Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell’s victory over nine-term Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware’s Republican Senate primary Tuesday night may have been a signal that a significant number of Delaware citizens are willing to support candidates who like to preach to Americans on what they should and should not do sexually.
Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell’s victory over nine-term Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware’s Republican Senate primary Tuesday night may have been a signal that a significant number of Delaware citizens are willing to support candidates who like to preach to Americans on what they should and should not do sexually.
Prior to her primary victory, there had been much talk about O’Donnell’s history as an advocate for abstinence and a crusader against masturbation. But, if O'Donnell is so anti-masturbation, she shouldn't be running for office. Doesn't she know her campaign is stimulating a bunch of dicks and assholes?
Last night MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow played a video of her appearance on MTV’s "Sex in the ‘90s," which shows exactly what O’Donnell means when she talks about being opposed to rubbing one out every now and then:
O`DONNELL: My name is Christine O`Donnell. I am the president and founder of the SALT. The SALT stands for the Saviors Alliance for Lifting the Truth.
We choose sexual purity in our lives. We have God-given sexual desires. And we need to understand them and preserve them to be used in God`s appropriate context.
We need to address sexuality with young people. And masturbation is part of sexuality. But it is important to discuss this from a moral point of view.
CHRISTINE GEDGAUDAS, MARKETING MANAGER, THE SALT: Masturbation is a selfish act, and it`s a lustful one. And we are to walk with pure hearts, not adulterous lusting hearts.
TODD HITCHCOCK, YOUTH PASTOR: The Bible is clear in the fact that it says that any sexual act outside of the realm of marriage is wrong.
O`DONNELL: The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So, you can`t masturbate without lust.
The reason that you don`t tell them that masturbation is the answer to AIDS and all these other problems that come with sex outside of marriage is because, again, it is not addressing the issue. You`re going to be pleasing each other. And if he already knows what pleases him and he can please himself, then why am in the picture?"
I can’t speak for any man in O’Donnell’s life, but I can say if he does masturbate, he will still want you. Just because the bumper cars are a good time doesn’t mean you won’t want to ride the roller coaster later. And, I wouldn’t worry: God will enjoy every minute that he gets to watch you and your man unleash the sexual desires he gave O’Donnell and her man.
Even more straitlaced, Justin Elliott has put up a post on Salon.com that indicates O'Donnell believed, while in college, coedization of colleges could lead to "orgy rooms":
Dorm life has evolved into a blending of the sexes, from coed buildings to coed floors, coed bathrooms and now even coed rooms.
"What's next? Orgy rooms? Menage a trois rooms?" asked Christine O'Donnell, spokeswoman for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Del., which publishes a college guide.
All this coedness is outside normal life, said Miss O'Donnell. "Most average American adults don't use coed bathrooms - if they had the option of a coed bathroom at a public restaurant, they wouldn't choose it." Coedness "is like a radical agenda forced on college students," she said.
O’Donnell’s commitment to surrendering her life to the will of a Father and her belief that a married person who uses pornography "compromises not just his (or her) purity, but also compromises the spouse’s purity" is just the type of Puritanism that has made sex education in America an utter wreck.
Evangelical Christians like O’Donnell have in recent years promoted the idea teenagers should take "virginity pledges" as a way of purifying American society and fighting moral decay. But, studies have shown that teenagers who take "pledges" are just as likely to have sex. They also were most likely to engage in sex without protection because the faith-based ideologues that defend abstinence-only education programs oppose reality-based sex education that includes education on contraception. [See this latest article on sex-ed posted on Salon.com.]
O’Donnell’s opposition to beating the bishop or, in her case, strumming the banjo may seem like a convenient distraction, but RHRealityCheck has noted how her view has translated into policy. For example, did you know she opposed President Bush’s restrictions on stem-cell research and contended they were not "restrictive enough"? And, did you know she once argued sex education "would cause [society] to become blasé about sexual predators"?
RHRealityCheck points out,
"This last argument is a particularly helpful illumination of the conservative position on sexuality: this aspect of being a human is dirty and shameful and deserving of punishment. Healthy sex or even just sex education is not distinguished from sexual molestation.
