Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Of COURSE It's Always About The Sex
Except, of course, when it's about the money. Or power. Which are all facets of the same thing. Bainbridge's efforts to prove otherwise are disingenuous at best and offensive at worst. Atrios and Max nail it effectively. I just have to add this: The whole idea of celibacy is based on women being a) inferior beings, and b) such irresistible temptations to poor innocent men (so that of course men can't be blamed if they want to grab those irresistible temptations without concern for such irrelevancies as consent), and never on the idea that women are independent beings who are fully human and should be treated accordingly. If the Church's cons truly respected women as fully-fledged humans, then why is the idea of homosexuality so scary to them? The cons' attitude towards sex comes straight from that held by the ancient Greeks, and which was summed up so brilliantly by Jon Stewart in discussing Jim "Jeff Gannon" Guckert the gay prostitute: "It's not gay if you're the 'guy'" -- meaning that if you're the penetrator, you are still considered manly. But anything that is penetrated -- be it women or other men -- is considered unmanly, which is another way of saying Not Fully Human. Unclean, in other words. This is why the cons like the idea of sex having far greater consequences for women than for men. Remember, Saint Augustine, the guy whose pronouncements form the basis of virtually every branch of modern Christianity, opposed abortion not because he thought it was murder (he didn't think that) but because it allowed women to have sex without consequences -- in other words, to have the same sexual privileges that men did.
More blogs about politics.
