Interlude:

Feminism's Tragic Turn

Up to now, I haven't really factored feminism into the equation. It wasn't just a result of the sexual revolution; in fact, the impetus behind feminism was there before even the Civil Rights Movement, and once this and the sexual revolution hit our culture, feminism blossomed.

But to see how it happened, we have to go back quite a bit, to the days of my childhood and before.

If you read books like The Rise of Silas Lapham, you find the women there actually pitying the men for having to go off to the office and be bossed around, while the women could stay home (or in the beach cottage) managing the household.

I realize that the feminists are already bristling at this, because the book was written by a man, who according to the Third New Commandment couldn't possibly know what life was like from a woman's point of view. But for those of you who haven't been totally brainwashed, bear with me a bit.

Even in the animal kingdom, the male is the aggressor, but the female is the one that has control. (I feel Edward Wilson consiliently nodding his head at this.) We decided to let my dog have a litter of puppies before we spayed her, thinking it would be healthier for her. Well, she went into heat, and the yard was full of panting males. She stood there and snapped at this one and growled at that, turned away from one and bit another, until the field finally got narrowed down to this ugly Doberman-mix--and to this day, I can't for the life of me figure out what she saw in him. She let him sniff her, and wagged her tail; but when he moved around behind her, she would sit. As I recall, this lasted almost two weeks, with the poor Doberman backing off and pawing the ground in frustration; but finally Luthien was ready and let him have her. (She wound up with thirteen puppies, by the way, which made me regret my decision.) The female had the control.

What we don't see from our vantage point is that a century ago--until the Second World War, in fact--a woman's life was a pretty fulfilling one. She managed the household, which in practically all cases meant supervising the servants, giving orders to the butcher (a man, by the way), the grocer, the draper, the furniture salesman, and on and on. Little Women begins with a "poor" family that suffered under the burden of having only one servant. Families in those days who didn't actually have servants had "help" that came in. My mother, the wife of an anything but affluent piano tuner, kept boarders to make ends meet; but she had Mrs. Butler come in to help out in the housework and to take care of me. Even servants (if not live-in) sometimes had servants when they went back home. The really poor, of course, didn't have servants, but used their children as servants; it was expected that by the time you were ten, you took care of chores in the house, and it was Mom, not Dad, who assigned them.

The second thing to notice is that the woman of the house took no orders, but gave them; she was the one who decided what was to be eaten, how it was to be prepared, when the washing was to be done, and when the ironing, how the clothes were to be folded and where they were to be stored. (I remember a really bitter dispute my mother had once with one of the "help" over the folding of sheets.) If she decided she was tired, then she took the day off, and no one had anyone to complain to--no one dared to think of complaining.

Also, if you want to look at who has control of something, look at how the money is spent, not at who earns it. And the money of the family, brought in by the father, was spent on household things and on dresses for the lady of the house. These dresses, by the way, were often made so that it was impossible to do any work in them, with their enormous skirts that kept you three feet away from everything. Even the very buttons were so arranged (opposite to the man's, who often put on his clothes himself) so that the servant could fasten them easily; and they were located in places where only a servant (or a husband) could fasten them at all.

True, the woman was "bought" with her dowry. But the dowry, really, was her contribution to the finances of the family; the husband's income was the family's money, and it was spent by the woman. Even as far back as 300 B.C., Plato remarked in the Republic that one of the advantages of his proposal of abolishing the family would be the avoidance of "all the little tricks they have to resort to to scrape together what they just hand over to their wives and servants to spend."

And men in fact did not regard marriage as a convenient way to have a live-in cook, housekeeper, and prostitute rolled into one. They all knew that it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper and less hassle to hire the three of them, and marriage was thought of as a trap.

Then why did they marry? For two reasons: Back in the days of horse and carriage, the old song held true: you couldn't get anything but disgraceful, dangerous sex without marriage. And secondly, men did fall in love. They still do.

