarianism rearrange the deck chairs a different way, if they want, but the ship is still sinking. And it will take more than any government, or government philosophy, can provide to stop the progressive flooding.
In the meantime, until the chance that our repentance and renewal will come from God, we will try to keep the idiots from opening up more watertight doors, and telling us that we are really fish on the inside, and breathing air is primitive and outdated.
I would not have guessed that PJMedia was frequented by so many persons eager to dictate the private lives of others. Generally, that accusation has been reserved for us Catholics. We’ve been trying, albeit irregularly and somewhat diffidently, to escape that characterization for some time now. If you folks want it, you’re welcome to it — and no backsies.
There’s no middle ground here. Either sex between consenting adults is a private matter beyond the proper reach of the State, or it’s a public one to which the law can and should apply. I’d like to hear some folks who subscribe to the latter view defend it without reference to Scripture. Because if we really do appreciate the meaning of republic and the nature of rights, private matters must not become issues in political campaigns.
Was it possible to ask your valid question without the opening salvo, “The social conservatives in the Republican Party have a problem with sex.”?
Or how about: All of the above are used by social conservatives to mask the real problem: their outdated, even primitive, critique of human sexuality that denies both the science and the cultural importance of sex and the sex act.
Do you buy off on that, Francis?
Because I look at these large, “socially conservative” families with six kids, and I’m having a hard go of determining the outdated and primitive. I realize to the reprobate, the idea of children are outdated, unless of course, as is always the case to soften the bigotry such as these, we “protect their dear souls” with V chips if they make it to term. Like safe, legal & RARE.
Read to me like Rick is a Dr. Ruth apprentice…
When we speak constitutionally, we speak only of the Federal Government. A state government, has always been thought, going back to our founders, to have much more authority. If a state wants to ban abortion, or homosexuality, that is their right. If the people don’t like it, they can vote for new legislatures. The Federal government is not only usurping the authority of states, its denying them their constitutional rights to dictate their own morality. Libertarians like Mr. Moran are hunky dory with having the Supreme Court stomp on state’s rights so long as it absolves them of any social responsibility. Can I get a Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional Mr. Moran?
Well, we all have to pay–big bucks–for all this private stuff. What about that?
In Canada, our Obama, Pierre Trudeau–a bisexual and promiscuous Marxist–said, “The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.” And then his Liberals–your Democrats–using Trudeau’s “Charter of Rights and Freedoms” (which is no such thing), shoved the sexual revolution, at taxpayer expense, down the throats of Canadians for the next 30 years.
I want less government all around. But to say that sex is purely a private affair is disingenuous. The costs to the state–that is, the taxpaying citizens–of the sexual revolution has been astronomical, in more ways than one. And a state that encourages less sexual discipline–Trudeau’s and Obama’s states–harms all of us.
Rather than take up a page or two in the comment section, I’d refer you to this blog post of mine which explains in great details why “getting the state out of marriage” won’t actually fix most of the injustice men face from the courts. The issues it touches on are example of why most people implicitly believe the state ought to be involved to one extent or another.
Missed the point again, or you’ve been skimming others’ comments too fast.
No one is arguing for “dictating what consenting adults do in private”. The argument is primarily whether non-consenting taxpayers should be forced to directly pay for what is specifically forbidden by their religious convictions; and whether it is either appropriate, or sound tactically, to make moral arguments, based on sincerely held faith, in the political arena.
Note: try the freedom of religion clause in the 1st Amendment for a start.
This piece is yet another attempt by Mr. Moran to dissuade Republicans from voting for Rick Santorum.
What he consistently fails to grasp is the utter disdain that most conservatives have for Mitt Romney.
I’m no SoCon, but no amount of “electability” issues are going to dissuade me from voting against the GOP’s preferred choice, whether it be Gingrich or Santorum.
Whoever has the best shot at defeating Romney in the primary when it rolls around here in PA is getting my vote.
This is the way the game has been played for as long as I can remember.
A Conservative group objects to some new governmental intrusion.
As an example, let us say some new mandate in public education.
Conservative group objects.
Conservative lawmakers take up this concern. Legislation is proposed, perhaps.
Democrats respond by saying that Conservatives hate education. They claim that Conservatives want people to be uneducated.
The media joins in by running stories about people who would not have succeeded if not for education.
The media runs polls showing that almost all Americans believe that it is important for children to be educated.
The next poll reveals an increase in the number of Americans who believe that Conservatives are anti-education.
The conservative lawmakers are completely blindsided by all this. They cannot understand why people think they are anti-education. In trying to respond to the anti-education accusations the original issue is completely obscured.
Change the issue to whatever comes to mind. Doesn’t matter. Always the same.
The problem is that most lawmakers who claim to be Conservative still think that solutions come from DC. After all, they are of DC. It is doubtful that they have any reason to view the issue as the original group that raised the issue.
And so the size and reach of government expands. And the voices of those who care about liberty can no longer be heard about the roar of the engine of progress.
So we should just surrender and let the left dictate the narrative? Has it ever occurred to you that the religious should have their liberty respected also? The left is not just guarding Planned Parenthood philosophy, they are cramming it down our throats. I am pro choice, I think any women who is selfish enough to abort her own offspring of her own free will is doing society a favor by practicing self eugenics. Nobody is trying to outlaw contraception, but some people really are trying to shove their (lack of) morals down the throats of school children. This is about big government and a trampling of our liberties. I am not anti education. That is the problem these days, the left has won with the narrative that you can’t be religious and scientific. Should we just lie down and take it like a “good” little sorority girl?
I am not anti-sex, I am pro-self respect.
Self-respect has to be earned individually, by behavior. It’s not something that can be legislated.
The most the state (at any level) can do is not undermine the conditions for developing self-respect.
This really is a libertarian issue. We can’t dictate morals, but we can stop subsidizing the behaviors of others. If anything, people should be more concerned about Pope Obama trying to shove his religion of redistribution of wealth down our throats.
You hit the nail right on the head. That scenario has played out over and over again on many different issues from contraception to abortion to welfare reform to global warming. Conservatives need to put a stop to that game and call liberals out on their dishonesty right from the beginning.
The problem is that most lawmakers who claim to be Conservative still think that solutions come from DC…And so the size and reach of government expands. And the voices of those who care about liberty can no longer be heard about the roar of the engine of progress.
Sweet pea, expanding the size and reach of government is almost exclusively a liberal wet dream, in every segment of public life, education, medicine, business, religion, you name it.
Liberal women demand help from the government in supervising their own wombs. It is they who claw and scratch for their “rights”, insisting that some dopey men somewhere pass & enforce some dopey laws about what they can and cannot do with their own bodies.
I think the point that Mr. Moran wishes to makes is that a person running for president of Sodom and Gomorrah who talks about imposing or restoring sexual morality will not get elected.
Excellent! Thanks for the laugh…
This is true, and one of the reasons why I expect to be voting for Romney in the general election. America is a place where right and wrong no longer exist (except as talking points for the Democrats). But I do object to this quite false depiction of social conservatives as anti-sex and anti-woman. Yeah, the Catholic Church has a doctrine that I find silly and objectionable that sex is only for procreation, but Catholics are not only not social conservatives, they are generally part of the Democratic Party coalition.
If you’re going to gripe about Catholic doctrine, at least tell the truth. There is no prohibition on sexual pleasure in the marriage bed, only on the attempt to subvert the procreative aspect of marital relations. Sex is unitive and procreative by nature, and any attempt to subvert either is sacrilegious. Just as contraceptives are prohibited because they subvert the procreative aspect of sex, so too is in vitro fertilization prohibited because it bypasses the unitive aspect of sex.
The distinction between right and wrong is alive and well in America. The problem is that social cons have a much different view of what is right and wrong than the rest of the country (on homosexuality, for instance), yet is all to willing to impose their view in spite of that majority opposition.
Exactly right Rick –
The only real woman is the one who rejects and seeks to destroy these things which are exclusive to women. To be pro-woman means to see the female body as something to be destroyed.
To be pro-woman means to despise the feminine and hate that attribute that is uniquely and exclusively woman, the one thing that sets women apart from men — after all, the uterus and ovaries are little more than defective abnormalities to be suppressed, and the fruits thereof, i.e. the unborn child, are nothing more than a diseased tumor to be cut out of the body.
As such, the good woman is the one who makes herself a female eunuch, who effectively cuts out her “female body parts” by chemical means, suppressing her natural fertility, so that men can exploit and use them as sexual objects.
And should the attempt to destroy that which is unique and exclusive to woman fail, then the good pro-woman man who has impregnated her makes sure to drive her down to the abortion clinic to demand that she abort, and then being sure to dump her a couple of days later.
‘then the good pro-woman man who has impregnated her makes sure to drive her down to the abortion clinic to demand that she abort’
Don’t give them any ideas! The next coverage mandate will be for a personal escort to the abortion clinic. To add realism the driver will stay outside during the ‘procedure’, honking the horn on the escort Camaro.
The “author” (i.e., sophist) wrote: “But when Republican politicians, and others associated with conservatism or the Republican Party, start echoing the various criticisms of contraception, of casual sex, of sex outside of marriage, the perception cannot be dismissed that the imprimatur of the entire party — and consequently, the government if they ever came to power — has been granted and that somebody, somewhere, might want to do something about it. As a voter making a political calculus on how to mark one’s ballot, the GOP is kidding itself if they don’t think this affects the decisions of millions of citizens.”
Aside from being poorly written and not at all thought through, this article rests on the false premise that a disapproval of aberrant sexual behavior equals a desire to impose a LEGAL proscriptions on that behavior. I think the author is kidding himself if he thinks Conservative voters are that stupid.
I think what this sophist/author, and those like him, really don’t like is people having negative views about bad behavior. They seem to want to pretend that their destructive behavior does not have consequences and to prevent (BY LAW; e.g., so called “hate” speech laws regarding sexual preference) people from having contrary opinions. It is very similar to those that want to change the legal definition of marriage. That has nothing to do with marriage and everything to do with trying to force others to endorse deviant sexual behavior.
So the public is stupid to believe that and yet the VA Republican Legislature and the VA Republican Governor has said he will sign it has passed a law dictating that Doctors must give a sonogram to every woman who wants an abortion. It’s not a necessary procedure and when a fetus is very small the only sonogram that can be performed to get the proper “picture” is to insert a vaginal sonogram into the vagina of the women. And you think this is smart because this only plays to the jesus freaks and not normal people.
If the isn’t a group to hate for the Republican social conservatives what would they carp about?
“It’s not a necessary procedure….” Of course it’s not for the man who wants to have his sexpot back to normal, or to avoid responsibility from having created a new person. Of course it’s not for the woman eager to rid herself of the “product of conception.”
And God forbid that the woman should make an informed choice! Obviously she is too tender and immature to expect that of her.
You are so deceived!
Now Flaming Idiot is talking about inserting stuff into vaginas ?
Anyway, I thought it was Texas that was considering requiring young girls scheduled for abortion to see the embryo or the fetus before “the procedure” is performed.
Not a bad idea, although sonograms themselves aren’t something you should have a lot of while pregnant.
Santorum has already said that the Supreme Court was wrong in 1965 to overturn state laws against selling contraceptives. (The CT law that the Supremes overturned in 1965 had forbade the sale of contraceptives even to married couples.)
That’s not just a matter of his personal opinion–because it is likely that two vacancies on the Supreme Court will occur in the next 4 years.
Santorum’s statements make it pretty clear what kind of justices a President Santorum would nominate to the Supreme Court. They would go way beyond overturning Roe v. Wade (which ought to be done), to overturning decades of Supreme Court rulings on keeping the Federal and state governments from interfering in how private adult citizens engage in consensual sex in private.
Let’s remember what things used to be like just 50 years ago. 50 years ago, in states like FL, GA, OK, and Idaho, it was illegal for even a *married couple* to engage in oral sex.
Do you really want Supreme Court justices who are nostalgic for that?
No, Rick, you are not anti-woman for hating those attributes that are uniquely and exclusively woman, believing that women should suppress and destroy her “female parts” and then become like the worst caricatures of men.
No, you are not anti-woman any more than you are an anti-Catholic bigot for mischaracterizing the truths of the Catholic faith, saying that they are ignorant and primitive, and then demanding that Catholics shut the hell up and stay in their damn chuches.
Well, the Libertarians need you to vote for “their” candidate, but then, get back in your churches.
Anti-Catholic bigotry is one of the acceptable forms of bigotry these days, actually it is encouraged and taught to school children.
As a proud ROMAN Catholic, I can and will attest to the accuracy of Moran’s characterization of Catholic teachings about sex: they do come from a philosophy that sex is only for procreation and nothing else. They do pay lip service to the emotional aspect of sex, but it’s lip service only with no appreciable affect on the underlying philosophy. Most Catholics including myself reject the Church’s teachings on sex because we find this philosophy absurd and insulting, not based in Scripture but on a hopelessly warped view of sex on the part of a hierarchy of celibate male priests. We are working to change that philosophy into something reasonable, but it is hard and slow.
The “anonymous” comment was mine. PJMedia did not record my info for some reason. I prefer to leave my name with my comments. It just seems more honest.
The prime political example is Ken Buck’s 2010 senatorial campaign in Colorado.
Running against the awkward, unqualified and unknown Michael Bennett, appointed to replace Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Buck was skewered on social issues.
Democrats successfully leveraged a few comments by Buck into a grand diversionary “defense of reproductive rights,” despite the economic gloom of 2010. Bennett took a few milquetoasty “fiscal conservative” positions, Buck tried to argue a principled free market philosophy, but the election turned on abortion. The unpopular Bennett should have lost, but won by changing the subject.
This will be the Democrat’s playbook in 2012.
Social conservatives forget that the country is equally divided. Electing a Santorum will not change that fact or magically stop our moral decline. How to change hearts and minds is another topic for a another time.
Perhaps Moran goes over the top here, but it is mild stuff compared to what will come this Fall. Especially if Republicans indulge the desire for purity at the expense of defeating Barack Obama who is all to eager to posture himself as the defender of against mean conservatives.
