WTF is a Traditional Family Value?

“Values” I Get, But Whose Traditions and Whose Family?

Now that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his theocratic allies in secular places have successfully launched the weight of the Constitution as they choose to interpret it in the early 21^st century and knocked at least part of it back to the 18th century, the future is more than uncertain. Depending on who you are, it’s terrifying.

It’s easy to see how women, the poor, those with disabilities, and those labeled racial or sexual “minorities” might, can, will suffer under an increasingly “originalist” interpretation of the founding documents that support so-called Traditional Family Values. Not only did the Almighty, All-Knowing, and Infinitely Wise Founding Forefathers not opine explicitly about whether a woman has a right to choose to safely and legally terminate a pregnancy, but they left a lot of other things unsaid. Some of those things are not a mystery because of social context and some are debated to this day.

I’m not a Constitutional lawyer. We had one of those for president twice and a certain percentage of the populace chose to scoff at him. I largely review porn and rant about things related to sexuality and personal freedom. Having said that, I don’t think I need an advanced degree in What Rich White Guys Who Owned Slaves Were Thinking in the Late 1700s to question whether some of their long-term planning might have been stunted by the world they lived in and the immediate benefit that the status quo provided them.

Radical proto-feminist Abigail Adams, who supported education and property rights for women, and was probably an early member of Antifa, got nowhere by pleading with her husband in March of 1776 to “Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.

Women theoretically gained the legal right to vote on August 18, 1920, barely 100 years ago. But women of color couldn’t reliably access this fundamental democratic right until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We still await the ratification of an Equal Rights Amendment declaring women legally equal to men. Perhaps that’s why it’s so easy for a right-leaning U.S. Supreme Court to feel no shame about stripping us of access to life-altering, sometimes life-saving, medical care. And then to threaten to further erode the ability of citizens to be responsible sexual beings by “reconsidering” Griswold v. Connecticut, which determined in 1965 that married couples have the right to use contraception without government restriction?

Imagine the United States of America without contraception even if you’re married.

Imagine the U.S economy and the individual lives and careers diverted, destroyed, unrealized, and cut short because women lose control of their reproductive destinies.

Play our cards wrong and we won’t have to imagine these things because the future will be now, and it will be grim as an unplanned pregnancy.

Contraception isn’t where the modern if it can be called that, Traditional Family Values crowd plans to leave off. It is, after all, still a hard sell to convince men that every time they have intercourse with a woman they should run the risk of becoming a father. While they chisel away at contraception by declaring human eggs sentient, they will continue to attack same-sex marriage (also known as “marriage”) and the right of orally or anally erotic heterosexual and homosexual adventurers from sharing their mutually consensual pleasures.

It seems to me that the party of “smaller government” has been obsessed with other people’s business since before the Evangelicals took it over, but with the introduction of so many lowest common denominator political figures and Supreme Court picks nothing has become too personal to pry into. To legislate. To moralize about. To take us back to the days of slavery and female domestic servitude.

While Justice Clarence “who put the pubic hair on my Coke” Thomas is cleaning up America’s morals and bringing them more in line with his fantasy version of Hamilton, he might want to meditate upon the Originalist intent concerning the so-called “races.”

If Loving v. Virginia didn’t spit in the faces of respectably white 18^th and 19th-century Christians with a societally reinforced fear of “miscegenation” and love of “State’s Rights,” I’m not sure what did. Thomas had best be careful what he asks for because if contraception, marriage equality, and private sexual conduct are all on the table, so is “interracial” marriage. A “reconsidering” of Loving could have unintended consequences for the Justice who has benefitted from its previous decision. Given that the ruling proved inspirational to the defendants in Lawrence vs. Texas, it’s not out of the range of possibility.

Whether Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Brett “I like beer” Kavanaugh want to believe it or not, we live in the butt end of the first quarter of the 21^st century.

Women vote. Women work. Women hold office. Women use contraception. Women have abortions. LGBTQ people have existed since the time of the Founders. Hell, some of the earliest cave art depicts same-sex intimacy. And people of color (what a white-centric designation that is) are and always have been worthy of the full range of human rights. Including the right to use contraception. Including the right to marry the person (or persons) of their choosing. Including the right to marry no one. Including the right to be sexually intimate with their adult partner(s) in whatever way they agree.

Those who claim to be “Patriots” who cherish Traditional Family Values like to quote long-dead men whose wrong behavior has been covered up by their expansion of finance or liberty, however minimal. But I prefer to draw my inspiration from Abigail, who foresaw the future far more accurately than did the men in her circle when she warned that “we are determined to foment a Rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice or Representation.”

And if that’s not as American as fucking an apple pie wrapped in a flag, I don’t know what is.