Screw Christmas! There is an ALL-OUT WAR ON SEX going on in this country … and we need to bring it out into the twinkling holiday lights, too!
This war came into direct focus for me last year after watching the documentary “Jackson.” It features Dr. Willie Parker—a reproductive rights hero and an amazing advocate for women’s choice nationwide, but especially in his home state of Mississippi. My best friend got to meet him recently when he was speaking here in Seattle, and said he was just as warm and genuine as he’s always seemed on the various docs and news shows. And it also showcases Barbara Beavers, a woman who continues to build and promote so-called “pregnancy crisis centers” across MS—including building one directly across the street from Parker’s clinic, the last remaining abortion provider in the entire state. She’s more accurately described with blunt adjectives, ones that properly identify just how much evil lurks behind her beatific, Christian smile.
After the documentary wrapped, Beavers apparently gave an interview with PBS.org, where she continued to promote her own special “no sex for you!” agenda:
We believe the initial pregnancy choice begins with deciding whether or not to have sex. Every sexual encounter has a potential for creating a child, regardless of what kind of birth control, regardless of what kind of precautions or whatever you use. Any kind of sexual encounter has the potential for creating a little one, so we want to talk to girls about that pregnancy choice and are they making good decisions and good choices with that.
… And we want to help women, empower women to think better about themselves, to not give away their sex free, to make those men make a commitment and a marriage and a ring and all that before they get their sex, to value themselves and to love themselves. And so we're working with the prevention aspect of pregnancy choices in our Sexual Integrity Program. …
In other words, Sexual Integrity = Abstinence until/unless you’ve got checks in all the right boxes on their check sheet. And it doesn’t matter if you’re 15 or 35. Their rules apply to you during your entire breeding lifecycle and beyond. In the mind of the Christian Right—to have sex—there MUST be a wedding ring on your finger. Period! So, until you’re in a committed relationship with a man who will keep a job—or, alternately, who they can track down and torment for the rest of his life if that’s what it takes to make him pay that baby’s bills … maybe even put him in in jail to feed the private prison monster they’ve created, too … and just imagine all those billable fees the state can charge him as well—you’re not allowed to have sex, period! … so that fine upstanding Christians won’t have to pay welfare for your slutty ass or your no-good children. And—since they believe the horrific (and WRONG) statistics they quote in their so-called clinics about the lack of effectiveness of the various types of modern birth control—they believe it’s just not worth the money either. Plus, they’ve convinced themselves that birth control just gives sluttiness some kind of permission, too—and, of course, they’re not paying for that that either—so we know there’s only one real cheap and Christian way to totally stop from getting pregnant … right?
No sex for you!
The first thing that struck me in the documentary was how Beaver’s pregnancy crisis centers—already well-known for using such scare tactics as shoving 8x10 full-color glossies of supposedly aborted fetuses (the Photoshopped, chopped-up baby kind) in front of scared teenagers and exhausted mothers of three or four alike, then telling them flat-out lies like abortions cause breast cancer—now routinely use ultrasound machines in their attempt to trick poor, uneducated, mostly Brown or Black women into not getting an abortion, all the while selling their Christian abstinence agenda …. hard.
No sex for you!
The ultrasound tech (who—immediately … because, of course, she has to legally—says she’s not actually a doctor … or a nurse … or anyone really trained to do ANYTHING in the medical world) tells the poor, Black, pregnant mother of four, “see your baby right there?” The image on the screen looks like she’s just set the ultrasound paddle in a place where it would show a tiny bit of the back wall of the woman’s uterus, framed by other parts of her uterus. Investigators have found that many of them will also over-estimate the age of the fetus at this point in the interview, too, trying to make women think it’s already far too late for them to get an abortion.
Even though she’s a poor, uneducated woman from a small town in MS, the pregnant woman in the documentary still has enough sense—when she sees the questionable image—to say something along the lines of, “How far along am I? Every other time I’ve been pregnant and had an ultrasound … you could see, like, fingers and toes and stuff.”
The tech quickly dismisses her questions without giving her a real answer. Unlike ultrasound medicine, she’s obviously had at least some training in the area of there are some questions that you shouldn’t answer. The tech instead offers to print the pregnant woman a picture of the back of her uterus to take home with her. She even writes, “Hi, MOM!” across it, too … a cheery, smiley face at the end.
