Our culture, or what's left of it.

Normally, I consider myself something of an odd centrist, with a decidely liberal bent in some places, but there are days when I read something that makes me think that the Left needs a deep and painful wedgie. Yesterday on Twitter I saw a comment, to which I shall not link, which to me perfectly encapsulated why I feel that way.

UK deputy leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman, was opining about why the disastrous "workfare"-like program in the UK was necessary, saying "The small minority who don't want to work they are let off the hook by the fact there isn't a proper work programme."

To which someone on my twitter feed said, "I've never fucking met anyone who wanted to work." To which my inner Theodore Dalrymple said, "There's our culture, or what's left of it, right in a nutshell."

Because I want to work. I don't want to sit on my arse all day and do nothing; I want to contribute, I want to be part of a community, I want my efforts to be valued and valuable. I want the self-respect that comes from doing something that keeps the machinery of civilization turning. I want to believe that I'm actively making these the early days of a better nation. Watching television isn't that. Nor is penning bad punk rock odes. Nor is urinating on sidewalks, puking outside pubs, or whinging about the system without actually doing something about it.

This disease of learned helplessness and immature entitlement is the real rot at the core of our civilization.

As a culture, I want to be able to support those who cannot support themselves. Even those, I want to want to be able to. I want a culture that values work. I don't know where the UK went wrong in this regard, but it surely seems to have done, and I hope that the US doesn't follow it the UK down the same pathetic path.

Contraception is the Absence of God

I was reading an article the other day on a judge's ruling that Plan-B, the after-sex contraception, be made available to everyone, regardless of age. In his ruling, he stated that Katheryn Sebelius's almost un-heard of political overturning of the FDA's own recommendation that it be made available over the counter was political, uninformed, and contrary to the public good.

In the responses, one of the complaints was that "children should not have access to abortion drugs without their parents' knowledge." This dredged up memories of the recent case of Hobby Lobby, the toy retailer, which argued that it shouldn't be forced to provide contraception because it was the same thing as abortion. When the judge informed HL's lawyer that contraception and abortion were not the same, the laywer responded with a straight face, "It is my client's sincere belief that they are the same thing, your honor."

Have you ever read Ted Chiang's short story, Hell Is The Absence of God? In it, angels are real, show up at random, do random stuff that either heals or (more often) fucks up the lives of people in the area. The few times they've responded to questions, their response has been "He works in mysterious ways. You wouldn't understand why. Just love Him, and all will be well." And then they go on wrecking towns and lives.

The story presents a reified version of the fundamentalist mindset. Everything Happens for a Reason of God's, Even If You Don't Understand It.

And then it clicked: after every incident of intercourse, a woman is presumed pregnant until proven otherwise. Because she's presumed pregnant, every form of contraception is abortion. Since rape is the one thing fundamentalists can no longer call "intercourse," the accomodation made is that real rape can't lead to the consequence of intercourse, the presumption of pregnancy.

Another powerful fundamentalist mindset is that we must head for a godly world. It doesn't matter if people get hurt along the way; it doesn't matter if pro-sex, pro-contraception policies would alleviate teenage pregnancy by some amount; they lead away from the Godly world and the true aim, which is making unmarried pregnancy non-existent.

The whole anti-contraception, "legitimate rape" argument emerges from the synergistic effects of these thoughts in the fevered brains of fundamentalist men. The only way sex does not lead to pregnancy is if God doesn't want it to, or if someone does something criminal. In their perfect world, that would always be the case. Always.