Part one of a four-part series on sex and politics.
Believe it or not, Sarah Palin wasn't chosen as John McCain's V.P. candidate just because she's passably telegenic and possesses a set of well-used ovaries. It's because she walks the socially conservative walk that she talks. Not only did she "choose life" when her Down syndrome child was diagnosed prenatally, but when her daughter became a pregnant, unwed teenager, abortion probably wasn't even on the table. (In 2006, she said she would "choose life" even if her daughter was raped — in other words, the kid's opinion didn't count.)
Why do these gestures carry so much meaning?
promotion
True, Christianity has always been suspicious of sex, and sexual regulation of the young has always been, like the Protestant work ethic, part of the mindset of capitalism. But a significant number of anti-choice believers have had abortions, defending their choices as the necessary exceptions to the rule. What's more, these beliefs have attained totemic value for particular tribes within the American public. Belonging to a church and paying lip service to its values is very important in certain communities. How did this subculture, and its repressive attitudes towards sex, insinuate themselves into the mainstream of American political life?
Evangelical use of the legal system to suppress sex education, abortion and the like goes back to 1873. That year, with the backing of the New York City-based Young Men's Christian Association, "Secretary and Special Agent for the Society for the Suppression of Vice and Post Office Inspector" Anthony Comstock persuaded Congress to pass a series of vice laws. The so-called Comstock Laws forbade the trafficking of any material judged "obscene" — including any sort of advertising for, or public discussion of, devices or techniques to prevent conception or venereal disease.
The Society for the Suppression of Vice later split off from the YMCA, and Comstock was granted near-absolute power in enforcing his mandate. A Civil War veteran and former dry-goods clerk, he was a man terrified of his own sexuality. Comstock felt such guilt over his teenage masturbation that he thought he might kill himself, and as an adult he sometimes acted out his contrition by paying prostitutes to strip naked, then arresting them for indecent exposure.
Comstock paid prostitutes to strip naked, then arrested them for indecent exposure.
Not only were sex workers entrapped, but those who sought to share realistic information about preventing pregnancy, even in medical textbooks, were subject to arrest, fines and imprisonment. Ads for condoms and potions meant to "restore a woman's menses" disappeared almost entirely from the newspapers.
Within ten years of founding the Society, Comstock had seized hundreds of thousands of dirty pictures, burned ten tons of books, postcards and engravings, and ruined scores of lives. In 1878, for example, he arrested the well-known Madame Restell, a self-styled "female physician" who provided the traditional midwife's services of contraception and abortion from her home at 160 Greenwich Street. Restell, dubbed "the most evil woman in New York" by the newspapers, committed suicide in her bath the morning before her case came to trial. Even though she was in her mid-sixties at the time, a contemporary illustration shows a beautiful temptress in her opulent Turkish-styled bathroom (no doubt bought with the ill-gotten gains of her illicit practice), the water colored with a dark India-ink wash to show the taint of her polluted blood.