We could certainly use some “mortality” in the old US of A.
But we don’t need a presidential candidate constantly declaiming on his version thereof, although of course some of that comes through intentional entrapment in questions posed by so called “reporters”.
Part of the Obama media’s agenda is to infuse you with the impression that nasty old backward republicans want to outlaw contraception.
What we do need is a presidential candidate focused (wait for it…her it comes…”like a laser”) on the corrupt and subversive cabal in Washington DC, a candidate who understands fully and articulates well the limitations on federal power built into the very fabric of the United States Constitution.
An individual who sings the praises of freedom while effectively articulating the more mundane but nevertheless absolute importance of fiscal responsibility.
We could certainly use some “mortality” in the old US of A.
“morality” not mortality.
Well, actually, we could use some more “mortality.” Too many people who are too stupid to live somehow manage to survive. We’ve made society rich enough and safe enough to all but repeal natural selection.
I agree with the viewpoint of most things on the social conservative menu. But Rick is correct. The good news for social conservatives – if they win out and get Santorum to the general election, Obama will coast to another term, the Dems will retain control of the Senate or regain control of the house (or both) and you will have another 4 years of legitimate (but unsolvable) complaints to scream about, and then the problems will be irreversible and escalating, so you will be able to scream and complain forever.
Just watch- we’ll win and we’ll do it without your help. Nominate Santorum, and he’ll not only win the Presidency, but he’ll deliver the Senate, too. Nominate Romney, and we’ll get exactly what you fear nominating Santorum will do.
You’re wrong Straight Thinker. We won’t have to complain forever. The country is going to disintegrate in the next few years.
Our immorality has left us without a Constitution. Our currency will soon be worthless and we will have a systemic collapse in our economy with an exploding Third World demographic that includes a veritable invasion of Muslims.
A true lefist paradise. Enjoy!
The problem is that no matter what the Republican candidate does, the left is going to twist and distort the agenda any way. So the only way to win is to learn how to deflect it and shoot it right back at them. It is time to get over the politically correct bullshit. Fight fire with fire.
Your harsh criticisms of the author and resorting to name-calling are indicative of your intolerance and propensity to being judgmental. Mr. Moran is entitled to his opinion, and so are you. Critique the message all you want, but don’t shoot the messenger. He, like most people (including liberals) are against child and female exploitation, abortions, rapes, bestiality, spread of venereal disease and AIDS through promiscuity, hypocrisy, etc., etc., etc. Mr. Moran was just stating some points that should be pondered by social conservatives since there are some so-cons (and I personally know some of them) who are, for example, quick to judge those who have not been, or do not want to be ‘saved’, as in church. There are so-cons who are quick to criticize those who are addicted to drugs, alcohol or some other vice, or who have kids out of wedlock or are gay, etc., etc., but don’t look within themselves to see that they or someone in their family are not perfect, either, or are one of those same things that they criticize of others. Only God is perfect, and everyone, including so-cons, has sinned. So, let’s stop throwing stones, and instead focus on defeating Obama in November.
First step to getting there is for us to understand that, right now, people’s sex lives and perceived immorality should not be core issues for any candidate. There are way too many other important issues that need to be discussed, debated and brought to the attention of the electorate so that they know the GOP is strikingly different from Obama in approach and leadership style in tackling problems, such as trillion dollar debts, high unemployment, rising inflation, China’s growing influence around the world, energy costs and what to do with Iran.
As a a conservative female and a long-time Republican,
(finishing my sentence above)…I am not “embarrassed” of social conservativism, as Rush Limbaugh stated of “establishment” Republicans on his radio program the other day. I am just a realist. The Dems going into the November election will control the narrative if we nominate someone with what they perceive, and can spew, out as an intolerant extremist bent on restricting freedom, since they dominate the air waves through the Obama-worshipping mainstream media and through idiots and REAL intolerant extremists like Bill Maher, Michael Moore, Pelosi and Wasserman-Shultz.
Mitt Romney is not perfect, as some so-cons seem to think Santorum is in their universe and previously, Gingrich with all his warts, flaws and baggage. But Mitt Romney is a family man, married to his college sweetheart over 30 years, doesn’t drink/gamble/chase women, a man of faith who taught Sunday School, gives millions to charity, has no personal baggage and doesn’t impose his beliefs and convictions on others, nor does he push his policies down the throats of an unsupportive majority, as Obama and the Democratic Congress did with Obamacare. In contrast to Obamacare, Romneycare was supported by the majority of Massachusetts residents when it was signed into state law. Still, Romney has said, and has insisted, that he will repeal Obamacare if he becomes our next President because he knows, as we all know, that it will not work at the national level (even the UK now is considering outsourcing parts of their famous, or infamous, national health system).
Romney fixes institutionalized and emergent problems and turns failure into wild success – that’s his expertise. And essentially because of this last sentence, we more than ever need Mitt Romney to run this mega corporation called America so he can begin to fix our economic, financial, security and even the systemic social problems that so-cons (and ALL conservatives, for that matter)
care so much about. Romney is solidly and uniquely qualified and experienced to repair America and Washington, DC because he is NOT, and never has been, a Washington Insider, UNLIKE Santorum, Gingrich and Ron Paul who’ve all spent their lengthy political careers in Washington, DC, and Santorum and Gingrich, in particular, continue to be Washington Insiders after losing their seats in Congress since they have stayed there as so-called ‘consultants’.
the republicans with their moral superiority delusions vs the progressives with their intellectual superiority delusions. you both disgust me
thank you for this article. I’m a Republican, but I’m very worried about this sudden turn toward moralizing that Santorum especially is showing.
my 21-year-old daughter voted for Obama last time. she refuses to do so this time, but if the GOP runs a candidate who threatens to take away her birth control pills, she’ll just stay home. the fact that we’re even having this conversation in 2012 is frightening.
this country is in big trouble. the world is in big trouble. but we’ve decided that now is the time to come down hard on birth control pills? seems like a loser move to me. are the Republicans really so eager to have another Sharron Angle moment by running someone like Santorum?
Well said. It’s not so much that a Santorum has actually said he’ll take away birth control, which he hasn’t, it’s that he creates a climate by what he does say that suggests he might, which the left will turn from the slightest ember into an inferno of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) that your daughter will think it’s not worth the risk the ‘pubbies might do something that would affect her lifestyle choices.
Mitt Romney is a mormon. Mormons can’t drink coffee. Do you think that he is going to outlaw coffee if he gets elected?
Has Romney made coffee the centerpiece of his campaign? Has Romney ever said or implied coffee should be banned? Has Romney ever said coffee is bad? Has Romney ever mentioned thing one about coffee?
Wow. Thank you, Mr Moran. There are very few things to equal the sight of a Libertarian tying himself into knots trying to reconcile our hypersexualized, pornographic society with his desire to crawl into a hole and be left alone to do what he likes. It would be hilarious, if not so sadly pathetic. His caricature of conservative morality beggars belief that he could be serious in this article. Bravo and my gratitude to those above with the patience and the ability to stifle their gag reflex in order to respond point by point. Dean from Ohio, I salute you! To all: read J. Budziszewski; for example, ‘What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide.’
“What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide” – a terrific essay; thanks for the reminder. I’ll go read it again. Thanks.
If people can’t see the difference between having morals and forcing them (or the lack of them) on others, then we have already lost.
This puerile article does not contribute. It is not a Democratic vs Republican issue. The argument on the state’s role in public morality predates the pill by several thousand years. In forming this nation, one axiom was that our population would conduct itself in a moral manner by the ubiquitous enforcement of self discipline. This concept was supported by religion but also a clear headed conviction that any other conduct would destroy the society. This was the driving force behind the Civil war, slavery was/is immoral.
The author holds a currently popular notion that our republic would be better served if religious people ceded the public square to moral midgets, while the right wing nuts constrained their life styles to the confines of church or synagogue. This is absurd. He ignores elite secularists, who authorized 45 million homicides, abortions, based on “emanations and penumbras” found in our basic law. He nods to teen sex, babies having babies, and the well proven poverty, crime and diseases that springs from this conduct. He says nothing about getting stoned; does morality have any thing to contribute on this legal issue? Since the pill was invented, America has run up a $17 Trillion dollar debt. Why should any citizen incur more debt due to the sexual irresponsibility of another? Where in the Constitution is this authority granted to the central government? Is this a valid point of debate in a Presidential election? It was the hottest issue in the passage of Obamacare. The writer holds that all those religious leaders should simply shut up when the government forces them to pay for conduct they abhor. Can the citizens of a state decide on gay marriage? On what legal bases?
There are centuries of blood letting in Europe which come from his concept of the power of the state. When President Santorum orders every American to convert to Catholicism, or be executed for their religious beliefs, I will concur with Mr. Moran. Until then I will listen to a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Mormon.
The issue is sex and the evolving cultural mandate that women should be able to enjoy the sex act as much as men without the fear of pregnancy.
Evolving? Buddy, that ship has sailed. I’d say in Western civilization at least, it’s a cultural given. The issue, I gather, for most so-called social cons is not whether females are entitled to enjoy sex, but rather when their engaging in that particular pleasure is appropriate. And most think it’s appropriate only in committed relationships most often within the confines of marriage. But here’s the rub: those rules apply to the men as well. It’s a moral code that applies across the board, not a “critique of sexuality” nor an attempt to keep the womenfolk sexually oppressed. Are there religious sects that teach sex should be used solely for purposes of procreation? Yeah, but they’re a minority and even the Catholic church sanctions the “rhythm method” of contraception which permits sexual relations even when the female is not ovulating and can’t technically conceive. And those who teach that the physical pleasure derived from the sexual act is sinful are a very small minority indeed. (I generally don’t like speaking for “social cons” because I’m not one–although I share a good many of their principles–so I apologize if I’ve in any way misrepresented them here.)
I don’t mean they have a problem with contraception, although many do (conservative men, anyway).
Really. Where are these conservative men of whom you speak? Because through the years I’ve know hundreds of them; I count many conservative men among my nearest and dearest. In my single years, I occupied the attention of conservative men, if you get my drift and I know you do. I would have to say a common thread among those men was (is) their four-square support of contraception. We conservatives would jump for joy if everybody who engaged in sex outside marriage would be responsible enough to use contraception (especially the type that prevents the spread of disease).
We conservatives know what a burden to society the out-of-wedlock birth rate is. We know that most single mothers and their children live in poverty or near-poverty. We know that children have the best chance in life if they’re brought up in traditional homes with a mother and a father (sorry fans of alternative life styles, but that’s simply the case as has been demonstrated in study after study after study). We know how the policies that emerged in the 60′s devastated the black community. How they rendered fatherhood redundant; how they enabled teenage girls seeking an escape from parental authority; how they encouraged the wholesale production of fatherless children. We know how much better off society would be if everyone in it lived moral and responsible lives. But it’s not the wages of sin that concern us in the public and political square, but rather the wages of horrifyingly bad policies. And we have both the right and the duty to speak out.
Now, all that being said, I’ll go on record against the nomination of Rick Santorum. I personally have never liked the guy and often find him smug, sanctimonious and even unctuous. He social conservatism is so pervasive that it tends to mask his lackadaisical dedication to other important conservative principles. In short, Rick Santorum is not the conservative we’re looking for. But most of all, I absolutely dread the prospect of an endless loop of videos of Rick explaining how contraception is bad for society and harms women because they can do whatever they want without consequence. If Santorum is the nominee, we won’t win. In fact, we’ll stand a good chance of losing the gains already made.
I understand, and enjoyed reading what you wrote. I believe you are correct on all points except one. Yes, slavery was/is immoral, but the Civil War started over States rights. What the Federal government could, or could not do reguarding the States. Lincoln took the moral high ground half way through the war.
Thank God some one still knows history.
Yes, on the Civil War time line but the concept of ethics/ morality informing political views. e.g. on slavery, runs back to the drafting of our Constitution. To hold that a candidate must not speak his views on morality, is simply unAmerican, and dumb.
When he uses force of arms to impose his religious views on other Americans is when he and I will part company. Our first two Amendments guarantee our liberty: to speak, to assemble, to pray as we believe, and to hold a weapon, so long as we have self discipline, and demand these God given rights.
States’ Rights furnished perhaps the majority of the explosive, but the primer cap and fuse was slavery—slavery being forced on the north, through the fugitive slave laws, and the desire of the south to extend slavery into new states and territories.
Will someone explain to me why the government should be encouraging contraception, when demographic trends indicate we will soon join Japan and other countries in not having enough young people to enter the workforce and help sustain Social Security and Medicare for a swelling number of retirees?
It’s also disappointing to see people being led by the nose to discuss purported conservative failings re contraception and sexuality, when the real issue is Obama’s direct and unconstitutional attack on religious liberty. Talk about missing the point!!!
Here Here !
Good essay. Conservaitve polioticians are in the government. As such whatever they do think and they have a right to think it, camnpaiging on things like sex which are pretty much outside the consitutional mandate are not their jobs. Their jobs are big enough already. Lets not be like the Democrats who having solved all the worlds major problems now have time for windmills, global warming, and the proportion of salt in kids sandwiches.
License in sexual matters and other social issues leads to loss of freedom and liberty. Conservatives know this. That’s why Santorum and other conservatives lament the state of our culture.
Freedom or liberty (the power of choice) exist in proportion to a healthy restraint. Freedom without restraint leads to license and license to bondage. Bondage then evaporates freedom. In other words, freedom must be guarded and cultivated. It doesn’t exist in an intellectual vacuum or a mindless, undisciplined gratification of the senses of the flesh.
Freedom is not a password for self-indulgence, self-gratification, or even self-fulfillment. Freedom means self-government, and self-government means self-discipline, self-respect, and self-control. Responsibility is essential to freedom. A responsible person is one who is able to think and act rationally and is therefore accountable for his behavior. Edmund Burke said, “If we don’t curb, control, and discipline our appetites, desires, and passions from within, we are increasingly being controlled from without. Man’s appetites, desires, and extravagances forge his fetters.” Christian discipline is the influence that enables us to do what is right without orders or supervision. Grace isn’t the right to do as we please but a divine enablement, presence, and influence to do what we ought to do.
