What about the teen sex cults?

Justice Anthony Kennedy thinks gay people are fabulous. All three of the Supreme Court’s most important gay rights decisions were written by Justice Kennedy. So advocates for birth control had a simple task today: convince Kennedy that allowing religious employers to exempt themselves from a federal law expanding birth control access would lead to all kinds of horrible consequences in future cases — including potentially allowing religious business owners to discriminate against gay people.

Kennedy, however, also hates abortion. Although Kennedy cast the key vote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey upholding what he called the “essential holding of Roe v. Wade,” he’s left no doubt that he cast that vote very grudgingly. Casey significantly rolled back the constitutional right to choose an abortion. And Kennedy hasn’t cast a single pro-choice vote in an abortion case in the last 22 years.

So Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, the two companies claiming that they should be exempt from the birth control rules had an ace in their pocket as well. Their path to victory involved convincing Kennedy that their cases are really about abortion — and it looks like Kennedy convinced himself of that point on his own.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Teen Sex Cults

by digby

We've discussed the strange phenomenon of wingnut fascination with bestiality, specifically sex with dogs. And recently we've been treated to the ick inducing sight of seven year old girls dressing up in ball gowns and pledging to their fathers to remain "sexually pure" until daddy turns them over to their husbands. 

Via  Kos, here's another peek into the strange, disturbed world of rightwing moralist sexual imagination: teen sex cults. It has even infiltrated the hallowed halls of science at the FDA:

Attorneys for a New York women's group plan to grill Food and Drug Administration officials this week about their failure to decide whether an emergency contraceptive pill called Plan B may be sold without a prescription.

Former FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, Dr. Janet Woodcock, deputy operations commissioner, and Dr. Steven Galson, director of the FDA's drug evaluation center, are to testify in court-ordered depositions to be taken by attorneys for the Manhattan-based Center for Reproductive Rights Wednesday through Friday in Washington, D.C., and Rockville, Md.

The women's group seeks to force approval of over-the-counter sales of Plan B, which can prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours after unprotected intercourse.

Simon Heller, one of the attorneys, plans to quiz Woodcock on a March 23, 2004, staff memo suggesting she was concerned Plan B might lead to teenage promiscuity.

The FDA is only supposed to consider the safety and efficacy of drugs.

In the memo released by the FDA, Dr. Curtis Rosebraugh, an agency medical officer, wrote: "As an example, she [Woodcock] stated that we could not anticipate, or prevent extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an 'urban legend' status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B."

Rosebraugh indicated he found no reason to bar nonprescription sales of Plan B.

"This was the level of scientific discourse," Heller said in an interview, referring to concerns attributed to Woodcock. "I find it very odd that these people who are supposed to be responsible scientists and doctors are making up wacky reasons."

Where do they come up with this stuff? I have to assume that Woodcock's dark fantasies came from her own twisted imagination because I haven't been able to find any other references to Plan B and teen-age sex cults. However, that's not to say that there isn't plenty of ludicrous paranoia out there about Plan B. The biggest purveyor of lies on this subject appears to be the Concerned Women For America (a cult if I've ever seen one) that writes volumes of misinformation and misleading blather about everything, but particularly sex. 

Here are just a few of their lurid Plan B "talking points":

Rather than reducing the core problem of young people engaging in sexual activity (which carries life-long consequences), it encourages sexual activity. An official survey revealed that MAP use among teenage girls in the United Kingdom more than doubled since it became available in pharmacies, increasing from one in 12 teen-agers to one in five. Among them were girls as young as 12. A girl who said she was 10 years old told the pharmacist "she had already used it four times."
[...]
Even morning-after pill proponents agree that sexually active girls are likely victims of sexual abuse, and interaction with medical professionals is an important defense.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute reported: "The younger women are when they first have intercourse the more likely they are to have had unwanted or nonvoluntary first sex, seven in 10 of those who had sex before age 13, for example."

...The rush to choose "pregnancy outcome options" may preempt efforts to rule out sexual abuse. "Sexual abuse is a common antecedent of adolescent pregnancy, with up to 66% of pregnant teens reporting histories of abuse…. Pregnancy may also be a sign of ongoing sexual abuse…. Boyer and Fine found that of 535 young women who were pregnant, 44% had been raped, of whom 11% became pregnant as a result of the rape. One half of these young women with rape histories were raped more than once."

It should be noted that this same group enthusiastically endorsed the South Dakota abortion law that offers no exemption for rape or incest. 
[...]
This is more of that "taking away women's autonomy is really giving them "freedom" gibberish. They might as well be speaking in tongues for all the sense it makes.

They believe that the morning after pill is an abortion. But they would be against it even if it weren't because it encourages promiscuity. Or it allows men to exploit women. Or it's unsafe. Or it will give women emotional problems. Or physical problems because women who have abortions are more likely to die than women who don't. Except they aren't. But no matter, even if that isn't true, there are always a thousand reasons why women should not be allowed to fuck. Pick one and run with it. 

"The morning-after pill is a pedophile's best friend," Wendy Wright, senior policy director for Concerned Women of America, a public policy organization, said in a statement after learning of Galson's decision. "Morning-after pill proponents treat women like sex machines."Pedophiles and sex-machines. Hoo baby. But hey, if it's fantasies of teen sex cults that rev these gruesome, obsessive imaginations, have at it. It would be nice if the scientists at the FDA got their jollies elsewhere, however. This is important.