OxBlog

# Posted 1:41 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

BLOG CABIN REPUBLICANS: Pardon the adjective, but in a somewhat hysterical editorial, the NY Times denounces the Bush administation's pro-life agenda as nothing more than a hypocritical attack on Roe v. Wade.

Alarmism aside, the Times makes some good points. If saving unborn lives were truly the administration's priority, it would increase the availability of sex education and contraceptives. After all, you can't get an abortion if you don't get pregnant. (And while I admire the ambition of those who preach abstinence, I think it's about time for conservatives to admit that no one is ever going to stop America's youth from getting its groove on.)

But here's an even more radical solution to the GOP's struggle to reconcile its secular pro-life stance with religious conservatives' aversion to latex: support gay rights. After all, how many lesbians have abortions? How many gay men ever got their partners pregnant?

Then again, that idea probably won't get all that much support from the Christian Coaltion either. But it is time for the religious right to start thinking strategically. If conservatives are serious when they say abortion is murder, than they should subordinate the rest of their social agenda to the struggle against abortion.

Besides, the campaigns against homosexuality and premarital sex are never going to succeed. While I am strongly pro-choice, even I recognize that banning abortion is one of the few Christian Right causes that has a chance to become law.

If the fundamentalists will not subordinate these other causes to the struggle against abortion, it will only confirm what moderate and non-Christians have long suspected: that what the Christian right elevates above all else is not the sanctity of human life, but rather the struggle to establish the law of the Bible as the law of the land.

PS I came up with the phrase "Blog Cabin Republicans" all by myself, then ran it through Google to see who else had come up with it before I did. As far as I can tell, the only mention of it was back in September 1999 over at a site called The BradLands. In addition, the Georgia branch of the Log Cabin Republicans has a section on its website called "Blog Cabin", but never puts the whole phrase together.

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