Rick Perry thinks the nation is in crisis, but Perry's idea of a crisis is quite different from the American mainstream. You can tell what Perry thinks the real "crisis" is by looking at the featured speaker roster for his 7-hour-long fasting and prayer service scheduled for today. To get to root of Perry's intentions I personally find myself looking at his event, with its catchy title, "The Response," in the context of how many American's responded to a news story of a week ago. No, I'm not talking about the debt crisis. I am talking about the headline, "Alex Trebek sleeps in the nude."
The connection between the scandalous idea of a naked Alex Trebek and the prayers of the pastors at Perry's "Response" event needs some history, so let me fill you in on the back-story.
A century ago, here in America, there was another religious-based furor going on. How that made-up "crisis" played out should be a lesson to Perry, his pastor friends, and their fundamentalist Christian sheep. That crisis has now become known as the "Noble Experiment," and history has judged it to be a colossal failure. Most people know it as the period of Prohibition, or the doomed Eighteenth Amendment.
American Prohibition traces its roots all the way back to 1657 when the first ban on the sale of liquor became law in Massachusetts. There were other fits and starts as states and cities toyed with some kind of a ban on the manufacture and sale of alcohol, but the move toward a Constitutional Amendment was finally kick-started by Carrie Nation. She earned her place in history by becoming a one-woman-posse as she went into saloons across Kansas to break their liquor bottles with her hatchet.
My point is, it failed! In truth, it never worked. Not even for a day. The abolitionists were in complete denial about it. But it was the fodder that the preachers needed to fill their pews. Nothing fills a church as quickly as having a powerful enemy, and liquor had become the common enemy of the 19th century. Finally, on December 18, 1917, the Senate officially declared that the enemy would be conquered as they proposed the Eighteenth Amendment. After 36 states gave it a nod of approval, Prohibition became the law in January 1920.
And nobody stopped drinking.
Like alcohol of a century ago, human sexuality became the "enemy-of-choice" for the latter part of the 20th century. Pastors have learned that nothing fills church pews better than a willingness to talk "dirty" to a congregation. And just as was true with the pastors of the Prohibition period, few people are bigger hypocrites than the pastors. Names such as Ted Haggard and Eddie Long come to the forefront of epic failures as it relates to homosexual dalliances, and on the heterosexual side we have the Jimmy "I-Have-Sinned" Swaggart and Jim Bakker.
And so, we arrive at last week when Canadian-born-and-raised Alex Trebek felt no compunction about mentioning that he needed to grab his underwear before chasing his intruder down a hotel hallway. For three days, millions of American prudes went all a-flutter and news commentators like Mika Brzezinski giggled and blushed as they told the story. Was this because they all secretly imagined themself with a naked Trebek, and then felt guilty at the thought? This would at least explain what drives them to church, full of guilt, every Sunday morning. And so the pastors reap the benefits of more money in the collection plate. Using Eddie Long as the most recent example, this money will then buy trinkets, toys, and trips for the boys on the down-low.
Returning to today, Rick Perry's "moral experiment" of 2011 is going to follow in the long-established tradition of other Southern Strategies. It will be full of code so that can stir up the fear that drives the sheep of the religious right to the polling booths in 2012. It has been their strategy-of-choice since 1976 when Jerry Falwell laid the foundation for what would become known as the Moral Majority. It needs to be mentioned that this movement would never have found this kind of traction anywhere else but in the South with a deeply entrenched anti-intellectual mentality.
Rick Perry and Texas come to the forefront in the battle to keep human sexuality as a taboo topic because of their heavy influence on designing elementary and secondary school textbooks and curriculum. And as one of the nations leading forces for abstinence-only sex education, Texas provided the rest of America with a model of failure in how pretending that something is not a problem actually exacerbates the problem. Take the following quote from a Washington Post story:
"In the seven years since their schools began teaching abstinence-only, young people here have been anything but abstinent. Teen pregnancy rates in the state remain above the national average, and Lubbock County consistently has one of the highest rates in the state. In addition, the number of Texas youths with sexually transmitted diseases has risen steadily."
I am a big fan of tracing a problem back to its roots, so let's not get caught up talking about sex education. Let us instead back up one layer and talk about human sexuality. Let's talk about what it is that makes an American blush when a foreigner (one of the proverbial "others") can be so casual about human sexuality that they find nothing wrong with telling a reporter that they had to grab their undies before chasing an intruder.
Actually, hold on a second. How about instead we talk about the state of denial that has to be in place to even be having this conversation in the first place in the year 2011.
Since you are already on a computer reading this, enter the search parameters, "nude male" or "nude female," into your search engine of choice. Now tell me whether an eight-year-old would have any trouble finding porn today. Even with parental control software we are kidding ourselves to think that we will be able to "protect" our children from images of the naked human body, so why don't we instead embrace it as an inevitability, like teenagers having sex? Why don't we instead educate our children about the difference between healthy nudity and unhealthy pornography? After all, nobody is born wearing underwear, so why pretend otherwise?
Maybe it is because of my Canadian birth and Scandinavian ancestry, but I too like sleeping in the nude. Heck, I like being nude every chance I get. I keep the house warm enough during the day so that I never have to get dressed. I do try to leave a pair of shorts by the door so that I don't embarrass the mail lady and other delivery people because I certainly never want to force my nudity on anybody who does not want the memory of seeing "all" of me. But trust me, I am really quite harmless - dressed or naked!
So, like Scott Brown, if I ever run for politics there will likely be a pictures of me in the buff that surface from the dark recesses of the Internet. I dated enough gay men before I met my hubby to know that they have probably kept some of their favorite photos of me on their computers. I have also been naked on enough beaches to know that somebody, somewhere, will likely recognize me and come forward to say that they saw me on said nude beach.
My question is, why is that such a big deal?
It is a "big deal" because Rick Perry and his pastors want to make it their business, and they will continue to fool themselves into thinking that their children will never have a sexual thought. They will continue to fill their church pews and the ballot boxes by having people think that nakedness is the gateway to a life of sinfulness.
And like the last "Noble Experiment," this effort too will fail. But this time it will not fail because of the proliferation of "Speak Easy" establishments. Instead it will fail because of Google.
Rick and Michele, knock yourselves out as you consider your runs for president and imagine an America under a Christian version of Sharia Law. It won't change the fact that all men really do have a penis, and women have a vagina; and that's a good thing! Too bad you won't teach that to your children.
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