Politics As Usual: The Family Leader Pledge

Recently The Family Leader, a hitherto-unknown group of Moral Majority nutbags, issued a pledge designed to coerce far-right political candidates (particularly those hoping to run for president next year) into swearing fealty to their belief system, which is just slightly more liberal than that of the Westboro Baptist Church. Ok, fine, extremists have published their screeds since time immemorial – and far more often since the advent of the internet – so why should we care about this? Because actual potential Republican candidates have signed this manifesto (provided that you consider Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum actual candidates).

So what’s so bad about this pledge? Well, first and foremost I think the idea of a candidate for the nation’s highest office signing a pledge to a Political Action Committee – an entity whose entire platform is decided by those who donate money to it rather than any actual survey of the electorate – is about the least democratic thing possible. In all seriousness, we worry about politicians being beholden to people because they donated to an election fund, so why aren’t we rioting in the streets over an actual signed and public pledge? This isn’t the fucking Prom Promise, folks, this is a document that is specifically worded to shape public policy. No politician should ever sign such a thing, no matter what it says, because that eliminates the will of the people. Granted, the punishment for not signing the pledge is that The Family Leader will not endorse you as a candidate – which seems like a fairly small price to pay – but that begs the question: why would any candidate submit themselves to the whims of a relatively small group of far-right voters at the risk of pissing off the vast majority of the public? Does the Republican base hold that much sway?

Just look at the fucking news. Of course they do.

So aside from the fundamental wrongness of the whole thing, what’s the problem with this document? If you want to, you can read it in its almost-entirety here. I say almost-entirety because some very specific wording has been excised since Ms. Bachmann and Mr. Santorum signed the document. More on that later.

Let’s get specific about what is fucked up in the pledge for a moment:

Social protections, especially for women and children, have been evaporating as we have collectively
“debased the currency” of marriage.  This debasement continues as a function of adultery; “quickie divorce;”  physical and verbal spousal abuse; non-committal co-habitation; pervasive infidelity and “unwed cheating” among celebrities, sports figures and politicians; anti-scientific bias which holds, in complete absence of empirical proof, that non-heterosexual inclinations are genetically determined, irresistible and akin to innate traits like race, gender and eye color; as well as anti-scientific bias which holds, against all empirical evidence, that homosexual behavior in particular, and sexual promiscuity in general, optimizes individual or public health.

Oh, I see. Now you’re terribly concerned with science. Well how about this: where is your empirical proof that homosexuality isn’t innate? I don’t think anyone is particularly arguing that it’s genetic, there are plenty of innate traits that aren’t (left-handedness, for instance). Just like I could train myself over time to use only my right hand, someone can “pray themselves straight”, but my inclination toward writing with the devil’s hand will always be my unconscious inclination, and nobody can be “cured” of homosexuality, no matter what Marcus Bachmann says. So let’s dispense with the sudden interest in science, shall we?

And I also don’t think anyone thinks that homosexuality optimizes health. I haven’t seen a single “Heterosexuality is wrong, convert the breeders” campaign, have you? I swear, what is it with you religious types and your obsession with the idea of a vast network of gays out to destroy the world? If you’re looking for a megalomaniacal group trying to change the entire world to their way of thinking, look in the fucking mirror.

Likewise, I don’t think anyone but the most hardcore sex advocates are saying promiscuity is good. But a lot of people are saying that if they want to be promiscuous it’s their goddamned right and no puritanical group of paranoid lunatics has the right to tell them to stop.

Personal fidelity to my spouse.
Respect for the marital bonds of others.

Ok, you’ve got me so far…

Official fidelity to the U.S. Constitution, supporting the elevation of none but faithful constitutionalists as judges or justices.

WHAT THE FUCK?! What does only appointing “faithful constitutionalists” (whatever the fuck that means – isn’t it literally the job of the Supreme Court to interpret the constitution?) have to do with marriage? Is this some kind of back-door (heh…”back-door”) way of saying that since gay marriage isn’t in the constitution that it’s not part of the law of this land? Because to the best of my knowledge – and I admit freely that I am not a faithful constitutionalist – the word “marriage” doesn’t even appear in the constitution, so straight marriage is out too.

I think I’ve covered gay marriage sufficiently thoroughly in the recent past, so I’m going to skip over a few points here, and head straight for…

Humane protection of women and the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy – our next generation of American children – from human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, abortion and other types of coercion or stolen innocence.

First of all, “innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy”? Who wrote this thing, Robert Frost?

Second, hey, sure, we all think sexual slavery and human trafficking is bad. Well, most of us. Obviously someone is into it or it wouldn’t exist. And infanticide, that’s bad too. But lumping abortion in with that is just…well, it’s pretty typical over-hyped fundie rhetoric, actually. So I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. Asking a political candidate to swear to save children from being “seduced into promiscuity”, however, is fucking ridiculous. You know what keeps children from turning into crack whores? Good parents. Why don’t you make the parents in your congregation sign a pledge to be kind and loving to their children, correct them when they must, and take a strong but not overbearing interest in their activities and see how far that gets you? Dollars to donuts one of your “innocent fruits of conjugal intimacy” still gets knocked up before the age of sixteen.

Also, you fucking lay off of pornography. You can have my porn when you pry it from my cold, dead, sticky hands.