This is, to me, the essence of what conservatives believe about morality and sexuality. Free license in morals and sexual matters results in governments stepping in to restrain people and impose discipline from without, just as Edmund Burke said. Liberals love all this so-called freedom because it allows them to make the claim that we are not capable of taking care of ourselves and, therefore, the government must take care of us. And they do make this claim. And each time they take over another part of our lives, we lose freedom and liberty. Eventually, we lose all freedom and liberty and the State has enslaved us. This is what has happened and continues to happen in communist and hard socialist countries. Why is this so hard for people to understand? Liberal governments don’t want to take care of you because they love you so much; they want to take care of you so that they can control you and every aspect of your lives.
“License in sexual matters and other social issues leads to loss of freedom and liberty. Conservatives know this. That’s why Santorum and other conservatives lament the state of our culture.”
That’s a pretty loaded statement. You need to provide in specific detail how what happens between two consenting adults in the privacy of their home/bedroom “leads to the loss of freedom and liberty.” You need to further explain how that “freedom and liberty” can be restored via the mechanisms proposed by many conservatives today. Conservatives often decry the insertion of government into our lives, but don’t seem to have a problem using said government for that very purpose if it comports with their agenda.
In order to exist, society depends on a population willing and able to support itself. People who have no sense of responsibility will either destroy society and yield anarchy, or else be forcibly restrained. If they only hurt themselves, society would have no business intervening, but in fact they harm not only themselves but everyone around them. Decoupling sex from marriage, that is, lifelong commitment, produces a large number of single mothers and bastard children who are afflicted with poverty while boys fail to grow into men, but instead remain boys all their lives. It is understandable, even reasonable, for a male to still be a boy at 15, and it is tolerable though problematic if he is still a boy at 25, but if he is still a boy at 40 it means that he has failed to assume responsibility for his own life and the way he affects those around him.
A boy might beget children, but he is incapable of raising them because he remains a child himself. In years past, begetting a child forced a boy to become a man, that is, to take responsibility, marry the child’s mother and get a job to provide for his family. A boy might have a job, but he has no regard for the future, and instead spends all of his income on what he wants. Conversely, there are plenty of teenage men, and the defense of liberty has always rested primarily on the backs of men in their teens and twenties. Men as young as 14 volunteered to fight Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. These men accepted or even sought out responsibilities that boys twice their age continue to shirk. Boys who refuse to grow up when it is long past time burden the rest of society with the consequences of their dereliction of duty, while simultaneously demonstrating that they cannot be trusted with the defense of liberty if under attack by an enemy.
Many of these boys are delinquents, but even among those that aren’t, if they remain boys, who will teach their sons to become men? The sons wind up worse than they who begot them, unless someone else intervenes. The daughters, too, never learn the difference between a boy and a man, so they repeat the error of their mothers and become single mothers themselves. Overgrown boys are often polyamorous, so some amass a de-facto harem that they refuse to provide for, while simultaneously denying men the opportunity to be fathers. Since such boys have no sense of responsibility toward their own families, why would anyone be surprised when they act violently toward society? Likewise, those who become sexually frustrated also have a tendency to lash out at society. If responsibility is forced on them, they try their hardest to reject it- this is why homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women- boys don’t want babies cramping their style, and some will go so far as to beat the message that there won’t be any babies into their girlfriends, or kill her trying.
Prison might succeed at turning a boy into a man when his parents failed or didn’t try to, but the boy has to decide for himself that he wants to be a man. Otherwise, he will rebel against the discipline that is being imposed against his will, and he will wind up back in prison not long after being released.
“Decoupling sex from marriage, that is, lifelong commitment, produces a large number of single mothers and bastard children who are afflicted with poverty while boys fail to grow into men, but instead remain boys all their lives.”
Well, you have certainly provided a litany describing certain situations that do exist, but I’m not sure you have answered the question I posed. What does that have to do with freedom and liberty? The fact is much of what you describe is very much an American problem. Scandinavian countries, who are much more open with regard to sexual attitudes, do not have nearly the unplanned pregnancy rate that leads to the situations you describe. They don’t view sex as dirty as we do in the U.S. It’s a part of life and it is a part of being human. Here sex is treated as some secret taboo that must be broken and explored. Religious political conservatives have not helped in this area at all as they seem to be the ones always popping up with sordid stories about their sexual adventures.
I think that once we get to the point where we view sex as something normal and healthy, and, yes, as something to be enjoyed, and not only for producing children, we will see a big change in all of the problems you describe. Maybe then the Larry Craigs of the world won’t have to find enjoyment in the restroom stall at an airport with a stranger. They will be able to be more open about who they are and what they feel, and do so without shame or guilt.
So they couldn’t got to a hotel, or their respective houses, or the houses of someoen sympathetic of their lifestyle; it’s soley the prudish nature of our society that forced them to use an airport bathroom stall, hun? No chance they were just devients attempting to further push the boundries of societally acceptable behavior? No, no, has to be so-cons that did it.
This is what many of us are refering too. Nobody bats an eye anymore at what two consenting adults do in their own homes, so now the subversive sex culture needs new venues to gain attention.
And Scandinavian countries are dying because their populations aren’t reproducing. All of Europe is like that. The jihadists will take over Europe without a fight because there won’t be enough Europeans around to put up a fight in 20 years.
Cindy said,
“That’s a pretty loaded statement. You need to provide in specific detail how what happens between two consenting adults in the privacy of their home/bedroom “leads to the loss of freedom and liberty.”
Someone up above wrote, “Traditional sexual mores protected the weak from the strong.” So in the absence of traditional sexual mores, the state intervenes to protect the weak from the strong with 1). massive wealth transfers in the form of welfare payments; 2). a large, intrusive garnishment aparatus for the purpose of child support collection; 2). an ever more paternalistic and all encompassing approach to public education and health and 3). other expressions of governmental overreach like the contraceptive mandates described above.
These are some of the ways in which the loss of traditional sexual mores leads to a loss of freedom and liberty.
. . . Also, 4). a vastly expanded need for police and prison facilities to deal with all the child victims.
On a side note, I happened to see about 15 minutes of one of the premium cable channel sitcoms last night. In it, the parents of a 14-year old girl are distressed (well, sort of distressed–dad tells her he’s not “pleased”) because they found her in possession of the “morning after” pill. The daughter protests by saying “So I should allow a fertilized egg to attach itself to my uterus?” which pretty much stops the parents cold. Listen, I was there for the sexual revolution; I participated in it. I was there when the first birth control pills were dispensed; I was among its first users. In short, I’m no prude, but I found this absolutely appalling. I’ll give Rick Moran the benefit of the doubt and say I bet he finds it appalling, too.
I agree with the article. This is a losing issue for Republicans. This is not Saudi Arabia.
This is not what we have a government for. We have Church and other venues for that. They should not get too entangled with government or will loose their independent voice.
If there is one thing that is a personal liberty issue it is sexuality. Reading through PJ Media posts on the contraception issue I find that objections to government mandates on insurance from conservatives are objections to contraception, not to government intrusion.
Conservative Republicans can run whichever candidate they choose. Just be aware that I want to vote for a Republican. I will not vote for this. The President is not a pastor, priest or rabbi.
Reminds me of one day some years back when a group of us nurses were chatting on the unit (when nothing was going on) & the subject of “How old should one be before one gives up one’s virginity” came up. For a host of reasons that were focused on maturity level among other things, we reached a consensus that 18 years of age was ideal. Should this translate into something that should be inculcated into our approach to the way we raise our daughters? Not necessarily, but I do think it rings of a healthy dollop of common sense. Too bad we never touched on what should apply to guys, but the subject of them never came up. Funniest thing. (Not really…..they don’t get pregnant).
Even back in the drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll days of the ’60s, sex between high-schoolers was not common in most of the Country, if for no other reason, high-schoolers, especially girls, had much less opportunity to be alone and much less access to birth control pills before age 18 or entering college. And if you lived in a small town, which many more people did, it was hard even for the guys to get condoms without the store clerk telling their parents, stealing them from the old man was somewhat, but only somewhat, easier. Not only were girls deathly afraid of getting pregnant, they were very jealous of their reputation, at least so long as they were living at home. I was a musician in the late ’60s and had money and easy access to drugs, and when we played high school dances, it was slim pickings even with the wannabe “hippy chicks.” College girls on the other hand were a very, very different matter. By the late ’60s even in The South, they could go to the college clinic and get birth control pills usually, though they had to pay for them. And by their sophomore year they were over 18 and go go to a private doc without their parents knowing. Contrary to legend, even those “hippy chicks” mostly had some scruples and were pretty careful of their health and their reputation. Mostly, they practiced a sort of sexually active serial monogamy. There were the “Quicksilver Girls” that Steve Miller sang about, but there weren’t many and even most of them were pretty judicious about “turning up the heat.”
There’s a lot of myth about the licentiousness of the ’60s. Real licentiousness didn’t really come about until the ’70s and into the ’80s pre-AIDS, interestingly coincident with the explosion of pornography.
Yep, the porn & also cable TV. Along the time we had that conversation (post-AIDS ’80s) I posted above, I had many a little patient whose mother was as young as 11. Those latch-key kids apparently didn’t have enough to do before Mommy (& Daddy too if there was one) got home from work.
To me it is pretty much a toss-up between The Pill, The Great Society, and virtually all women joining the full-time workforce having done the most damage to our culture and social order.
My mother and grandmother worked a little; my grandmother doing alterations part-time, very part time, for a small town department store, sometimes at the store, sometimes at home. My mother would work as a “clerk” in one of the small town department stores or Five and Dimes at Christmas, Easter, and, maybe, back-to-school time. That said, there was always somebody home at Rt.2, Box 95 unless we were all gone somewhere; I never came home from school or anywhere else to an empty house. Until the day they couldn’t keep house anymore, and despite a LOT of bad things between us, I knew somebody would be home and I could come in. Wife v. 1.0 didn’t work at all when our daughter was very young. When she was about 3 we put her in pre-school because onlies really need socialization with children and she wasn’t talking as well as she should because she didn’t have to with us finishing sentences for her. When she went to pre-school, my wife went to work part time and when we were in business for ourselves in ATL, she helped part time. When we came to Alaska, at first it was simply economically necessary that both of us work fulltime but we found shift work and such to make sure somebody was always home and then found good neighbor daycare. But as the kid got older my wife really got into her work – and the other things that being out and about as an attractive woman could get you – and before long the kid had a housekey on a chain around her neck and, frankly, both of us were leading, shall we say adventurous lives. We kept it together about ten years longer than we should have, but both of us working and having our own circles of “friends” and social activities doomed that marriage.
Wife v. 2.0 and I had both seen the movie, but I had to deal with all the temptations that a man with money and power in a capital city has, and I didn’t always deal with them as well as I should have. We both worked a lot of hours and travelled a lot, and frankly, both pretty much had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy; neither of us wanted to know, and knowing might well have destroyed our marriage. We’re old and settled enough now – and not powerful enough anymore, that those temptations are rare if extant at all, but it is damned hard to stay married in today’s world and even harder to raise a kid when the whole damned world is trying to pollute that kid’s mind.
“…a toss-up between The Pill, The Great Society, and virtually all women joining the full-time workforce having done the most damage to our culture and social order.”
Agreed, with emphasis on the latter. With all these women working all the time (& so many of them are single parents as well), who is raising the kids? Cable TV & video games. In the ’70s, my bro & SIL settled in a really nice subdivision with a community pool. As a teenager still living at home a short distance away, I used to enjoy visiting them at the pool. Some 15 years later or so, in the wake of cable TV & more women out in the workforce, the pool closed down & was ultimately filled in & that area is now a park with a playground for kids. I hardly ever see people there (too busy glued to the TV & playing video games).
Like yourself, I only worked part time so I could have the time for my son, soccer games, be at home when he got out of school. I think it made some difference but certainly didn’t sway him from sowing the ol’ wild oats. At 23, he is still quite unsettled, with plans now to go trekking up the AT in March. Hopefully all those starry nights will prompt some direction, as in knowing at last what he really wants to do. This points to, IMO, as you alluded to the polluting of the mind (at least I had VH1, MTV & BET blocked while he was growing up, but then there are those spend-the-nights at friends’ houses). NTS, he is far more cynical about things than he should be; perhaps the AT will be truly cathartic. I hope so.
I do miss those days though when TV & working so much didn’t distract people so much; neighbors were good friends. Now, you’re lucky to know just a few. Thank goodness for activities like bowling that offer some semblance of community where people actually come out of their TVs & cell phones long enough to actually interact.
Like
yourselfyour wife, I only worked part time…..Sarah Palin got to deal with it very publicly and while I don’t defend her about much, I do defend her about her kids; Alaska has a youth culture right out of “A Clockwork Orange” and no matter how hard you try, your kids are going to be exposed to all sorts of things and they may very well fall into some of them.
I raised my bio daughter as a single father during her teenage years and she was a latchstring kid through HS, though I kept a pretty tight rein on her. That said, I trotted a lot of women through my life and she could never be sure who she might be sharing her cornflakes with. I kept her very busy with extracurricular activities. I wouldn’t let her date, or even get her ears pierced, until she was 16, but then I never told her when to be home, I just asked her when she’d be home and held her to it. I was very open and honest with her about booze and drugs because I felt like I had to so as not to be a hypocrite because I had been a fairly serious druggie in my younger days. Never had any trouble with her about either though you pretty much couldn’t get through a day as a kid in Juneau without some exposure and access to booze and drugs. I’m sure she had her college-age flirtation with pot, it is de facto legal here, but never became a user and while she likes her wine these days has never been a drinker. I have to say that one of the great advantages we had with her was the fact that when she was younger, television in Alaska was just terrible. In Anchorage where she lived until she was 12, there were just the three networks and public and at first no live network programming not even news or sports. The evening news came on at 7AM – if the plane from Seattle got in and network programs were weeks old by the time they aired. We watched some public but really there was very little TV in her life until she was a teenager living in Juneau and she was pretty much immune to it from never having formed the habit of sitting in front of a TV.
