Real life

This post by Steve Gilliard had the best paragraph in it:

The reason I mention this, besides the rank amusement of it is this: the real America, not the sanitized one we offer up for children and TV, is a pretty funky, fucked up place. Weird shit happens all the time. A lot of this security mom crap comes from this ideal of a fictionalized America which never existed. In the real world, people do incredibly stupid things. Like pass out drunk on a New York sidewalk.

I love this, because of the phoniness of most political discourse. Our total unwillingness to talk about how people really behave has created a good deal of the tension that exists between those who classify themselves as "liberal" and "conservative".

We live in a country where the vast majority of people will have premarital sex, and yet we think that it's acceptable to speak piously of abstinence-only education, a form of "education" that helps exactly no one. This kind of discussion should be the cause of nothing but derision amongst adults, but we find ourselves having to discuss its merits with a false patience.

The false piety of American discourse is half the reason that conservatives have the political power they enjoy. I know I'm not alone to say that I know tons and tons of people who vote one way and live another and when you call them out on their crap they laugh and say that no one takes the piety that conservatives put on seriously. It's not so much hypocrisy as the fact that they don't realize that the hardcore members of their party really mean it.

The best examples of this type of thinking are the sexual psuedo-hypocrites (for lack of a better term). I've met a gazillion examples of these people, mostly men who try to get dates with me and don't quite understand that I have serious problems with sexual hypocrites of any stripe. They support a myriad of legal intrusions on people's sex lives--everything from being against same-sex marriage to being anti-abortion to being for abstinence-only education--but they also expect that they will be able to conduct their own sex lives freely. There's nothing odder than being out with a man who expects you to go to bed with him but cheerfully votes for a party that would restrict your ability to prevent conception and/or birth from being the result of such actions.

They're not hypocrites so much as just disconnected. In regular political discourse, it's so verboten to mention common behavior that is frowned upon by an uptight minority that it becomes for some an intellectual exercise that has very little bearing on actual practice. When it comes to sex, this kind of disconnect is easiest for straight men who are not going to fall pregnant and have to figure out what to do about it.

Seriously, when did everyone decide that political discourse had to be conducted as if we were all 12 year olds with hyper-religious parents? The only reason that marijuana is still illegal, people are trying to get the birth control pill banned, there's any chance that abortion will be made illegal and there's not a serious effort to cut back on drunk driving by making it cheap and easy for people to get back and forth from their homes to the bars is because everyone is so busy pretending we don't drink, smoke or screw that we can't even see straight. Everyone is all tied in knots about handing out condoms in high schools--most of the people passing judgment first had sex in high school. We need to grow up and now.