Evaluating Perils
A sex-disaster industry has emerged, linking federal and local governments with fundamentalist morality groups whose goal it is to desexualize the environment and to instill fear and divide the populace into the sexually “safe” (us) vs. the sexually “dangerous” (them).
All anti-sex crusaders routinely portray opinions as facts. They employ linguistic legerdemain by coupling buzz words like sex and violence, unborn child, gay agenda, traditional values, childhood innocence and partial-birth abortion. These self-appointed guardians of moral purity want nothing more than to limit sexual expression to their own sober standards. They become obsessed with the subject of sex itself, which they see everywhere in a world being polluted by the sex-crazed antics of the non-devout.
Inaccurate and Misleading
The author exposes the more than 4,000 crisis pregnancy centers for what they really are anti-choice clinics luring young, mostly-poor, women away from legitimate healthcare facilities. As magnets, they provide inaccurate and misleading information with scare tactics about supposed links between abortion and breast cancer, future infertility and mental health. The federal government has already provided more than 60 million of our tax dollars for these and other deceitfully-disguised anti-abortion operatives.
In like manner, Uncle Sam will fund nothing but fear-and-shame-based abstinence-only sex ed. In his dissection of this tragic travesty, Dr. Klein underscores the truism that although abstinence-only sex ed is an attainable (if unrealistic) goal for straight teens, it excludes millions of their gay peers who can never legally marry (except in Massachusetts). Also, numerous peer-reviewed studies demolish the specious argument that reality-based sex ed leads to more sex among teens.
What our government labels censorship in other countries and regimes, in America, by dishonest contrast, it considers mere regulation and restriction for the ostensible purpose of providing safety (from what?) for all citizens. Not content with its stranglehold on the content of radio and TV, the Federal Communications Commission now focuses its attention on the most profound communication tool in the history of the world the internet , the worst possible nemesis for all anti-sex soldiers.
And Here Is the Half of It
At least 50 million Americans spend upwards of $12 billion annually on internet porn alone (half of all online searches). Yet a very vocal and determined minority of fearmongers wants to demonize, criminalize and pathologize porn because of its very subversive nature in revealing that we can empower ourselves sexually and challenge the acceptable status quo.
Porn tells us that sex, by itself, is not dangerous, a very dangerous message to them. The very idea of recreational sex is anathema to the religious righteous. The virtually limitless ammunition in their formidable arsenal of anti-sexual weaponry has targeted all adult entertainment venues strip clubs, massage parlors, adult bookstores, and all other adult businesses.
Postscript
If this work infuriates you as much as it did me, it will have achieved its goal, for as Marty Klein so forcefully reminds us, eternal vigilance is not only the price of liberty, but especially of sexual freedom in puritanical America.
Mr. Akerley can be contacted at benakerley@aol.com.