It never ceased to amaze me as I used to look at one of these young tiny "oppressed" things walking down the corridor of my college with the huge football player panting after her, writhing and twisting around that delicate pinky. How can they not know what power they have?

Put it this way: was there ever any oppressed group in history except women who woke up one day and said to themselves and their men, "You know what? You've been oppressing me! Stop it!" and had their oppressors say, "Really? Honestly, Hon, I had no idea. What do you want me to do?"

But if all this is true, what happened to bring us to where we are now? Basically, the Second World War.

I remember it vividly. Once the War started, all the young men were in uniform (I was still a child), and so Rosie the Riveter had to take their place in the factories. Rosie suddenly discovered that (a) she made a lot more money than she did as a servant, and (b) the boss at the factory was a lot easier to work for than her mistress. You did your job, you didn't get second-guessed at every move (no arguments and tears over how you fold sheets), you got paid, and you went home. Terrific.

So the pool of servants dried up faster than a shower in the Sahara. Which, of course, meant that the servants' work now devolved upon the woman of the house. And that rapidly meant that the family money was now spent on labor-saving devices: first, the vacuum cleaner, next the washing machine, the refrigerator, then the washer with a spin-drier, followed rather closely by the drier itself, permanent press, then the dishwasher, the blender, the microwave, and so on. Carriages, which needed grooms to care for the horses and footmen and all the rest, gave way to automobiles.

And since the woman had the car now (the second one, if she didn't drive her husband to work), she could do all the shopping for a whole week much cheaper at the single supermarket. But at the supermarket, you don't talk to anyone; you just pick out the stuff and go home. To what? Not to servants any more; to the kids and the machines.

But these labor-saving devices did save labor. In the days of servants, the washing used to take a whole day, rubbing the clothes against the washboard and then rinsing them in the other tub, and hanging them outside; and the ironing took another. Now it takes three hours max, and most of that time, you're free to be doing something else or watching the soaps.

So what was the problem? That these machines were monotonous to use, and were, after all, machines and not human beings; very few people spend time in conversation with a washer, whereas before, you could relate to the servant--with the special added attraction of being condescending. But the only actual people the women of the Forties and Fifties saw were their own kids and the neighbor over the back fence--but mostly the kids, who are lovely in their way, but not really stimulating to talk to. Besides, kids are absolutely horrible things to give orders to; unlike servants, they tend to resent being bossed around and drag their heels and in general make it more effort to get them to do anything than to do it yourself.

The result was that women, especially intelligent women, were understandably bored right out of their minds. Then when the Civil Rights Movement came along, and victimization got prominent play, women began to see themselves as victims, and instead of looking with pity on their husbands who went off to work, they realized that their husbands were actually interacting with adults, and on some semblance of an intellectual level that didn't have anything to do with diapers and how to run the dishwasher.

And then came The Pill. Women saw that by using it they could be the equivalent of men in sexual promiscuity--and this made them realize how "inferior" they were sexually in the old days, and this brought forth books like The Second Sex.

So they took the tragic turn. They decided to be just like men, on the idea that to do what men did was to be their equal. Note the irony here. The man was the ideal, something to be imitated; no longer were the distinctive feminine differences, which had once given women (in their minds at least) a sense of superiority, looked on with anything but loathing as signs of how oppressed previous generations had been.

A nation without fathers.

But it all backfired, though you'd never know it listening to the feminists. The institution of the indissoluble marriage was designed to protect the woman, really, who was biologically and emotionally bonded to the children in a way men aren't. Men tend to look on their children as their "product," so to speak; "Look what I've done!" and either to ignore them or to push them to be worthy of so great an ancestor, while women focus on the person and love and nurture him for all his faults.

Okay, so I'm making generalizations and using stereotypes. The problem with stereotypes is that you can't apply them blindly to individuals; but the reason they are stereotypes is that they tend to be verified so often--more of the stereotype in some cases, and less in others. It doesn't follow that a given woman is nurturing; but it's absurd to say that women aren't on average much more nurturing than men are.

