MYOB, You Religio-Fascist

The Crunchy Con reveals something about himself when blathering about an eminently sensible (if you know what we mean) David Brooks column in which Brooks typed

[Blah blah blah ... Republicans] would ask: What threatens Americans' efforts to build orderly places to raise their kids? The answers would produce an agenda: the disruption caused by a boom and bust economy; the fragility of the American family; the explosion of public and private debt; the wild swings in energy costs; the fraying of the health care system; the segmentation of society and the way the ladders of social mobility seem to be dissolving.

Rod, however (Was that name a curse throughout his childhood? Is that, perhaps, why he has sex on the brain?) thinks that it's Demon Sex that's ruining everything.

[Y]ou cannot have community without order, and you cannot have a workable order as long as both economic and sexual decisions are wholly privatized -- that is, as long as they are considered only a matter of consequence between the parties making those decisions. Because in reality, they aren't: the entire community, one way or another, has to bear the burden of those decisions. So: David is right in that the Democrats seem to speak more the language of civic order and commitment today. But I don't see either party being willing to connect the dots that Wendell Berry, among others, have connected. You cannot have civic order based on a culture where people feel at liberty to conduct their economic lives entirely as they see fit, nor their sexual lives (particularly if that involves making babies without the means to rear them in an ordered manner).

Whatever happened to keeping sex private & personal? Crunchy refers to himself as a traditionalist. We can remember when tradition was not to stick your nose into other peoples' private lives. If these traditionalist goofballs could stop pretending that sex is an exclusively reproductive activity that must be ruled & regulated by any authority available we'd all be better off. Step one in reducing abortion & unwanted pregnancies is coming to grips w/ the fact that birth control is not even abortion, let alone "murder." 

We do enjoy Mr. D.'s devotion to order, though we wonder if he omits the "law" part of the phrase because Nixon/Agnew pretty much ruined it, or because he's much more interested in order than any legal impediments thereto.