Lemondrop

Another year, another Values Voter Summit. The annual Christian right event thrown last week by the Family Research Council held few surprises: VVS-ers still want you ladies back in the kitchen and you queers to just stop existing already, but as usual, it provided plenty of laughs.

Most VVS attendees don't understand why outsiders find their agenda so funny, but then, these are people who consider Stephen Baldwin a major celebrity and thoughtful leader.

As usual, the event featured several of the right's pet theories, among them:

Pornography Causes Homosexuality
Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn's chief of staff Michael Schwartz argued that nothing would turn your boys gay faster than looking at pictures of naked women at an impressionable age. He quoted an "ex-gay" friend as saying, "All pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards."

Wait, what does that mean? It seems he's saying that because porn leads men to masturbate, masturbation might give a man a taste of what it's like to have sex with other men. He then suggested that scaring boys with the threat that they'll turn queer is an effective parenting technique to keep them away from Playboy.

If exposure to photographs of naked women really drove men to homosexuality, we would most likely have no straight men left. Then again, we can't be sure that Schwartz's friend even exists; the number of ex-gays is so small as to vanish if you look too hard.

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Women Need to Be Shamed Out of Having Abortions
Anti-choice activist Lila Rose suggested a novel way to introduce shame back into sex: Women who have abortions should do so in the public square. Even by the time Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about it, the concept of putting a woman in stocks and painting her with a scarlet letter for unapproved sexual behavior was outdated. But that doesn't mean the Christian right has given up the ghost.

If you have sex when they don't want you to, they're determined to find out who you are and shame you publicly. Why else do you think anti-choicers enjoy showing up at abortion clinics and taking pictures of patients? Of course, forcing women to have abortions in front of everyone who wants to throw eggs and titillate themselves will prove to be a hard fantasy to realize, patient-privacy laws being what they are.

Dudeliness Is Under Threat
The preoccupation with gays and abortions all point to the main obsession of the "values voters": masculinity. It's hard to find and harder to hold on to in a world of feminist women and hot homosexuals. According to the Family Research Council's Pat Fagan, masculinity is under assault from a "polyamorous" culture, which is a lot less hot than he makes it sound.

He's not talking about the few people who practice actual polyamory. No, if you've had one partner in the past and have one now, it turns out that you're more exciting than you thought -- you're into polyamory! And you're out to destroy American manhood.

It's hard to say why serial monogamy should signal the end of American manhood, but we at Heathen Headquarters suspect that this is an argument favored by men who strongly feel they'll fail any competition with the memory of a previous lover. If you never let women have steak, they won't complain about being fed cat food.

Fighting Their Own Increasing Irrelevance
There was a sad cast to the proceedings of the Values Voter Summit this year. The Christian right doesn't have as many champions in power as it used to. George Bush is out of office and Sarah Palin flamed out spectacularly. The leadership of the conservative movement is more interested in race-baiting and screaming about socialism than promoting fantasies of barefoot women and suddenly-straight gays. Reactionary fantasies are silly to begin with, but they become all the more so when even your own people aren't listening as much as they once did.

Amanda Marcotte is the author of "It's a Jungle Out There" and writes about politics daily at Pandagon.net.