Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy.  Those were skills to be learned and practiced.   I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop.  He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes.  He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade.  Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore.  The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up.   I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth.  I knew how to do that.  Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down.  On the second try, aimi
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w
Post a Comment
Read more