And don't cloud the issue with "But that's the way they were trained." Biologically, it's what you would predict from an instinct that gave the mother working breasts and infants that needed years of nurturing before they could survive on their own; and attempts to train women out of this (and why would anyone want to? Think of that.) have found them reverting to type. Well, surprise, surprise.

But one of the other stereotypes that men still believe but won't say any more is contained in the phrase, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Women, probably just because they are stuck for years with the "products of conception," tend to be very single-minded and determined when they have made up their minds. Men used to laugh at women for how they vacillated, because women don't make up their minds lightly; they can't afford to. But once they do! Heaven and earth shall pass away, but what I want shall never pass away! A man, unless he is a complete brute, is totally helpless when faced with a determined woman--and men have recognized this for ages.

--And now I've alienated the three readers who have agreed with me up to this point.

But for the rest of you, concede that it's conceivable that there might be a germ of truth in what I say, and look at what happened. The first thing was that the Civil Rights movement got stood on its head, once the feminists took hold of it--which was almost right away. Equality based on ignoring a totally irrelevant characteristic turned into the pseudo-equality that pretended that women were just as good as men as firefighters and combat soldiers; it was just that the standards were too rigid and "irrelevant" to the tasks. Strength requirements were "obviously" designed to eliminate women, by analogy with the ridiculous voting requirements that disenfranchised blacks. Group rights replaced consideration of the individual; and so now we regularly discriminate--in favor, of course, of the oppressed groups--in the name of not discriminating.

The very language was looked on as a tool of oppression, and the most idiotic ukases were passed to remedy the evil--ukases which the men meekly went along with. I remember one time years ago in a meeting I had the temerity to say, "But the members of the humanities faculty opposed this to a man!" and a priest replied, "How dare you! We have a woman in the Theology department!" I answered, "I am not going to be lectured to by you on how to use the English language." (Anyway, what did he know? He was a celibate man--pardon, "male." Isn't it interesting that men are now identified by their crotch, even though "man" is supposed to be a term that applies only to them?)

It was a pure decree from On High that "lady," a term of respect from time immemorial, was now demeaning because of the phrase "ladies of the night" (which would make "gentleman" a pejorative term because of calling tramps "gentlemen of the road"--irony is totally lost on these people); "chairman" had to be replaced by "chairperson," and "chairpersonship" invented, showing that the "man" was still behind the thought, since the abstract of "person" is "personhood," not "personship." Somehow, it was an insult to call someone Mrs. or Miss, and you had to use Ms. And how do you now write the salutation of a letter when you don't know the "gender" of the person you're addressing? As to "gender" itself, a word taken from words and applied to sex, I say no more.

If you don't bristle at this mangling of the language I love, it shows what a determined campaign which takes no prisoners will do.

"Sure, go ahead! Blame the women for all this!" I'm sorry; I am not going to be swayed by the feminine ploy of forcing people who disagree into a guilt-trip. I don't blame the women; I understand why they took the reins the way they did. But the only solution to the mess has to come from the women; the men, as I said, are completely helpless when the women are determined, because a determined woman will not see anything that does not reinforce what she wants done, and will not rest or allow any rest until it is done. This is not necessarily a bad thing, unless it is applied badly, by the way.

But the point is that unless the women wake up and shuck off the postmodernism they are so responsible for foisting on us, they won't be able to realize that what in fact has happened as the result of their "liberation" from male oppression has been to free the men, and to make women and especially their children victims a hundred times worse than they ever had been in the past--and unless they do, we are all doomed. Men simply can't do it; women have to; and ironically, it's mainly in their interest if they do.

So let me veer away from stereotypes a minute, and explain what I meant by the title of this section: A country without fathers. I didn't mean that more and more men are refusing to accept their fatherhood; I mean that there are no fathers in the sense of "male human beings responsible for their children" in the contraceptive culture, especially when abortion is brought into the picture.

