The Christian Right's Fear of Pleasure is Our Greatest Threat to Choice (by Chris Hedges)

[marmar]

From Truthdig, via AlterNet:



The Christian Right's Fear of Pleasure is Our Greatest Threat to Choice

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted May 19, 2007.



The war against abortion has nothing to do with the protection of life. It is a war against an open society -- a cover for assaults against sexual pleasure and personal choice.

Jeniece Learned stood amid a crowd of earnest-looking men and women, many with small gold crosses in their lapels or around their necks, in a hotel lobby in Valley Forge, Pa. She had an easy smile and a thick mane of black, shoulder-length hair. She was carrying a booklet called "Ringing In a Culture of Life," which was the schedule of the two-day event she was attending, organized by the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation.

The event was "dedicated to the 46 million children who have died from legal abortions since 1973 and the mothers and fathers who mourn their loss."

Learned, who had driven five hours from a town outside Youngstown, Ohio, was raised Jewish. She wore a gold Star of David around her neck with a Christian cross inset in the middle of the design. She stood up in one of the morning sessions, attended by about 300 people, most of them women.

The speaker, Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had asked if there were any "post-abortive" women present. The most fervent activists in the pro-life movement have usually had abortions, with large numbers admitting to multiple abortions.

Learned runs a small pregnancy counseling clinic called Pregnancy Services of Western Pennsylvania, in Sharon, where she tries to talk young girls and women, most of them poor, out of having abortions. She speaks in local public schools, promoting sexual abstinence as the only acceptable form of contraception. And she has found in the fight against abortion, and in her conversion, a structure, purpose and meaning that previously eluded her.

The relentless drive against abortion by the Christian right -- the first salvo having been fired with the 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision last month to uphold the federal ban on the procedure known as "partial birth abortion" -- has nothing to do with the protection of life. It is, rather, a cover for a wider and more pernicious assault against the ability of women to control their own bodies, the use of contraception and sexual pleasure.

...(snip)...

The leaders of this movement understand that the only emotion that cannot be subsumed into communal life, which they seek to dominate and control, is love. They fear the power of love, especially when magnified and expressed through tender, sexual relationships, which remove couples from their control. Sex, when not a utilitarian form of procreation, is dangerous.

They seek to fashion a world where good and evil are clearly defined and upheld by the nation's judicial system. The battle against abortion is a battle to build a society where pleasure and freedom, where the capacity of the individual and especially women to make choices, and indeed even love itself, are banished. And this is why pro-life groups oppose contraception -- even for those who are married. The fight against abortion is the facade for a wider fight against the right of an individual in a democracy. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/rights/51674/

[AndyTiedye]

1. kicking and recommending

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. Years ago I noticed that a lot of the hardcore anti-choice activists were

really in "future shock" against the sexual revolution. They'd been brought up in a Victorian time warp and internalized the virgin/whore view of women.

If I had gotten pregnant, I most likely would not have had an abortion (there's something about the idea that has always made me uneasy), but I cannot make that choice for someone else, and I certainly do not share the privately expressed belief of some anti-choice advocates of my acquaintance that pregnancy is a "just punishment" for non-marital sexual activity.

[Demeter]

3. Love and Sex Aren't The Same Thing

and I'm really tired of people looking for sex and running like their pants were on fire from the possibility of love. All these no-strings-attached people--they are what produces psychopaths like Bush. They are the source of DeNial.