Straight Rights
For a couple of months, Dan Savage has been sounding the alarm for "breeders" to wake up and smell the half-caf no-foam double latte: American conservatives are waging war on sex. Not just gay sex either. Straight sex, premarital sex, married sex, adolescent sex, kinky sex, pretty much any kind of sex you can imagine or think to look up on Google. And he's been right. And we, his straight readers, have been nodding absentmindedly and wishing he'd go back to answering letters from the total freaks who make us feel better about our own inadequecies.
Now he's not the only one speaking up. In this week's column, he printed an excerpt from The New York Times Magazine cover story "The War on Contraception", by Russell Shorto. You can read everything Dan Savage has to say about the article here, but I think this paragraph is all you really need to know:
"The American Taliban is not just opposed to straight premarital sex, with their abstinence education and hilariously ineffective virginity pledges, or gay sex, with their "ex-gay" campaigns and their anti-gay-marriage amendments. The American Taliban doesn't think married heterosexual couples should be able to use birth control. If you care about your own freedom—not just your right to have premarital sex, but your right to decide whether, when, and how many children you're going to have—you need to read "The War On Contraception." And don't comfort yourself with the notion that these are just some anti-sex religious wackos: The Bush administration not only listens to these wackos, it appoints them to important positions all over the federal government—and let's not even think about the members of the American Taliban that Bush has already appointed to lifetime positions in the federal judiciary."
So, an appeal to all American voters who value the idea that the government has no place in the bedrooms of its citizens: you have an opportunity to send a message in this year's midterm elections that you no longer want your nation to be run as a theocracy. Just because you're not voting for the President, doesn't mean you're not able to vote for a change.
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