Editor’s Note: The following article by Eric Francis will be presented in three parts over the weekend. It was originally published on Nov. 3, 2006, halfway into Bush’s second term. –RA
Dear Friend and Reader,
TWO STORIES made news this week that ring the bell during these extraordinarily Scorpionic days — days leading to a wildly contentious national election in the United States, where presently Republican majorities in our legislative bodies are up for grabs. If you’re not from the US, you may well marvel at how strange this all seems.
The local astrological background, as we’ve been discussing, is that five of the traditional planets are currently in Scorpio: Venus, Mars, the Sun, Jupiter and retrograde Mercury talking to all of them (but speaking backwards, like on a Beatles album). And retro is the word. We also experienced the Mars-Chiron square on Monday, which seems a nice provocative emblem of the week’s news in the world of sex; last week, Venus and the Sun both squared Chiron. This pretty much assures we’ve all had some buttons pushed recently.
As for the deep background. As previously reported in Planet Waves, the US government has for 25 years been running a program misinforming (supposedly educating) teenagers on the dangers of sex and the virtues of being abstinent until heterosexual marriage. As part of the curriculum, students are misinformed that birth control doesn’t work, and in some places are sent for therapy if they so much as ask one question about homosexuality. The program often includes making teenagers sign an “abstinence until marriage pledge” that according to one study delays the first experience of teenage sex by about three months, but increases the risk of STDs and pregnancy.
I looked into the history of the issue last year, and learned that this was one of the very first social policy moves of the Reagan administration, dating back to shortly after Reagan was inaugurated in 1981. His administration worked with the conservative ‘think’-tank, the Heritage Foundation, to start getting Abstinence Only policies through the government. Cash is involved; states may apply to the Feds for grants to teach abstinence, and all but a very few take the cheese. Currently, four states do not. California, for example, is banned from taking the money because what is taught in its schools must, under state law, be consistent with the findings of science. AO sex indoctrination does not qualify.
This week, USA Today reported that new federal guidelines encourage the money to be used to brainwash unmarried adults up to age 29 that they should not partake in sexual activity. This is in despite of the fact that 90% of adults ages 20-29 have had sex, the newspaper reported, citing a federal study. But, the Feds are suggesting you should wait until your Saturn return before getting any nookie.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
Abstinence education programs, which have focused on preteens and teens, teach that abstaining from sex is the only effective or acceptable method to prevent pregnancy or disease. They give no instruction on birth control or safe sex.
The National Center for Health Statistics says well over 90% of adults ages 20-29 have had sexual intercourse.
But Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the revision is aimed at 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children.
Government data released last month show that 998,262 births in 2004 were to unmarried women 19-29, the ages with the most births to unmarried women.
“The message is ‘It’s better to wait until you’re married to bear or father children’,” Horn said. “The only 100% effective way of getting there is abstinence.”
We may question why it’s national policy under conservative administrations to indoctrinate people into not having sex, and why hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on this while people go hungry and homeless. We may observe that the most important social policy at the moment is fear. Whether it’s being freaked out about shampoo on airplanes or by the possibility of someone blowing up your local Super K-Mart because they resent our awesome way of life, fear is all the rage. But so far no commentator that I have seen has made the connection between fear as a way of life (and politics as usual), and a publicly-funded policy of sexual repression.
But someone named Wilhelm Reich did, more than half a century ago. Reich, a medical doctor and psychoanalyst, was Sigmund Freud’s favorite student until the two parted ways [that’s a story worth telling, but not today]. He was a practicing psychiatrist and writer through the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s. He noted that the Nazis placed sexual purism high on their list of social agendas, essentially spreading fear on the emotional level, weakening the integrity of personal relationships in the process.
In his 1942 book, The Function of the Orgasm, Reich commented on the relationship between repression and fear: “It became increasingly clear that the overburdening of the vasovegetative system with undischarged sexual energy is the fundamental mechanism of anxiety, and thus, of neurosis. Each new case amplified earlier observations.” In other words, the more orgasm is suppressed, the more scared people are, and then the easier they are to manipulate with that fear.
He observed, as well, that repressed sexual energy creates the effect of a deep mystical longing in people, such as a yearning for cosmic answers to their problems, rather than taking personal responsibility and making adult decisions. This mystical longing can be harvested by those with political agendas, and was answered in the person of Hitler, who portrayed himself like the god-emperors of old. His power was fuelled by the increasing anxiety, terror, and oppression of the Nazi regime, all of which were intermingled with a climate of sexual moralism. Remember that in Nazi Germany, homosexuals and prostitutes were among the specifically targeted groups, and part of the ethnic cleansing program held that only pure Nazis could have children.
In the United States, this type of social policy is currently being effected through mingling religion and politics. The neo-conservative government in the United States is supported by a vast network of churches that essentially function as Republican clubhouses, and which push an agenda of supposedly Christian moral values. These involve foisting severe anti-gay and pro-marriage agendas on their constituents, including movements to ban gay marriage by state constitutional amendments. The only reason it does not seem outrageous is because we’ve grown accustomed to insanity.
The neocon anti-sex agenda rose to its very heights during the impeachment of Bill Clinton, whose supposed “high crimes and misdemeanors” involved denying that he had sex with Monica Lewinsky.
Clinton’s impeachment, along with many other agendas, could happen largely because most people suffer from sexual guilt and as a result, tend to be appalled by the erotic conduct of others. What other people do is always “deviant” as compared to one’s own “normal” behavior. One way to discharge guilt is to project it onto others, but that of course spreads it like an epidemic. Simply put, under this philosophy, weird or immoral is what other people do. Someone is always queerer than you.
Consider this. In neocon terms, you may have a serious problem even if you’re just attracted to someone of the opposite sex. In 2005, something called The Institute for American Values published a report called The Future of Family Law. In part, the report concluded: “As an institution, conjugal marriage addresses the social problem that men and women are sexually attracted to each other and that, without any outside guidance or social norms, these intense attractions can cause immense personal and social damage.”