My stepkids were another story altogether! By the time they came into my life at ages 2, 4, and 6, they were already tV addicts and I swear the oldest one could tell you what was on at any hour on any of the hundred or more channels by then available on cable. My wife and her ex had really put no restrictions on what they could watch. My wife had done the typical Alaska girl story; she’d hooked up with a guy right out of high school and had married him and had three kids with him before she figured out he was always going to be an a**. Such raising as they’d had, she had done while working full time and he was always off doing his thing. I foolishly believed that things would be OK with a little stability, but I was wrong; once kids have been allowed to become feral, they stay feral at heart. You may be able to outwardly control them, but only while you’re looking and my wife to this day has almost zero ability to say no to them about anything. The oldest boy went on a mission to sleep with every attractive female of any age who would sleep with him and cut quite the swath, even among some of my coworkers who were older than his mother. I also had to deal with more than a few “Is my daughter with your son” and “Do you know how old my daugher is?” calls. But he was a jock and that kept him away from booze and drugs for the most part and he had to keep his grades good enough to be able to travel with his teams. I can’t say we never paid for some girl’s unplanned trip to Seattle but if we did, it was kept between him and his mother. He made it through college, has a job, not a good one, but a job, in Seattle, his fiance gets her degree as a Pharmacist this spring and they’re getting married in June. I just hope he’s found that faithful gene. Had to get the middle one out of Juneau and away from her car, credit cards, and lifestyle to get her out of high school, so she spent her junior and senior years in a suburb of Anchorage living with her much less affluent bio dad and without all her accustomed perks, but she did get to hear Pomp and Circumstance and didn’t have a baby on her hip for the graduation march. She’s married, though I had a little trouble with the white gown and the baby on her hip. She and her husband are finding out what life is like with two high school educations and no trade; they rely heavily on the “New GI Bill,” Good Inlaws. They’ll make it, but are unlikely to ever live as well together as they did as kids living at home and their two boys are graphic evidence of what happens when two very spoiled brats get married and have their own spoiled brats. They really drive home that old saw about the best thing about grandkids is that you can give them back. And the youngest boy is the only reason I ever used my position for anything personal; I talked the prosecutor into not swearing out a warrant for him if I’d get him out of town and not let him come back. We shipped him off to military school and from there into the Army. I thought he was pretty well squared away after three years as an infantryman, but I swear he must have spent the whole time dreaming of getting high as soon as he could get out. He showed that he hadn’t lost his unerring sense for the shallow end of the gene pool and fell right back in with the usual crowd of losers. We sent him to ANC to go to school on his GI benefits, and within a couple of weeks had found a new crowd of losers and quickly burned through all his savings from three years of being shot at plus got himself a DWI, for which Alaska extracts a draconian price. Anyway, since we moved to Anchorage, he’s been incarcerated in our house, which is better than where he’d be incarcerated if left to his own devices. With the courage of his connections he became a Laborers Apprentice, but those connections and the fact that he’s a vet are the only things that have kept him in it. He’s laid off for the winter, but has already adopted the union ethic that he won’t take any job that pays less than his union scale, so he sits in his room drawing his unemployment and burns up my internet bandwidth, but one of us is leaving this house pretty soon!
I love my wife and we’ve more or less made it past raising kids, though they never really get on their own these days it seems. Hell, as disgusted as I am with some of the things ours have done, we’ve had it one Helluva lot better than lots of parents I know and it isn’t because they were poor or disinterested or uneducated; it’s just really tough to raise kids in a cesspool. That said, if one of my buddies came up and said he was really serious about a woman that had three kids, I’d ask him if the bio dad was still alive, and if he was, I’d tell my friend to go sleep with her one more time for old times’ sake and run like Hell!
“He’s laid off for the winter, but has already adopted the union ethic that he won’t take any job that pays less than his union scale, so he sits in his room drawing his unemployment and burns up my internet bandwidth, but one of us is leaving this house pretty soon!”
I hope you’re charging him rent! I take my hat off to anyone who raises other people’s kids. Imagine being married to someone who doesn’t allow you to adopt their kids (as happened to one of my brothers)? He went through really rough times with 2 of them but now is close to one, on good terms with 2 others, not so much with another (he’s a real ne-er-do-well who has been incarcerated in the past).
@bobbcat – We get some money out of him- when he has any. We get a good bit of work out of him, basically anything around the house that resembles physical labor falls to him, both because he should and because I broke my heel bone moving into this house Sept. 1, couldn’t walk at all for a month, was on crutches until early December, and still need a cane to get around on any uneven ground and can’t go down stairs in anything like a normal manner, so anything that needs carrying, lifting, or needs to go up or down the four levels of stairs in this house, he does. The Doc and PT’s goal is that I be able to wear a normal shoe again by summer, but I may never be able to walk naturally again. That said, I can do what I really need to do now, but as longs as he’s consuming my oxygen, I don’t need to do anything that looks like work. Construction season isn’t far off, so he should be back to work somewhere pretty soon and working keeps him pretty straight since practically every constuction employer in Alaska requires pre-hire drug tests and many also require randoms, so you have to stay straight to get and keep a job. That’s the flip side of having very liberal Workers Comp; employers start getting really strict about anything that might pose a safety risk. It isn’t a stretch to say the TransAlaska Pipeline was built with cocaine, but these days you can’t get near it with a trace of any drug in your system.
Broken heel, how awful! Best wishes for a complete recovery. Bones take so long to heal, it’s not funny. You are fortunate to have this kid around to do the heavy lifting for you.
As for the drugs, the fact that more employers are in the habit now of testing employees for the presence of drugs, another huge reason to end the drug war, with legalization of some drugs & decriminalization of others.
Mr. Moran,
Your column today states, “That’s an awful lot of voters to offend by hinting, as Rick Santorum did, that states should have the right to ban contraceptives…
[As others above have noted, Mr. Santorum never "hinted" any such thing. He merely stated a scientific fact, some details of which I will share below.]
… Or that oral contraceptives are more dangerous or harmful than most other drugs on the market…
[Mr. Santorum did state this, accurately, and some of the scientific evidence for that assertion is shared below.]
…Trying to attach a stigmata to women who use birth control pills — implying that being sexually active is the same as acting licentiously — may fulfill some atavistic desire to apply an outdated code of conduct to women, but it is hardly good politics.”
Herein, of course, lies the core of the issue (and I don’t mean your “stigmata” malapropism). Those who understand sexuality — like everything else in life — as a gift from God to be enjoyed within — and only within — the moral boundaries He prescribed for its enjoyment (which include, but are far from limited to, procreation) also understand that moral boundaries cannot become “outdated.” Civil and ceremonial laws are temporal, the religiously faithful contend, but moral laws are not. To them, moral laws are intended to be – like the moral lawgiver Himself – eternal.
I will not attempt to argue either side in this reply, though. My purpose here is simply to point out a) the crux of the dispute and b) your lack of familiarity with the most recent, reliable, peer-reviewed science vis-a-vis chemical contraception which, like Rick Santorum, I am not arguing for its prohibition — only the universal awareness of its measured risks, which do, indeed, exceed many other OTC and scripted drugs.
Now to those scientific data. I will simply share below a few links to some of the available scientific evidence which Mr. Santorum has apparently seen but which you, apparently, have not.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091026152820.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100506102940.htm
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/cleanprint/CleanPrintProxy.aspx?1285381392265
http://www.usatoday.com/yourlife/health/medical/womenshealth/2010-11-10-birth-control-stroke_N.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110719093802.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110909141637.htm
http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2011/09/yaz_blood_clots_fda.html
and…
http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-birth-control-clot-20110601,0,1727054,print.story
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111003195253.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/12/05/fda-reviewing-newer-birth-control-drugs-over-safety-concerns/
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/02/politics_and_the_presidents_pill_are_they_healthy_for_women.html
http://www.christianpost.com/news/cizik-is-wrong-on-contraception-and-overpopulation-62161/print.html
So, Rick Moran is a huge believer, like so many believers of the sexual revolution, that women acting like the sex crazed, animal sexual whores that men are is a good thing, a great thing, freedom? WOW!! How about teaching men to be gentlemen, to treat women with respect and not objects?
He bemoans, rightly so, the great problems the sexual revolution has brought to our children, teenagers, families, but like a blind fool he still pushes for a sexual revolution which has utterly failed our society, our culture, our nation.
Instead of teaching and pushing women to be the whores men are, we should teach men to be gentlemen. Yes, but it is easier to push the sexual, animal instincts of human beings than push their humanity, their nobility.
AND what has happened the last few weeks is far from being about contraception. You are an idiot and an easily led tool of the Left if this is what you have come to believe. This is about religious freedom. Use contraceptives if that is what you want to do, but don’t demand that others buy your contraceptive wants.
I have to ask, for years we have been told that government and everyone else should stay out of the bedroom of Americans. And I 100% agree. Why then are these same individuals supporting the contraceptive mandate, forcing everyone to buy your contraceptive needs, to become part of what goes on in the bedroom?
“I have to ask, for years we have been told that government and everyone else should stay out of the bedroom of Americans. And I 100% agree. Why then are these same individuals supporting the contraceptive mandate, forcing everyone to buy your contraceptive needs, to become part of what goes on in the bedroom?”
Insurance companies have to treat men and women equally in terms of the medical products and services that patients and their doctors determine are appropriate for them. Contraception is a part of female reproductive health just as Viagra is a part of male reproductive health. Rarely are things black and white but this is a case where it is: You either have to cover all or nothing at all. When men step up to the plate and so they don’t care if their Viagra is covered then maybe we can have a conversation, but until then women will use the medical products and services that they feel are appropriate for them just as men do. Outside of that it isn’t anyone’s business.
Cynical wonders,
Sadly, and you and I both know this. 99.9% of contraceptive and viagra prescriptions are for sexual wants FAR from medicinal purposes to cure an illness. These prescription are for people to enjoy their sexual escapades.
I am a man and I 100% believe that Viagra should not be covered. The ONLY time that this of a contraceptive should be covered is when it can be proven, through a minimum of two different medical doctors, that not using these will lead to certain death.
If this was truly about health reproductive health for both men and women, why isn’t the government also regulating who you can sex with, when it comes to consenting adults? What is more dangerous to men’s and women’s reproductive health than STDs?!!! The treatment of STDs in the USA costs millions per year!
Sorry, this has NOTHING to do, just like Viagra, with anyone’s reproductive health. This has more to do with government forcing people to buy the sexual wants of others to allow people to behave like animals and not deal with the consequences of having sex.
If you can’t afford Viagra, contraceptives, for men or women, you should not be having sex, period. But we live in a society that asking human beings to act like human beings and not animals is outrageous. We are witnessing the fall of the Western world and so many people are so blind and so willing to go along with this fall. All in the name of promescuity and what they have been sold and chose to believe is sexual freedom.
By the way, the media and the Left love to claim that a women’s contraceptive can cost up to $600. All women that I know, work collegues, family members, friends who use a contraceptive spend about $25 a month on it. And all of them admit it has NOTHING to do with any reproductive health, but rather the wish not to have a child because it will ruin their career, it will not allow them to travel with husband or boyfriend, it allows them to sleep around and not worry about getting pregnant. All of them admit they use it for selfish reasons and not for medical needs.
Claiming it is for reproductinve health is a nice and catchy line which too many fall for, but it is a lie and you and I both know this.
and my question was never answered. If people want others, the government and everyone out of the bedroom, why do they bring us inside of it by forcing us to buy Viagra, contraceptives and other sexual wants for them? If you are going to force me to buy your sexual wants I want to know what you are using my hard earned money for. Just like if my friend, son, family member asks me to give them money, I want to be 100% involved in how they are going to use this money.
The irony of the Left. Stay out of our sexual life, out of our bedroom, except when we force you to buy our sexual wants!
By the way, some would say that sexual toys are part of men’s and women’s reproductive health, should this be covered too? where does it stop? and who makes the call?
I really don’t know where to start with you. You have provided a lot of material with regard to what you like and don’t like and what you think is right and not right. I’m not sure how any of that relates to the medical products and services that an individual receives through their health plan, however. One thing that stuck out, however, is your assumption that “you” don’t like paying for the things that you don’t like. You are not paying for them. Employees pay their own insurance premiums. That’s nothing new. I do and I’m sure you do as well.
The whole contraception issues revolves around whether or not the Catholic bishops can impose a particular religious doctrine on those who don’t share it as a condition for general employment. This is utterly unrelated to religion at all. All that is happening is that INSURANCE companies must cover contraceptives. The for profit companies run by the church have to obey the law like any other organization that takes money from the federal government.
Colleges that are church affiliated are only allowed to discriminate if they don’t take any federal money (Bob Jones University, for example). A for profit company cannot discriminate based on religion ( i.e. making employees follow your religion) if it takes federal money. The church is not being required to pay for any contraceptive coverage for their non catholic employees. The church is not being required to provide contraceptives. They are being asked not to stand in the way of their employees if they choose not to follow the Bishops family theories.
Bottom line: people who pay premiums for health insurance coverage should have the reasonable expectation that the medical products and services they want and require will be available to them if they want or need them. That’s just business. It’s capitalism. What you and I think about the necessity of those products and services is irrelevant (and really none of our business).
I would just add one other thing: contraception and erectile dysfunction drugs are considered preventive medicine by the medical and pharmaceutical community. Contraception prevents an unplanned or unintended pregnancy and erectile dysfunction drugs prevent impotence. As such they fall under the umbrella of medical products and services. I think this is a bit different from having health insurance companies provide “sex toys” as you suggested.
Fool, the “medical and pharmaceutical” communities consider only what will get them paid, just like the “theraputic” communities. It’s all about getting your hand in somebody’s pocket. Sorta like global warming grants, you understand that, don’t you?
