Via Broadsheet comes this money quote in an AP article regarding the Prevention First initiative, a bill aiming to mandate better access to and information about contraceptives, increase funds for family planning and comprehensive sex education funds, and assure that emergency contraception is made available to rape victims at all hospitals:
"There's a utopian view that women ought to be able to have sex any time they want to without consequences -- that's the bottom line of all these bills," Janice Crouse, Concerned Women for America.
OK, Janice. You've got me there. I really do believe that women--of legal age and sound mind and willing spirit--ought to be able to have sex when they want, how they want, and with whom they want. Isn't that what men have been doing for centuries? As long as said women are not coming over to my house and commandeering the bed, who am I to decide when sex is appropriate?
I'm not advocating some giant, national orgy--although, as a liberal, I guess I'm supposed to welcome that--but I am saying that mandating "consequences" for having sex is ridiculous. First of all, why is it only women who should have to face these consequences? Is a baby a precious new life or a punishment for an orgasm? And cervical cancer. There's a great consequence we should want to preserve for all women who have sex. Because God knows without the threat of cervical cancer and unintended pregnancy, women everywhere will be doffing their clothes and shagging the first available man they see.
Certainly not every consensual sexual encounter in this world happens for all the right reasons. People get drunk and make bad choices. Hell, a lot of us are fully capable of making bad choices even without alcohol. But it's pretty hard to make laws against bad choices, and it's even harder to make laws that go against fundamental tenets of human nature.
Maybe abstinence before marriage was truly viable in the days when it was expected that people get married when they were 17 or 18 years old. (I don't have trouble with the notion that women AND men can and in most cases should avoid sex until they are old enough to vote and have true control over their bodies. But you can't mandate it by law. You can make it clear in no uncertain terms that to have sex before then would require a trip to the dreaded gynecologist, as my mother did to me. You can put condoms in your teenage child's luggage before camp, ensuring that any sexual experience will have to take place with the thought of Mom and those goddamn condoms uppermost. Have I said too much? Ahem.) Encouraging abstinence before marriage in a time when the average age of marriage is 26 for women and 27 for men seems just a waste of time. Why shouldn't unmarried people in their twenties be having sex if they want to? If they have kids in their thirties, those memories just might get them through.
Oh, and let's not forget the great, heteronormative Catch-22 that the whole "abstinence before marriage" crowd sets up for gays and lesbians: Don't have sex before marriage and--haha!--you can't get married! It's a life of celibacy for you, my friend.
Making the choice to have sex should not mean a life of fear--fear of pregnancy, fear of disease, fear of cancer. And a woman who can't control her body can't control any other aspect of her life. I wish to hell that, just once, Antonin Scalia would have to experience the terror of a late period. Or that Samuel Alito would have an abnormal pap smear. But most of all, I wish that the morality police out there peddling inaccurate information about sex would all be as honest as Janice. Because it's not really about "protecting unborn life" or "helping kids say no to sex", it's about controlling women. To hell with the consequences.