in their own words

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Jan 28, 2008

The NARAL website, in celebration of last week's Roe v Wade anniversary, gives its viewers a glimpse into the world of pro-choice bloggers. Like turning over a dead log after a rain, the exercise briefly reveals some hard-to-categorize and distinctly unlovely specimens emergent from the political netherworld. What's hard to understand is why NARAL should go out of its way to put the blogs on display at all. They don't appear at their best in the sunlight.

A blogger who identifies ?-self as a "pansexual panamorous gender queer married androgyne and trans-woman" has this to contribute to the conversation:

As a trans-woman I will never have to worry about getting an abortion, so why is voting pro-choice so important to me? Well the main reason is that I am a feminist, one who holds that radical notion that women are humans capable of making rational decisions about what's best for them. ... Besides the whole 'no abortion to save the babies' thing, the anti-choice movement wants to ban all contraception. Despite the fact that that would drive up the abortion rate. Then again the Catholic church and their fundamentalist allies have never let a little thing like inconsistent or contradictory positions bother them. But these positions are only contradictory if you buy their official position that it is all about the babies. Their real agenda is to keep women in a subordinate position, it's all about control and power.

Unclear, it would seem, on the concept. Likewise trotted out by NARAL for our admiration is Babeland, a commercial blog whose concern for democratic citizenship centers on the recondite theme of what were once called Marital Aids.

For me, remembering Roe v Wade is important not just because we need to keep abortion not only legal but accessible, but because of what this decision symbolizes. Namely, we should have the right to do what we want with our bodies. This isn't just about whether or not to have children, it stretches into who we can love and the pleasure that each and every one of us has a right to.

Between bans on gay marriage, bans on sex toy sales, crackdowns on pornography and abortion clinic fires, our right to chose how we want to live erodes a bit more every day. Those of us who want the right to buy sex toys fight the same fight as those who want the right to chose when to have children.

Even though it may not seem like gay people and sex workers are truly a part of the choice movement, for me they are. ... Hopefully we can all continue to work together to bring about change that is radical and progressive, not just change that appeases the right-wing public.

I don't remember that the right to buy sex toys much preoccupied the fathers of the Constitutional Convention or that it was enumerated in the First Amendment, but I find it telling that Babeland views gay marriage, abortion on demand, and unrestricted porn as a single political package. If we (the folks Babeland calls "the right-wing public") ventured to make this connection ourselves, we'd be accused of using smear tactics -- regardless of the inability of our critics to pronounce an adverse moral judgment on gays, or on pro-aborts, or on vendors of porn. But in fact the unity is not contrived, for in each case the innovator has declared war -- not on a particular point of morality -- but on the idea that there exist exceptionless moral norms binding on all human beings, without reference to accidents of birth or station in life. Thus it is no an accident that the Catholic Church is singled out by NARAL (and the remoras attached to its underside) as the principal obstacle to the satisfaction of their singularly gruesome appetites.