Helen Alvare, currently teaching at the George Mason School of Law, and formerly the spokeswoman for the Catholic Bishops on Life issues.
This is a great essay; please take the 8 or 9 minutes needed to read it in it's entirety. It prints out at three and a half pages (12 paragraphs).
The White House and Sexualityism
Professor Gerry Bradley made a spot-on observation here at Public Discourse that one of the underlying forces driving the HHS abortion, contraception, and sterilization mandate is the current federal ideology of “equal sexual liberty,” embracing the notion that “women will and should have lots more sexual intercourse than they have interest in conceiving children. … [that] sexual license should never impede a woman’s lifestyle, at least no more than it does a man’s.” Elsewhere, I have identified such a position as “sexual expressionism” or “sexualityism” and have defined it to include also the suggestion that sex should not only be free of the slightest reflection on its link with procreation, but also free of commitment, or even the real possibility of a relationship between the man and the woman involved.
In this essay, I propose to examine this ideology, not only from a woman’s perspective, but also from the best scientific evidence we can currently lay our hands on. I will suggest that the insidious “twofer” the White House is currently proposing—trampling religious freedom in order to promote sexualityism—is even worse than doing the latter alone.
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The theory of sexualityism has now had four to five decades to prove itself. There has been a massive expansion of “sexual liberty” on a nationwide scale. Consequently, by this time, observers (and policymakers) with an objective bone in their bodies who believe in the scientific method, would now be searching for a net improvement in the reported happiness and freedom of women. If they did not find one, they would discard this theory about women’s happiness and search for another. But the opposite is happening: the federal government is seeking to expand sexualityism—even while it appears to be at odds with what all known social and human sciences tell us. Simultaneously, it is claiming that groups and individuals who support practices that are closely associated with human happiness and freedom (religion and marital sexual intimacy) are irrational and unscientific.
The federal government has it exactly backward. …
Alvare then makes her strong case – and here is the end of the essay withthe repucussions of her speaking out:
…the backlash against fingering sexualityism is real. For a while, after revealing my thoughts on the subject on National Public Radio a few times, and being mentioned in a pro- and con- piece in the Wall Street Journal, I believed I might get off easy. But then Jon Stewart ridiculed me twice on the “Daily Show,” and the Internet magazine Salon featured a piece on my thinking, apocalyptically headlined: “Birth Control’s Worst Enemy.” Setting aside the article’s multiple inaccuracies and the author’s failure to call me, it made clear that I had committed public-image suicide in the eyes of the people-who-matter. The comments are as expected: I am the worst kind of self-loathing, woman-hating, celibate-male-mouthpiece prude, who wouldn’t know good sex if it slapped her across the face.
Yet I am far from alone in my conclusions. When this past February I co-authored an open letter with Kim Daniels, to HHS and others, it included a substantial paragraph taking on the subject of federal birth-control programs and women’s immiseration. Nearly 30,000 women signed, solely via friend-to-friend email. I had only sent it to about twenty-four. The letter touched a nerve.
The women continue to write me weekly. They are relieved that someone is saying what they believe but have not previously had a sufficient forum for expressing. I hear personal stories about the side-effects of the pill and about what one eloquent young woman titled the new “problem that has no name”: how girls who believe in sexual integrity are finding neither the courtships nor the marriages they desire. The new “marketplace” for sex and marriage made possible by celebrating birth control and abortion as some kind of “feminism” is raining down some serious misery. Perhaps we’ve started something. Perhaps more of us will continue to feel the urgency to speak. If so, we have the extremism of the HHS mandate to thank for it.
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