I'll do some analysis of abortion in the next section, but for now I need the fact of it to establish my point. The first thing to note is that a person is responsible for what he has control over: what could have been different had his choice been different.

Given that, then who has control over whether a child results from sex, in a contraceptive culture? (1) If a woman wants to get pregnant by a man, she can have sex with him telling him she's on the Pill, and how is he to know she's lying? (2) If she doesn't want to get pregnant by him, all she has to do is be on the Pill (or whatever), and how is he to know that she's lying? (3) If a man wants to make a woman pregnant, and she doesn't want to get pregnant, then with contraceptives, there's no way he can make her pregnant; and (4) if he doesn't want her to get pregnant and she wants to become pregnant, then even if he uses a condom, it's not all that difficult for her to have his baby, if he has sex often enough with her.

Do you see where I'm leading? In a contraceptive culture, sex "in itself" is not supposed to have anything to do with reproduction; as I mentioned, the contraceptive mentality regards the sterile sex act as the "reality" and the child as a side-effect that can be attached to it if one wants, without being something that "belongs to it as such."

But the one who does this "attaching" is the woman, not the man. Reproductive freedom is totally hers; both she and the man are sexually free to do what they please nowadays; but the man has no say in whether the sex is reproductive or not--or rather, if he has a say, it is to express his wish, which the woman then takes under advisement and either vetoes or goes along with.

It follows from this as night follows day that it is the woman and only the woman in the contraceptive culture who is responsible for the child. The man is now a mere condition for her to exercise her reproductive freedom, since the sex act itself is not something reproductive. True, the man is a conditio sine qua non for reproduction; but notice that even here, the man's action or contact is not necessary, given sperm banks. We have lesbian couples who decide that one of them will have a child. The man and his sexual intercourse are no more a cause of the child than I am the cause of my grandchild, on the grounds that if I hadn't fathered my daughter, she couldn't have become a mother by her husband.

This is made even more evident when abortion is factored in. (5) If the woman becomes pregnant and the man doesn't want her to have the baby, there's nothing he can do to stop her; and (6) if she becomes pregnant and doesn't want the baby, the man can't force her not to have an abortion on the grounds that she's killing "his" child. It's not his child; it's her body, the culture says, and she can do whatever she wants with it.

And so there are no fathers any more. In the contraceptive culture, the father has no choice in being a father; all he decides is whether to have sex or not. But to have sex is not to make oneself potentially a father; sex, remember doesn't have anything to do with children in the contraceptive culture.

Is it any wonder that more and more men are saying, "Look, it's not my fault; all I wanted was a good time, and she told me that she was on the Pill. And then I asked her--I pleaded with her--to have an abortion, and she told me Nothing doing. So don't blame me."

Women, of course, will have none of this. When they don't want to have a child and their man wants one, it's too bad, Buster; it's my life and you have nothing to do with it. But when they have a child, then suddenly the man has everything to do with it.

But you see, men don't have to go along with this nonsense. They can just walk away. The women have freed the men from commitment, thinking that they were freeing themselves from oppression. And when the men discover that they've been diddled, they don't rant; they just walk away. If they have no say in the matter, then they'll say no say; they'll find somebody else.

And we've discovered that this doesn't really bother the men all that much. Sure, they love their kids; but it's that funny kind of love that's not too unhappy with not having to change diapers and wipe noses, that likes simply watching from a distance as former Junior grows up. It'd be nice if they could to steer him into football or rocket science, perhaps; but it's pretty easy to just let bygones be bygones. Besides, the new woman really is on the Pill, and she's a lot hotter than Martha ever was.

Meanwhile, Martha has the diapers and the runny noses, and has to get a job or another pig of a man who's willing to take over that rotten Henry's role. Which he never can do, of course, because the kids aren't fools; they know that he's not Daddy; Daddy's over there with the new babe. And that's pretty cool, if you happen to be a dude yourself, even though he is a rat. Ask Dr. Laura. I had a black student once who told me that when he was seventeen, he went to the office downtown to see his father, and to chew him out for abandoning his mother and himself. He told me another time that he had a son by an old girlfriend he didn't care about any more, and "was going to take him away from her one day when he settled down and raise him as his own kid." Sure. Of course.