That’s evil enough, but Barbara Beavers shows the real evil in her heart when she’s given unfettered access to express her personal opinions on this issue in the documentary. That’s where reading between the lines of her so-called Christian rhetoric is enough to make you want to wash your eyes/ears/mind out with Clorox.
The pregnant mother is finally taken in to talk to Beavers after she’s given some news about her overall health. The tests show that her blood pressure is severely elevated, and she has four children already, when—if she’d had adequate access to birth control starting at the time she first became sexually active—that might not be her lot in life at age 25. It’s hard enough for her to be living with her mother and working at Walmart, dreaming of going to school herself, so she’s even more upset after hearing the news that—on top of being pregnant with her fifth child—she now has health problems, too.
It’s at that moment when Beavers condescendingly suggests—if she’s going to keep having kids like this—maybe she should have a real big boy so he can play football and make his momma lots of money. In other words, it’s obvious that your genetics will never make a doctor or a lawyer out of one of your children. Look at how little you’ve accomplished yourself …. so maybe you should just hope for an athlete this time. Your people are good at that, right? But, other than that ...
No sex for you!
After the poor mother gives birth, Beavers shows up at her house, chattering like a bird and bringing presents for the baby almost eight weeks after she’d promised the mother she’d have them there. In the meantime—at Beaver’s urging—the young mother has moved out of her own mother’s home, trying to demonstrate her willingness to stand on her own two feet. That move leaves her struggling in a run-down house with peeling walls and five children under the age of six, including a new-born who sleeps in the bed with her. Of course, Beavers responds to that sleeping arrangement with no small amount of snark, too, despite the fact that the present she’d promised to buy and bring the struggling woman was a bed for the baby. The so-called do-gooder doesn’t stay long either, just long enough to cluck over the woman’s children like she’s some kind of grand dame delivering her monthly allocation of noblesse oblige to the po folks in her own shire.
On her way home in her car, Beavers chatters on about spending the weekend with her own children and grandchildren … intermixed with judging the woman they just left about the state of her house/children/life. The filmmaker ultimately asks, “Don’t you think she should be on birth control?”
Beavers responds that she’s “torn” on that issue … adding, “I don’t think that birth control is the answer. I think what’s ultimately going to work is going to be self control.”
No sex for you!
“And I think that’s our job ….”
No sex for you!
“…. more so than giving her birth control … to encourage her to assess herself and her value and her worth in such a way that she does not give herself away.”
No sex for you!
“The real issue of abortion is our immorality … our sexual immorality.”
No sex for you!
“And who am I to say that? I’m not, but God says it in his word. And I’ve seen it work positively in my own life and in the lives of others and i’ve seen it work negatively when done in the world’s ways.”
No sex for you!
God’s ways work, and that’s why we don’t give birth control or all that kind of stuff … because God’s ways work and they’re 100% effective, and they’re good for you body, soul, and spirit.
Yup! THERE’S NO SEX FOR YOU!!!
Not if you’re poor.
Not if you’re black or brown.
Not if you’re unmarried.
Not if you're not Christian.
Not if you’re not straight.
Not if you’re not THEM!
In other words, if you’re not a white, Christian, straight, married person … THERE’S NO SEX FOR YOU in the Right-wing Christian world! And they’re going to do everything they can do to enforce that rule … in every city/state they can manage … in every WAY they can manage … trying to push White Christian Eugenics to its ultimate end-game!
This is especially evil since—as they actively try to encourage POC to not breed—there’s another white Christian contingent out there who are, “raising the army of the Lord” like one homeschooling friend of my daughter’s. She’s 38 and has nine children she can’t afford, either, but she’s White and married (to a guy who’s never had more brains or ambition than to run parts for a parts store) and actively supported by her church, TOO! … despite the fact that her parents—who are both doctors—still keep trying to bring some sanity back into her life instead of the religion she found when she ran away from home at age 16, pregnant for the first time. According to my home-schooling daughter, this woman’s Southern Baptist church sees her as part of the new wave of Christian parents … the ones who feel like they should have as many children as possible—even if they can’t afford them—since … if you can’t run them out … you can at least breed them out! Oh, and why should the Blacks and all those Brown people get our hard-earned tax dollars in the form of welfare for families. They should be coming back to us, right?
