A Weird New Era in Conservative Sex

Missouri AG Andrew Bailey

Pioneering Austrian psychologist Carl Jung wrote about “synchronicity,” when two occurrences physically unrelated appear to form a pattern. For him, this meant not the objects themselves, but how the audience perceives the objects, that we imbue life’s circumstances with meaning. When two separated events or objects appear meaningfully related to us, that doesn’t describe the events or objects, but us seeing them. Humans don’t receive meaning, we create it.

In court filings this week, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey asked federal courts to intervene and restrict access to mifepristone, an abortifacient, through telehealth. Missouri had trigger laws which went into effect following the Dobbs decision, making abortion mostly illegal overnight. But Bailey complains that, because recent regulatory changes make mifepristone available without a face-to-face doctor visit, women are circumventing state law to access abortion.

News junkies my age were astounded when Bailey’s filing, supported by attorneys general in Kansas and Idaho, specifically cited the desire to have more teenaged mothers. Bailey complains that, without teenagers becoming pregnant, Missouri’s economy has suffered a workforce shortage, and the state becomes poorer. I’m old enough to have had public-school sex education in the 1980s, when teenaged motherhood fired paranoia and irrational parental crackdowns nationwide.

Reports quote Bailey, a Republican, claiming that fewer teenage pregnancies result in “diminishment of political representation and loss of federal funds.” In other words, Missouri needs more mothers too young to shoulder the psychological or fiscal burdens of motherhood, in service to the common good. Very Maoist. Bailey’s findings continue from there, including false accusations of medical risk, but media reports focus on the jaw-dropping teen motherhood component.

On Wednesday, former Fox News cornerstone Tucker Carlson introduced former President Trump at a Duluth, Georgia, rally with an extended rant. Carlson described Trump as “Daddy” who was “coming home” to deliver a “spanking” to his electoral opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. According to reports, audiences responded with spontaneous chants, but even many Trump loyalists in attendance—who also comprise Carlson’s audience base—reportedly felt uncomfortable.

Tucker Carlson, corporate puppet

It's hardly breaking news that Republicans care deeply about American sexual habits. Trump promised at the 2016 Republican National Convention that “I will do everything in my power to protect LGBTQ citizens,” received a striking round of applause, then largely lost interest in the topic. Throughout my political lifetime, Republicans have granted increased freedom to Americans’ money, but simultaneously imposed bleak restrictions on sexual autonomy beyond man-on-top heterosexuality.

For years, the LGBTQ+ community’s supposed sexual licentiousness galvanized Republican support among suburbanites fearing change. Footage of supposed debauchery from Pride parades, caricatured stereotypes of Castro District lifestyles, and the artwork of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano help keep squares firmly within the (R) camp. “Don’t Say Gay” bills in Florida and elsewhere have been motivated, partly, by keeping sexuality hidden from children.

Therefore this sudden pivot to sex positivity seems weird. For Republicans to not only disclose their bedroom kinks publicly, but to seemingly encourage adolescent sexuality, contradicts everything I once believed as a teenage Republican. The conservative milieu in which I hit sexual maturity, suffused with Christian purity culture, feared youthful sex, but like anything kinky, it simultaneously wallowed in that which it feared.

The same voting base that supposedly elected Andrew Bailey (he was actually appointed) and bankrolls Tucker Carlson, also gave America the moral horror of virginity pledges and purity balls. These rituals sought to control teenage sexual exploration, but to control it, they first foregrounded it, walking youths through the temptations they’d putatively confront. Unsurprisingly, conservative Christian youths are, if anything, more likely than general American teens to have premarital sex.

As revolting as Bailey and Carlson are, they’re only two data points, not indicative of American conservatism overall. It’s unclear what fraction of Republicans they represent. Yet their apparent willingness to reverse course and condone public sexuality, bespeaks a changing ethic atop American conservatism. Republicans of my generation asserted an overwhelming interest to intervene to preserve teenage celibacy. Now Bailey wants to pimp teenagers out for the common weal.

It apparently never occurs to these reprobates that, to make their states grow, they chould make their states into places people want to live. Economically vibrant, demographically diverse, and yes, open to multiple sexual expressions. These attempts to weaponize human sexuality seem more likely to alienate than invite voters. Instead, these activities turn citizens into livestock, and lawmakers into pornographers.

Sex positivity doesn’t mean public luridness, or breeding teens like puppy mills. Republicans need to learn this if they hope to survive.