Foster Friess stated a timeless truth last Thursday, and re-ignited a fight we think should be fought even harder, not run away from.
Friess said:
“Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives,” adding: “The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”
It was a joke, a chestnut, as they say.
But CBS had to add this little footnote to its dumbed-down readership:
The implication was that women held the aspirin between their legs, which left them unable to open them.
Duh! If hick preachers, hick parents, and their hick daughters knew what this little turn of a phrase meant in 1950, how come CBS has to ‘splain it to its hip readership today, who probably started doing scissor-leg exercises when they were 15.
This “aspirin” visual aid isn’t quite as dated as the media would like you to believe, and to prove it, I submit Exhibit A: the book titled above. Yep, a book, published in 2006, which six years later, both hardback and softback are still fairly high on Amazon’s sales lists.
What’s proven here is that snarky titles, like Mr Friess’ old chestnut, still sell, if there’s substance to go along.
Interestingly, it was written by a man named Freeman who had been a rounder for years, then found God and a fine wife, then began advising men and women about all the pitfalls of using sex as a way to land a permanent mate.
Anyone, particularly Methodists, who are old enough to remember old revival preachers speak of Billy Sunday, a WWI-era evangelist, (and despised by H L Mencken…which is ten times worse than being hated by Andrea Mitchell, NARAL, and The View gang ), will recall that Billy Sunday preached against sin from first hand experience. He’d done it all.
In fact, his past life of sin was the key to his success, so if you think Christians are the unforgiving, judgmental ones in the socio-political landscape today, guess again. Only Christians would accept a reborn drunk, George W Bush, and make him president. The self-righteous religious Left never would. And it isn’t Christians who call Rush Limbaugh a “drug addict” today.
In the early 90’s I was invited to a lawyers prayer breakfast, made up mostly of fans of Robert F Kennedy. As the only guest I sat next to the head of the group, and quipped casually over coffee and wheat toast with orange marmalade that the difference between conservative Christians and liberal Christians is that conservatives are enjoined by God to forgive the sinner, while liberals keep trying to forgive the sin instead, often neglecting the sinner altogether.
I was not invited back.
(That was only a short diversion about judgmentalism which sets up the current faux contraception flap set up by Obama. It shouldn’t work, about which I’ll have more to say at another time.)
When the story broke last week that Obama intended to hold church organizations to the requirement to provide free contraception to its employees, and the Church said “no” (after having been a little too compliant with the aims of the Left the past several years), Unified Patriots was among the first to see this move as a way for Obama to secure his “slut base”. Obama had been slipping in favor with so many of the unmarried white single voters (college kids, young professional) who were almost as loyal as his black voter base in 2008. And as we all know, while notoriously loud about loyalty to The Won, they often get hammered (no pun intended) the night before the election and forget to even go home to change drawers, let alone vote.
They needed to be given a reason to get angry and turn out as they did in 2008, and what better way than to tell them the Republicans want to take away their birth control rights.
Trust me, the Democrat Party base is a cretin-rich environment, so this is perfect logic-speak to this class of people, so don’t bother yourself with trying to dissemble it.
Dick Morris assumed (rightly I think) that this entire contraception non-issue is being played up hard so as to simply piss off the promiscuous Left, who are way down on The Won right now.
UP was one of the earliest to make the pitch that we should double down on Obama’s gambit, and that the moral issue should be taken back to center stage, because Obama has decided to turn licentious behavior into tax-supported behavior that not even the Roe or Griswold courts would have allowed.
With Rick Santorum now leading in many polls it seemed like a good idea to once again raise the culture issue. We think it’s a winner.
The book title (above) proves the issue has been out there for a long time, both as a moral code and as a practical, common sense idea as to how permanent relationships come to fruition…by being with partners you can take home to Mom rather than Room 222 at Motel 6.
It follows that as a matter of conscience moral people, however indirectly, should never be required to subsidize conduct by people who they would never allow their children to bring home.
This is an idea that never really has gone out of style for it is the only ideal that can create a whole House, upon which any free society is based, instead of the single-house, the broken home, or empty house, all of which send tiny fissures down into the foundation of any society.
