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Crotch Politics and Chicken Hats

It cannot possibly be true, but I have read, repeatedly, that it is against the law to enter Wisconsin while wearing a chicken on one's head.  It cannot possibly be true, because thousands of people in Wisconsin wear cheese on their heads.  People in Wisconsin are not super-sensitive about what happens to their heads.

Anyway, this excursion into laws and mores did not begin with chicken-heads, or cheese-heads.  I was meditating on the oft-repeated claim that people have passed laws specifying that sex is legal only in the "missionary position", which I assume to be somewhat "face-to-face", which is, itself, somewhat of an anatomical evasion.

Moreover, the issue is not really even about presumed missionary-defined sex.  It has to do with crotch politics in general.  That is to say, to the extent that people's personal and private behavior ought to be regulated by law.

It cannot be, as so many of us say, that what goes on in the bedroom is nobody else's business.  First, and obviously, we try to protect children, because we recognize that they are not yet fully-capable human beings.  Becoming a person takes a long time.  But even some adults are not only stupid, but self-destructive.  Private actions become matters of public concern when the private actions result in conditions that the public has to deal with.  If "private" behavior produces a health epidemic, the public ought to be concerned.  If "private" behavior results in significant expenditure of public funds, and use of public services, the public has a stake in what caused it.

So we get stupid laws.  Why do some people think we should have laws to govern sex and reproduction, even when a little basic education might seem to do the job?  It probably grows out of what are mostly religious beliefs.  After all, religions are the ways traditional societies expressed their values:  what it means to be a human being.  Don't kill!  Don't steal!  Leave your neighbor's wife alone!  Protect the kids!  Obey your parents and the elders; especially the religious elders!  Don't work on the Sabbath!  Don't eat pork!

But we aren't simple religious communities.  We are democracies, commonwealths, republics.  And sometimes we are totalitarian.  There are, still, religious societies, governed by holy men (mostly men), but in this country, we are not that.  We are not a Catholic country, or a Protestant country; not if that means that we use the government to achieve religious aims.  We have a constitution.  The constitution states what kind of a nation we are pledged to be.  Even if a majority of our population were Islamic, or Baptist, or Jewish, we would still be a constitutional democracy, not a religious state.  We separate those things.  Our beliefs are stated in our constitution and our laws, not in our church councils.

In fact, our Founders were particularly anxious to get away from religious oppression.  They insisted on religious freedom, by which they meant that nobody with a religion different from yours could coerce you. And, at the same time, government itself could not adopt a religion to be its own and coerce everybody.  They did not want a Christian nation, or a Jewish nation, or a Buddhist nation.  They did want to protect the right of people to be religious, if they wanted to, but it would not, like most of the places the settlers came from, have an official religion.  We are free of that.

So it is maddening to have people try to impose their religious beliefs on our behavior.  It should not matter to us what the Pope thinks about marriage or abortion, any more that it matters what Southern Baptists think about dancing, or what Mormons think about marriage or drinking coffee.  We have every right to howl with frustration at the attempt of anybody to impose their sacred belief system on our bedroom behavior.  Crotch politics is an ignorance of our constitutional identity.

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