When met with defeat you have two options: You can take heed to Aaliyah’s message that “if at first you don’t succeed, you can dust it off and try again” or after one too many slides down the loser slide, you can echo En Vogue’s advice on knowing when to “give it up, [and] turn it loose.” When it comes to the Family Research Council (FRC) and its insinuation that young people should be punished for engaging in unmarried sex, I’ll let you figure out which path they’ve chosen.
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Why are faux-saints so bothered about premarital sex?
Well, Right Wing Watch reports that Family Research Council senior fellow Pat Fagan appeared alongside FRC head Tony Perkins, on “Washington Watch” this week to discuss his article that “claims that Eisenstadt v. Baird, the 1972 case that overturned a Massachusetts law banning the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people, may rank ‘as the single most destructive decision in the history of the Court.’”
Hello, uncontrollable laughter. It’s always nice to see you.
Fagan goes on to say, “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.”
OhmiGod, consenting adults have the right to do as they please with their own bodies independent of what archaic fables believe they ought to be doing with them?! The horror. The free will. The agony.
Fagan’s rant continued:
They just said no, singles have the right to contraceptives we mean singles have the right to have sex outside of marriage. Brushing aside millennia, thousands and thousands of years of wisdom, tradition, culture, and setting in motion what we have.
…
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.
Holy Taliban, Batman, if the Family Research Council had its way, we’d be living in a sexually repressive theocracy that would essentially be the Christian equivalent of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other Middle Eastern governments.
Meanwhile, it’s historically inaccurate to act as if for thousands of years prior to this court ruling marriage was the primary way sexuality was expressed. That’s a cute little theory for the heterosexual protestant White man into American life, circa 1950, but that’s not even true in the history of this country let alone civilizations that long existed prior to. If anything, the Supreme Court caught up with reality versus creating an entire new one in the wake of one ruling.
People are going to have sex, even unmarried Evangelical Christians (a whopping 80 percent of them), and yes, in some cases, young people too. You don’t have to like it, but restricting contraception isn’t going to stop them from enjoying the act.
Have we not learned from the spreading of STDs and teen pregnancy rates — both of which have proven again and again to be lowered when proper sex education accompanied by access to contraception are readily available?
Younger evangelicals are recognizing this, subsequently embracing a more evolved point of view on sexuality in the process.
But for Fagan, Perkins, and the rest of their ilk, they just keep on fighting.
What is it really for, though?
They dress their stances up in shrouds of morality, but in actuality, they’re merely pining for the days of yore when women were more like property, expressions of sexuality were (sometimes fatally) shunned, and any bigot holding a Bible got to dictate the way the rest of us rolled. Those days are through, “gentleman,” so let go and let God direct you to the fact that this is a brand-new day. One that’s not so bad at that.
Sound off!
Michael Arceneaux is a Houston-bred, Howard-educated writer and blogger. You can read more of his work on his site, The Cynical Ones. Follow him on Twitter: @youngsinick
Family Research Council Hates That Single People Have Sex was originally published on newsone.com