Cynical Wonders,
I want you to explain how the Catholic Church is preventing anyone from buying contraceptives. Your narrative is false at best! And by the way, this doesn’t only affect the Catholic Church, but also Muslim community centers, Protestant hospitals, universities, elementary, high schools, etc, etc, etc.
No employee who works at a Catholic institution is forbidden by the Church from buying and using contraceptives. You can buy all the contraceptives you want. You can use them and the Church will not fire you, will not make your life miserable, send the police to your home or any of the sort.
so, again, I have to ask, how are the Bishops, the Church imposing a religious doctrine on anyone? Are they sending an army to your home, the police, the tax collector, the Crusades to your home? How exactly are you being forced by the Catholic Bishops to not go to Walgrees, CVS, Wal-Mart, Target pharmacies and buy your contraceptive wants?
On the other hand, what you are doing along with Obama and his mindless minions is imposing your moral values on others. You are forcing other people, whether Catholic, Christians of other denominations, Jews, Atheist, Muslims, etc., to buy health insurance group plans which will give contraceptives for free.
It is no different than forcing an individual to hire a lawyer, doctor, etc. who one believes is immoral.
If I am a person who believes that contraceptives are wrong, immoral and I want to start a health insurance company, I can’t do it now because if I do, I will be forced by this totalitarian government to go against my moral beliefs and offer “free” contraceptive coverage.
By the way, get a clue, Catholic hospitals, universities, high schools, junior highs, elementary schools are NON-FOR-PROFIT entities FAR from for profits as you claim.
And do you know how GROUP health insurance coverage works? you know the health insurance offered by your employer? I pay a premium, but guess what, the employer pays most of the other monthly premium that you don’t see!!! Say for example that your premium, what you pay out of pocket to the health insurance company is $200, this is the tip of the iceberg! The employer is probably paying $800 or more a month just for you! So this whole thing that because I pay a premium only I will pay for my health insurance is ridiculous at best. You do not know what you are talking about.
Additionally, many so called contraceptives are also abortive in nature! Most contraceptives used by women allow the egg and the sperm to join, forming the zygote. Then the “contraceptive” will not allow the zygote to attach itself to the woman’s uterus, in short, causing an abortion.
But again, I must ask, how is the Roman Catholic Church preventing any of its employees from going to the local pharmacy and buying and then using contraceptives?
All we are asking is that YOU do not force YOUR morality on us and force us to pay for your contraceptive wants. If you can’t afford contraceptives and you do not want to have a child, guess what, close your legs and don’t have sex. Period.
Oh BS! The question isn’t about sex, but who has to pay for it. Every time an issue of the public costs is attached to sexual promiscuity, libertarians forget their alleged hatred of big government, and put their hand out for “free” stuff.
You want The Pill, fine, just don’t make me pay for it. Increasing my co-pay for medicines my family needs, so you can get your free pill is making me pay for you. Isn’t that what libertarians claim to be against? Just go be Democrats and stop bothering those of us who truly love Liberty.
BurkeanMama,
Exactly. this is not about sex. Rick Moran and his supporters have fallen for the Left’s narrative!
This is about the government forcing others to buy your sexual wants.
Amazing how the Libetarians love to claim that they are all for the government not forcing anything on anyone, yet they yawn at this mandate and poke fun at Conservatives for agreeing with them, in this case, that government shouldn’t be forcing anyone to buy anything for others.
if you can’t afford contraceptives and you don’t want to have children, don’t have sex! But to ask this of our society today is considered stupid. Instead, we now we are forcing people to pay for your sexual wants instead of asking you not to act like an out of control animal.
Sad how far our Western culture has fallen.
George Stephanopoulos brought this up during the NBC debate to the bewilderment of all watching.
At the time it appeared George was having a flash back or some Black hole opened to the 1960′s. The [incidental] question is now emitting the odor of Media Matters. Transcending obscurity to central theme and rocking the world of the sexually inadequate. (virtually all the yuts and many many more.)
An auspicious question indeed George, as well as suspicious.
If this is an attempt to shore up the youth vote and have them preoccupied with titillation, no worry, they already are.
Those narrow-minded so-cons in Illinois are now proposing yet one more law restricting sexual freedom and expression!
I mean, if someone’s dead, their lack of consent is irrelevant, isn’t it? They aren’t harmed by it. Is anyone harmed by it? And it is so Victorian to say that there’s something morally wrong with this.
Even though a person is dead, their legacy, including their remains, belongs to their heirs.
It is trespass on the physical property of another, causing emotional distress, that is more than sufficient to sustain barring necrophilia, with no fancy contortions of alternative or supplementary justifications required.
So you get consent from the deceased before they are dead. No problem? Right?
At #41, Francis W. Porretto (whose writings I have enjoyed at his blog, and elsewhere), poses the following question:
“Either sex between consenting adults is a private matter beyond the proper reach of the State, or it’s a public one to which the law can and should apply. I’d like to hear some folks who subscribe to the latter view defend it without reference to Scripture.”
I would like permission to attempt to outline such a case (for the “latter view”).
“Sex” historically has had two roles: procreation, and the gratification of the male sexual appetite. (I’ll deal with the gratification of the female appetite below.) I propose that in both cases sexual relations is a public matter to which which the law can and should apply.
Procreation is most emphatically a res publica, a thing of the public, a matter of concern to the common weal. The state has an interest in maintenance of population, ensuring that people have children who can provide them in their old age. Although I am the first line of provision for my own old age, by having children, the state has an obligation to the common weal of all elderly, an obligation that can only be met by ensuring that all adults who can do so, mate, and have sufficient offspring. Here “sufficient” is a public, not private determination.
(On the demographic collapse facing many parts of the world, and the economic and social consequences of that collapse, see the work of David Goldman/Spengler, elsewhere on this website, and at atimes.com .)
Gratification of the male appetite has been a central focus of human culture. The claim that the males have priority here is a public claim of many cultures. Why does the female appetite not get the same level of recognition by law or custom? The ancient myths tell us the female appetite was fundamental to the disordering of human affairs.
The Epic of Gilgamesh describes Gilgamesh’s rebuff of Ishtar’s attempted seduction in Tablet VI:
You loved the colorful ‘Little Shepherd’ bird and then hit him, breaking his wing, ….
You loved the supremely mighty lion, yet you dug for him seven and again seven pits.
You loved the stallion, famed in battle, yet you ordained for him the whip, …and the lash,….
You loved the Shepherd, … who continually presented you with bread baked in embers,….
Yet you struck him, and turned him into a wolf,…
(trans., Maureen Gallery Kovacs, Stanford Univ. Press, lines 46-59)
In other words, women make man lust after them and then stab them in the back.
Hesiod agreed: in Theogony, Pandora is “The sheer deception, irresistible to men. / From her is the race of female women, / … / A great infestation among mortal men, / At home with Wealth but not with Poverty” (lines 593-597). The problem with women is that their desires impel males to gain property (to gratify the needs of woman), which generates the better known account in Works and Days:
There, Zeus tells Aphrodite to “…spill grace on her head / And painful desire and knee-weakening anguish. / And he ordered the quicksilver messenger, Hermes, / To give her a bitchy mind and a cheating heart
……. [and] Lies and wheedling words and a cheating heart,…” (lines 84-87, 98, all translations from Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation, trans., Trzaskoma, Smith, and Burnet, Hackett Press).
So women seduce men in a whirlpool of desire that cannot be satiated and will finally be betrayed. Male domination is justified as an effort to bring some ordering (by custom/law/morality) into this otherwise dis-orderly world.
As to the ordering of male desire, the ancient Greeks said, according to Pseudo-Demosthenes, in Against Neaera, 122:
For this is what living with a woman as one’s wife means–to have children by her and to introduce the sons to the members of the clan and of the deme, and to betroth the daughters to husbands as one’s own. Mistresses [hetaira] we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines [pallakê] for the daily care of our persons, but wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households (trans. http://mkatz.web.wesleyan.edu/10.neaira/neaira_text.htm ).
Men have the right to have their needs gratified–to have the sexual “itch scratched,” while lawful wives are there to provide heirs that can be recognized by the community. This ordering is public, and is here referred to (in a supposed court case) as grounds for a legal ruling.
I personally think that Judaism and Christianity provides a superior ethic for the relations between men and women, but Mr. Porretto’s strictures prohibit me from referring to the scriptures of those religions. But in any case, any such ordering of the sexual appetite of either sex is most emphatically a res publica.
BRAVO, David. Thanks.
This is rhetorical argument and not personal belief, I hope. LOL Well done!
Well, it is serious scholarship. Nothing to laugh about but read and heed. As you would with argumentation second to none.
Thanks for the words of wisdom. Now, get over yourself.
A nice, well-written piece that does a lot to explain but little to justify. I think the request to avoid Scripture was intended to produce a public policy justification, not a resort to other religions.
In ancient Sumer, Gilgamesh was a demigod and Ishtar was worshipped as a goddess. In the Olympian cults, Zeus (Jove/Jupiter) was the king of the gods, and Aphrodite (Venus) was the goddess of love and eroticism. Both had their own cults with specific requirements. While recitation of stories of each might help explain why ancient cultures behaved the way they did, I wouldn’t use it to justify their behavior. Otherwise, it would be easy to argue that Zeus’ promiscuity or Aphrodite’s corruption and selfishness (remember she bribed Paris, helped him steal Helen and started a devastating war in the process) were somehow OK.
And in any event it does little to justify why a society based on liberty and individual freedom should nevertheless restrict sexual freedom for the good of the state.
Our choices are: Romney, who can’t convince more than 30% of conservatives to support him and will run a McCain-type campaign; Gingrich, who has had too many wives and is expected to blow-up at any moment; Santorum, who is a so-con; or Paul, who doesn’t appear to understand foreign relations and the need for national defense. Who do we select to oppose Obama?
Romney is who we have to support to defeat Obama. I’m not happy about Romney, but he is far enough left to persuade many Americans to vote for him. It’s a small step in the right direction. Sodom and Gomorrah isn’t going to elect Santorum, and that’s what America has become.
Then the primary is pointless and Obama will be re-elected. Sodom and Gomorrah were too far gone to save, which is why they remain infamous to this day.
What you’re spewing here is crap. I’m a woman, a Catholic, and this entire issue is trumped up. This entire situation was a set up to try to make it appear as though Republicans are against women and birth control. Republicans are against abortion. Do you know anyone in this country who can’t get birth control. Get real. Zero can’t run on his record so it was all set up to make it appear as though Republicans are against women getting birth control. If you believe this, you don’t have two brain cells to rub together.
By the way, it’s none of your business or a Muslim impostor’s business what the teachings of the Catholic Church are. I’m getting really sick and tired of the attacks on my faith.
Barack Hussein Obama will not get the Catholic vote man or woman. Any sane woman knows she can get birth control. She doesn’t appreciate the attacks on her freedom of religion. Birth Control is one thing, you attack our church, and it’s like attacking a family member. Blood is thicker than water.
“That’s an awful lot of voters to offend by hinting, as Rick Santorum did, that states should have the right to ban contraceptives. Or that oral contraceptives are more dangerous or harmful than most other drugs on the market. ”
Rick Santorum was merely referring to the 10th amendment in the Bill of Rights.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
This entire article is twisted and false. Stop making things up.
Terrific leftist head fake in this article. Way to get everyone thinking about contraception and abortion and free sex instead of thinking about how to point out the absurdity and unconstitutionality of requiring religious organizations to violate their consciences and the First Amendment so that no one notices the exponential growth in an unsustainable budget. This spending is of course made even more ridiculous by insisting on a demographic policy (free sex, free birth control and abortion) that will result in fewer people working to support more people on Social Security while draining the Social Security fund with extra unemployment and tax vacations created by liberals who you just know will want to tax tax tax and spend spend spend. And libertarians buy right into this stuff when it suits their purposes. The mind reels.
The GOP has no sex problem, but it does have a serious message problem. Socons have a very good case that demographics and a lack of both fiscal and moral responsibility are going to bring this nation down in a hurry. The trouble here is that RINOs are too embarrassed to articulate this case and libertarians are busy tearing it down because they have their own personal causes which take priority over undoing the damage liberals have already done to this country.
bill, any of those Republicans would be better than the Islamist sympathizer Obama.
Several years back the people here in California voted for a fiscal conservative and a social liberal (so-lib?). Yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger claimed to be everything a libertarian could want. How did that work out? If a man is not morally responsible, how can he possibly be financially responsible? The two are inseparable.
By the way, I have had libertarian moderators on more than one “conservative” website block my comments about Arnold. They believe in freedom of speech as long as it is for them or their kissing cousin liberals.
I’m no fan of Clinton, but he had a surplus and signed welfare reform. As we all know, he was also a serial womanizer, including right there, with no respect and undignifyingly, in the People’s House with a tempting intern. Jefferson impregnated his slave, but look at all the great things he did. What I’m trying to say is, yes, character and morals count, OF COURSE, but right now is not the time for us to get hung up on issues that the Dems will easily turn around and use against all conservatives and whomever becomes the GOP nominee. I, myself, was on the pill from college on — they were (are) readily available everywhere, including in Small Town America. I enjoyed sex with boyfriends, and still enjoy sex and will always, so long as I have a working brain to think about it and I’m physically able to partake in it. Whether we want to admit it or not, we all think about sex; it’s just the frequency that distinguishes us. But sex is a personal thing.
Yes, there are consequences to uncontrolled and irresponsible sex, and they can, and do, affect society. But if you want to make contraception (not morality) a central issue, then frame it so that Obama looks ridiculous and out of touch (rather than a savior of women’s rights and health) because he can’t force, and has no authority to force, insurance companies to provide contraception “free of charge”. Also, he has trampled on constitutionally-protected religious rights by imposing his policy on religion-oriented institutions, despite his still-problematic “accommodations” fix. Lastly, it’s a moot point anyway since, as I said earlier, contraception is available practically anywhere, and most women who were, or are, active the past 3 decades, including Catholics, have used the pill or some other contraceptive device to prevent unwanted pregnancy. For those women who were very active and, at the same time, pursuing a career or couldn’t afford additional kids, the pill has been a Godsend. Sorry, if you think that is untraditional or unconservative thinking. It’s reality. And the pill was not invented so that women can experience pleasure; it was created and exists today to prevent unwanted pregnancy – plain and simple. Now let’s move on to other, more pressing problems and get a GOP to beat Obama in November.
