Dark Brown Waffles

You know how you end up thinking that writing this article is a good idea? You’re fucking bonkers insane. No normal, reasonable person looks at the ingestion of contraception and sees a Leviathan at work, tearing our society apart. No normal, reasonable person looks at the ingestion of contraception and sees anything other than a woman who doesn’t want to get pregnant.

But not George Weigel. He sees women taking contraception and he immediately launches into the fevered paranoia of a lunatic, convinced that this simple thing is evidence of a massive sexual conspiracy designed to destroy society. You think I’m kidding. I’m not:

For that was precisely what was at issue 18 years ago, and it is precisely what is at issue today: Will the sexual revolution, which reduced sex to a recreational activity of no moral consequence, be protected, advanced, and indeed mandated by the coercive powers of the modern state?

Wiegel objects, you see, because sex ought to be an activity frought with moral consequence at every imaginable turn. That it isn’t - that people have the audacity to have sexy sex with one another simply because it is an enjoyable way to spend eight minutes - makes his blood boil. It is plainly unjust that this sort of behavior is occurring anywhere. Churches have said that it is wrong. How can anybody, anywhere, take issue with that?

Weigel’s problem is that he is convinced it is centuries earlier than it actually is. He doesn’t understand why the social oppression that was practiced for so long by so many is no longer working. So he melts down, describing the idea that women are having carefree sexual experiences as a Leviathan that will, at any moment, destroy society. Just look at what he writes:

What began as a movement to liberate sexuality from the constraints of moral reason, custom, and law has become a movement determined to use the instruments of law to impose its deconstruction of human sexuality and its moral relativism on all of society. 

The movement he’s referencing is presumably an amalgamation of liberalism, feminism, and general sexual freedom, the sort of things that make social regressives go even limper than they usually are. Note his misunderstanding of what was happening as society changed: he thinks people were angry at “moral reason, custom, and law.” He doesn’t recognize that people were angry with sanctimonious dickheads who believes that they should have dominion over the decisions made by others. People like Weigel. Although he doesn’t say it, he strongly implies that society’s problem is that it doesn’t do what Weigel wants it to. How dare society stray from Weigel’s vision? Look at him here:

Where this is all leading is not pleasant to contemplate. But if Leviathan is to be confronted, and defeated, in his attempt to impose the sexual revolution by brute state power, a critical mass of morally serious minds have got to get clear on one crucial point: The invention of the oral contraceptive was, with the splitting of the atom and the unraveling of the DNA double helix, one of the three world-historical scientific developments of the last century — scientific accomplishments that have within themselves the capacity to change culture and history in fundamental ways. By effectively sundering sexual expression from procreation, modern contraceptives have done something their less-effective predecessors were unable to do for millennia: They have created a contraceptive culture that identifies fertility with disease and willful infertility with “health.” Those who celebrate that culture are not interested in compromise: They are interested in having everyone pay for what they want, and in levying serious penalties on those who won’t truckle to their will. 

He imagines jack-booted thugs forcing churches to perform abortions because he is a madman, not because anybody anywhere seriously proposed such a thing. He looks at contraceptives and sees an evil, precisely because it freed women from the servitude of parenting if parenting wasn’t what they were interested in. He might as well be saying, “But women belong in the home!” That’s his argument. But it’s one he can’t make plainly, so he dresses this up with talk of a Leviathan.

Put simply: it isn’t contraception that’s the problem. It’s conservatism’s idea that women have certain lives and certain freedoms that they shouldn’t. Standing around decades after the introduction of the birth control we now know and complaining about it?

Maybe Jeffrey Lebowski can put it better. “The war’s over. The bums lost.”