Some wag once defined a Puritan as someone who was terrified that somebody, somewhere out there was having unauthorized fun. It seems this is the basis for the "morality" wing of the Christian Right.
This Sunday's NY Times Magazine by Russell Shorto on banning contraception in the US. Shorto starts with Daniel Defoe's Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom and moves on from there. This has been the root of much of the cultural right's attack on abortion; banning contraception as well has always been their next step.
Some excerpts for your perusal after the jump.
Still with me? This attitude hasn't changed. Observe.
Defoe (yes, the Robinson Crusoe Defoe):
It was this latter subject that Defoe chose to address. The sex act and sexual desire should not be separated from reproduction, he and others warned, else "a man may, in effect, make a whore of his own wife." To highlight one type of then-current wickedness, Defoe gives a scene in which a young woman who is about to marry asks a friend for some "recipes." "Why, you little Devil, you would not take Physick to kill the child?" the friend asks as she catches her drift. "No," the young woman answers, "but there may be Things to prevent Conception; an't there?" The friend is scandalized and argues that the two amount to the same thing, but the bride to be dismisses her: "I cannot understand your Niceties; I would not be with Child, that's all; there's no harm in that, I hope." One prime objective of England's Christian warriors in the 1720's was to stamp out what Defoe called "the diabolical practice of attempting to prevent childbearing by physical preparations."
Judie Brown, American Life League:
We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion. The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set. So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception.
Dr. Joseph B. Stanford, FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee (and of course, Bush appointee):
Sexual union in marriage ought to be a complete giving of each spouse to the other, and when fertility (or potential fertility) is deliberately excluded from that giving I am convinced that something valuable is lost. A husband will sometimes begin to see his wife as an object of sexual pleasure who should always be available for gratification.
Doesn't this sound like Orwell's Junior Anti-Sex League?
Many Christians who are active in the evolving anti-birth-control arena state frankly that what links their efforts is a religious commitment to altering the moral landscape of the country. In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they want to change the way Americans have sex. Dr. Stanford, the F.D.A. adviser on reproductive-health drugs, proclaimed himself "fully committed to promoting an understanding of human sexuality and procreation radically at odds with the prevailing views and practices of our contemporary culture." Focus on the Family posts a kind of contraceptive warning label on its Web site: "Modern contraceptive inventions have given many an exaggerated sense of safety and prompted more people than ever before to move sexual expression outside the marriage boundary." Contraception, by this logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality) and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage.
There is much, much more to the right-wing assault on any sex that doesn't lead to pregnancy. Do read it.