Oh, if only people had stopped having sex!
The American Taliban,
in action:
Jeffrey Kuhner, president of the conservative Edmund Burke Institute, say(s) birth control is no less than an affront to God. "In short, liberals want to create a world without God and sexual permissiveness is their battering ram. Promoting widespread contraception is essential to forging a pagan society based on consequence-free sex," he wrote in an opinion piece for the Washington Times.
I had to go check out the source column, and it's really fun:
Contraception violates the natural moral order. It decouples sexual intercourse from its main purpose: procreation. It entrenches the hedonistic ethic that sex is about recreation and individual gratification. It strikes at the very heart of a functioning, self-renewing civilization - having children and perpetuating one generation to another. This is why practically every major religion and most cultures have rightly believed that birth control, pornography, homosexuality and adultery are wrong. They threaten the basic institution of society: the traditional family. The family existed before the state; its importance transcends the state. Hence, our ancestors understood that moral standards must be upheld, not demolished. The breakdown of the family inevitably leads to social collapse.
Every time you hear conservatives talk about the "rights of the unborn," remember this—their opposition to abortion has nothing to do with babies. If it was, they wouldn't oppose funding for pre- and postnatal care. If it was, they'd support wider dissemination of contraception and better sex education and family planning services. After all, the best way to avoid an abortion is to avoid unwanted pregnancies in the first place.
No, this has nothing to do with babies, and all about controlling human sexuality. If people can have abortions, if they can use condoms, then they will fuck—and that will somehow bring about "social collapse." Forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to full term is, in their minds, a just punishment for being sluts.
To conservatives, sex is simply bad. It's like Rick Santorum said in last week's debate:
I would say any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military.
Too bad. People like sex.
On the plus side, the GOP is increasingly abandoning its dog whistles for more overt expressions of its true agenda. Whether it's immigration, or Social Security, or choice or whatever—conservatives are no longer content to dance around their pet issues with coded language. The tea party schtick has emboldened them to reveal their real agenda, and it is a profoundly unpopular one.
Good.