I don’t know if Foster Friess, the billionaire supporter of Rick Santorum, is representative of all of Santorum’s supporters, but I get the feeling he is. Which is great, because if Santorum wins the nomination, that means that all Barack Obama has to do is role tape of this sort of bad crazy and he’s sure to win:
“Here we have millions of our fellow Americans unemployed. We have jihadist camps being set up in Latin America, which Rick has been warning about, and people seem to be so preoccupied with sex. I think it says something about our culture,” Friess said. “We maybe need a massive therapy session so we can concentrate on what the real issues are.”
He continued: “On this contraceptive thing, my Gosh it’s such [sic] inexpensive. You know, back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”
Charming.
Friess’s ties to Santorum go back a few years. He donated to Santorum’s miserable 2006 campaign to no avail. I think his money is going down the drain this time around, too, but it’s his money and if he’d rather spend it trying to prop up a losing candidate with seriously antiquated ideas about sexual equality, he’s welcome to it.
For that matter, the culture wars represent a losing battle for the right, regardless of the money they burn to wage them. It’s a question of dying ideas and the dying demographics who hold them. I’m all for keeping an eye to tradition, and making sure that as society evolves we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, but part of evolution is to cut off limbs. If we’re to really grow as a culture and a people, we have to get past the notion that somehow women are inferior or that they shouldn’t have control over their own destiny. And we need to get beyond the idea that sex is icky, too.
For conservatives or people like me who actually do value a certain brand of conservatism, this means keeping an eye on how to run a properly limited government – not extend ourselves so far overseas, not fall too deep into debt waging wars and locking up nonviolent offenders. It means modesty instead of hubris. There is much to be said for a conservatism of doubt and a conservatism that urges caution and skepticism toward power. That’s not on display on the right anymore, but it isn’t to say that it couldn’t be. Certainly Ron Paul strikes me as the most tempermentally conservative presidential candidate we’ve seen come out of the GOP in a long time.
Over at Forbes I talk about why women ought to be allowed into combat, by the way, contra Santorum. If Israel can do it, so can America.
The defining characteristic of cultural conservatism is a deep discomfort with sex: sexual urges, sexual behavior, and sexual deviations. Friess was trying to make a joke, and forgot he wasn’t in the locker room of his country club. (I found it ironic that he thought this birth control issue illustrated how *other people* were over-obsessed with sex…)
Nevertheless, with the birth control kefuffle in the news quite a bit lately, I’ve seen many liberal commentators conflate this discomfort, or any opposition to birth control, with misogyny, and a desire to oppress women. This may be the case for some, but I suspect it’s very few. And I think it obscures the discussion to automatically presume complete equivalency between the two attitudes.
For better or worse, I think that many religious and cultural conservatives consider contraception to be, I don’t know, against the natural order of things. Or a succumbing to hedonic pleasure. Or something implicitly condemned by their religion, with its proscriptions against fornication.
But I don’t think that it’s necessarily anti-woman, even if the logical consequences of reducing access to contraception are.
If we’re to really grow as a culture and a people, we have to get past the notion that somehow women are inferior or that they shouldn’t have control over their own destiny.
I agree with this, provided “having control over one’s destiny” is not meant in an absolute sense. The very idea of morality and ethics is that there are limits to which we may rightly act in control of our own destiny. Regrettably, the destinies of women have historically been controlled by men, and this is a history too often forgotten, dismissed, or ignored by those championing traditional or old cultural norms (e.g., condemnations of birth control). However, not every criticism or moral opposition to birth control, abortion, or other acts that today are considered women’s rights is grounded in or tantamount to a cultural notion that women are inferior or that they shouldn’t have control over their own destiny.
Friess, though. Wow. What an ass.