"The puritans always try to make everyone else live in the
miserable way that they do. As Robin Williams said, "this country was founded by
people who were too uptight to stay in England!" What I resent more about
puritans is the sexualization of everything they lay their eyes on."

".....the real difference between liberals and conservatives
in this country is that conservatives think sex is very, very important and
liberals think sex is essentially trivial. Note what I didn't say. I didn't say
that conservatives think sex is dirty and liberals think it's wonderful.
Conservatives think some sex is good and some is bad, and so do liberals. They
even share some of the same ideas of what makes bad sex. Both sides condemn rape
in particular and coercion in general. Both sides condemn adults who force or
seduce children or adolescents. Both think deception and cheating in
relationships is wrong. Both recognize that sex can be deeply corrupting under
at least some circumstances. It's not so much the particulars that are at
issue--although some of those are, inevitably, as well--but the centrality of
sex to morality. Conservatives think that sex and sexual behavior are at the
very heart of what makes us moral or immoral human beings. Liberals think that,
except in those few cases that are "bad" sex, sex and sexuality are minor issues
that have nothing at all to do with whether we are morally good
people...."
----------snip---------------------
"....Critics of the
abstinence-only movement tend to concentrate on the misinformation these groups
put out--I don't think I've ever seen a more tendentious use of statistics,
anywhere--or on their relentless attempts to create a climate of terror around
all things sexual. What strikes me about them, though, is how adolescent they
all are. There is a time in everybody's life when he contemplates sex as The
Most Important Issue In the Universe, with Life and Death Implications for
everything from nuclear war to what he had for breakfast. It's between the ages
of twelve and eighteen, when the whole idea of sex is new, and he hasn't had any
yet. That's why Romeo and Juliet makes sense, and
why it often seems overwrought and silly when produced with fully adult
actors.
But there's somewhere else where sex is invested with this sort of
feverish hyper-importance: in societies where its expression is heavily
restricted by custom, taboo, and
religion...."
------------------snip-------------------
"....It's not
surprising that the foundations of the abstinence-only movement are religious,
or that so many of the people who truly believed that Clinton should have been
impeached over the Monica Lewinsky scandal grounded that belief in their
religious faith. Throughout history, religion has been one of the means by which
societies restricted and controlled sexual activity among their members. Modern
American religious movements preserve a sense of human sexuality that is at once
highly charged and deeply problematic. They also place a lot of emphasis, and
enormous moral significance, on the ability of individuals to control their
responses to all things sexual. It's no wonder they feel almost continually
under assault from a culture they think is saturated with sex. The drive for sex
is a hard-wired human instinct. Sexual behavior can often be channeled or
restricted. Sexual desire is out of human control under the best of
circumstances. If you believe that your status as a moral person rests on your
ability to remain chaste, and you're surrounded by sexual imagery, you're not
going to be a happy camper.
Then there is the way this sensibility runs into
a wall in the larger culture, because there's a curious thing about attitudes to
sex. People who believe that sex should be carefully restricted and controlled
are more likely to respond to sexual cues in the environment than people who
think that sex is neat but no big deal. The people who thought Clinton should be
impeached and the people who thought he shouldn't be weren't even walking down
the same streets, even when they were side by side on the pavement.
Sex-is-trivial people literally don't see a lot of what the sex-is-important
people see. Billboards of women in tight clothing selling cars and liquor, Christina
Aguilera videos, porn pop-up ads on the Internet, Janet Jackson's nipple--sex-is-trivial people tend perceive them, if at all, as nothing
but white noise in the background. Sex-is-important people find their attention
drawn to each and every one.
Abstinence-only sex education, like the
impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, is a stand in for a
larger issue, an attempt to change the entire culture, to wrench it back to a
time when sex-is-important people think it would have been more comfortable for
them to live in. They're wrong--the Fifties were a lot more sex saturated than
they remember--but the effect of their movement is just what it would have been
if they had been right: to fix our attention on sex as the central issue of
modern politics...."