The recent Ohio special election that blew up a GOP attempt to head off voter initiatives lest voters enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution should have sent a message to Republicans. The GOP obsession with abortion is turning off voters — even when they are conservative but female as Kos notes in this post. Why they continue to try to force their minority views on the country despite the political cost would seem to make no sense.
But it’s not simply about “the right to life”, as might be guessed about a party that is trying to dismantle the social safety net, weaken child labor laws, is trying to reverse action on the climate crisis, and is blocking action on the number one killer of children.
I subscribe to David Corn’s newsletter Our Land. His August 12 edition was written while he was on the road. He had a few comments about the Ohio vote. These paragraphs are from an earlier article he wrote after the Dobbs decision:
...Mara Gay, the New York Times columnist, recently penned a perceptive article regarding the Dobbs decision that ended a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. Underneath the headline “The Republican War on Sex,” she wrote, “One day I hope to become a mother. But for now, I have sex just because I like it. Sex is fun.” She pointed out that many religious fundamentalists who oppose abortion “are animated by an insatiable desire to punish women who have sex on our own terms and enjoy it.”
This is a core element of the battle over reproductive rights that we do not discuss enough: sex. In fact, though our culture and popular media are full of sex, we rarely talk about sex in straightforward terms. It’s fun (for many, if not most, people), and most Americans engage in sex more than once a month, according to one recent study. But it’s usually not part of the public discourse. (Do government officials ever promise voters more and better sex?) One obvious reason the protection of reproductive rights is so important is that people want to have sex for recreation, not procreation. Yet some Americans cannot stand this idea. They may have a theological objection. The Catholic Church insists sex should only occur with the intent to breed. The same holds true for evangelical Christians. Others might just find sex icky. A big chunk of the social turmoil of the 1960s involved sex. Though it seemed the so-called “sexual revolution” was ultimately won by advocates of sexual freedom, the anti-sex crowd never went away. And it is back and not just focused on abortion, as Justice Clarence Thomas showed in his concurring decision in Dobbs. These tyrannical puritans want to allow states once again to enact anti-sodomy laws and to restrict your right to obtain contraception. This is not just about assigning personhood to zygotes; this is about control.
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Corn discusses an incident from a time when he was a regular on a talk show. One guest was Reverend Lou Sheldon, an ardent antigay crusader and head of a religious right group called the Traditional Values Coalition. Corn eventually got him to admit the reason for his opposition to LGBTQ rights. ”Sheldon was horrified at (or obsessed with) a particular sex act, and that seemed to be what was propelling his hatred of gay men. It was about the sex. Quite literally.” (Read the article for the details of the encounter.)
Corn sums up the conservative problem with sex with this:
...Whenever there is a clash over gay rights, abortion, pornography, sexual education, same-sex marriage, or contraception, I always remember my special moment with Sheldon. Yes, it’s just one data point—but a revealing one. The fights over these subjects are fights over sex, why you have sex, and who (if anyone) gets to say what sex you can have and who you can have it with. Of course, with abortion, the direct target is women. But the war on sex extends beyond that. As Gay noted, American men must “recognize that their way of life is also under attack. Men also have sex for pleasure. This is not just a women’s issue.” Indeed, sex is a multi-gender issue. For many people, it’s part of the pursuit of happiness, and, once again, it must be fought for.
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Corn in his newsletter links to this brilliant ad that captures what Republicans are trying to do and how far they will go in their obsession over controlling sex.
If you want to know why evangelicals and conservatives support a corrupt amoral sexual predator for president, a big part of it is because they see him as their best chance to impose this agenda on everyone else.