The United...er, Divided, States of America
When tolerance of intolerance is not an option, you have the America we live in today
Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.
Joseph Fort Newton
Declare your jihad on thirteen enemies you cannot see -egoism, arrogance, conceit, selfishness, greed, lust, intolerance, anger, lying, cheating, gossiping and slandering. If you can master and destroy them, then you will be read to fight the enemy you can see.
Al-Ghazzali
Those who know me understand there are two things I hate more than anything else- intolerance and willful ignorance (hypocrisy could also fit in there nicely). Unfortunately, those two things often go hand in glove- intolerance often stems from willful ignorance, and vice versa.
Both stem from laziness, the lack of desire and/or willingness to make any effort at all to investigate what makes others different. Because of that, some folks cling to their beliefs/knowledge (such as it may be) as if it had been handed down to them by God Almighty when it could just as easily have been Ronald McDonald.
The ignorant and intolerant fail to recognize that they don’t know all there is to know in this world, and that we can all easily learn something from one another. But that would take effort and the willingness to admit one’s experience and expertise may be lacking in certain areas. It may also require tempering one’s ego long enough to understand that someone else may know a better, perhaps even better, way.
If you believe in God, you understand that He/She/It didn’t create all human beings to be the same. Not all are White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals. Not all walk the same path in life. And not all think, act, or conduct themselves in the same manner.
That’s neither good nor bad; it just is. Whether White, Black, Red, Green, or Yellow, we’re all God’s creatures, right? Or whatever word you use to describe your deity. None of us have any control over whatever chemical is it that colors our skin, where we were born, or the language(s) we speak.
If we’d been born in Syria, our skin would be olive, and we’d call our god “Allah.”
If we’d been born in Israel, we’d be Jews.
If we were born somewhere in Africa, our skin would likely be black, and we’d worship whatever god dominated the region we lived in.
Those are might be referred to as “accidents of birth.”
But what if it turned out that despite our differences, none of those things were true, that “God” was just a figment of someone’s imagination created to enhance the possibilities for social control? What if “God” was just a way for Catholic Schools to keep young ‘uns under control by keeping them burdened by guilt and shame?
What if “God” was just a way for Joel Osteen to buy himself another $5 million home? Or Creflo Dollart to purchase another Gulfstream?
What if “God” was just the way some folks justified they desire to dominate resources and the socioeconomic space…kinda like the Dr. Suess story “The Sneetches” What if “God” really was just a star on your belly?
Didja ever think about that??
But what if the problem was so very simple that most of us blew right past it because it seemed silly (which it does)?
What if the problem was that Americans are just having too damned much sex? Yes, that’s right; instead of doing the horizontal mambo when people want to have babies, people are copulating for all sorts of hedonistic reasons. People think it’s FUN and it FEELS GOOD.
Well, la dee FREAKIN’ da…. If people did things because they’re fun and feel good, we’d have idiots getting runner’s highs, sniffing glue, and stuffing lubricatedbroom handles up their…hey, wait just a damned minute. This is supposed to be a family show, is it not? Or is it?
I can never remember where the guard rails are.
Now, though, The Party of Small Government © wants you to know that righteous Americans should only be doing the nasty when procreation is on the table. Otherwise…well, that’s what cold showers are made for, Comrade….
Last May, The Heritage Foundation — the far-right architects of Project 2025, the creepy ass plan to fire all federal civil service workers and replace them with conservatives who have been specifically trained by them to further Trump’s agenda — published a tweet calling for the end of birth control and recreational sex.
For whatever reason, the tweet started going around again this week. It features a video in which some ridiculous woman starts talking about how “we” need a feminist movement to end birth control and also recreational sex, so that people only ever have sex when they intend to have babies.
(So, because some ridiculous woman hasn’t had sex since the second Reagan Administration, we should all be as shut down and repressed as she is?)
And that tweet from the Heritage Foundation is a bit frightening. Like, are these folks so ugly and boring that anything but procreational sex is completely off the table, and even then only if they’r wearing a ski mask?
"It seems to me that a good place to start would be a feminist movement against the pill, & for... returning the consequentiality to sex."
Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills.
Have none of them ever had a wild night in a bar, come home at 2 with a 10, had fun, anonymous sex, and them awakened at 10 with a 2? That’s almost a rite of passage for some folks. You get your stupid stuff out of the way in your early- to mid-20s. Then you wise up, get married, pop out a few kids, do the white picket fence thing, and become every bit as boring and uptight as your parents.
It’s the circle of life, don’tchaknow?
Plus, it’s easy to tell other people not to have sex. But, and any guy can attest to this, when the one-eyed soldier snaps to attention…well, he’s kinda hard to ignore, if you knowhutimean. It’s the old biological imperative coming to the fore, telling you it’s time to spread your seed…or just get laid because it’s been awhile and it feels good.
No thank you! If people want to add danger to sex, there are things they can buy at their local sex shop that’ll do just fine without bringing a child they don’t want into the world or contracting a virus.