Who's free and who's oppressed in this picture?

And women are discovering what men knew all along: that work is not all that fulfilling. Take the most exciting, creative job you can think of, say something like Rex Harrison's playing Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. Exciting. Creative. Fulfilling. Having done some acting myself, I know what it's like to say exactly the same thing in exactly the same way with exactly the same excitement and exactly the same gestures day after day--and he did it week after week, for years on end. The only thing that makes it bearable is that every day you have a new group of people to convince that Henry Higgins is last century's Bill Clinton: likeable but rotten to the core. (I love playing Higgins, by the way.)

The same goes for teaching, my profession for thirty-five years. If you're honest with the kids, you'll keep your presentation fresh and exciting to them, but you won't just add frills that entertain you, and you'll stick to the stuff that these kids need to know, just as the kids last year and fifteen years ago did. What makes all this monotony (after all, you know this stuff, forwards, backwards, and upside down) worth while is that the kids don't know it, and they're wonderful kids, and they need to know it.

Any job, when you look on it as what it gets you besides salary, is a boring kind of thing; it's what you're doing for others that redeems it. When you've put the last stitching on your fifteen thousandth Tickle Me Elmo doll, you think of the kid who's going to laugh along with this Elmo that you produced, and you smile. Otherwise, you complain about carpal tunnel syndrome and demand more money.

But this is just a pale phantom of what women had when they managed the household and raised their children and bettered and tamed their men. And they gave it up for this! No wonder they feel cheated; but they've cheated themselves.

Don't get me wrong. Unless we could find a supply of servants, and mom-and-pop corner butchers and bakers and greengrocers, there's no way that women can go back to the days when "women's work" was the envy of the men.

The point is that the women had a real problem, back in 1950. But they tried to solve it in the worst possible way: instead of forcing men to be responsible for their actions with them--instead of holding on to the notion that sex is a joint venture that involves the possibility of a child, in which both partners cooperate in the act and take all of its consequences, without trying to pretend that it's just part of itself--instead of this, they tried to be as irresponsible as men are biologically. And they can't be. And the result is that they and their children are the ones who suffer. And, I might add, the men they allow to become Bill Clintons suffer just as much as men, because they're trapped in the perpetual adolescence that our affluent culture not only allows but promotes. Whatever you think of Clinton as President, he's a pretty sorry excuse for a man.

There's got to be a better way. But it's only the women (Hillary take note) who can bring it about, because the men aren't going to give up the freedom they're permitted to have. But the women still have the power, because men still need sex, and still fall in love, and are still no match for a determined woman.

The terrible disaster of abortion.

And in all of this, I haven't mentioned the real tragedy of this tragic turn: that in order to be as sexually irresponsible as men biologically are, women are faced with killing their own children. Many women even recognize this (since it's becoming so very, very hard to ignore it), but they accept it as just a fact of life, of being a woman; you have to make hard choices sometimes. The choice to dismember your own child!

Oh, come on! You talk as if it were a two-year-old. You see? Once you've bought into the lie that there's nothing amiss about contraception, then all the other lies are simple to swallow.

So let's do some more logic. I'll give you the standard items of "evidence" that abortions are okay, and comment on what each implies. Judith Jarvis Thompson years ago gave the argument that even if the fetus were a person, he had no right to use your body, any more than an intruder has a right to use your home; and so you can "unplug" yourself from him even if it kills him. This would imply that if a person breaks into your house and offers no threat to your life, you can kill him to get him off the premises. I wouldn't try that if there's a policeman nearby; it's called "murder."

But more to the point, what of two Siamese twins, who happen to share a vital organ? When they get to be twenty, John suddenly says to James, "You've been using my heart long enough; I'm going to separate myself, so say your prayers." To which James replies, "What do you mean, your heart?" Which one has the "right" to "unplug" himself, and which one has to let himself be killed?