In other words, her Army of the Lord is costing tax payers a butt-load, too … but it’s okay because she’s White, Christian, and married. Check, Check, and Check!
I’m White and I was raised Lutheran/went through Catechism with a pastor who felt like his purpose in those two years of classes we took to become “adult members of the church” was to show us every niche and cranny he could of our own religion, as well as every other religion that he could show us, TOO! Given the wealth of different faiths represented in my hometown of Savannah, GA, I was able to explore not only the standard Christian line up of Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic, Episcopal, etc., all first-hand … he helped us explore the Church of Christ, Jehovah Witnesses, African Methodist Episcopal, Greek Orthodox, Judaism, and more because they were all represented in our town, and almost all welcomed a bunch of 10-12yo Bible students from another church who were there to learn from them as well. Plus, we had long, honest discussions about African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and more religions along the way, too, not judging them for their beliefs, but discussing them in the classic compare and contrast way with our own beliefs, and exploring how both could be valid in the modern world …
… and one of the things that came out of those two years for me is this: I can say with 100% certainty there there are NO PROVISION IN THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE that says, explicitly, “you must FORCE everyone around you to act according to YOUR DESIRES.” Nor are there Biblical dictates that say, “You must FORCE political changes in the law to make where you live more Biblical” … or “You must FORCE the entire world to become Christian/act according to YOUR model of Christian behavior,” … and not a damned one of them ends with, “or you’ll have to ANSWER FOR IT AT THE PEARLY GATES!” EITHER!!! There’s not a single bit of that propaganda in their defining literature that pushes for THE ABSOLUTE DOMINION OF CHRISTIANS, much less just WHITE CHRISTIANS! Nope! They’re just a bunch of assholes who’re trying to make the world into one *they* want to see themselves! Look at what Roy Moore said about the greatest time in America being DURING SLAVERY, FOR GAWD’S SAKE!!!!! AND then they complain about that the same behavior/belief coming from the “awful Muslim/Sharia Law Agenda” people, too?
So every bit of this BS is them twisting that Bible in a transparent attempt to prove their own personal prejudices are a-okay … and to prove that that they’re 100% right to push them on every other person on the planet, too.
But they’re not!
At the end of the documentary, the young mother comes to one of the society’s banquets and tells Beavers she’d like to volunteer at the crisis center, possibly to share her own experiences. Beavers barely listens, all-but spinning her wheels trying to get away from the young mother by pretending that she needs to speak to others. In other words, the young mother was impressed with Beavers and all of her wonderful Christian rhetoric. She obviously wanted more of it in her life … but what she was shown instead is that Beavers could really care less about that mother as a person. All she cares about is using that poor mother to feel superior herself, and to act like she’s doing something good for the planet and for her town, too … when what she’s really doing is pushing one agenda and one agenda only.
No sex for you!
The final words on the screen tell us that the woman found out shortly afterwards that—instead of getting on birth control after the birth of her fifth child—she was pregnant again … twins this time. And I get it, TRUST ME! She has more children than she can handle already. She’s poor and uneducated so her chances to get anything resembling a good job are slim and none, and it sounds like she chooses bad sex partners who have no real interest in her as a person, either … so her story makes everyone who struggles with paying their own taxes think, “really, girl?”
But the reality is … if you'd just give that damned woman some BIRTH CONTROL … then she might have a better ability to control her OWN LIFE FROM THERE … without just adding more kids to the problem every time she feels lonely and lost … and reaches out to another human being, just wanting to feel good for ten minutes.
Once you reach the age of consent … then sex is part of normal HUMAN RIGHTS! I know that then becomes an issue between a lot of young people and their parents, but parents need to wake up about this issue, too. That whole “Purity Ball”/Promise Ring crap is being used in high school to divide girls into cliques who then use their so-called virginity to torture other girls who’ve already become sexually active … and the slut shaming is off to the races from there!!!! So we need to stop letting the “no sex before or outside of marriage” people set the bar on this issue, because—in no small part—it’s being used for EVIL instead.