One of the right’s biggest weaknesses is the fear of sex. If you have the stomach to read right-wing literature, there are countless prohibitions against sex before marriage and sex outside the marriage bed. A lot of these scruples are based on fear; many right-wing fundamentalists are even more afraid of sex than they are of an axe-murderer breaking into their house at night and killing them.
The right’s fear of sex and the fear of being vulnerable go hand in hand. And they are both part of the fear of the unknown. Conservatism is inherently an ideology of fear of the unknown, while Liberalism embraces the unknown as an adventure.
Why else do you see so many right-wingers screaming bloody murder when a questionable book is being sold in their community? Because they think the reader might get corrupted and learn about how to make sex pleasurable.
Why else do you see so many right-wingers complaining about abortion? Because they want to make it as hard as possible to escape the consequences of sex. Same with the denial of birth control.
Why else do you see so many right-wingers complaining about <gulp> “the gay agenda?” Because they don’t want to deal with the possibility that they might be gay themselves.
Some right-wing fundamentalists even go so far as to prohibit the practice of masturbation, even though it is a biological reaction which you can’t avoid; you will do it on your own sooner or later if you don’t do it voluntarilly. Are the right-wing fundamentalists therefore revolting against God, who made us that way?
When you engage in the act of sex with your partner, you become extremely vulnerable to them. They know stuff that can hurt you for the rest of your life. Even the ancient Biblical writers knew that; when talking about the act of sex, they state that a man “knew” his wife and had children.
This fear of becoming vulnerable, of changing as a result, is the inherent flaw of Conservatism itself. It is also at the heart of the Bush administration’s committment to secrecy and demands that everybody else just trust them and get back to their lives.
After the 9/11 attacks, Bush, almost hysterically, pleaded with people to get back to shopping. The implication was that people should just trust the President and let him do the work. Bush declared that either you were with him or against him. This implied that people who questioned the President were somehow being unpatriotic.
When Joe Wilson debunked the Niger-to-Iraq Uranium connection, that triggered panic within the Bush administration because they had been exposed and made vulnerable. That is why Karl Rove was willing to committ treason to restore the cloak of secrecy around the Bush administration.
You can see this fear of vulnerability in Bush’s Iraq War speech of a month ago. He declared that he talked with the military commanders on the ground every day and that based on those reports, we were doing fine in Iraq. But given the Joe Wilson scandal, I suggest that the commanders are simply telling the President what he wants to hear; if they don’t, their careers could be ruined.
You can also see this fear of vulnerability in the President’s refusal to hand over the documents on the Bolton nomination that the Democrats want. After all, what kind of scandals that we haven’t heard of are hidden in the pages of those documents?
This fear of vulnerability and the fear of sex that I described in the beginning go hand in hand. A person who hides stuff from you is likely to be afraid of sex and vice versa. And both fears are part of a larger fear of the unknown that is at the heart of Conservative thought. It is a fact of human nature that many people are more comfortable with what they are familiar with, even if they don’t like it, than they are with something they don’t know anything about.
The fear of the unknown is what prompted the scuttling of the Equal Rights Amendment. Opponents freaked out at the thought that women could register for the draft and be drafted into the military.
This fear of the unknown is what causes people to oppose a national health care system. Everyone and their dog knows the system is broke; however, many people are even more afraid of the unknown ramifications of a national health care system than they are of the current one, even though it is broken.
And this fear of the unknown was what led Edgar Ray Killen to organize a conspiracy to murder the three civil rights activists. Southern politicians were moaning and complaining throughout the 1960’s about how well things were in the South until all these civil rights agitatiors came and screwed things up. People were afraid of what it was like to live next to a Black family, so they kept them at a safe distance.
So, throughout its history, Conservatism has been a gospel of fear. On the other hand, Liberalism has been a gospel of change and adventure. It embraces the unknown as a fact of life.
While the Hoover administration was fearful that drastic changes would only make things worse, Liberalism, under FDR, brought us the New Deal, Social Security, and many other programs which made life better for us all.
While the Old South was afraid that the Civil Rights Movement would destroy their cherished way of life, the Left embraced the notion that Blacks were citizens just like Whites were.
While the Johnson administration sold out to the right and went to war in Vietnam, the Left and the Hippie movement showed us that there were other ways besides wars to solve problems.
While the Nixon administration was willing to smear, lie, and destroy the careers of people to protect its power, the Left brought down the Nixon administration in the Watergate scandal.
While the Reagan administration was illegally selling arms to Iran and diverting the proceeds to the contras, with a little help from John Roberts, the Left aggressively held hearings to get to the bottom of the matter, resulting in the defeat of the Bush I administration in 1992.
Against the advice of all his fellow Democrats, John Kerry investigated and brought down the Bank of Commerce and Credit, International. This act of heroism by Kerry delayed the rise of Bin Laden by several years by drying up one of his main funding sources.
And today, the Left is exposing the massive corruption that the Bush administration is engaged in, including the 2000 and 2004 elections, the lead-up to the Iraq War, the Tom DeLay scandal, and the torture scandals.
We are now at a crossroads of our journey. We can either embrace change and rise to new heights, or refuse to change and diminish. We can embrace alternative fuels and the Kyoto Accords and reduce the threat of global warming, or continue making more and more gas-guzzling cars and go back to the days of the horse and buggy in 10-30 years.
We can embrace change and define health care as a basic human right, or we can continue the way we are as even simple visits to the doctor become too expensive.