Without delving into the history of the feminist sex wars of the 1980s (Hooray! We won!), we shall get right to the point here — which is that not everyone was quite as horrified by this as we might be.
Michael Shermer, who is one of those people who thought the Right was seriously into free speech and didn’t realize that the whole plan all along was Christian nationalism, quote-tweeted the article writing “I called it yesterday--IVF frozen embryos is just the start: a feminist movement against the pill end recreational sex have sex, make babies.”
This is not some kind of M. Night Shyamalan twist. This has been their plan all along, but guys like Shermer just kind of pretended it wasn’t because they liked dunking on “wokeness” and asking “genuine questions” about trans people too much.
WAIT JUST A DAMNED MINUTE!!! You mean to tell me that all along, this whole thing was about control? That Republicans want to control women’s bodies and kill the idea that recreational sex is permissible? (And fun??)
Well, duh….
Of course, there’s always “that guy” who thinks it’s his responsibility to be the “Conservative intellectual” who tells the reactionaries on the Far-Right what they should be freaking out over in this case, it’s…
Christopher Rufo, the guy whose job it is to tell conservatives what random academic terms they should be freaking out about at any given time.
“So what? The pill causes health problems for many women,” he wrote. “‘Recreational sex’ is a large part of the reason we have so many single-mother households, which drives poverty, crime, and dysfunction. The point of sex is to create children—this is natural, normal, and good.”
Yes, just to be clear, he thinks that birth control pills cause women to become single mothers. Roll that one around in your mind for a minute.
This is not a new thing. Conservatives have always wanted to end recreational sex (for other people) and yet somehow it’s never been all that successful. In fact, it’s been just the opposite. The states that teach abstinence-only sex-ed also have the highest teen pregnancy rates.
(And I’d wager that Christopher Rufo hasn’t had sex with anything but his right hand since the Dallas Cowboys won their last Super Bowl.)
Birth control pills lead to recreational sex, which leads to health problems for women. This obviously explains why America has some many single parent households.
You see, it’s so easy when you break things down scientifically, yeah?
Except that Rufo’s connect the dots argument is 90% bullshit and 10% a (money) shot in the dark. The problem is that Conservatives HATE sex…when other people are having it. They have no problem with it if they’re getting their helmets polished or if they’re doing the horizontal mambo on the hood of someone’s F-150 in a parking lot with their sister-in-law.
I’d love to be able to say “Good luck with this tack! The people will never go for it!” but the fact is, there are a whole lot of people out there who, while they may enjoy recreational sex themselves, also very much enjoy the idea of punishing other people for having it as well. It’s more or less the entire story of the Republican party.
There is also a whole anti-sex, anti-masturbation thing going on with young male Republicans, especially. Nick Fuentes bars his Groypers from not only masturbating, but from having sex with women, on account of how having sex with women is “gay.” The incels have largely taken over the asylum, and their rhetoric permeates a good deal of today’s conservative discourse.
To say that most of these creep-o incels couldn’t get laid if they were the last man with an erection on Earth would be an understatement. They think porn is real sex and that women should be throwing themselves at them. When this doesn’t happen, which is all the time, it means something’s wrong with women.
Of course; it couldn’t be the incels who are repellant and repulsive maroons who wouldn’t know how to treat a woman if you handed them a hooker, a guidebook, and Dan Savage to translate. It’s that women don’t appreciate REAL men.
Sure, youbetcha; that’s gotta be it. **snicker**
Speaking of people who may enjoy recreational sex on their own but delight in punishing others for it, Marjorie Taylor Greene got up on her pulpit to tell Christian women to dress modestly because otherwise they could cause men to “stumble” — which I believe means “want to have sex” in the parlance of evangelicals.
This might be an unpopular opinion and could hurt some feelings. There are many conservative Christian women, who are influencers or leaders, that are selling themselves short and not being good role models by conforming to the world’s sexualization of women.
If you are conservative and a Christian you know you don’t have to express yourself in sexual ways and you know you are attractive by dressing nice and feminine, and you can be beautiful and modest at the same time.
Men will respect you more and think of you much more highly than just a sexual object for gratification. It’s also good to not tempt your Christian brothers and cause them to stumble.
As conservative Christian women let us always be an example to girls and young women by displaying actions that our faith believes and not conform to the patterns of this fallen world. Be the light, don’t fall into the darkness.
Is that the advice Marjorie Trailer Greene got from the polyamorous sex guru she cheated on her husband with? I’m just asking for a friend.
But, seriously folks….
The kind of man who would think less of a woman because he can see her sinful elbows is not the kind of man who should ever be around women, period.
Nor should anyone who thinks having sex with women is “gay.” That’s just a whole ‘nother level of fucked up I can’t even begin to fathom. Than again, Nick Fuentes is a living, breating, walking, talking advertisement of the need for maximum therapeutic doses of Thorazine.
For those of us who make a serious effort to exist in the reality-based world, this is WAY more “fucked-upness” than I’m used to…and more than any one person should have to endure.
I feel as if I may need therapy (and certainly a shower) after all this….
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