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As the Republican National Convention begins, we’ve got an article from the last print issue by E. J. Dionne about liberals’ opinions of the conservative movement:
The left first ignored the American right, then imitated it, and then became obsessed with it.That pattern is likely to reproduce itself in reverse, even if conservatives are currently stuck in the first stage: They are so persuaded that ours is a “center-right country,” to use a phrase Karl Rove is fond of, that they cannot take the center-left seriously. Just as a legion of liberals initially dismissed the resurrection of Richard Nixon and the rise of Ronald Reagan as aberrations, so many conservatives are now dismissing the parlous state of their creed and the Obama phenomenon as an accident of George W. Bush’s presidency.
And, as GOP VP nominee Sarah Palin discloses her daughter’s pregnancy Courtney Martin explains how the debate over sex education has been absurdly limited:
We’ve been inculcating young people into America’s hypocritical, schizophrenic “present system.” We ask them to conform to either one of two views -- that their sexual desires are sinful outside of the context of marriage and must be tamed, saved, and resisted, or that they are helpless to resist them, sex being natural and they being hormonal teenagers, so they must be responsible and protect themselves. In either case, sexuality is not a joy, not a means through which human beings actualize their unique desires and relationships, not a potential site of transformation. It is a landmine.
Part of the myopia comes from defining sex so narrowly. When we frame it as solely heterosexual intercourse, of course we obsess about pregnancy and STI risks. It’s as if we offer young people a worldview with 95 percent of the frame blacked out. Touch, comfort, fantasy, intimacy, experimentation, healing, not to mention masturbation and other sexual practices with no disease risks, are written out of the narrative altogether.
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—The Editors