We can embrace change and work to create a society in which all people, including GLBT’s, Blacks, Hispanics, Women, and Immigrants are truly equal, or continue to polarize relations between the races.
We can embrace change and quit using wars as a way to solve problems, or continue the way we are and risk a nuclear holocaust.
We can embrace change, tie our support for Israel to its human rights performance, and treat the Palestinians as equals, or go the way we are and continue to inflame the opinions of Muslims everywhere.
Liberalism is the philosophy of adventure and change, where we seek to create a society where if everyone works hard and plays by the rules, they will be financially secure. Conservatism is the philosophy of fear. In the next two elections, our country will hit a crossroads in which they will choose their future. We must work to ensure that the people choose wisely.
Sex is a dirty disgusting thing you should only inflict upon the person you love.
I think we might be able to get a little more specific than that, even. Conservatives are also afraid of change because it means admitting that the modern world – or, more importantly, the world they grew up in – is imperfect. That it can be improved and changed, and move away from the world they’d seen through the eyes of a child. They want to roll back the clock so they can enter that world as adults, but this is fundamentally impossible.
You see that in a lot of conservative rhetoric, though. A stubborn insistence that the modern world is perfect – or as good as it gets – and that nothing needs to change or can be allowed to change.
That’s one of my weaknesses. I think a lot of today’s music is not nearly as good as the stuff in the ’60’s, ’70’s, and some of the ’80’s stuff. It actively challenged right-wing power. Now, you have celebrities like Brittany Spears and Jessica Simpson telling people to blindly defer to the President and songs like the one which says, “A soldier, yeah, he’s the one for me!”
You see that a lot in Emperor Dobson’s writings. He always talks about how society is going to pot and if we’d just go back to the ’50’s, everything would be just fine.
Sometimes its true, other times its not. A lot of modern music is total trash, it’s true, but there’s also some really good stuff hidden among the noise.
There’s a lot of modern music that really challenges the status quo: Anti-flag, Rage Against the Machine, Immortal Tchnique, System of a Down, Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM, etc, etc, etc. In virtually every genre, there is an anti-establishment messgage coming from someone. And its often pretty good as music also.
A lot of modern music is pro-establishment bullshit, but music has ALWAYS been that way, as long there’s been ‘the music industry’, and probably even before.
Unfortunately, many of those groups are part of the machine. Any group whose label is part of the RIAA is contributing to the problem, not fixing it.
You cant make generalizations about how “Any group whose label is part of the RIAA” is contributing to the problem of bad politics in music. the music industry is the root problem, i’ll agree, but just because a band has their profits stolen by their label doesnt mean that they cant have a good political message. The INDUSTRY tries to keep anti-establishment politics out to some degree, but that doesn’t mean that every RIAA-signed group is somehow helping with this effort.
Blaming bands who sign with the RIAA is like blaming homeowners who sign mortages, or tenants who sign leases (or people who shop at wal-mart). They ARE contributing to the problem in some way, but you cant really BLAME them for it. Its a choice they’re more-or-less forced into.
Actually, they’re not forced into it. At this point, any band that doesn’t walk away from an RIAA label has to be assumed to be supporting what that label supports and does until they do walk away. There have been such a growth of alternate, successful distribution channels over the past couple of years…
“Bad News Bears” challenges the win-at-all-costs mentality that infects our society. Everything about the movie is rebellion-oriented. The protagonist coach is a rebel who hires go-go girls from a juice bar to cheer on the Little League team; he’s a deadbeat dad, the kids fight like crazy, the cursing is so bad that only MaryScott would be truly at home. And yet, I’d much rather coach the Bears than the Yankees.
Oh, may I suggest you Kill your FM Radio. You’ll be better. It won’t feel any pain.
Cut the chord
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I think that what some right-wingers fear are that other people are having fabulous, frequent, guilt-free sex….and they resent it.
You suppose that’s why the right wingers are continuously yapping about the sixties, as though it happened last year.
I’ve actually met people who were on the “other” side of things back then who now seem to regret not being in on it all.
Of course, I encouraged their conclusion, ha! If they only knew what they’d missed… Ah… and if only I could remember?
In addition, many right-wingers speak of a “New Age Movement” as though there were some vast conspiracy out to get them.
I wonder if the White House Staff of Bush, actually claims their inflatable dolls as dependants on their taxes???
food for thought.. ; )
a lot of male right wing psychos I’ve known have been pretty well into being whipped, crossdressing and having large implements inserted into them. Always seemed a bit odd (and painful) to me but each to their own. I cant figure out if this is fear of sex or what though.
I would say that it is a major reason why people are right-wingers, although hardly the only one. There are some who act like sexual prudes just as a way of getting power. After all, if you can do something 99% of people can’t do, that is power. So, they whip up fear of sex in other people and then go off and do it themselves.
In addition, I have seen studies in which homophobic people were frequently secretly gay themselves.
Y’know, I think the analysis here is a little off track… (but then I may be even further off.)
I don’t think it’s about fear of sex, I think it’s about control. If you can convince people that you should be the one in control of their sex lives and their reproductive practices, then there’s not much that you WON’T be able to control…
Controllers are an important part of the dynamic, one that I didn’t mention. They whip up fear of sex among the masses so that they can do it themselves. Being able to do stuff that you deny to the masses is a major form of grabbing power. That is the exact sort of thing Jesus denounced the Pharisees for.
The Republicans are very much like their Muslim fundamentalist counterparts in their hysteria about sex.