Obviously, that ploy won't work. But still, "a woman has a right to do what she wants with her own body." I would be willing to concede this, if you added, "as long as she doesn't do harm to anyone else." If you want to make this into a right to an abortion, you have to add the silent premise, "and the fetus is a part of the mother's body, not a distinct organism--or at least, not another person."

The trouble with this, first of all, is that biological parts exist for and act for the good of the whole. But from the very beginning, the embryo and fetus are taking from the mother (often, early on, making her feel very sick) for their own benefit at her expense (which is why she has to take extra calcium, for instance, or she will suffer as the fetus leaches the calcium he needs from her bones). Mothers' bodies reject implantation of the embryo, which the embryo thwarts in a way analogous to a tapeworm. Clearly, the biology of the situation is that a pregnant woman is two distinct organisms, one of which happens to be inside the other, and is a parasite on the other. So that won't work.

But "the embryo or fetus are no more a human being than an acorn is an oak tree or a caterpillar is a butterfly." The trouble with this argument is that caterpillars are organized in a totally different way from butterflies, and until metamorphosis grow into bigger caterpillars, with their own organs, metabolisms, and life. Similarly, the acorn stays an acorn forever, unless it's planted (or unless water gets into it), when it is totally reorganized, and now must be an oak tree or die. And one of the first visible organs to develop in the human embryo is the eye, which is of absolutely no use for life inside the womb; and in fact, all the organs which develop remarkably early (by the time the second period has been missed) are adapted for life outside the uterus, not inside--with the single exception of the umbilical cord, which, when all is said and done, is nothing but an IV tube. So that won't hold water. The fetus is clearly organized as the same kind of thing it is when it's two months out of the uterus, or twenty years out of it. It's a human being, from the very beginning.

"No, wait, now. At the earliest stages, you can separate the cell mass in two and you get twins. That proves that it's not an organism, but just a mass of tissue." No it doesn't. You can cut up a starfish into a dozen pieces and throw them all back into the ocean, and every one of them will turn into a new starfish; but no biologist holds that the starfish is a "colony of cells," any more than a geranium is, in spite of the fact that you can cut off a branch and grow it as a separate plant. So that's out.

"Well, but even if it's a distinct organism and a human organism, it's not a person, for heaven's sake. It doesn't interact with others." Tell that to the pregnant woman who happens to be annoying Junior inside her in her hurry to get to the airplane. Or who gets kicked in the stomach every time she eats something cold like a popsicle. Anyway, if you had to be able to interact with others to be a person with a right not to be killed, then sleeping people could be killed. Nope. It won't work. If something is a human being, it's the kind of thing that makes choices and controls its life, even if because of the circumstances it can't actually do this at the moment.

The point is that if you want to hold that abortions are okay, then you have to blind yourself to the facts--or subscribe to the First New Commandment and say that the fact is that there aren't any facts.

Well, but what about an abortion in the case of incest or rape? Well, let me give you this scenario: A woman has an accident and is in the hospital unconscious for three days. During that time, a man comes in and rapes her unconscious body. She recovers, having no notion that this happened, and returns home to her husband, and to her joy a month later, she finds herself pregnant, thinking (of course) that she's carrying their child. The child is born, and grows to two years old, and then for some reason has a DNA test, and it is discovered that the woman's husband is not the father--and let's say that investigation proves that there was a rape while she was in the hospital.

Now. Can she kill the two-year-old because she can't deal with the fact that he's a child of rape? If you say, "Well, she can put him up for adoption, so she doesn't have to kill him," my answer is, "What if the procedure takes nine months? Can she kill him to get rid of him tomorrow, or does she have to wait the nine months?" I hope the New Morality hasn't so blinded you that I have to spell out the answers to these questions.

