Another Zealot for Bush

Chicago novelist Sara Paretsky has a passionate and thoughtful op-ed piece in today's Tribune about Eric Keroack, Bush's latest morality-zealot nominee for an important public health post, heading the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Population Affairs. Among Keroack's steadfast beliefs are that abstinence is the only appropriate topic for sex education, that women who have sex outside of marriage (those trollops!) "use up their 'bonding' hormone, oxytocin, and are unable to form lasting relationships", that premarital sex is a form of "germ warfare," and that contraception "demeans women...degrades human sexuality and is adverse to human health."

Little girls, Bush and Keroack are telling us, you must have our permission for anything you do in the privacy of your beds and doctors' offices. And if you do what you want without our permission, we will see that you are punished: We will force you to become pregnant -- because we will deny you access to contraception -- or we will tell you to risk death if you want to end a pregnancy.

Normally I don't speculate about the sexual and contraceptive choices of any woman, whether she's the first lady or the lady next door. But when the lady's husband is prying into those choices for the rest of the world -- deciding whether my goddaughters can have abortions, whether my nieces can have access to contraception and whether my granddaughter can learn that her boyfriend's condom can protect her from STDs -- I am understandably curious about the First Marriage.

Laura Bush has carried only one pregnancy to term in her 29 years of marriage. Has she "demeaned" her body by using contraception? Has she terminated a pregnancy? Has she chosen "the only moral course" and been abstinent?

Once again, middle-aged white men well past their child-spawning years dictating how women should conduct their personal lives. Once again, Bush picking an advisor whose views conform almost perfectly to his hypocritical own. Once again, the Republican Party, which otherwise insists that government shouldn't meddle in peoples' lives, arguing in favor of controlling uteruses across America and the world.

(Tribune site requires its typically insidious registration. Use "bugmenot@gmail.com" for the user name, "bugmenot" for the password. Thanks, as always, to bugmenot.com.)