Never mind the economy, stupid: this election is all about sex

By obsessing about birth control, abortion and homosexuality, the GOP has turned its back on mainstream America
Religious figures testify on Capitol Hill on new rules on employee insurance and contraception
Religious figures testify on Capitol Hill on the Obama administration's new rules relating to employee insurance and contraception. Photograph: Benjamin J. Myers/Corbis

Last week the travelling circus of the Republican presidential race went all Vegas. Bigger stage! Brighter lights! Death-defying stunts! In one ring, celibate men gave Congress expert instruction on the ins-and-outs of birth control. One up-and-coming star of the small-government, freedom-loving party vetoed gay marriage, while another mandated government inspection of women's uterii. And in the center ring, Rick Santorum, who thinks that birth control and women in combat are not ok, won over the crowd with harrowing visions of guillotines and Sodom and Gommorah on the frontlines.

Perhaps if the pill had never been invented, American politics would be very different today. And I don't mean Bayer aspirin.

The hysteria du jour will pass but it has done us the service of exposing essential truths about American politics today, if only we pay attention. A small group of reactionaries, obsessed with controlling the sex lives of other people, has hijacked the GOP and commandeered American politics.

If the history of the sexual counterrevolution were better known, no one would be surprised.

Consider the state of America's sexual politics just 50 years before Barack Obama took office. Birth control was indeed illegal in some states, and men and women were sentenced to prison for distributing it. Sex between consenting adults of the same sex was a criminal act in every state. Discrimination against women was pervasive and perfectly legal.

The sexual revolution, feminism, and the gay rights movement revolutionized sex, the family, the workplace, and popular culture in the space of a little more than a decade. Simultaneously, and in large part responding to these social movements, Congress outlawed gender discrimination, half the states repealed their sodomy laws, and the Supreme Court ruled that laws against birth control and abortion were unconstitutional.

America is a fun-loving, freedom-loving nation, so most people welcomed the expansion of freedom to personal life. Yet given that the government had long been in the business of legislating puritancial sexual mores, it is understandable that those who thought the old ways were just fine, thank you, chose to wage their reactionary crusade through the political system.

The sexual counterrevolution began in the early 1970s, when ultra-conservative fundamentalist, Catholic, and Mormon women organized on the grassroots level to turn back the tide of cultural revolution. They campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment, sex education, government-financed child care, and gay civil rights. They were unashamed to say that their God and Church decreed that women must be submissive to their husbands and that being gay was evil.

After winning nearly every one of these campaigns, these sexual fundamentalists infiltrated the Republican Party and methodically took it over from bottom to top. They were the stealth force behind Newt Gingrich's rise to power in 1994. Sarah Palin would have remained an obscure Alaskan hockey mom but for their devotion. Since 1992, the religious right mobilized by the sexual counterervolution has constituted the largest and most powerful bloc within the Republican Party. As we now know-- and should have known all along--the Tea Party is largely populated by the sexual fundamentalists of the religious right.

Today's GOP was forged in the crucible of this sexual counterrevolution.
Santorum's recent surge, Mitt Romney's renewed attacks on abortion and birth control, and Governor Chris Christie's veto of gay marriage are salutary reminders that Republican politicians are the captives, not the masters, of the GOP base.

For the last few weeks I've been fielding calls from China to Italy asking, essentially, what's wrong with America? Four years into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, why has birth control become a major issue in the presidential election?

For most Americans, the economy and job creation remain the issue of the day. The GOP, however, has turned its back on mainstream America. The sexual fundamentalists, who are leading the charge against the recent birth control ruling, who demand as the price of their vote that abortion be outlawed and gay civil rights be rolled back, make up only between 15 to 20 percent of the nation. A majority of Americans support gay marriage and legal abortion; two-thirds support the new policy of insurance companies providing birth control with no co-pay. And the use of birth control is nearly universal, even among Catholics.

Conventional wisdom has insisted the 2012 presidential election would be solely about the economy. The real America, that is just fine with the 21st century's sexual freedom, gender equality, and equal civil rights for all, needs to remember that this election has never been just about the economy.

It's also the sex, stupid.