Continuing what seems to be a news week full of doofuses making fools of themselves over sexual politics, a Family Research Council leader took to the radio to say that we ought to punish premarital sex like we used to… because young people were never given the “right” to have sexual intercourse outside of marriage.
While guesting on Washington Watch Monday afternoon, FRC senior fellow Pat Fagan argued that the 1972 Supreme Court court case Eisenstadt v. Baird, which overturned a Massachusetts law banning the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people, is quite possibly “the single most destructive decision in the history of the Court.”
Fagan was accompanied by ever-so-thoughtful evangelist and FRC head Tony Perkins.
In Fagan’s mind, that Court decision effectively told all single people that they have “the right to engage in sexual intercourse.” Never mind the fact that, well, they kind of do have the right — you know, consenting adults and whatnot — because Fagan remembers when society used to have laws forbidding such sin.
“Society never gave young people that right,” he continued. “Functioning societies don’t do that, they stop it, they punish it, they corral people, they shame people, they do whatever. The institution for the expression of sexuality is marriage and all societies always shepherded young people there, what the Supreme Court said was forget that shepherding, you can’t block that, that’s not to be done.”
By giving an implicit seal of approval on premarital sex, Fagan said, the Court was “brushing aside millennia, thousands and thousands of years of wisdom, tradition, culture and setting in motion what we have.”
And thus setting forth the downfall of Western civilization, of course.
Without talking about preventing pregnancy and not providing the wherewithall to do so, one can become a grandparent very quickly. Just ask Sarah Palin and her daughter Bristol . . . . . and, of course, Levi Johnson.