Russell Shorto's piece on the tiny but increasingly vocal anti-contraception movement reveals yet again how some social conservatives distort language and conceal the nature of their values. The freedom to choose when to get pregnant is considered "anti-humanistic", even though that freedom allows partners to consult their feelings and make a considered decision. The freedom of a woman to have a sexual life even when she doesn't want to get pregnant is considered to expose her to a presumptively predatory male sexuality. (And they think feminists are hostile to men?) For anti-contraception advocates, orienting identity around family-centered roles is almost a religion unto itself, and the desires of others for different choices are a kind of heresy. Conformity to them equals goodness, and the idea of freedom loses any practical relevance in personal living. Although they profess concern about the sexualization of culture, the theocons manifest a prurient impulse to impose a universal script for personal sexual decisions that perpetuates far more obsession with sex and a far more mechanistic conception of relationships than an information-based moral framework.

The latter approach, by contrast, is actually honest when it claims to value freedom; it cares about saving lives by preventing STDs according to the dictates of empiricism rather than rigid ideology. It cares about advancing equality between men and women rather than claiming to protect women by reducing their independence (which unplanned pregnancy entails). For reasons of practicality and morality, of health and dignity, it teaches people to be adults who have learned to make responsible decisions rather than regarding them perpetually as children. The political potential of this contrast can only be exploited on behalf of freedom when the moral debate set by theocons is squarely met and advocates of egalitarianism and personal freedom refuse to allow ourselves to be defined in reductive terms that misconstrue our values and reasoning. We are not hedonists but inevitably and self-consciously diverse adults with differing needs and values. If totalitarianism offends human freedom by invading privacy and denying individuality, so too does rendering divinity in anthropomorphic, authoritarian terms. Both social schemes raise the specter of Big Brother and belie the complexity, mystery, variance, and transcendent potential in intimate human relationships. In their efforts at obscuring and controlling these intangible factors, secular and religious totalitarians each reduce our humanity while claiming to fulfill it.