Apr 25 2007
Another great reason to live in the Northeast.
As much as I love the wide-open spaces of the American West, I take comfort living in the northeastern U.S., because even if the religious right whackjobs managed to get more power (thankfully, looking less and less likely lately), I think that they’d hit a wall as soon as they hit New York state, maybe New Jersey. N.H. just passed civil unions, without a court order. New York is considering gay marriage. As I type this, the masses are congregating at the VT Statehouse demanding that the impeachment resolution passes the House of Reps.
Now that’s not to say we’re immune from it. The cave dwellers were out in full force during the civil unions debate back in ‘00, and we still unfortunately have ‘my-insanely-tight-pucker-cracks-diamonds-at-the-mention-of- “the free market” John McLaughry, and paranoid wingnut Paul Beaudry of TrueNorth Radio. But at least in Vermont, if you’re a far-right whack job, you’re marginalized, and rightly so.
Anyways, to get on another tangent, one of my atheist criticisms is that religious liberals and moderates don’t do enough to fight the extremist elements. I found a rare exception, and a great story, as well. Over at Talk to Action, an organization that includes many religious moderates intent on keeping a leash on the Religious Right, there’s a great piece about how the new governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, is standing up to the christofascists and rejecting federal grant money to pay for “abstinence only” education in the public schools.
The money was previously funneled by then-GOP governor Mitt Romney to a project of the anti-abortion group, A Woman’s Concern — whose medical director the controversial Dr. Eric Keroack; recently resigned from the Bush adminstration under a cloud. Although many polititians have feared standing-up to the religious right’s abstinence only tide, Massachusetts joins eight states have refused the restrictive federal grant money — and a dozen others considering it — rather than teach unscientfic, bogus and counterproductive approaches to sexuality. A Woman’s Concern is the chain of antiabortion “crisis pregnancy centers” that employed Dr. Eric Keroack, whose crackpot medical views were controversial at the time of his appointment to a federal family planning post, from which he recently resigned, apparently due to investigations by state Medicaid officials.
It’s really about common sense and living in a reality-based society. Sex rocks. Kids are going to have sex, so it’s important that those who do are educated to make the right choices and stay safe. Part of the problem is the fearmongerers think we’re all as stupid as they are. They really don’t get ’cause and effect’ down too well. They assume that giving kids an HPV vaccine (which I have to say I am not necessarily for, for other reasons) wil ‘encourage’ kids ot have sex. RU-486 (the abortifacient pill) will ‘encourage’ people to have sex. Teaching kids about birth control will ‘encourage’ people to have sex. Um, no. Sex is fun. That’s usually what ‘encourages’ people to have sex. And one could make the valid argument that keeping it in a ‘taboo’ nature also encourages kids to pluck the forbidden fruit. That’s why countries who are more open abut sex end to have fewer abortions and teen pregnancy rates. Hats off to Gov. Patrick for bringing some sanity and common sense back to Massachusetts.
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