I’ll tell you what truth hurts “Truthhurts” the best loving that can be made is the baby making married kind. My husband rocks my world. Nothing like being loved by a man who respects you and cherishes your heart. Nobody is forcing you to live like that. Get over yourself. I know the difference, I spent too many years in a domestic partnership with a man who was a porn addict who never wanted children, all I felt was used. I’ll take the earthquaking love makin from my husband any day than from some disgusting man whore. Every person falls short of perfection, but it does matter which direction you are looking. Catholic teaching protects women, thanks be to God!
Clinton pressured banks to make loans to minorities and others who could not afford them. The loans were covered by Fannie and Freddie. The current recession/depression was caused by Clinton’s housing policies. Also, the country was in a recession when Clinton left office. Get your “facts” straight.
Get over yourself!
I know about Clinton’s CRA 2 and Carter’s original CRA and both laws’ culpability and involvement in the housing and financial collapse, culminating in the recession, and Clinton’s and the Democrats’ refusal to reform Fannie and Freddie. I write about that frequently. But you both missed my point entirely. It’s hopeless.
It is not hopeless. I agree with you on Romney, I think he is the best shot. At this point I would take Hillary and that is about equivalent to sticking needles in my eyes then pouring tobasco in them, but it is still better than the status quo. With that said, this article was about criticizing us supposedly sex deprived Catholics written by some man whore. Religious liberty is something worth defending if anything was ever worth defending. It may seem small to you, but if the federal government can dictate the conscious of the Catholic Church, the largest religion in the world, then we have all lost.
I note that Mr. Moran doesn’t actually have any quotes from conservatives to substantiate his thesis that there’s some kind of Republican war on sex. All he has are Santorum objectively describing federalism, during which he explicitly states that he *wouldn’t* vote to ban contraception, and Santorum five years ago explaining his personal belief about contraception, during which he again makes perfectly clear that that personal belief has not influenced his votes.
It’s bad enough we have to put up with this crap from liberals; should PJ Media really be helping the Left reinforce their narrative do jour?
I don’t think Moran’s point was about a Republican war on sex but a social conservative war on sex, a war that most of the electorate opposes and can/will be used to tarnish the entire Republican brand.
He may have been short on specifics, but they are easy to find. In the case of Santorum, check out Jennifer Rubin’s latest WaPo piece or David Paul Kuhn’s column in RealClearPolitics titled “Is Santorum too socially conservative to defeat Obama?”
At least one Republican, former Vice President Cheney, supports gay marriage.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/dick-cheney-lobbied-maryland-gay-marriage-bill-report-article-1.1025192
It is very easy to come up with a pragmatic argument for why a social conservative, at least a strong, in your face and principled social conservative like Santorum would not be the best choice to defeat Obama in the general election. You could point out that Americans are deeply divided about many of these issues, and it is important to get people in the middle to vote for the Republican nominee.
You can make this argument without insulting social conservatives (whose votes will be necessary to help elect the Republican). This essay, however, went out of its way to insult social conservatives. If you don’t understand how insulting this was, imagine an essay arguing against Romney that started out by claiming that moderate Republicans all supported gay pride parades with NAMBLA marching in them. That would not be an effective way to get everyone to work together for the main goal: defeating Obama.
Thanks for this post. I didn’t know Moran is an idiot. I hope he comes to realize how stupid he looks for parroting the straw man arguments of the left. Shame on him.
I really resent it when people, especially men, equate conservatives views on sexuality with anti-woman paternalism. Or an “assault on sex.” Or religious extremism.
As you point out, Adrienne, there are a host of purely practical reasons to hold conservative views on sex, e.g. STD superbugs, poverty and social instability.
Apparently conservatives are supposed to sit down, shut up and let totalitarian leftists ram their social issue mandates down our throats (and our children’s throats), and to make way for social “moderates” like Mitt Romney who will sell us out on economic issues as well.
No thanks.
I suspect the “new sexual morals” will just have to be experienced, along side the inevitable totalitarian political climate, before humans will understand the real serious damage being done to our species. A lot of our moral values are learned behaviors, which have allowed humans to live in societies larger than family clan, and are not natural or instinctive behaviors. This isn’t a bad thing because learned behaviors are the enablers of free markets, private property rights, and individual liberty, none of which will ever be found in any collectivist controlled economy. What I am saying is that many of the behaviors we teach our children are necessary if we are to ever be anything but servants and slaves. The USA is the worlds big experiment, not the hundreds of nations whose people are living for the benefit of their governments, and what if our experiment fails? Another dark ages? Well, maybe something better will be tried that will finally extract us from that kind of debacle.
Before commenting on this particular piece of self-rightiousness, I took a little time to try to figure out who this Rick Moran might be. I sort of expected a Libertarian, since the boundaries of Libertarianism seem to depend on each individual’s definition. Instead he is a self- described “establishment Republican, a RINO. Interesting. I guess by his definition an eatablishment, RINO considers any morality outside government interest- except for the children, of course. Mr. Moran, along with the Obama crowd, wishes religious thought and speech to be limited to places of worship, and warns Republicans to avoid any thought or word of sexual morality if they want to have a chance in November.
Which is to say Mr. Moran seems to want politics limited to fiscal conservatism and a national defense sufficient to protect the markets. Personally, I suspect a silver spoon at birth and an Ivy League education; together with a taste for the “sexual revolution”.
If this pinhead wants to lecture religious people on their disregard for science, and attack religion as broadly as he does here, he should at least learn something about what religion teaches. From mischaracterizing the current flap over the Obama/Sebelous(sp) attack on religious liberty to the typical Luddite charge of the oh- so- wise, he sounds like your typical college lefty. Rick, it is science that says human life begins at conception and Luddite to deny it.
Bottom line, if conservatives feel betrayed and un-represented by RINO’s, Mr. Moran, in his self esteemed wisdom as an Establishment Republican, provides here more than enough reason for us to feel that betrayal and to reject them.
To be fair, there are plenty of establishment types who wouldn’t buy this nonsense, but, I’m afraid, too many who agree. The moral decline in this nation is not limited to secular-humanist socialists, secular-humanism is destructive of respect for humanity even if held by Libertarians or wealthy RINO’s.
Mr. Moran is wrong, wrong, wrong! It is the establishment republicans that have trouble w/ sex. They are total cowards & won’t say anything against abortion, Planned Parenthood or single women having kids out of wedlock. This just increases our cultural decay. As someone once said, you can’t disconnect cultural rot with economic rot. I would NEVER vote for a republican that is NOT a social conservative! I could not disagree more w/ Mr. Moran. The problem in the GOP is that establishment reps. like him are ashamed of the social conservatives. Look,the establishment GOP gave us candidates like McCain. What a winner he was! Now they want Romney. He will not beat Obama. Me? Give me someone that has courage like Santorum who says what is right & true. Forget these mealy mouthed GOP RINOS like Arnold & McCain!
Wrong answer. Ultra-conservative Christine O’Donnell; ultra-ultra-conservative Utah Congressman Chaffetz; fiscally and socially conservative Virginia Governor McDonnell; pro-life CHAMPIONS Senator Thune and, yes, John McCain and ex-Wisconsin Governor Pawlenty; and, South Carolina Governor Haley, all are against abortion. They’re also all supporting Romney.
It is a ridiculous notion that what so-cons consider as “establishment” Republicans are amoral people with no value system. Give us a break, PLEASE! Stop the self-righteous BS, and save those cheap shots for Obama and the liberal elitist establishment who will use their billion dollar treasure trove to crush our nominee in November. We need to start moving with an all-out offensive against The One, lest we suffer through another 4 years of his socialist agenda and reign. God help us all then.
TruthHurts,
Well then, maybe you can ask Rick Moran to stop writing such self-righteous, ridiculous attack on social conservatives. You can ask Rick Moran to aim his attacks on President Obama instead of other fellow Republicans.
Why is it that RINOs love to eat their own and have such a hard time going after Democrats and Liberals, why? Then they turn around and attempt to lecture Conservatives on lining up behind RINOs because if not, it will be the end.
With articles like this one from Rick Moran, he is giving a lot of ammunition to the Left, Liberals and the Democratic party which WILL be used, have not doubts about it, to attack whom ever is the Republican nominee.
Please ask Rick Moran, who has much more national recognition than any of us typing on this forum to safe his attack for Barack Hussein Obama! If you are going to lecture anyone against cheap shots, please address your comments to Rick Moran who took a huge cheap shot at Republicans who are Conservatives!
In 1979, in his infamous “malaise speech,” President Jimmy Carter went on nationwide TV and criticized the American *people* as apathetic and selfish. And we conservatives didn’t like that.
And as we all know, Obama criticized the American people as “bitter,” “clinging to guns and religion.” And we certainly didn’t like that.
And I don’t want a President Santorum to criticize the American people as immoral and contributing to “cultural rot.” Or criticizing Americans who use birth control and practice sex for pleasure instead of for procreation. Or even criticizing single moms as having done something wrong. He can believe that if he wants, but he should keep his opinions to himself.
I’m sick and tired of politicians who are elected by the people who then turn around and criticize the American people instead of self-criticism of themselves.
In our system of government, our elected officials are public servants. They’re supposed to work for us. And you don’t keep your job by bad-mouthing your boss in public. No elected official has the right or duty to criticize the morality of the American people he’s supposed to be serving.
Cynical Wonders,
I want you to explain how the Catholic Church is preventing anyone from buying contraceptives. Your narrative is false at best! And by the way, this doesn’t only affect the Catholic Church, but also Muslim community centers, Protestant hospitals, universities, elementary, high schools and anyone else who believes that contraceptives are either immoral or bad for your body. I can tell you right now that I know quite a few medical doctors who believe, because of medicine, that certain contraceptives which are widely use are very dangerous to your body.
No employee who works at a Catholic institution is forbidden by the Church from buying and using contraceptives. You can buy all the contraceptives you want. You can use them and the Church will not fire you, will not make your life miserable, send the police to your home or any of the sort.
so, again, I have to ask, how are the Bishops, the Church imposing a religious doctrine on anyone? Are they sending an army to your home, the police, the tax collector, the Crusades to your home? How exactly are you being forced by the Catholic Bishops to not go to Walgrees, CVS, Wal-Mart, Target pharmacies and buy your contraceptive wants?
On the other hand, what you are doing along with Obama and his mindless minions is imposing your moral values on others. You are forcing other people, whether Catholic, Christians of other denominations, Jews, Atheist, Muslims, etc., to buy health insurance group plans which will give contraceptives for free.
It is no different than forcing an individual to hire a lawyer, doctor, etc. who one believes is immoral.
If I am a person who believes that contraceptives are wrong, immoral and I want to start a health insurance company, I can’t do it now because if I do, I will be forced by this totalitarian government to go against my moral beliefs and offer “free” contraceptive coverage.
By the way, get a clue, Catholic hospitals, universities, high schools, junior highs, elementary schools are NON-FOR-PROFIT entities FAR from for profits as you claim.
And do you know how GROUP health insurance coverage works? you know the health insurance offered by your employer? I pay a premium, but guess what, the employer pays most of the other monthly premium that you don’t see!!! Say for example that your premium, what you pay out of pocket to the health insurance company is $200, this is the tip of the iceberg! The employer is probably paying $800 or more a month just for you! So this whole thing that because I pay a premium only I will pay for my health insurance is ridiculous at best. You do not know what you are talking about.
Additionally, many so called contraceptives are also abortive in nature! Most contraceptives used by women allow the egg and the sperm to join, forming the zygote. Then the “contraceptive” will not allow the zygote to attach itself to the woman’s uterus, in short, causing an abortion.
But again, I must ask, how is the Roman Catholic Church preventing any of its employees from going to the local pharmacy and buying and then using contraceptives?
All we are asking is that YOU do not force YOUR morality on us and force us to pay for your contraceptive wants. If you can’t afford contraceptives and you do not want to have a child, guess what, close your legs and don’t have sex. Period.
“But why bring what by any definition is a personal moral judgment into the political arena?”
. . . Because, given its self evident costs and victims, it most assuredly is not solely a “personal moral judgement.”
” . . . until quite recently, most cultures tried to suppress female sexuality as a means of control and to ensure fidelity.”
Was the cultural disapprobation assigned to these acts solely a “means of control and to ensure fidelity”? I think this sentence seriously understates and even misstates the cultural importance and utility of these norms to both men and women. To the extent that either gender has benefited from the abrogation of these norms, I would say that men are the clear winners while women (and children) are bearing most of the costs, both emotional and financial.
In a free, open and democratic society under a constitutional form of governance, space must be made for a number of alternative choices, including those that we would not ourselves select, and may even detest, if freedom is to mean anything whatsoever in such a society.
Only in collectivist totalitarianisms such as communism, fascism and theocracy are all individual behaviors either mandated or forbidden. Constitutional democratic republics, on the other hand, in principle, in fact, and by necessity, allow for individual choices between arrays of options.
If you do not approve of, or even loathe and despise, a particular sexual choice, do not engage in it. Even make public arguments against others engaging in it, in an attempt to persuade or convince them, if you must. But do not support endeavors to legally prevent other people from making their own, perhaps different, choices concerning such things, and do not allow your silence to be misconstrued for assent when others try to employ such legislative tactics, because the one thing that tolerant people cannot in all good conscience tolerate without falling into bad faith with their own principles and ideals is the coercive intolerance of others, for then they find themselves supporting, and perhaps eventually embracing, the very thing that they abhor. Then they can no longer honestly describe themselves as freedom-loving people, because they have shown themselves willing to take the freedoms of others away. The draconian machinery of the State has no place here – or it least it shouldn’t have.
That way lies jihadism in the service of sharia law. It is not a model that Christians – fundamentalist or otherwise – should aspire to emulate in America.
