The Christian Right's Fear of Pleasure is Our Greatest Threat to Choice

Jeniece Learned stood amid a crowd of earnest-looking men and women, many with small gold crosses in their lapels or around their necks, in a hotel lobby in Valley Forge, Pa. She had an easy smile and a thick mane of black, shoulder-length hair. She was carrying a booklet called "Ringing In a Culture of Life," which was the schedule of the two-day event she was attending, organized by the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation.

The event was "dedicated to the 46 million children who have died from legal abortions since 1973 and the mothers and fathers who mourn their loss."

Learned, who had driven five hours from a town outside Youngstown, Ohio, was raised Jewish. She wore a gold Star of David around her neck with a Christian cross inset in the middle of the design. She stood up in one of the morning sessions, attended by about 300 people, most of them women.

The speaker, Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had asked if there were any "post-abortive" women present. The most fervent activists in the pro-life movement have usually had abortions, with large numbers admitting to multiple abortions.

Learned runs a small pregnancy counseling clinic called Pregnancy Services of Western Pennsylvania, in Sharon, where she tries to talk young girls and women, most of them poor, out of having abortions. She speaks in local public schools, promoting sexual abstinence as the only acceptable form of contraception. And she has found in the fight against abortion, and in her conversion, a structure, purpose and meaning that previously eluded her.

The relentless drive against abortion by the Christian right -- the first salvo having been fired with the 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision last month to uphold the federal ban on the procedure known as "partial birth abortion" -- has nothing to do with the protection of life. It is, rather, a cover for a wider and more pernicious assault against the ability of women to control their own bodies, the use of contraception and sexual pleasure.

The movement openly conflates contraceptives with devices or substances that cause abortion. It holds up as heroes of "conscience" those pharmacists who refuse to sell contraceptives. It works to block over-the-counter sales of Plan B emergency contraceptive pills. It peddles, with hundreds of millions in tax dollars handed to the movement by the Bush administration, abstinence-only sex-ed curricula and opposes a vaccine against the HPV virus, the major cause of cervical cancer, claiming it would promote promiscuity.

The denial of contraception, as is well documented, increases the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions. And abortion is never going to go away. If it again becomes illegal, the rich, as in the past, will find ways to provide abortions for their wives, mistresses and girlfriends, and the poor will die in unhygienic back rooms.

But since this is a war with a wider agenda, abortion statistics and facts do not count. The Christian right fears pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, which it sees as degrading, corrupting and tainted. For many, their own experiences with sex -- coupled with their descent into addictions and often sexual and domestic abuse before they found Christ -- have led them to build a movement that creates an external rigidity to cope with the chaos of human existence, a chaos that overwhelmed them. They do not trust their own urges, their capacity for self-restraint or judgment. The Christian right permits its followers to project evil outward, a convenient escape for people unable to face the darkness and the psychological torments within them.

The leaders of this movement understand that the only emotion that cannot be subsumed into communal life, which they seek to dominate and control, is love. They fear the power of love, especially when magnified and expressed through tender, sexual relationships, which remove couples from their control. Sex, when not a utilitarian form of procreation, is dangerous.