Cured: Global Warming, Racism and Moral Decay

By: Brook

I often wonder if the voices of the those who espouse radical values realize just how radical they sound. We all have our beliefs, but the point is to not trample on the rights of others in our communities in pursuit of these values. I've been doing a lot of research on abstinence only education in America that has led to a lot of eye opening moments. These abstinence only programs have censored information, made moral judgements, stigmatized students and discriminated against the LGBT students they teach. Extensive research on the issue has concluded that eighty percent of the curricula taught contains false, misleading and distorted information about reproductive health that misinforms students about the effectiveness of contraceptives and risks of abortion.

It goes without saying that women's independence in reproductive health issues goes hand in hand with this issue. Denying any woman the necessary information to make healthy and informed decisions about their bodies and sexuality does not lead to more 'moral' and abstinent teens. It only creates a vacuum of empowered, economically successful women who are leading healthy and self defined lives in which they have accrued honest self respect. The very prevention of this goes to the heart of governmental desire to maintain social roles that serve a patriarchal state.

However, abstinence only programs insist that teens abstain, and that if they make the mistake of having sex, that they bring their pregnancies to term. All sorts of methods have been employed to create a "morally pure" message, and some of the tactics and visual imagery I observed were quite shocking. Shockingly offensive.

Now that all of these issues are at the forefront of public debate with Obama's so called 'liberal agenda' that

will effectively end abstinent only education with his proposed 2010 budget cuts, I wonder what the radical pro-life voices have to say about all this? I did not have to look very far for some visual messages on the issue. Did you know that pro-life supporters cannot be environmentalists? Or that abortion is actually racist and the creates the 'ultimate exploitation of women'? Here I am fighting all this time to recycle, reduce and reuse, while raising awareness against unequal pay, opportunities and access, and all I had to do to stand against the exploitation of the environment, women and minorities was to encourage women to bring more babies into the world!

Why does one concept have to be so antithetical to the other in the pro-life discourse? A pro-life supporter can't advocate saving trees until those tree huggers finally take a stand on the abortion debate? And we all know the ultimate form of racism is abortion. Of course. Forget all those that we lynched, held in captivity, sold into sexual slavery and dehumanized. Because when a black woman aborts, she causes the ultimate hate crime that perpetuates racism? This is a loaded conversation that has many facets that the person who rendered this illustration probably didn't consider fully.

And this is exactly what we should be doing when addressing all social issues: considering it fully. Why are abstinence and pro-life rights so valued by conservative proponents? Why is there such a high price on maintaining moral purity through virginity? Why must women define themselves through their sexuality, or lack thereof? And why are the politics of virginity focused on girls as the keepers of morality, rather than on boys?

Comments?

P.S. I have begun reading The Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti to help deconstruct some of these questions further. The research continues...