The only ones doing that are the Dominionists, and I will forcefully condemn Dominionism as a heresy that denies the importance of the Second Coming. Yes, we want to ban abortion and punish abortionists appropriately for the crime they commit, because abortion is violence against another person, and therefore well within the proper jurisdiction of the government to forbid and punish. Euthanasia, infanticide and destructive research fall in the same category. The rest- contraception, homosexual “marriage,” etc. is a religious freedom issue. We don’t want to be compelled by the apparatus of the State to assent to things we believe to be immoral, and our political actions in that regard are purely defensive. We do not wish to ban contraceptives, but we insist that we be protected from being compelled to distribute them against our will, and from having them distributed to our children against our will.
This article is, well, odd. Take this,
All of the above are used by social conservatives to mask the real problem: their outdated, even primitive, critique of human sexuality that denies both the science and the cultural importance of sex and the sex act.
Denies the importance of the sex act? What Rick means by the outdated, primitive view of sex elevates women and magnifies the importance of the act. A few minor examples are: Adultery was once the primary reason for divorce, women still celebrate their virginity (or desire to appear pure) by wearing white, men required to take responsibility for the outcomes of their sex acts. It is the modernists, that have tried to reduce the act to something as unimportant as “shaking hands” . (Surely I don’t need to give a reference for that.)
Now consider these sentences…This is the real beef that the social conservatives have with the pill. It has revolutionized bedrooms in the U.S., while setting off a a massive change in the mores and morals of men and women. But simply because sex as a cultural phenomenon was hidden from view does not mean it was any less important, or had less impact on society than it does today. The sexual images flooding our living spaces were glimpsed in the imaginations of men and women at the time the first hominids became self-aware. One can guarantee that there is very little sexual imagery we are exposed to today that our primitive ancestors didn’t daydream about in between hunting and gathering forays.
So would one conclude the last, say, 50 years are the first time humans have acted on these thoughts? Of course not, quick reference, Marquis de Sade Sex is now a cultural phenomenon? Oh come on. Sex has always been at the front of the human mind. Did the pill really revolutionize mores and morals or did it simply change the outcomes of how humans have always acted?
Very strange. So I looked up Rick. Self described libertine. One of nine children. No mention of wife or children. Oh, now I get it. Goodness write something more honest next time like, I can’t handle the responsibility of being a husband and father, but I want sex so come on folks loosen up and let’s swing.
Uh, no, it does not “elevate women and magnify the importance of the act.” It actually demeans women by reducing them to mere baby machines. It cheapens sex by reducing it to procreation only and dismissing its emotional aspects.
I don’t think any of us here would argue that Islamists respect women, with their requirements for burqas, restrictions on going out, enforced lack of education, etc. It is telling that Islamists, too, say they are “elevating” women. Most of the women find this “elevation” a living hell.
Thank you, Rick Moran, for injecting some sanity into the discussion. People are going to eat, drink and have sex and someone who thinks they can be stopped from any of these basic functions is living in a dream world.
The current dust-up over sex is just a smoke screen to distract from Santorum’s record of profligate spending. Santorum doesn’t want us to focus on it at all. Dems want to keep it hidden until he’s the nominee and they can use it to destroy him. Republicans who defend Santorum’s radical views will hand four more years to Obama.
Perhaps all of our dandered up libertarian collegues like Mr. Moran should read the NYTimes article: Unwed Mothers Now a Majority Before Age of 30 that was out in the NYTimes on Feb 18th. Despite the most sympathetic preening, the article’s author still managers to mention that out of wedlock children do worse in school, are poorer, require more state resources and generally are less productive and happy. Are these the perfect citizens we need for the 21st century? Also please don’t bring up the failing social security network or increased ethnic fragmentation, all of these issues are directly related to the dysfunctional nature of marriage and child-rearing throughout the West. Liberals and their Libertarian facilitators are wrong on most major moral questions and we are seeing the consequences of their poor judgements jump out from our newspapers everyday.
Amen!
“Anonymous
Cynical Wonders,
I want you to explain how the Catholic Church is preventing anyone from buying contraceptives. Your narrative is false at best! And by the way, this doesn’t only affect the Catholic Church, but also Muslim community centers, Protestant hospitals, universities, elementary, high schools, etc, etc, etc.
No employee who works at a Catholic institution is forbidden by the Church from buying and using contraceptives. You can buy all the contraceptives you want. You can use them and the Church will not fire you, will not make your life miserable, send the police to your home or any of the sort.
so, again, I have to ask, how are the Bishops, the Church imposing a religious doctrine on anyone? Are they sending an army to your home, the police, the tax collector, the Crusades to your home? How exactly are you being forced by the Catholic Bishops to not go to Walgrees, CVS, Wal-Mart, Target pharmacies and buy your contraceptive wants?
On the other hand, what you are doing along with Obama and his mindless minions is imposing your moral values on others. You are forcing other people, whether Catholic, Christians of other denominations, Jews, Atheist, Muslims, etc., to buy health insurance group plans which will give contraceptives for free.
It is no different than forcing an individual to hire a lawyer, doctor, etc. who one believes is immoral.
If I am a person who believes that contraceptives are wrong, immoral and I want to start a health insurance company, I can’t do it now because if I do, I will be forced by this totalitarian government to go against my moral beliefs and offer “free” contraceptive coverage.
By the way, get a clue, Catholic hospitals, universities, high schools, junior highs, elementary schools are NON-FOR-PROFIT entities FAR from for profits as you claim.
And do you know how GROUP health insurance coverage works? you know the health insurance offered by your employer? I pay a premium, but guess what, the employer pays most of the other monthly premium that you don’t see!!! Say for example that your premium, what you pay out of pocket to the health insurance company is $200, this is the tip of the iceberg! The employer is probably paying $800 or more a month just for you! So this whole thing that because I pay a premium only I will pay for my health insurance is ridiculous at best. You do not know what you are talking about.
Additionally, many so called contraceptives are also abortive in nature! Most contraceptives used by women allow the egg and the sperm to join, forming the zygote. Then the “contraceptive” will not allow the zygote to attach itself to the woman’s uterus, in short, causing an abortion.
But again, I must ask, how is the Roman Catholic Church preventing any of its employees from going to the local pharmacy and buying and then using contraceptives?
All we are asking is that YOU do not force YOUR morality on us and force us to pay for your contraceptive wants. If you can’t afford contraceptives and you do not want to have a child, guess what, close your legs and don’t have sex. Period.”
You are flat out wrong. Here’s why:
As an employer (i.e. the Catholic Church), you have the absolute right to religious freedom. Attend any church, temple, synagogue or reading room you like. Give as you feel obligated. Worship as you please. Place on yourself any restriction in diet, activity or anything else that you feel is in keeping with your beliefs … but only on yourself. You don’t get to impose these restrictions on your employees.
Your employees are separate from you. Not only that, they are equal to you in rights, no matter how unequal you may be in income. You do not get to tell them who to vote for. You do not get to tell them who they can love. You do not get to use your religious beliefs as an excuse to limit their health care. Got it?
The Church is not imposing their beliefs on their employees, they are just refusing to pay for it, GOT IT? It is amazing how you are using labor union arguements to back your statements. I wonder how many liberals know that for many years the American Catholic Church has been the moral backbone to the labor movement? Do you know that you are shooting yourself in the foot? Catholics have overwhelmingly supported liberals in the past, most church services focused on social justice issues. They had your back big time. Go ahead keep it up, peel the moral facade off of the social justice movement. What are we really going to see when it comes out into the light of day. Many voters are uninformed, I pray that the left is left in the scorch of daylight as the general public peels the candy off of their eyelids. Tell me what exactly is a social justice movement without a moral backbone? Is it something the average American is going to like to see?
ella8, you are flat out wrong. They, the church are not paying for the contraception. Why can’t you imbeciles get that through your thick ignorant Neanderthal skull?
No matter how strong your personal faith, the employees of the Catholic church are not obligated to live according to those beliefs, expressly because they are personal. You may find it frustrating, but those employees have just as much right to their own beliefs as you do to yours, and whether you pay them pittance on an assembly line or six figures as a manager, you have zero right to carve off a slice of their freedom. The direction of the pay arrow has no effect on who gets to dictate to who. If this is about religious freedom it is about people like YOU imposing your beliefs on those who do not share them as a condition of employment. If you want to fight on that hill then fine. You will lose.
If the government was telling you, as an individual, that you had to use birth control, that would be a violation of your rights, correct? That’s not happening. They’re just saying that you don’t get to make that decision for the people who work for your company. Because, really, you don’t own them.
If you’re still mad; if you’re upset that healthcare has to be funneled through employers at all … there’s a cure for that. It’s called “single payer.”
And what you can’t get through your thick skull is that health insurance is not free. The Catholic Institution is paying most of the cost for health insurance. My family is self employed, unlike those who work for an employer, we understand the full cost of health insurance, we pay both the employee and employer portion of our health insurance. So, yes the law would require the employer to pay for insurance that provides contraception. How about instead of single payer, I have the right to buy whichever policy I choose. We actually prefer high deductibles because we are self employed and pay the full cost of premiums. If we have a healthy year we have a chance to save money and in the worst case scenario have to pay the $14,000 that a low deductible plan costs. With the increasing cost of premiums, it would even make more sense for my family to just have catastrophic insurance and pay out of pocket for everyday things like routine dr. visits, birth control pills (they are not very expensive), antibiotics etc. It could end up being cheaper on average than paying $14 k per year in premiums. But you totalitarians want to force me to buy coverage that covers every last thing with no copay which will result in higher overall premiums. 14K per year is enough thanks. I would rather have copays than higher premiums. I know it so hard for people like you to get it, because you see everything through the prism of an employer/employee relation and you create rights out of thin air and have not the slightest concept of simple economics. Free rainbows and unicorns for everyone, just wave your collective magic wand.
“expressly because they are personal.”
Where did you get the idea that religion is only personal? Christianity requires a commitment to what sociologists today would call an “authoritative community” that serves as a check on the tendency of fallen people to act as their own god, redefining good and evil. That authoritative community is called the church, and is voluntary.
You are instead describing the secular religion of the autonomous self, where you are accountable to nothing and no one. And at the end of that road is the destruction of all freedom, and all community, and all caring. That place is called hell.
Bitterness and unforgiveness, like the autonomous self as god, are heavy loads to bear. Government cannot carry it, and neither can any of us. Only the self-sacrificing love of Jesus Christ is able to free humanity from it.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and heavily burdened, and I will give you rest.” –Jesus Christ
Those who have no God become their own god. That would be just fine if it stopped there, but it never does, they are totalitarian. Look at the “good” works of Margaret Sanger, her beast has grown into probably the world’s most powerful organization.
Cynical Wonder,
Where to begin with your complete and utter stupidity. The only Neanderthal here is you who is clueless, CLUELESS! And you are merely spewing radical Left wing propaganda.
1) The Roman Catholic Church is not imposing its values on anyone. Again, YOU failed to explain how the Roman Catholic Church is limiting your health care!!! You are spewing pure and utter propaganda!
Is the Roman Catholic Church forcing you not to go to your local pharmacy where you can buy your contraceptive wants? Is She? This is a complete and false narrative on your part! No Roman Catholic institution who hires employees is forbidding anyone from buying or using contraceptives!! So, you are lying!
You can work for a Catholic hospital, school, university, community center, you can work for the rectory at the Church and you can still buy AND use, without any repercussions from the Church contraceptives from your local pharmacy.
Again, answer the freaking question, how is the Roman Catholic Church forcing you not to buy or use contraceptives?
You are pushing a false, radical, anti-Catholic narrative. And it is an anti-Catholic feeling from you and countless others. Why focus on the Catholicism alone? Islam forbids use, selling or buying contraceptives, so do countless of Protestant religions.
Why do you radical Liberal totalitarians want to impose your moral values on others and force them to buy for you, your contraceptive wants?!
2) The monthly premium that you pay is but a mere fraction of what it costs to cover your part of the group health insurance. What don’t you understand about this, ignorant person? You may pay $200 a month premium, right? But your plan, like ALL group plans that you receive through an employer, costs much more a month than the $200 a month you pay. Guess, Neanderthal, who is paying the rest of the cost? The employer!!!
3) Employers impose their moral values on employees WHO FREELY CHOOSE TO WORK FOR THEM all the time! You have to be at work at the time the employer demands. You have to work the hours that the employer demands. You must complete the work that the employer demands, you must dress as the employer demands. You even have employers who will forbid you from dating customers or other employees!!!
Employers put ALL types of restrictions on their employees all the time!
But guess what…NO ONE PUT A GUN TO YOUR HEAD AND SAID YOU MUST STAY AT THAT JOB! you have the freedom to walk away from a job, from an employer which you do not agree with!!
3) As for your claim that the GOP lost the women’s vote. Well if they did, women are bigger idiots in America than I have ever thought. But more importantly, you are again lying! As polls show, most Americans, men and women, disagree with you and they do not want the government of the USA imposing its morals on any religious institution.
It looks like your only ammunition is lying and pushing a false narrative.
Let’s see if this time you have the self-respect to answer the question of how the Roman Catholic Church is forcing you not to go to your local pharmacy to buy your contraceptive wants, Neanderthal.
If the government cannot dictate morals (it can’t), then how can you even concieve of the “right” to “FREE” birth control without dictating your “morals” to someone else? That is where positive rights fall apart and secular humanism fails, it is totalitarian. By the way, simple economics, nothing is ever FREE.
When people sign up for a healthcare plan, and pay the premiums for that plan, they are entitled to the expectation that the plan they sign up for will provide the medical products and services they need and require. THEY ARE PAYING FOR THE PLAN! GOT IT? Neither you or the Catholic church will dictate to them what they can and can not use in terms of medical products and services because it is really none of your business what medical products and services they use.
Bottom line: the GOP has already lost the female vote BIG TIME. Ultimately, we don’t defeat you and your anti-American ideology on a blog. We do it at the voting booth by outnumbering you, and that we will do come November.
