Pro-life, Pro-choice and social fear

Look but don't touch...

Our intrepid USA writer-guy Torrey Meeks considers the pro-life versus pro-choice war and wonders why the hell the only things locked in a glass cage in his supermarket are oh-so-dangerous condoms.

by Torrey Meeks

America loves to split things in half. This is a compulsive trait rooted deep in our Puritanical psyche.

This concept, splitting things in two, is known as dualism. You're either A or C. You're not allowed B. That B letter strictly off limits. Choose a side and get black or white about it.

If you're looking for a good polarizing example, go no further than abortion. In the abortion debate you are strictly pro-life or pro-choice. You can't be pro-choice when it's a choice that really needs to be made and pro-life whenever possible. Lending credence to such a two way stance might make you something completely unacceptable, like pro-human decency.

What this creates is a moral code that is impossible to satisfy. You're either a baby killer, all but salivating at the prospect of little unborn fetuses being ripped apart by cackling abortionists, or you're saving all of God's children from the bad, bad, bad infanticide loving Jesus hating liberals.

There is no middle ground in this debate. Ultimately this kind of enervating extremism results in apathy for the sane majority who can't buy into one or the other. Percentages of Americans that vote nicely illustrate this point.

Since we have such a penchant for destructive dualism we've fostered some truly retarded, and I mean that word literally as an aspect of American culture that is slow or limited in intellectual and emotional development, ways of looking at sex.

I say this because the other night I found myself in a supermarket. A normal, average, every day store in a not terrible part of town. Upon rounding a corner towards the pharmacy I came upon a locked display case. Can you possibly fathom what was locked inside this case? If your answer is anything but condoms, you're wrong.

Yes. Of all the dangerous, terrible, awful, harmful things you can get your hands on at the supermarket, like bleach, window cleaner, ball point pens under the right circumstances, matches, and lighter fluid, securely ensconced behind shatter proof glass and a tumbler lock sat condoms.

The jarring ridiculousness of the sight prompted a few basic questions.

Are condoms more prone to stealing than other items due to a cultural embarrassment factor, making locked condoms somewhat reasonable? I can only conclude, "no." There are a handful of items that instil equal embarrassment. A red faced man slinking down the tampon aisle and stuffing a package of maxi pads up his shirt before hustling out of the store without paying is as plausible as a man stuffing a package of condoms up his shirt. So that's out.

Do unlocked condoms perhaps inspire inexplicable acts of random violence from Christian fundamentalists when in close proximity? After doing a Google search for 'condom' 'store' 'unlocked' and 'violence' I can only conclude that no, they don't.

The only decent answer I can come to is that this supermarket, a national chain, is a supporter of the giantly flawed abstinence movement. In a nutshell, the American abstinence movement indoctrinates its teens into believing that if they don't wait to have sex until they're married, then they're godless pagans begging for STDs, unwanted children, and a long eternity in Hell.

In the trenches on the other side of this battlefield, the sex education camp says that kids are going to screw. Instead of giving them zero options, they say let's tell them to be careful, choose their partners wisely, and make sure they know using a condom is always better than not using a condom.

Not surprisingly the loudest cheerleaders for this abstinence movement are the same cultural snake oil salesmen such as religious leaders and other self-appointed power mad moral authorities who say abortion under any circumstance is wrong.

After searching for a reasonable reason that a national supermarket chain might lock up its condoms and coming up empty, I can only conclude that it's in league with the abstinence movement. The logic runs: if access to condoms is difficult, maybe people will stick to abstinence.

Wrong. If condoms are hard to get hold of people will make like animals and screw anyhow.

And make no mistake. The key to this locked display case is nothing even remotely reasonable or accessible.

My curiosity piqued, I asked the pharmacist if I could look at the different brands of condoms in the locked case. She informed me that as a pharmacist she didn't have the keys. This from a woman licensed to dispense all manner of exotic substances. In fact, only one individual in the store had the key to the condom case. It was the on-duty manager. The on-duty manager just happened to be located in a little booth in the front of the store at the center the checkout stands.

In order to merely look inside the case a person would have to walk to the front to ask if they might handle a package or two of rubbers in front of numerous shoppers.

All of this despite the half-naked women plastered all over beer ads, the airbrushed sex symbols on the covers of news stand magazines, clothes that are growing more and more risqué for younger and younger women, because sex is still not okay in this country.

The brilliant closing monologue in Devil's Advocate delivered by Al Pacino put it perfectly. "Look, but don't touch. Touch, but don't taste. Taste, but don't swallow."

On the way home from the supermarket, trying to figure out when other culturally corrosive items like books will start popping behind locked display cases, I pass a billboard with a group of stylishly dressed teenagers staring into the camera. They look confident, self-assured, and hopeful. Character traits that no teenagers in their right mind possess for even for five minutes. In giant jazzy letters across the top, it proclaims, "Abstinence, it's the right choice."

About the author

Torrey Meeks lives to write and writes to live. He also writes to pay the bills and to buy the gas for his motorbike.
Read his American Newswire column

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