FAGAN: The court decided that single people have the right to contraceptives. What’s that got to do with marriage? Everything, because what the Supreme Court essentially said is single people have the right to engage in sexual intercourse. Well, societies have always forbidden that, there were laws against it […] It’s not the contraception, everybody thinks it’s about contraception, but what this court case said was young people have the right to engage in sex outside of marriage. Society never gave young people that right, functioning societies don’t do that, they stop it, they punish it, they corral people, they shame people, they do whatever. The institution for the expression of sexuality is marriage and all societies always shepherded young people there, what the Supreme Court said was forget that shepherding, you can’t block that, that’s not to be done.
I’ve written at some length previously about the Family Research Council (no, I’m going to dignify them with a link), and, said to say, nothing has changed since the last time I weighed in on their hyper-religious silliness. FRC is one of the largest collection of uber-Christian hypocrites known to mankind, which is saying something, because they’re not lacking for competition.
You’d think that a group so allegedly committed to protecting families would be all about helping people plan those families, include sex education, reproductive health care, and yes, even contraception. Instead, FRC has decided to go in the other direction. FRC is advocating that sexually active unmarried couples should be punished, because…wait for it…they have no right to engage in sexual intercourse.
(Yeah, I know; these are the same folks agitating for “smaller government”- evidently small enough to fit inside a vagina. I’d point out the hypocrisy, but they don’t merely deny their sanctimoniousness- they embrace it as a badge of honor.)
Never mind that fully 80% of unmarried Evangelical Christians admit to having sex. Never mind that sex is a perfect normal part of the human condition. The problem, of course, is that far too many within the Evangelical community are terrified of sex (perhaps if they got more themselves….) and devote considerable time and energy teaching that sex is dirty, awful, and should be suppressed. They teach young adults to be ashamed of their bodies, and they refuse to equip those same young adults with the tools they need to understand their sexuality and manage their sexual health.
[I]gnoring the reality that teens are having sex has had serious consequences across the country. The states that push ineffective abstinence-only health classes have higher rates of teen pregnancy, higher rates of STDs, and higher concentrations of HIV infections. Even the evangelical community itself has started to realize that denying teens sexual health resources isn’t working, and has begun to move in the direction of supporting contraception and sex education.
The United States’ teen birth rate has actually recently plunged to a record low — but that wouldn’t be the case if Fagan had his way and unmarried Americans were denied access to birth control. According to the Guttmacher Institute, that decline in unintended teen pregnancies is “almost exclusively” the result of more young people using contraception.
If you want to understand what happens when ignorance of sex and sexuality become the norm, all you have to do is look at Texas, which has severely cut funding for women’s health care. The Lone Star State is well on its way to becoming The Barefoot and Pregnant State.
The truth of the matter is that regardless of what Evangelical haters of all things sexual believe, people are having sex, and they will continue doing the horizontal bop. It’s what humans do. People have sex for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is that it’s fun. People who are sexually active tend to be healthier and happier than people who don’t.
Hmm…if you think about it, that might explain why FRC and similarly oriented anti-sex zealots seem such a miserably unhappy lot, eh?
As for criminalizing sex outside of marriage, I’m not sure I can stop laughing long enough to do justice to what a truly and ridiculously absurd idea that is.
