Conservatives, that is.
Check out this little gem from the Doubleday Web page for Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility For 9/11:
He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom — from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.
This, frankly, is chilling. And the fact that this is a major publishing house putting this shit out and not some Scaife-funded wingnut welfare imprint like Regnery is doubly so.
Let’s think about this for a moment — this guy is actually arguing that women having sexual liberty and being able to control when they have children and how many is an abuse of freedom. And the same goes for support of gay marriage and no-fault divorce.
But what does it mean to “abuse” freedom? What is the difference in his mind between the exercise of freedom and the abuse of it? Is freedom something only straight men are entitled to? Because honestly, D’Souza’s statement here echoes Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s exchange shortly after 9/11:
JERRY FALWELL: And, I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way – all of them who have tried to secularize America – I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”
PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we’re responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system.
Make that “straight Christian men,” because the ACLU is often associated in the wingnut mind with Jews, particularly of the intellectual New York liberal sort.
I agree with Amanda that this drivel is as anti-American as it gets. The whole idea is that we’re a free society, and freedom is messy in that not everyone is going to do something you agree with. If their hatred and enmity is based on hating us for our freedom, and if we’re supposed to be all strong and resolute and fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here, aren’t we just capitulating to them if we restrict freedom in response to people who aren’t happy with our freedom? Shouldn’t we be giving them the finger and being even more free instead?
Well, not if your goal is to create a society every bit as fundamentalist and theocratic and reactionary as Wahhabiism. And we don’t call these folks the AmTaliban for nothin’.
Methinks the D’Souzas and the Falwells and the Robertsons are having a small problem with the concept of “freedom.” Here’s how Scott summarized the description of D’Souza’s book:
Shorter Dinesh D’Souza: “we must turn over the control of the state to Comrade Kass and make sure to reinstate the oppression of women, egregious double standards, and sexual puritanism we share with our fellow non-abusers of freedom in the Muslim world before they can impose it on us with their fearsome armies.”
These folks would love to return the country to some mythical time prior to the legalization of abortion, prior to the Pill, prior to no-fault divorce, prior to the Civil Rights movement, prior to Stonewall, and prior to the banning of prayer in schools. They usually imagine this as the 1950s, though their imaginary 1950s bears little or no resemblance to the actual 1950s, when women had sex outside marriage, they had abortions, and gays, lesbians and atheists very much existed. The real difference between then and now, as Mad Melancholic Feminista points out, is that back then, all of that stuff was kept quiet because of shame.
Shame. Shame about sex is what gave shape to the fantasies that we have of the 50s. It wasn’t that people didn’t have sex back then, rather it was that the shame of having others find out was powerful enough to drive you to get an abortion. You might perform it on yourself. You might kill yourself rather than have others find out that you had been having sex. Shame lead to untold numbers of deaths, and probably untold numbers of abortions.
Many pro-lifers believe that abortion rates will drop if you ban it. But, if you pay attention closely to the reality of the 50s–not the fantasy–you will realize that probably nothing is more likely to shoot up abortion rates and female suicide rates than prohibiting abortion, contraception and sex education. The fact is that our own times, which seem to be full of sexual dysfunction, are probably not a whole lot different than the 50s, except in one way: women don’t have to be as ashamed of themselves now. If you find yourself pregnant, you really do have the option of keeping the child, being a single mother, and continuing on in your community. You have that option because shame is no longer the single most important force directing your life.
And that loss of shame as a means of controlling those at the bottom of society — the women, the racial and religious minorities, the queers — drives people like D’Souza and Falwell and Robertson and Kass and Dobson absolutely batshit insane. And it makes them afraid, too — if the masses aren’t afraid of them, and aren’t buying into the shame that made it easy to control them in the past, they might just lose their place at the top of society. I mean, did anyone else see A Bug’s Life?
[Hopper has just drowned three dissenting grasshoppers in a pile of seeds]
Hopper: You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life! It’s not about food, it’s about keeping those ants in line. That’s why we’re going back! Does anybody else wanna stay?
[grasshoppers shocked – all the grasshoppers “rev up” their wings]
Molt: [motioning a fellow grasshopper] He’s quite the motivational speaker, isn’t he?
Hopper: Let’s ride!
I’ve written about the fear behind the idea that men should marry women who aren’t in any economic position to leave them. We’ve also covered the fear behind the wingnut opposition to birth control, abortion, gay rights, affirmative action and no-fault divorce – essentially, it’s the fear of the ants standing up and taking away all those unearned privileges.
No-fault divorce is a particularly interesting item in D’Souza’s litany, since at first glance it doesn’t really fit in well, what with the longstanding acceptance of divorce in Islam. But let’s look at that for a second. Divorce in Islamic countries that follow some version of sharia is in favor of the husband – Islamic law puts divorce in the power of the husband but not the wife (the husband can divorce the wife whenever he wants, but the wife must get the husband’s consent or the intercession of a judge). One of the things that women’s rights groups in Islamic countries have been working on is the reformation of the divorce laws so that women’s access to divorce is equal to that of men.
And that’s something that women’s rights activists here achieved for women, because while divorce was never quite so easy here as a simple declaration, for many, many years women in the US and in other Western countries were left in the same position after divorce that women in Islamic countries often are today. It was only after feminists fought for no-fault divorce and reformation of the custody and property-division laws that divorce became an “abuse of freedom.” I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that women now file the great majority of divorce petitions.
Note, also, that every last one of the groups and freedoms that these bedwetters blame for 9/11 have to do with individual rights and freedoms, not the actions of the government; if you framed it a different way, all the things they blame are “feminine” traits, while the stuff they ignore is the swaggering macho stuff. I know they don’t like to think that what the government does in the world pisses people off as much as lesbians getting married must, but c’mon.