GOP Marriage Vow Pledge: Obsessed With Sex

Social conservatives in America’s Grand Old Party today are pathologically obsessed with sex. They fervently believe that their own sex lives, as well as yours and mine, are the business of government. And now they won’t endorse any candidate for political office unless he or she signs a formal pledge affirming that they too are religiously and pathologically obsessed with the sex lives of all Americans.

Can you imagine the founding fathers demanding a sex life pledge from aspiring politicians? If they were obsessed with anything while forming our nation, we know that it was independence, personal freedom, and individual liberty. The last thing on their minds was government meddling into the people’s private sex lives.

“The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and Family,” is a socially conservative sex life pledge drafted by an Iowa religious organization called the Family Leader. Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum have both shamelessly pandered to the group by signing their pledge. The other candidates can forget about any endorsements from the religious right in Iowa unless they also sign on the dotted line.

Politicians who pander to the religious right have always believed that the United States of America should be a republican theocracy in which strict sexual conformity to biblical scripture is mandated by the force of law.

“Faithful monogamy is at the very heart of a designed and purposeful order–as conveyed by Jewish and Christian Scripture … Enduring marital fidelity between one man and one woman … protects the liberties of all American citizens under our republican form of government,.” they insist, because their Christian God planned it that way.

According to these religious zealots, there can be no liberty in America without the opposite of liberty -- pious legally enforced sexual purity. “Our exceptional and free society simply cannot endure without the transmission of personal virtue, from one generation to the next, by means of nurturing, nuclear families comprised of sexually-faithful husbands and wives, fathers and mothers,” they declare.

Though the Family Leader group has since apologized for some of it’s incredibly stupid and bigoted positions, it originally claimed that blacks were better off during slavery than with present day equality, because: “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 U.S.A.’s first African -American President.”

Still, they demand that all candidates solemnly vow to affirm all their other half-baked claims that the institution of marriage in America is in “great crisis,” due to the “debased currency of marriage,” characterized by: “adultery; ‘quickie divorce’; … non-committal co-habitation; exemplary 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.”

And, that’s not nearly all:

Those who sign this pledge must also promise to support only “… the elevation of none but faithful constitutionalists as judges or justices” – “faithful” in this instance meaning only judges or justices who are both politically and religiously suitable to enforce the sex life laws of their planned Utopian theocracy.

“Vigorous opposition to any redefinition of the Institution of Marriage; faithful monogamy between one man and one woman through statutory, bureaucratic, or court-imposed recognition of intimate unions which are bigamous, polygamous, polyandrous, same-sex, etc.,” is likewise part of the pledge, as well as: “Recognition of the overwhelming statistical evidence that married people enjoy better health, better sex, longer lives, greater financial stability, and that children raised by a mother and a father together experience better learning, less addiction, less legal trouble, and less extramarital pregnancy.”

Furthermore, the pledge candidates must support: “prompt reform of uneconomic, anti-marriage aspects of welfare policy, tax policy, and marital/divorce law, and extended “second chance” or “cooling-off” periods for those seeking a “quickie divorce,” and: “… bona fide legal advocacy for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) at the federal and state levels” together with: “Steadfast embrace of a federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which protects the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman in all of the United States.”

In short, they want their candidates to promise changes in the Constitution and the laws of the United States which will enforce their sex life policies upon us all.

Not wanting to leave any stone unturned regarding matters of gratuitous sex, and other so-called forms of “stolen innocence,” the group also demands a vow to protect “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.”

“… Self-centered adult egos and agendas in American families must be subordinated to the long-term interests of America’s children,” proclaims the Family Leader, and those who sign their pledge. “… Robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to U.S. demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial health and security.” They don’t think that adult Americans should have their own “agendas.” They think child bearing is for the purpose of economics and national security.

To this group, individual liberty means forced selflessness and sacrifice to the greater good of the collective; especially the children who are also expected to grow up and sacrifice their sex lives to the thing. The people (including you and me) exist solely for the benefit of society and these religious zealots what to make it the law.

“… society’s interest in a healthy, vibrant, and growing indigenous population and workforce to drive economic growth and actuarially support public and private pension, benefit and entitlement systems is [not] in any way advanced by undermining the institution of faithful, lawful marriage as between only one man and one woman,” concludes this transparently fascist inspired sex lives pledge.

The pledge does exhibit one useful purpose, however: it identifies the nuts of the G.O.P.