Sexual Intelligence
An Electronic Newsletter
Written and published by Marty Klein, Ph.D.
Issue #47 -- January 2004 Contents
1. Something New In Sex
2. Roe vs. Wade Anniversary
3. Gay Marriage Poll Explodes
4. Babes Against Bush
5. Strom's Little Girl
6. Lenny Bruce Pardoned
7. Correspondence: Molestation vs. Murder
8. Correspondence: Catholics & Condoms
9. Sexi's--Thanks, & Last Call
...Actually, in Sexual Intelligence. Spam filters--of our subscribers--are killing us. Thus, we're changing our traditional lavender title and return address. Despite the fact that "sexual" is causing some problems in the subject line, we're keeping Sexual Intelligence because, well, that's who we are.
What should you do?
January 22 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that decriminalized most abortions in the United States.
Give yourself an anniversary gift: do something about it, just one thing. Write a letter to your newspaper, find out if your local medical school teaches abortion procedures (not all do), email your congressmember, ask a high school or middle school for their sex education policy.
Just do one thing. You know a lot of people will be praying against you.
The American Family Association (anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-separation of church & state) has an amazing website (www.afa.net) and ambitious agenda (see issue #45). After recent court cases in Massachusetts and Canada, they decided to do an internet poll of their members and submit the results to Congress with a simple message: look at all the people who will be upset if you don't stop this gay marriage thing, preferably with a Constitutional amendment.
For a while, all went as planned: those "opposed to legalizing gay marriage and civil unions" outvoted those in favor by roughly a jillion to one. Then word got out, and various non-AFA people started to vote--you probably received encouragement to do so yourself--and the numbers started to change. As of this writing, 700,000 people have voted, and those favoring legalizing gay marriage or civil unions are outvoting the scared and selfish more than 2 to 1.
Just as I wasn't planning to honor the poll's result if it
were skewed as originally expected, I don't honor its statistics now. Internet
polling is still an imprecise adventure (it certainly isn't a "science"),
always begging the question of who has voted, and what the results mean. If
you can't trust that the panting bisexual woman you meet in a chatroom isn't
a middle-aged unemployed guy with dandruff, how can we say anything about a
thousand, or hundred thousand, anonymous votes in an internet survey? There
is no possible way to determine the authenticity of the results,
much less their generalizability to the larger population.
This AFA/gay marriage poll did have an interesting feature: preventive voting. People voting for gay marriage weren't trying to change anyone's mind, and presumably don't expect the results to be taken seriously by AFA, Congress, or anyone else. The intent was, simply, to destroy the presumed value that the "properly" skewed poll was going to have. This is either solid political activism or trashy political vandalism, depending on your point of view.
But it raises questions about the future--with preventive voting, will future interest groups keep their polling secret? You can already see a new mini-industry evolving, guarantors of internet voting integrity. In the future, people will need some kind of password to vote in a poll of their own organization. Of course, hackers will be only moments behind them in busting the password codes. It's the law of the jungle, internet-style.
In fact, democracy is taking a beating from internet expansion. Now that anyone can mobilize thousands of emails to a senator, TV network, or magazine--or send thousands himself--how is public opinion to be judged? How is the "will of the people" to be assessed? Does the future of democracy simply belong to those who can buy the best email-generating programs?
So will the AFA present its results to Congress, as promised? "We didn't get the results we expected" is a pretty lame excuse not to. Memo to AFA: keep blaming the "homosexual lobby"--the more you underestimate the strength of the forces for civil rights in this country, the better, strategically, for us. Just as many white Americans supported the drive for racial equality, many straight Americans care about gay rights. It isn't just a "homosexual issue".
The political slogan "Lick Bush in '04" always makes me chuckle and it's even funnier when said by a woman. Thus was born "Babes Against Bush," a traditional-looking pin-up calendar with a difference: every month has a countdown to our own hoped-for "regime change" (inaugural day '05), and includes a selection of the Bush Administration's environmental, economic, civil rights, and law enforcement crimes.
The Michigan women's group's website, www.babesagainstbush.com (motto: "because hot chicks hate him too"), features other fun merchandise, and promises to donate part of each sale to "organizations that give Bush and Cheney fits."
Last week, 78-year-old family "friend" Essie Mae Washington-Williams finally told the world she was Strom Thurmond's daughter. Her mother was Thurmond's black maid, about 15 when she conceived. Thurmond was 22.
Williams was born in 1925, and it's easy to say that Thurmond did what many rich Southern men did in 1925--he had sex with a black servant. Chances are, his grandfather or great-grand-uncle did that with his slaves only 65, 70 years before that.
But there's a difference: most wealthy Southern men made the law on their own property, for their own servants and slaves. As judge, governor, and senator, Thurmond made the law for everyone in South Carolina, indeed, the whole South. He enshrined in law that blacks were second-class. In 1948 he ran for President, swearing before God that he wouldn't allow Negroes into Southern schools, homes, or churches.