This kind of repression and denial is, of course, what gets people into trouble: we’re not really having sex so let’s not use a condom; we weren’t supposed to have sex so let’s abandon the baby in a trash can."
O’Donnell’s position on spanking the monkey or pearl fishing is not only an attempt to shame people who have no problem with this human activity but also a part of the values voter agenda, the agenda which advocates a ban on same-sex marriage (sometimes even suggesting the criminalization of homosexuality), seeks to prevent women from having a right to choose abortion, and endorses policies that make it difficult to get birth control and/or emergency contraception.
Back in the 1990s, O’Donnell served as a spokesperson for Concerned Women for America, an organization founded by Armageddon fantasist Timothy LaHaye’s wife, Beverly LaHaye. The organization’s mission is to "protect and promote Biblical values among all citizens – first through prayer, then education, then finally by influencing [American] society – thereby reversing the decline in moral values in [America]." They are an organization of literalists who believe the Bible to be the "inerrant Word of God," and they believe it is their "duty to serve God" to the best of their ability and to "pray for a moral and spiritual revival that will return [America] to the traditional values upon which it was founded."
Sarah Posner of ReligionDispatches reported this morning, in 1995, O’Donnell claimed integrating women into military institutions crippled "the readiness" of America’s defenses. O’Donnell said, "It's an honor to be a lady. That's a beautiful part of womanhood is to be ladylike," and West Point "has had to lower their standards" so that men and women can compete, which has, "reduced the effectiveness of [America’s] military." And, in response to criticism she said, "When you remove the role of the mother, the family is left to crumble," and blamed declining SAT scores on giving women a role in the military they should not have.
Exactly, how far might this go? What might she tell women about the importance of submission to husbands as a necessary part of maintaining a good family? What would she do if a man she was with didn’t approve of her Christian-feminist advocacy? Would she tell her man God has commanded her to help men find salvation through personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and so she has God’s permission to be more than a housewife?
Sociologists Margaret Power and Paolo Baccheta wrote a book, Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists, which was an analysis of conservative women and their conduct around the world. In the book they claimed, "One striking feature of a great many right-wing women leaders and full-time activists is their system of double standards. There is a huge gap between how right-wing women...live out their lives as individuals on the one hand, and the subjectivities they propose for other women on the other."
In other words, she may not go hiking on the Appalachian Trail, but it is unlikely O’Donnell has never gone hitchhiking on the Southern Trail.
Max Blumenthal wrote in his book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, "Redemption from a life of sexual sin is the right-wing woman’s business card; it is all the expertise she needs." This is the "feminism" that emanates from people like O’Donnell and Sarah Palin, who campaign on how they have done right by God and avoided Satanic acts of pure pleasure that godless liberals would have no problem with. Women who have been trained by religious right groups with wives married to bullheaded loons that encourage people to be more aroused by prospects of Armageddon instead of the bodies of women are driven by this fixation on redemption and purity.
There is no evidence that O’Donnell became a fighter against choking the chicken or toggling the bit because she wanted to redeem herself from a teenage life of sexual sin. But, if history is any sort of guide, it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that Americans find out before November O’Donnell has posed nude for photos while in the company of an ex-boyfriend or had a homosexual experience with a fellow Concerned Woman of America.
Finally, O’Donnell has been talking about how she won’t give out the location of her house because someone broke in and vandalized it during her 2008 campaign. A paranoid O’Donnell told the conservative Weekly Standard that she believes people are following her and that she has to have a team inspect cars and the bushes. And, she believes these people following her "knock on doors at all hours of the night" and hide in the bushes when she’s at candidate forums.
Honey, nobody is hiding in bushes. The only person or thing during this campaign that is hiding behind any bush is your vagina. Now, take a finger out, shove it into the Victoria’s Secret underwear you don’t want your supporters to know you wear because it would clash with the values you preach, and give the donut a rub. That’s right. Buff the muffin, douse the digits, and do the very thing conservatives love to chant about at conventions: Drill, baby, drill.
Perhaps after engaging in an act that most humans engage in and usually find comforting and relaxing, you will be less stressed and paranoid. And less toxic to America.