Thank You for Protecting Me from Pornography!
Forget the terrorists. Forget the people who have been killed in 9/11, the London subway bombings, and in the other terrorist attacks occuring daily around the world. Forget the efforts of people like my husband and my coworkers, who go out every day and risk their lives to stop crime and terrorism.
Because what we need is protection from ( Read more... )
Because what we need is protection from ( Read more... )
For the record, I've seen porno films. They tend to be stupid and badly made, and no one in them really looks like they're having a good time.
Why do Christians feel that, if their faith prescribes (or proscribes) a certain behavior, then they must see it made into law?
That's not just Christians. That's fundamentalists. In the U.S., it's the Christian fundamentalists doing it, but in places like Nigeria and Sudan, you have Muslim fundamentalists, and in Israel, you have Jewish fundamentalists doing it (which, incidentally, has driven out much of the Israeli wedding business, but that's another matter).
The thing that pisses me off is how blind rabid fundies are to their own flaws. We've had a plague of fundie preachers at the University for the past week or so, and the entertaining guys seem to have gone home. In their place, they've sent the rabid anti-abortion people. These are the folks who stand on the quads with ginormous color photographs of aborted fetuses and -- get this -- signs comparing abortion to the Shoah. That's just cheap. Not just that they're comparing abortion to the Shoah, but that they're doing this at the same time as the state legislature is considering a bill that would make it illegal for the University health services to distribute birth control. (The University is a public school.)
You. Don't. Do. That. If you want to prevent abortion, you legalize birth control. People will have sex. Two million years of human history have proved that. You can't stop them. What you can stop is unwanted pregnancy. I agree, abortion isn't a smart method of birth control. Birth control is a smart method of birth control.
But back to pornography. What most of the "think of the children!" crowd fails to grasp is that children are innocent. If they happen across a brief image of the horizontal mambo, most of them won't figure out what they're looking at and will go off in search of cartoons or something. Families are less in danger from children seeing the mattress tango than from, say, chain-smoking or alcohol abuse, both of which are perfectly legal and don't have the FBI investigating them.
And everyone is in even more danger from what I'm doing with my computer this very instant. I've been playing circus calliope music at work since 7:45 this morning. That's guaranteed to mess up more minds than mere images of two consenting adults playing hide the salami.
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That's sick.
I am pro-choice and despise abortion. I would love for there to be zero abortions in this country. But unfortunately, there are always fathers who will want to rape their ten-year-old daughters (and they are probably the same people rallying behind Bush and this "porn squad"), and I place the rights of women above those of unformed cellular masses.
There is a big difference between terminating a pregnancy in its early stages--before there is sentience or the ability for the life to survive on its own--and taking masses of people (for reasons of religious intolerance, ironically) and murdering them. Last I checked, the people who died in the Shoah had fully formed fingers and toes and could breathe outside the womb. They also had awareness and sentience and that--to me and most logical, non-fundamentalist people--is the difference between abortion and the Shoah.
And then you get on this viscious cycle: It is wrong to terminate a first trimester pregnancy. Then it is wrong to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg, as with the morning-after pill. Then birth control is wrong because it prevents ovulation or sperm from reaching the egg. What's next? Are we going to advocate arresting women with their periods because they are flushing that potential for life away?
It is a slippery slope argument, yes, but it is just where these people would love to see things go. They would love nothing more than for people to have sex only to create children, to have women who wish to have normal sex lives tethered to the home and a mass of screaming babies.
I hate to imagine what that would do to our aching, overpopulated planet, but that is a whole new issue.
I would like to say I'm surprised by the initiative to make birth control illegal on your campus, but I'm not. You may have heard about the snafu a few months back where pharmacists were refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills or transfer them to another pharmacy, and the conservative politicians raised the issue of protecting the pharmacists from being fired for practicing their religious beliefs.
Never mind the rights of women trying to obtain a legal product ordered by their physician that were being turned away after having said prescription torn up and thrown away.
What most of the "think of the children!" crowd fails to grasp is that children are innocent. If they happen across a brief image of the horizontal mambo, most of them won't figure out what they're looking at and will go off in search of cartoons or something.
When I was a kid, bizarrely enough, I wanted to be an entomologist and so learned about sex very early. Why? Because all my insect field guides had pictures of grasshoppers and butterflies mating. I never made any nefarious connections; it wasn't until I was suitably older that I realized the connotations of sex--about the same age as everyone else did. To me, reproduction was a fact of nature: beetles did it and humans did it. I don't molest children now, and I have never been promiscuous. If anything, I have always had a healthy and realistic attitude towards sex, unlike teenagers who believe you can't get pregnant the first time or you can test for STDs with earwax.
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Or burning post-menopausal, and therefore infertile, women at the stake for being witches. Ever read the Malleus Maleficarum?
We've got those pharmacists here. I think they were the ones who first thought up the thing about banning the University from distributing birth control. And you'd think that, being pharmacists, they'd know that not all birth control pills are prescribed for purposes of controlling birth. There's a nifty little sideline of regulating periods, and I know at least one woman who takes them for precisely that purpose.
Ah, but I forget. Curse of Eve and all that rot.
I think I first learned about sex through the pregnancy literature on the dining room table whenever La Leche League met at our house when Little Sister Pony was a baby. As far as I know, I don't molest children either, though I do mess with their minds, which is more fun anyway.
or you can test for STDs with earwax
Bzuh? Do tell. . .
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Erm...no.... This is a new one for me.
(Again, though, I find myself largely unsurprised. This world has ceased to astound me at the old age of 24!)
Ah, but I forget. Curse of Eve and all that rot.
But of course! ::goes off to count ribs::
Bzuh? Do tell. . .
Apparently, there is an old legend that is resurfacing among the youth population.
According to this legend, a male can test a female for STDs by putting his finger in his ear and digging around for some earwax. He then puts said waxy finger into the female's vagina. If it burns, she has an STD. If it does not, she is "clean."
Incidentally, this is one of the many interesting things that I learned at "Bloodborne Pathogens" training a few weeks ago. Of course, it's not true. (I don't feel the need to tell *you* that, but you never know who's reading this comment and digging around in his ear right now....)
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The Malleus Maleficarum, or "Witches' Hammer" is a 16th century manual for witch hunts. It describes in great detail the qualifications for suspecting someone of being a witch (being female, mostly), the specified amount of torture both before and after confession (essentially, the quota of further accusations the witch hunter needs to extract from the witch before they can proceed to Part III), and how to execute (hanging or burning). It would be a comedy classic if it hadn't been used to wipe out a significant portion of Central Europe's women in the late Renaissance and early Baroque.
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Gotta love that Christian kindness!
I've had people think I was a witch before. Perhaps it is the long hair, the copious amounts of jewelry, and all the blather about animals and the earth and vegetarianism....
Good thing this is the year 2005 and not the 16th century.
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French Pony: What makes you think that she is a witch?
Ignoramus: She turned me into a newt!
French Pony: A newt?
Ignoramus: I got better. . .
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Wood!
Churches!
Lead!
Very small rocks!
A duck.
Dawn: Who are you who is so wise in the ways of science??
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Hubby is fond of talking about "interrogation" (in other countries, of course; we civilized nations do *nothing* of this sort).
"Well, how?" I ask, and he gives me that look.
He knows how I am.
"Never mind," I say. "I don't want to know." :-/
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