Washington-Williams came forth only after Thurmond's death, she said, because she didn't want to hurt him or those he loved in any way. She showed him compassion at the very same time that he was spewing vitriol toward her "kind."
Did shame about his own desire for black women help drive his demand for segregation? Did he hate himself for having sex with a black woman--a black girl--and project this hate outward into a social program of hate?
This is surely what happens with many gay-haters. We know there are men attracted to men who promote gay-hating, such as Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover. And we've seen men who hate their own sexual desire become rabid erotophobes, such as Jimmy Swaggart.
This is why teaching kids to hate their sexuality is so damaging. We're told to hate the sin and love the sinner, but when the sinner is yourself, and the sin--sexuality--is so much a part of yourself, you can't separate the two. Teaching kids to disown or hate their sexuality is teaching them to hate themselves. And that makes them hateful--not only toward themselves, but toward others.
Thus is born another censor, another abstinence-only radical, another Strom Thurmond.
New York Governor George Pataki pardoned satirist Lenny Bruce last week, 39 years after the obscenity bust and conviction that began the end of Bruce's life. Obsessed with defending himself, unable to get work, bankrupt and on the lam, Bruce died 28 months later at the age of 40.
The gifted satirist was arrested for saying dirty words in a Greenwich Village club after midnight. Of course, these same words are now said routinely on cable TV. But this does not mean we're freer today than in 1966. Sure, you can now say the dirty words--but you still can't have the dirty thoughts.
Bruce may have been arrested for saying "motherfucker," but he was destroyed for telling the truth. One of his routines described Jesus and Moses returning to Earth, passing through Harlem and seeing starving people living 20 to a room; they then visit Cardinal Spellman and remark that his ring is so expensive it could feed all the people they had seen. If you still can't repeat this (still true) line on network TV, exactly how valuable is our right to hear someone say "motherfucker"?
In response to a campaign of conscience by Robin Williams, the Smothers Brothers, Penn Jillette and others, Governor Pataki issued the pardon as "a declaration of New York's commitment to upholding the First Amendment." Bruce himself would have mocked the cynical emptiness of Pataki's rhetoric, coming only months after Pataki polished his conservative credentials, supporting the Patriot Act and other attacks on America's Bill of Rights.
Governor, it's easy to pardon a man dead four decades. Where was your commitment to the First Amendment when Mayor Giuliani wanted to close the Brooklyn Museum for "offensive" art? Where was your support for public libraries pressured to install blocking software on public library computers (issue #21)? Why are you silent on the zoning vigilantes attempting to destroy legal adult businesses throughout the state?
What might Bruce have said about the pardon?
These cocksuckers want to pardon me now--thanks a whole fucking lot. Where were you when I was getting my balls kicked in "liberal" New York? And then he might add, the Church says ‘if you thought it, it's the same as doing it’. Let's apply that to the collection plate next Sunday.
At this writing, there was still no actual response to the pardon from Bruce, who is still dead.
7. Correspondence: Molestation vs. Murder
Regarding the Michael Jackson debacle (issue #46), Ben Akerley, author of The X-Rated Bible, writes "please point out that accused murderer Robert Blake had his bail set at only $1 million--vis-a-vis Jackson's $3 million tab. Alleged child molestation really is more heinous than murder in our culture if you have to put a price tag on it."
8. Correspondence: Catholics
& Condoms
Two months ago (issue #45) we wrote about the latest Big Sex Lie--this one from a Vatican spokesperson, claiming that condoms don't offer any protection from HIV/AIDS.
I appreciate Dr. Linda Hendrixson, Assistant Professor of Health Education at East Stroudsburg University (PA), alerting me to Catholics for a Free Choice and their excellent website www.condoms4life.org. The site describes CFFC's international public awareness campaign about the devastating effect of the condom disinformation program. Their ultimate goal is to change the Vatican's policy, challenging its aggressive lobbying against condom availability in parts of the developing world most at risk (from which, by the way, the next Pope is almost certainly coming).
They also believe that the love, justice, and morality at the center of the Catholic mission make condom use not only permissible, but a responsibility. Their creed:
We believe in God.
We believe that sex is sacred.
We believe in caring for each other.
We believe in using condoms.
9. Sexi’s--Thanks, & Last Call
Thanks to everyone who sent in nominations for the 4th annual Sexual Intelligence Awards™. Here's your last chance to submit your suggestions, with a couple of sentences about why your nominee should get an award. Feel free to nominate yourself as well. Awards will be announced in the February 1 issue.
You may quote anything herein, with the
following attribution:
"Reprinted from Sexual Intelligence, copyright
© Marty Klein, Ph.D. (www.SexEd.org)."