Well, well, as we read this morning, the Plan B emergency contraceptive is inching its tortured way towards being offered on drugstore shelves with no age restrictions. Soon this will come to pass although I'm sure the self-appointed moral police of America are trying desperately to get some court somewhere to issue a stay while they fulminate and try to scare everybody as they plan their counterattack.
Why this furious response? Although you'd never hear it from the fundamentalists, teen pregnancies have been declining for two decades. You'd think that people so concerned with young people getting pregnant and with the abortion rate would cheer over a proven and safe tool to help further reduce those rates wouldn't you?
In a rational culture, of course. In ours, not so fast. Let's think about what's really going on here.
Of course we know that the "concerns" over abortion and teen pregnancy are a rational screen over the real, primal fear. The traditional culture of United States, with its puritan religious heritage so predominate for so long, has always been and remains terrified, absolutely terrified, of normal human sexuality.
Who's so afraid, and why?
Abortion and emergency contraception (any contraception, for many) is opposed so furiously because they promote sexual freedom and therefore "promiscuity." The real goal here isn't to reduce unintended pregnancies or abortions. It's to restore sex to its "biblical" role solely within marriage for the purpose of reproduction. Of course if this happens abortions and improper pregnancies will disappear, but this is a side effect. What the moral police are seeking is an orderly society of self-restraint in which economic productivity is not hampered by baleful influences like hedonism.
I grew up a Southern Baptist in the 1950s and 1960s. The Conspiracy of Silence, designed to "keep us out of trouble" by keeping us ignorant was starting to crumble. But they still had fear: fear of diseases, social shame, and pregnancy. And we, teens and preteens, were slammed with those fears as often as we went to church. It was a big part of the whole conform or else mentality designed to keep us all under control.
The story I heard over and over again was the justification: the ancient societies of Greece and Rome crumbled into ruins because of sexual immorality. If they'd just kept their togas zipped they'd still be running the world. That's the lesson for Christian America: keep those pants zipped, or this will happen to us. Read the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" if you doubt this, they said. And the Bible, read that too, they said. Confident that I wouldn't of course.
Well, I did. Both of them. Gibbon's masterpiece taught me that the fall of an empire is complex but hasn't got much to do with private behavior sexual or otherwise. And a close read of the Bible made me doubt everything the church had been telling me.
Gradually I found out that I was being fed lies. I didn't know why, but I do now:
The people who benefit from the status quo will do whatever it takes to preserve it.
Sexual freedom is basic. Orwell knew this well. If you can control human sexuality by promoting a set of restrictive rules based on a self-serving mythology you can control just about everything. And control is the name of the game. Control means a safe and orderly society that conforms and does not ask questions. The preservation of the status quo.
In the mind of the fundamentalist personal freedom equals disorder, and disorder leads to anarchy, and that's what happened to the Romans. Women, freed from the role of baby factory and nursemaid are free to compete with men in the economic marketplace and even worse, in the marketplace of ideas. Minorities, once kept in their place by fear, now can believe they have rights equal to their masters. The evil effects are practically endless when you think about them.
That's why Plan B is a product of the bugbears of the modern conservative movement (communism, terrorism, paganism) and not simply a logical way to reduce the societal problem of unintended pregnancy.
But they will never say this, except among themselves. "Moral decay" is as close as they will come. But that's what they mean. The status quo is threatened.
In the end, like pretty much everything political, it's all about power; who has it and who doesn't. Who is losing it, and who is gaining.
Imagine that. Giving a teen girl power over her own body can bring down empires. Now that's real power.
Kind of awesome, if you ask me.