Kathryn Jean Lopez, Power Broker

The Christian fundamentalists always intended to go after birth control. It frees a woman's sex life from male control; she can make the same choices a man can make about sex partners and career. If you control someone's sex life you control them, which is why the right wants to deny civil rights to gays as well. You can banish gays from sight and keep women legally and emotionally submissive if you have enough power.

We do not make decisions based on facts or logic, we base them on emotions. Power is wielded by people affected, and often controlled, by their needs and wants. And powerful people know how to manipulate emotions to keep their power and deny power to anyone else. One of the easier methods of controlling others is to convince them to control themselves, with the powerful setting the parameters of their lives and continuously making little demonstrations of power and strength to keep them in line. The obedient, the authoritarians, want to be good, to be accepted and praised. They will both control themselves and monitor everyone else in their class. The authoritarian leaders will control the followers and monitor their own class, using different standards than the followers, of course. The truly powerful will control everyone else and are not accountable to anyone.

The idea of Miss Kathryn Jean Lopez, authoritarian follower par excellence, wielding power over anyone, male, female, child or animal, is the single most ludicrous proof of how unequal the balance of power has become in the US. The woman has the brains of a potted plant. Her religious monomania drives her to ludicrous extremes of self-abasement and weepy sentimentality. She can't think, write, or relate to anyone who hasn't been nailed on a cross. Yet she seems to think that she and all the other small-minded, badly educated, empathy-impaired conspirators in a War Against Freedom If Freedom Has Boobs actually have the power to control all American women.

Why are Republicans waging war on contraception?

Further proof that Lopez isn't very smart. Republicans don't admit this if they want to stay in office.

It's not the first time the question has been asked, and it won't be the last. Truth be told, Republicans aren't engaging in battle on that front -- but the phrase gets close to a legitimate fight.

Congress, for its part, held an unprecedented vote in the House in February to end funding of Planned Parenthood. It's not a permanent or final vote; it was attached to a short-term move to keep the government funded. The debate in Congress was given momentum by the Live Action investigatory videos, which raised significant questions about what exactly Planned Parenthood is doing; but the rest of us need to discuss why we've let Planned Parenthood step in as a mainstream Band-Aid, throwing contraception and even abortion at problems that have much more fundamental solutions.

We need to discuss why Lopez is getting away with passing off the Live Action videos as proof of wrong-doing. Nobody wants to get near enough to Lopez to ask her questions and pin her down but if they don't, she'll continue to peddle this line and repetition creates belief.

While women may want love and marriage, they don't expect it. Justice Sandra O'Connor wrote in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey opinion that women had "organized intimate relationships, and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail." And why wouldn't they? Who, nowadays, encourages them to want more?

Roger Ailes (the one not about to be indicted), already covered this bizarre tidbit. Hollywood makes an endless stream of popular movies about women falling in love and getting married, yet nobody wants marriage?

We've come to expect less for and from ourselves, and for and from one another. In part, it's the fruit of the contraceptive pill. New York magazine recently observed in a cover feature: "The pill is so ingrained in our culture today that girls go on it in college, even high school, and stay on it for five, 10, 15, even 20 years." That, of course, has had all kinds of fallout: a false sense of freedom, security. And it has ravaged women's fertility, as it seeks to mute exactly what women's reproductive power is all about.

And now we come to what this is really all about: power. Women think they're free if they control their reproductive system but they are not free and should not be allowed to think they are. Why are they not free? God created their "reproductive power" so only he can control it, and since God doesn't show up personally when some slut needs shaming, men will just have to do it for them, with a few women as humble helpmeets.

That's why I want to turn back the clock -- to a time when we valued love and marriage and didn't expect, support and even encourage promiscuity. Life and history don't work that way, obviously, there is no actual rewind. But we do have opportunities to learn from our mistakes.

Sex outside the parameters set by Miss Kathryn Jean Lopez is promiscuity.

The spending fight over Planned Parenthood in Congress is about a number of things. It's primarily about good stewardship, as so much of the spending debate is. But beyond legislation, beyond anything Congress can or should do, it is a call to arms for a new sexual revolution. It's about wanting more for ourselves and for those whom we love. It's about ending the surrender to a contraceptive mentality that treats human sexuality as just another commercial transaction.

Either you obey Miss Lopez's religious dogma or you are nothing but a prostitute.

Perhaps nothing better illustrates that than a recent commercial for a contraceptive called Beyaz. Women walk into a store and literally shop for men. "It's good to have choices." A woman happily shakes her head at the stork and its offerings in a sassy "we girls can do anything" kind of way, promenading through an adult Barbie commercial complete with Ken, a dream house and a trip to Paris.

Women should never have choices. They should willingly submit to those with power.

That commercial does not, needless to say, do justice to the pain and desperation many women suffer when they find themselves thinking about an abortion, or popping pills in pursuit of something that masks itself as satisfaction but is really just a bad substitute, oftentimes making true happiness all the more illusory.

True happiness is submission to God and men. Any personal satisfaction is wrong and will destroy your chance to have a family.

As evidence of the reckless and dangerous callousness at institutions supposedly dedicated to women's health -- failure to report the sex trafficking of minors, failure to report child abuse -- continues to emerge, we can't afford to lose sight of another, more fundamental conversation that we've got to have, among friends, in our homes and churches -- a talk about what it means to be human.

Humans were created to worship and obey God, as interpreted by Miss Lopez. And anyone woman who thinks that she is free and can make choices about her life must be disabused of that notion, through the use of political power if necessary.

This is what happens when you are polite to religious fanatics, when you let them manipulate your emotions. They go fucking nuts. They should never, ever be let near the slightest amount of power, and the very idea of submitting to and obeying these idiots is absolutely ludicrous. If they really want this war then we can start trying to pass laws that hand out The Pill like candy. Free condoms! Unisex bathrooms! Public nudity! If they want a fight let's give them one. Idle hands are the devil's playground and these fools have way too much time on their hands.