And, of course, the case of incest is the same; if the woman is a female Oedipus, who doesn't discover until years later that the man she thought was a stranger is actually her long-lost brother, does that give her the right to kill nine-year-old Junior, who resulted from this incestuous union?

Then if not, and you can have an abortion for rape or incest, you're saying that the fetus is not the same kind of thing as the born human being. And I just pointed out that there is no objective evidence to support this, and all kinds of evidence against it.

"So you're saying that women who have abortions should be prosecuted for murder, right?" No. It's a homicide, but there's generally no deliberate intent to kill a human being; and mercy is the order of the day, because any woman who would kill her child has got to be emotionally so overwrought (or intellectually so blind) that this mitigates the evil greatly. The abortionist who encourages and abets this sort of thing has a lot more to answer for.

(By the way, bombing abortion clinics or killing abortionists "to protect the babies" is morally wrong. You can't use a death as a means to protect life; it's a direct contradiction of what you're trying to do, even if you're "protecting" many lives. You can only kill someone in defending another's life when your action of blocking an actual attack on that life happens unfortunately to result in the death of the attacker. That doesn't obtain in killing the abortionist. You're not blocking his action, you're stopping him.)

Abortion is a terrible, terrible wrong. We have killed over thirty million human persons since Roe v. Wade, and done it often for what were thought to be the best of reasons. But the end never justifies the means; and the cheapening of life we see all around us is the result of it.

From the lie of thinking that contraceptive sex involves no contradiction, it is a tiny step to the lie that abortion is just an "option" when the contraceptive fails, that it's just another form of contraception. Partial-birth abortion, when a baby's brains are sucked out of his skull in the very act of being born, is even justified (by the Supreme Court, no less) on the grounds that there's no logical reason for outlawing this and allowing any other abortion. But rather than follow the logic, we arrogate to ourselves the "right" to decide when someone else is human or not, irrespective of the facts--and that leads to "physician assisted suicide," and as no-longer-thank-God-Dr. Kevorkian has just demonstrated, to "physician killing of the willing," and, as we have in the Netherlands, "physician killing of those who ought to be willing."

It's due to the tragic turn feminism took, and there's only one way to remedy it. Women have to face the facts of what they're doing to themselves, their men, and especially their children, and once again force men by social pressure to be as responsible for what they do (they used to be, after all) as women have always been and always will be. In some cases, biology is destiny. But we aren't just biology; and women can, as they have in the past, bring pressure to bear on men to make reality be destiny. If they don't, the New Morality wins, the Clintonian version of sex is as much the real thing as anything else, and humanity loses.

Abortion is the pons asinorum of the New Morality, as can be seen from the fact that Bill Clinton, who was all over the place on almost every other issue, never wavered on this one. If abortion goes, then it goes because there is a return to objective truth, and because the facts matter more than the agenda. If that happens, then the sexual revolution is over, because in fact sex is the opposite in many ways of what the New Moralists say it is. In that case, the First New Commandment has been shown up for the sham that it is, and agenda-driven "science" will be laughed off the world stage, and we will once again be oriented toward finding out what the facts really are, rather than manufacturing "facts" that support our moral prejudices.

President Clinton was smart enough to see this; and so like a true New Moralist, he went on public television to defend the grisly partial birth abortion procedure, having with him on the dais four women, whom he claimed would have died had they not had it. All four of them subsequently admitted that their lives were not in danger, that the abortions were elective. And this would have to be the case; if the doctor's hand is already in the birth canal around the head of the baby, then clearly the baby's head can slip out without any further trauma to the mother. But then you have a baby, not a "tissue mass resulting from conception."

But hey, what's a little lie about sex? Besides, it was the truth, wasn't it? It promoted the New Morality and kept the Religious Right from destroying the freedom of women to kill their own children with impunity, even during birth. So the agenda was the right one, and that's what truth means in the New Morality. There are no facts, remember.

Keep this in mind as we go on and find more about what the New Morality is forcing upon us. Agenda is all. Facts don't exist. That's a fact. Oh yes?