Again you are too thick to understand that the $200 per month that the employee pays for the insurance is only a fraction of the cost. The employer pays the remaining $800 or so of the cost of the premium. Also, nobody is holding a gun to the employees head telling them that they have to work for a Catholic Institution, GOT IT?
And that is why thankfully we are not a full fledged ruled by the mob democracy. That is why we have a constitution, to respect even the rights of minorities. No matter how anti-Catholic the majority, the constitution still protects the conscious of the religious few.
Brain dead lefty, like all the rest of your ilk, you live in a world of unicorn farts and pixie dust. If somebody is paying their own premium, they can buy whatever benefits they want. What the Communist SOB you fools elected President has done is order the Catholic Church to buy a package of benefits that it finds morally reprehensible. Here’s the part you idiot lefties never seem to understand; those plans that you feel put upon to pay a little co-pay and deductibles and maybe a little chump-change contribution with more responsible employers cost many, many hundreds of dollars a month, in some states and some plans well over a thousand a month, so you idiots aren’t buying your health insurance, you’re making a modest contribution so that you feel some of the economics of health care.
When an employer buys a package from a provider or sets up a plan as a self-pay and a TPA, it is relying on actuarial studies to price that bundle of benefits. When the communists running a government tell them that they must provide some benefit not already priced in, the price goes up; maybe not this plan year but certainly on renewal. There will be no “free” “reproductive health services,” it will just be priced into everyone’s plans and the Catholic organizations will be forced to be a part of buying for everyone something it finds morally reprehensible. But then, both muslims and communists have always had troubles with the Church.
Oh and please keep it up with your bigoted Neanderthal comments. I wish you were shouting them from the rooftops. The more the vile ugliness of the left becomes apparent the sooner your catastrophic views will end up in the trash heap of history. It took much less ugliness to convert me from a raging left wing liberal to a conservative in a few short years. You can cover yourself in all the rainbows you want, but your vileness will eventually come out into the light of day. Don’t forget many people who vote Democrat are moderate not radical, and quite a few religious people who I know voted for Obama. I voted for Obama. There is something about being truly offended that turns people off, you know like Obama and his bitter clinger statement.
All you have to do is provoke them to be themselves. They’re accustomed to and expect anyone who doesn’t agree with them to be nice, civil, and not disagree with them. Call them an effin’ idiot in front of their friends, especially when they’re trying to show off and “speak truth to power” they have no clue what to do and since most of them are both physical and intellectual cowards, if you puff up at them a bit, they just run. One day we sane people really are going to have to discipline America’s perpetual spoiled children.
Reading back on this, I fear that my rainbow comment may have offended gays. I almost forgot that they own the rainbow. It really had nothing to do with that, just a pixie dust fairy tale kind of rainbow. Thought I should clarify that so I don’t get accused of hate speech.
why should the repression of fertility be any better than the repression of sexual desire?
What I mean is that liberty is not achieved by means of the satisfaction of the human will, but by its repression, by self-control. The right to private property is inseparable from a condemnation of theft or fraud on the part of government or private individuals. The full exercise of the will does not result in liberty, but power politics and tyranny, viciousness, backstabbing, cruelty, etc.
Is there anything as adolescent as the cry that there is a war on sex being waged by the uptight and primitive?
People who don’t recognize the justice of that question should not get within a thousand miles of government leadership.
Humans inherently see sex through a moral prism. Mr. Moran isn’t arguing for taking the morality out of the discussion; he is arguing for a particular moral idea. Why should anyone have to simply give in to a different moral idea when the issue is what guides the government we all have to pay for and obey?
We do not have a neutral government posture; we have a government posture that insists on specific attitudes about sex, from what governments at different levels seek to teach children to what they plan on paying for, what they advocate for and expect of the citizens, and what they allow and even encourage the citizens to sue each other over.
Get government out of the business of battling and denigrating conservatives’ beliefs about sex. That is the only correct answer to this problem.
You said absolutely nothing in this article except “I hate social conservatives’. You offered nothing and said nothing.
Rick, I think you are right on the money.
Social conservatives focus their energies almost entirely on imposing their religious beliefs on others through the coercive powers of government. They claim to be fiscal conservatives to get elected, and as soon as they are in office, put their fiscal promises on the back burner and focus their energies entirely on their social agenda. In a nation with freedom of religion, they may say whatever they want as long as they stay in the realm of persuasion. But government is the realm of force, and more and more brazenly, social conservatives seek control of the realm of force. It is an ambition even more totalitarian that the planned economy that liberals wish to impose to stifle liberty in the name of social justice, because liberals, at least, seek only to control thoughts and behavior, while social conservatives also want your heart and soul.
When our nation is confronted by grave fiscal problems that only a fiscal conservative candidate could solve, we are running social conservatives with terrifying ambitions to impose their religion on the nation through force. If there isn’t a brokered convention that swaps out the current field of candidates for a fiscal conservative, we are going to lose in landslide.
P.S.
However, there’s good news on the teen pregnancy front: it has not “exploded.” Just the opposite — the CDC says the teen birth ratefell more than a third between 1991 and 2005. It went up by five percent in 2006 and 2007, then began to trend down again. In 2009, the teen birth rate was the lowest recorded in the nearly 70 years for which national data are available.
Thank God my teen mom chose not to kill me.
And my parents managed to raise three of us without welfare with no college degrees and one income. It is possible. Parenthood is not any easier if you are older, it just depends on how the challenge is handled. No need to get all preachy about teenage parents.
“[Social conservatives' agenda] is an ambition even more totalitarian that the planned economy that liberals wish to impose to stifle liberty in the name of social justice, because liberals, at least, seek only to control thoughts and behavior, while social conservatives also want your heart and soul.”
What are you talking about?
Who are the ones instituting hate crime laws that penalize our heartfelt motivations?
Who are the ones trying to change the world to please their violated consciences, who will not stop until all the world declares homosexuality, adultery, homosexuality (and later, bestiality, polyamory and all manner of fetishes) to be right, and good, and true, and beautiful?
Who are the ones teaching our children that masturbation and homosexuality is normal, and that a child who draws a family with a mommy and a daddy and children with a smiley sun and flowers is heterophobic and worthy of ridicule?
Who are the ones turning our children from Hannah Montana into slut personas like Madonna and Miley Cyrus?
Who are the ones who are demanding that we worship at the altar of Molech by funding immoral sex and sharing in the evil of abortion to cover up the consequences?
Who are the ones who are trying to end freedom of religion if it ever speaks a word that crosses the liberal agenda?
YOU are, and your fellow liberals.
Perhaps you no longer recognize what heart and soul really are, but that is what liberals are after in each of these oppressions they are forcing on our society. Your fellow travelers are those who have made a religion out of sex, self and political power, and are demanding that we bow at their altars. That we will never do, and we will not apologize for not doing it.
As Jesus said, “He who commits sin is the slave of sin.” Part of that slavery is being so deceived that one blames everyone else for her shackles but herself. Social conservatives are not the totalitarians; the “tolerant”, “progressive”, “liberal” and “gay” groups are. Having trashed and twisted each of these words beyond all recognition, they blame everyone else for their problems. They don’t want monogamous marriage; they want to take over the word “marriage” and trash that too, so they don’t have to be reminded of God’s plan, and God’s standard, and God’s joy that he gives to the man and woman who follow him in humility and obedience. These groups are miserable, and can’t tolerate the joy of purity in anyone else.
My pastor once said, “Wherever you go, there you are.” I would add to this, “and you still blame everyone else for it.”
You were created for more and better than all this. You deserve better. Ask God to free you. He will.
“It is an ambition even more totalitarian that the planned economy that “liberals wish to impose to stifle liberty in the name of social justice, because liberals, at least, seek only to control thoughts and behavior, while social conservatives also want your heart and soul.”
Hey Cynthia Yockey, are you being sarcastic? You said, “liberals at least seek ONLY to control thoughts and behavior” ONLY?
No one can control your heart or soul, if you are lucky enough to have one. Not even if you are locked in chains. However, government can control your behavior – news flash – that’s what politics is about. They make laws, supposedly by the consent of the people, to determine who can drive, who can drink, who can marry and at what age, who can vote, what taxes you have to pay and what happens to you if you don’t pay back your creditors etc.
Conservatives are trying to maintain the freedoms that prevent government from controlling our speech (political correctness) and to defend ourselves (2nd Amendment) – so that we are citizens, not slaves. No government can can control your heart or soul. Duh. Maybe you just don’t get that whole heart and soul thing?
Good grief. This article sounds hysterical. Is this the type of nonsense we have to look forward to? Are you so eager and bigoted that you are willing to help reelect Obama rather than see a religious Christian get elected? The boogey man will take away your birth control…..oooooh….scary. This is on a par with the Palestinian propaganda. Take a pill – get laid. You need to chill out.
Talk about falling into a trap. Sex is not the issue other than some two people must have performed it to create the monster we now have in the White House. This whole topic was created out of thin air by Obama,or whoever he is, and his cabal. Boy has it ever worked thanks to his pals in the MSM and all you Pavlov pundits. You should not be writing trash like this. You should be writing what a joke trash like this is when written by other political “analysts.” The more we talk about sex the less we are talking about the man intent on destroying America.
Marriage is a religious, cultural institution, thousands of years old, where young men and young women make lifelong commitments to the future of their children in exchange for conjugal privilege. Rights and privileges always goes with responsibility: the right and privilege to drive on the road goes with responsibility of respecting traffic laws for the safety of others, but you always find someone trying to synthesize a third way.
The censorial disapproval of traditional American culture to children born out of wedlock relates to this Christian ideal: that foremost of all children’s rights, is to have, responsible, committed parents with the mature understanding that the meaning, purpose, ultimate happiness and fulfillment of life was found in something much larger than the pursuit of the self.
The cultural revolution of the 60s was about separating rights and privileges from responsibility in the pursuit of the self: the philosophy that happiness is found in pursuit of pleasure and gratification. The ultimate extension of this philosophy, for many, is the euphoria of drugs.
They- ahem (if I dare use this old-fashioned word) sinned. They sinned against their children and their forebears because they burned the heritage of committed parents (Norman Rockwell America) and broad connection to the “village” that they (undeservedly) enjoyed but did not pass it on to their children.
And, so many of these children are seriously disadvantaged: starting with prenatal drug and alcohol exposure, suffering emotional and psychological damage, sociologically handicapped, and worst of all — the loss of that religious/ cultural operating software that makes civilization possible.
Just go look in the inner cities and see for yourself the end result. Secular education is of no help. Education is not a religious, moral, cultural system, but the result of one. Thus no amount of money, teaching effort, extravagant school facilities is going to make any difference to a young child that has no reference points to guide him into the future except what is brutally learned on the street in a dysfunctional society. That is the only reality they know, and school is only a meaningless rite of passage required by law.
I never get how liberals and libertarians get that it is important to educate children so that they can become better citizens, but for some reason, many are completely ignorant that children likewise need to be educated in matters of reqarding their soul.
They don’t. They educate their children towards subservience to a collectivist mindset and they mistake that for good citizenship. They don’t recognize the soul of the individual, but somehow find a conscience in the society and assign a soul to that ephemeral substance. I have never known a society to have a conscience.
Glad I read right to the bottom. This is possibly the best response on this board. Cheers!
I’m sorry this article and most of the comments are pure BS.
The GOP has no problem with sex.
Well said and totally on point. Yes, the GOP has a problem with sex, so much so that none of the young people I know would ever consider voting Republican. The idea of taking the government out of the economy and putting it in the bedroom makes no sense.
My three kids ages 24, 21, 18 vote Republican.
The article completely misses the point. The to do about the contraception decision isn’t about sex or contraception. It’s about the constitution and our God given rights being trampled.
I stopped reading when the author used “stigmata” instead of “stigma”. What a dummkopf!
“I’m sorry this article and most of the comments are pure BS.
The GOP has no problem with sex.”
Oh yes you do…you all hate Obama so much you are literally destroying yourselves (and possibly America) with your own self righteousness. Worse of all, you are in complete denial of it.
Please listen to Moran and others on this site and even Bill Quick…you cannot enforce your morality on Americans anymore than the liberals. And with the MSM being pro-Obama you all are giving voters more reasons to reelect Obama. Just because he’s unpopular does not mean he won’t win again, especially if women feel that the conservatives will take away birth control. Want proof? Santorum’s comments on birth control. If Obama’s actions and statements before he became president worried you how can Santorum’s beliefs not have the same impact with women today? So-cons not want to admit it, therefore we will have another four years of Mr. Teleprompter.
I’m actually relieved this article appeared. Moran and some of the responders show they have common sense and want this country in a truly better state. The rest of you sound like you want a theocracy. And that will lose us a lot.
Lots of dark commentary about how the GOP can’t separate its member’s sexual ethics from its party policy. Could you provide an example, please. Not an attitude or a suspicion but an actual example of a major GOP politician who proposes legislation or government action to limit sexual freedom. (If this the widespread problem asserted, actually 3-5 examples would be in order.)
The only example cited was wrong. I know of no sign that Santorum wants to limit contraceptives. Only a constitutional opinion that the states have that right. (An opinion which is, on purely legal grounds, correct.)
The problem isn’t the GOP it is the “Progressives”, in both parties!
The Progressives gave us:
1. The progressive income tax.
2. Prohibition.
3. The extreme Environmentalism of the EPA.
4. “Nation building”.
5. Democracy movements in the Middle East leading to radical Islamists taking over countries, resulting in less freedom for the people.
I could go on, but I have to get up early to go to work!
This article reads like a bunch of progressive liberal nonsense from beginning to end. Sad.
Awesome issues here. I’m very glad to look your post. Thanks so much and I am taking a look forward to contact you. Will you please drop me a mail?
“Time and again Gods chosen people were harshly punished for disobedience. And here are we, killing babies, promoting homosexuality, practicing promiscuity, fornication, and defying God- challenging Him to do something about it!”
Not to mention wearing clothes made of mixed fabrics, or switching lights on and off on the Sabbath.
But let me ask you: What does God or God’s commandments or disobedience to God have to do with government?