When You’re in Bed with Dogs Don’t Be Surprised if You Pick Up a Few Fleas
Erick Erickson has a post up at RedState about CPAC sex that is predictably getting attention because, well, anytime anyone writes anything about sex on the internet gets attention:
After RedState got started in July of 2004, blogging on the right became all the rage, though it was correlation and not causation. By 2005, CPAC had a Bloggers Row and I went for my first time. The event was held that year at the Reagan Center in Washington, D.C. Most of the attendees stayed across the street at the JW Marriott. It was not an ideal venue, but it was my first time and I did not know better.
Being the good, intrepid blogger, I ran across the street to a CVS to buy a notepad, having left mine in my office back in Macon, GA. There in line were a half dozen young men, each with CPAC credentials around their necks and each buying condoms.
Erick goes on to lament that for too many attendees CPAC has become akin to a drunken frat party.
Melissa Clouthier responds with strong warnings for women. (And in writing the piece she assumes the “Gen-X Big Sister trying to protect younger Millennials from unchecked male sexuality” archetype I wrote about in reviewing Hannah Sternberg’s novel Queens of all the Earth.)
Joy McCann at Little Miss Atilla chimes in, rightfully pointing out that this is not just a problem of young people being stupid, but that strains of thought within the conservative movement mutate to fuel it:
There is, in fact, a sort of intellectual jujitsu that a few conservative males practice, wherein they decline to respect women in the egalitarian John Stuart Mill sense (because, doncha know, that’s feminist, and it’s bad), and yet they decline to do it in an Old-World, gentlemenly sense (because that would be old-fashioned, and we’re all very modern around here). These two approaches can overlap, but in a certain type of male they might both be eschewed . . . and that is a recipe for caddishness.
I’ve seen it, and it isn’t attractive.
Joy is on the money in identifying ideology as a component in the problem. But strident anti-feminism is only one of the dogs conservatives welcome into their bed each year.
Last year was my first and last CPAC. The original plan was to report on the conference and network with others in the blogosphere. That collapsed when I discovered my colleagues down at the booth on the convention floor sabotaged in their efforts to recruit students for their pro-Israel campus campaign. Both college kids and adults with Ron Paul paraphernalia would approach them and spend 15, 20 minutes or even longer explaining why Israel was a fascist state. Thus, I ended up spending most of the conference arguing with antisemites.
CPAC has been infiltrated on so many levels — by the anarcho-capitalists, the stealth Jihadists, and now the misogynists. Yet GOProud isn’t welcome.
It’s time to forget about CPAC. There are plenty of other opportunities for activists to network and hear speakers.
Young people having sex…
My word, what has the world come to?
Just to mention amusing people, the other day one of the too-regular commenters was saying that it doesn’t matter if Republicans lose this election because if they do, then America and Western civilization will fall and then, you know, after the fall of civilization, Christians will take over.
When I challenged him to explain why America is so sure to fall, his first answer was Greek style financial melt-down. I pointed out that, no we’re not gonna be in trouble, there’s a fundamental difference between “can’t pay your debts” and “will moan loudly while easily paying your debts”
So then he sprung his other idea on me.
Civilization will fall because of promiscuous sex…
He ‘explained’ that sex leads to fascism.
Facepalm.
Care to provide a link to that exchange?
I’ve seen it, and it isn’t attractive.
Joy says that, but then what are all those condoms for?
(doing the math) … er, never mind.
It was a joy to attend CPAC this year w/o the presence of the antisemitic Ron Paul crowd. They really do wreck CPAC and most don’t wear the ‘conservative’ label. They are anarchist-lite libertarians.
I think the good stuff that comes out of CPAC outweighs the bad, but they still have a Grover Norquist/Suhail Khan jihadist problem. I simply avoid them, but it doesn’t speak highly of the organization that enables them.
Why yes, Ron Paul’s followers are anti-Semitic. Why yes he buses his Ronulans in to stack straw poll votes. So your answer is to stay home and let the Ronulans have the floor? I used to vote Libertarian but the insane infiltrated and took positions of power. Go ahead, lie down, and let these whacks do the same thing to the conservative movement. How ever attractive their economic message, it is an overlay over a pot happy, naive, bunch of religious bigots and yet they have been tolerated for years because Ron Paul would vote with the Republicans in the house. His vote isn’t worth it anymore. I used to wonder how he lasted so long considering the stunts he pulled, but now I know, lack of guts in the Republican party leadership both moderate and conservative. Amazing considering that even in Texas Ron Paul couldn’t get elected to the US Senate, is a declared Libertarian, not a Republican, and yet here he and his are, the cockroaches of the Republican Presidential primaries. If you are going to stay home and do nothing why do you complain?
On the contrary, this is the best argument I’ve heard for attended CPAC.
I have to blow a razzberry at this tempest in a teapot.
First and foremost: In case you’ve spent the last forty years in a medically induced coma, the notion of premarital sex has been largely destigmatized. It might be a bad idea in many instances, perhaps even most of them, but there’s no longer a warrant for a blanket denunciation.
Second: Quite a lot of the older mechanisms that bring couples together have become ineffective, or have lapsed entirely. One of the most important factors in assuring the longevity of a romance is shared values — which includes political values. Another is sexual compatibility, which can only be determined by experiment. For young men in the presence of potentially compatible young women to reject the possibility of finding a mate at CPAC, just because it’s a political rather than a social gathering, is absurd.
Third: What imaginable connection can be drawn between young single people having sex after meeting at CPAC and the decision to exclude GOProud, an organization dedicated to same-sex marriage and other special rights for homosexuals? That’s not even a decent distractor.
Fourth: Conservatives do not reject nonspecific “feminism.” That strawman burns most readily. Conservatives reject gender-war feminism. The older equity feminism, today ably championed by such stalwarts as Christina Hoff Sommers and Wendy McElroy, is just fine with us.
There are far more important matters with which to concern ourselves than young singles enjoying one another’s bodies at a political convention that’s supposedly not affiliated with any particular set of religious doctrines.
And what was his problem?
That an insurance company didn’t provide those contraceptives free of charge, right?