Support for the enactment of safeguards for all married and unmarried U.S. Military and National Guard personnel, especially our combat troops, from inappropriate same-gender or opposite-gender sexual harassment, adultery or intrusively intimate commingling among attracteds (restrooms, showers, barracks, tents, etc.); plus prompt termination of military policymakers who would expose American wives and daughters to rape or sexual harassment, torture, enslavement or sexual leveraging by the enemy in forward combat roles.

See, one of the insidious things about this document is that it starts you off with some sensible stuff so that you think “yeah, ok, I can see where you’re coming from”, then it sneaks in some nonsensical garbage when you’re not looking. Yeah, everyone should be safeguarded from sexual harassment. Technically, everybody already is. We have laws against that sort of thing. But we all know that it still goes on in spades despite the laws, so I guess adding in wording about making sure those protections stick is valid, though one wonders why it’s specifically geared toward the Armed Forces, leaving the rest of us to be harassed at will. Then there’s the thing about “intrusively intimate commingling”, which I guess makes some sense if you’re really fucking puritan about people seeing each other’s junk in case they might appreciate it. Me, I believe in that Battlestar Galactica future where gender roles break down and people all shower together. But mostly because I really want to take a shower with Katee Sackhoff. Also, nice use of the made-up word “attracteds”. I don’t really understand why a group that is working so hard to keep gays out of the military would use such an ambiguous word, but I guess your motives are your own.

It’s the last part that really gets me, though. I don’t know what it is about the singling out of women to be saved from rape, sexual harassment, torture, enslavement and sexual leveraging by the enemy that rubs me the wrong way, but I assure you that it does. Maybe it’s the condescending attitude that women are delicate, fragile flowers incapable of protecting themselves and in need of a big, strong man to save them. Maybe it’s the fact that I think men should probably be excluded from those activities as well – it’s absolutely foolish to think that men aren’t raped or enslaved in war. Hell, many of the activities at Abu Ghraib fall just barely shy of what is generally considered the definition of rape, and our brave American soldiers were the ones committing them. And finally, I find it offensive that the pledge calls for the protection of “American wives and daughters”, and the rest of the world can get fucked. How about making sure our boys in uniform don’t do any raping themselves? Or is that not a priority for you?

Rejection of Sharia Islam and all other anti-woman, anti-human rights forms of totalitarian control.

You mean like fundamental Christianity?

Commitment to downsizing government and the enormous burden upon American families of the USA‟s $14.3 trillion public debt, its $77 trillion in unfunded liabilities, its $1.5 trillion federal deficit, and its $3.5 trillion federal budget.

You know, it wasn’t clever the first time you tried to sneak conservative politics that have nothing to do with marriage into your marriage pledge, now it’s just getting irritating.

Fierce defense of the First Amendment‟s rights of Religious Liberty and Freedom of Speech, especially against the intolerance of any who would undermine law-abiding American citizens and institutions of faith and conscience for their adherence to, and defense of, faithful heterosexual monogamy.

Again, I have to ask: who exactly is trying to take away your freedom to worship the way you want to? Nobody. Seriously, we don’t give a fuck if you want to spend your Sunday mornings singing songs in praise of the great bearded white guy who gave you life and made you Republicans. We’re all generally sleeping off hangovers at that time anyway, so feel free to do what you want as long as you do it quietly. And certainly nobody wants to undermine your monogamy – honestly, you religious types tend to be complete boner-kills. But doesn’t fierce defense of the First Amendment also mean fierce defense of my right to any  form of expression I want to engage in too? Doesn’t it include fierce defense of erotic images, as they have been declared repeatedly to be protected speech by the Supreme Court? So doesn’t this directly contradict the point above? Or does it only apply to your own personal First Amendment rights?

There’s a lot to quibble with in this version of the pledge, but the part that was possibly the most insane and egregious does not appear anywhere in the current text. That’s because it was excised after it (justly) drew a lot of controversy. The text appeared in the first section of the pledge – what I like to call the “here are some nebulous facts to justify the total horseshit we are about to shovel upon you” section – and read as follows: “Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.”

What?! Clearly, this is why Michele Bachmann signed the thing in the first place: her love of completely batshit insane and wholly wrong history compelled her to. There are no words to describe the level of ignorance and condescension going on here. First and foremost, slave families were broken up all the time. Not to mention that the mere existence of slaves in this country meant that a family was broken up across the ocean. And I’m not even going to start on the rape culture involved in slavery. The inclusion of such an inflammatory and clearly wrong, pandering and racist statement should invalidate the pledge as a whole, and should (and does) reflect extremely poorly on any candidate who signed it.

The whole basis of this mess of a country is freedom. That’s what we fought our way free of England for. We throw the word around so much that it obviously has no meaning any more. So why should it be alright for someone who would like to become the most powerful single person in America to sign a pledge saying that they will work tirelessly to severely restrict the freedoms of Americans just because they don’t conform to someone else’s outdated and often contradictory moral code? There is no excuse for this whatsoever. Ms. Bachmann, Mr. Santorum, you really need to think long and hard about your reasons for wanting to become president, because a president is meant to serve the will of the people, not the will of some people. And if you can’t handle that, maybe it’s time you backed clumsily out of the running.

EDIT: While I was writing this, it came to light that Mitt Romney (known around the FD offices as “Mittens”) has refused to sign the pledge. If Mittens is against it, it must be good. So you should just go ahead and ignore everything I wrote above.

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