In fact, it is this very destructive power that makes indiscriminate consequence-free sex not just cultural, but political today. The Left, since Margaret Sanger in the 1918, and the Democrat party, in part since FDR, in full since (some say) Joe Lieberman was expelled from the party, and the current administration, since 2009, has always understood the political benefit of offering people something for free that is so much fun, so easy, yet so destructive to civilization.
So when Foster Friess threw out that old chestnut to Andrea Mitchell about the aspirin between the knees, he was simply re-stating a moral and practical certitude that has been around as long as Hallie Ermine Rives, Grace Aguilar and Gertrude Atherton were writing romances in which the rougish man never got the girl….either way.
What Mr Friess wasn’t making was a political or even a legal point. His mistake, while the ever-stunning Andrea Mitchell, whose ankles were joined with a staple gun when she was 7, and hadn’t entertained a serious moral thought since Arlene and Kenny were still dating on American Bandstand, was outraged. Foster let her have the last word.
The right to contraception in America, like abortion, has been universal (for adults) since 1972. Current news stories and actions by females in Congress and the media act as if this is not the case. Maybe they don’t even know, but the freedom to prevent a fetus is older even than the freedom to kill it.
And contraception had been commonplace before Griswold in most states. It was easier for men, though not fool proof. Guys still had to show proof of age, plus, in my town, that guy behind the counter staring down “Who’s your Daddy?” I could have bought C4 easier than a pack of Trojans. And considering how little teenage boys knew about the pregnancy process actually worked…there were all sorts of urban legends out there and I’ll leave it at that…the absence of “protection” was as good as abstinence, it turned out, for no way we were going to take any chances.
So considering, as I reported earlier, that the slut rate in most towns in the 60s was about 1%, rather than the anything-goes rate today (now that they have changed the name to “sexually active”) our abstinence wasn’t always by choice. But it had the same effect.
No finer argument for the morality of a saner cultural moral attitude can be found than in JadedbyPolitic’s post here on Thursday. (Read Fr Tad’s argument closely.) Such arguments would be part of public school curricula….for if schools can teach a universal amorality they can certainly teach a universal morality.
The Supreme Court in Roe or Griswold, did not mandate that abortions or contraception be made universally available. Many doctors and clinics still refuse to perform abortions. In Kentucky (last time I checked) 98% of all abortions took place in only its two largest cities. And while Planned Parenthood is congenial to single white females just looking for a weekend “shack pack”, it is still most loyal to its original mission, as set out by Margaret Sanger, and that is in either preventing or killing as many little black babies as it can.
Nor did the Court require…nor could it, considering the reasoning it used in both cases, (right to privacy and due process)…that the America people should pay for this right.
So what is left then is not a legal argument, but rather a political one, which the Obama administration now wants to make a legal one through mandatory regulation. And in doing so it wants to “deem illegal” all the moral arguments our religious institutions have been making against harlotry since the Middle Ages.
As I said, my only regret with Mr Friess’ comment is that he did not get in the last word with Andrea the Fair, for indeed he was making a moral and practical, not political comment. He should have walked away with that last comment still pregnant (sic) in the air.
That’s how you win, Foster. If you’re going to take these people on, make sure you get in the last word. And keep it moral. Don’t ever let them politicize it.)
My other regret is that the moral conservative GOP candidate, Rick Santorum, cut and ran on Mr Friess’ comment, when he should have doubled down.
After spending his entire career arguing against the moral decay in this society, suddenly, when confronted with a chance to say “Damned straight, I favor morality, let the games begin”, and as Mitt Romney just cravenly joined forces with Obama to attack this moral stance, he turned that pink and blue hue we always hate to see in Mitch McConnell as he starts to backtrack.
No matter, let’s keep this issue out there and never lose sight of the simple fact that the purpose of the Left, the Democrat Party and the Obama Administration, and yes, the media, is to destroy the moral underpinnings of our society, so they can then rebuild it later according to a whole new set of moral rules.
This is not a cultural condition that will go away on its own. Once it’s out of the bottle, it has to be grabbed by the neck and shoved back in.
But it can be done and the government “of the people” has to be made to be on the side of public morality once again.
