Monday, May 08, 2006

After I read yesterday's New York Times Magazine article about the Right's war on contraception, I started to wonder: How long do you suppose it'll be before the usual self-hating Democrats start announcing that the party "has a sex-without-consequences problem," start saying that Democrats will relegate themselves to permanent minority status until we come down from our hedonistic ivory tower and declare that every sex act must have potential consequence of pregnancy?

And once the religious rightists start to have success in their long war on contraception, what'll be next? Well, Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who's quoted throughout the Times article on contraception ("The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age -- and one of the most ominous"), is also a member of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, where, among other things, he calls for the replacement of modern gender roles with what he says is a Bible-based "complementarity" or "complementarianism." Russell Moore, who serves under Mohler as the dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's school of theology, tells us more:

Complementarianism is the view that men and women have been created equally in God's image but have different yet complementary roles....

Moore called for a complementarian response built upon a thoroughly biblical vision of male headship in which men lead their families and churches by mirroring God the Father, whom Scripture portrays as the loving, sacrificial, protective Patriarch of His people.


And no doubt, eventually, the Democratic hand-wringers will be talking about "the Democrats' egalitarianism problem," their stubborn devotion to the notion that women can do things men ought to do. Of course, it'll be a hell of a lot harder for women to do them by then, what with Roe overturned and birth control unavailable in 85% of the counties in the U.S.

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