This is part of what will be an on-going string of posts about how Conservatism, and generally Republicans because they now overwhelmingly identify as conservative or very conservative, are repeatedly wrong. Normally these errors only surface after a period of time, such as denying (for many years) the earth is warming or that there are no examples of evolution or that Intelligent Design is science (and so on and so on and on and on and on). There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of examples of vast, important policy errors. I expect to bring up a few (dozen) of those over time.
This morning I picked up the paper, and is almost always the case whenever I pick up a paper, I noted a headline that spoke, yet again, to another massive, crushing error Conservatism has made. Specifically, conservatives have argued for years that "abstinence" education would be successful, and that normal forms of birth control and sex education were corrupting our youth and leading to high rates of pregnancy among the irresponsible young poor and from that, leading to high dependency rates on welfare programs. Now, taking aside that most of the time "irresponsible poor" is code for "black" among conservatives, they fail to acknowledge that "abstinence only" has generally lead to, at best, neutral pregnancy rates vs. no education at all, and nearly always to rates of pregnancy at least as high, if not far higher in certain areas, than places where sex education and contraception are made available without the intrusion of conservatives hyper-religious, hyper-puritanical moral sanctimony (and don't get me started on STD's). In short, their policy fails while the policy they oppose, succeeds.
The USA Today noted today that US teen birth rates, despite the vast hand-wringing and whinging from the right about moral turpitude, is at an all-time low. Are people, especially teens, more moral, e.g. are they having less sex? The conservatives would claim the former (more moral) is clearly not true, after all, look at the "occupy movement", which they claim is a manifestation of the laziness of our youth. Of course, assuming less or more sex has ANY relation to "morality" is absurd, but the second part, "are they having less sex", well the answer is clearly "no." They are, if anything, the most sexually active generation in history if statistics on sexual activity are to be believed.
So, what's going on? Simple, if given the education - according to the the National Center for Heath Studies, and probably if given access to contraception - our youth are behaving MORE responsibly, not less, about pregnancy - and this DESPITE the fact that many more of our younger people are poor than in the past.. gosh.. what??! How can this be?
It's a simple answer, one not hard to fathom, people, women especially, have grasped that having kids at a young age is crippling to their future. Where it once was considered almost a theology that as a woman you a. found a man and b. had a family, especially and meaningfully at a younger age (say less than 25), now that is a long-forgotten relic of a time when women had many fewer protections in employment and were generally treated as "women" (meaning, you'd hear things like "she's just a woman"). That attitude has been dropped like a dead fish into the dustbin of US history, and, especially when combined with effective birth control, has allowed women to take control of their lives and futures, having ALL THE SEX they want, damn them to hell, without consequence. And by the way, isn't that what many men want? Isn't that why we force their employers to pay for Viagra - gosh those men are.. what's the word Limbaugh used.. Anyway, the point is, EVERYTHING conservatives have preached on this point - that moral people will avoid sex (wrong, they (suburban white folk) have sex in and out of wedlock as much as the rest, including their young people, including those who go through sex education), contraception hasn't lead to more pregnancy, sex education hasn't lead to unreasonable rates of teen pregnancy and poverty, in fact, it's done JUST the opposite. The other question to be asked and answered by conservatives is simply this, why is having sex immoral?
So, what's driving this ignorance of fact, this denial of truth? Also pretty simple, conservatives view the world as needing to conform to their set of moral rules, even if they don't live by them themselves. Just like the Islamic Jihadists who attacked us on 9/11, most conservatives DEMAND behavior that they deem as "right" from others, while secretly watching porn or sleeping with their secretary or .... oh I don't know Newt... staffer? In this, they share a common bond with Jihadists, they want to impose their ultra-orthodox, religiously based views on everyone, and in many respects feel no one should have a choice about it. They demand that, for example, ALL employers be given an "out" from paying for birth control, because after all it might offend someones religious sensibilities. They fail to admit that paying for health care is a christian duty, and further that, as "liberterians" they pledged to foremostly apply their "rights" to themselves - meaning they can easily chose FOR THEMSELVES not to use birth control, but should not be choosing for others, at least not if they actually believe the sermons they give about individualism and personal choices.
No matter to them though, no matter that their economic arguments about wanting to avoid welfare costs fall on their face when sex education is shown to work and their argument about abstinence is shown to not work - no matter that sex education and birth control work to reduce teen pregnancy to the lowest point in history - no matter that THEY COULD NOT POSSIBLY BE MORE WRONG on this point, drive ahead little soldiers, drive ahead, you're doing God's work, by God - those immoral savages having all that sex, that's all bad, and they should be punished, punished by being made to carry a baby to term as the consequence for their immoral act. Perhaps you should fly a plane into a building or something to prove how right you are about the sanctity of life. The similarities between ultra-orthodox religious views and ultra-conservative views, from any part of the world, are eery and striking.
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