Health Fascists Take Over Voyuerism

The First Essential Scary Truth

1973.  The Supreme Court of the United States issued Roe v. Wade; the controversial decision that made abortion a legally protected medical procedure across the Republic.  To this day there remains a great deal of screaming and occasional real debate over the act of abortion, a woman’s right to choose, a person’s right to control their own body and the role religious beliefs should play in the law of the land.

Frankly, I find the whole debate to be something of red herring argument for those who would control concept of personal responsibility.  Abortions were preformed in the United States as far back as the founding of country.  Various state legislators passed the first laws outlawing the procedure in the 1820’s.  By the early 1900’s, almost all the states had laws on the books making abortion illegal.

The reasons why these laws were passed are three fold: 1. Racism.  New immigrants were out breeding our forbearers at an alarming rate.  WASPs, the first Jews from Charleston and all the other ‘real’ Americans had to have more children to keep ‘real’ American blood alive and well.  2. Religion.  Life is sacred in Judeo-Christian mores and therefore abortion had to go.  3.  The medical establishment wanted abortion gone.  Back before the advent of ether, penicillin and the ‘new wonder drugs’ surgery was at best a 50/50 proposition as to the survival of the patient.  Thus the Hippocratic oath stipulated it must go.  However, there is a darker reason doctors in the US wanted to see abortion outlawed.

(From www.prochoice.org)

The strongest force behind the drive to criminalize abortion was the attempt by doctors to establish for themselves exclusive rights to practice medicine. They wanted to prevent “untrained” practitioners, including midwives, apothecaries, and homeopaths, from competing with them for patients and for patient fees.

The best way to accomplish their goal was to eliminate one of the principle procedures that kept these competitors in business. Rather than openly admitting to such motivations, the newly formed American Medical Association (AMA) argued that abortion was both immoral and dangerous. By 1910 all but one state had criminalized abortion except where necessary, in a doctor’s judgment, to save the woman’s life. In this way, legal abortion was successfully transformed into a “physicians-only” practice.

This unholy combination of racism, Old Time Religion and corporate unionism was able to enforce its agenda for over 50 years until technology caught up to the debate.  By 1973, the aborting procedure was safe, religion was an important part of Americans lives but (for the most part) was out of the policy making business and racism (for the most part) was on it’s way to becoming a discredited thing of the past.  The time seemed rip for the Supreme Court to rule on constitutionality of abortion – to put push the issue into the file cabinet of our legal history once and for all.  So Roe v. Wade was issued and everyone screamed.

It seems even the nine Solon’s of the United States legal system are not immune from Murphy’s Law.  Instead of a Brown v. Board of Education styled decision where the procedure of abortion was just declared legal and up to the AMA and states to regulate, the justices led by author Harry Blackmon played super legislature by creating the trimester system.  No political campaign has been safe from screaming, litmus tests and general boredom as the real debate is lost in talking points from partisan jerk offs since.

Roe v. Wade also gave us an unintended consequence: the legal backing for the rise of the Health Fascist.

The Health Fascist is someone you know well.  Easily recognizable by the their holy than thou attitude, occasionally mixed with hemp clothing, patchouli stink and blood shot eyes from too much pot smoking, he/She is the bozo who demanded the smoking ban in bars and restaurants.  They tell you what to eat, where to live, claim every weather change is all about global warming and issue health ‘scares’ in an effort to force a specific paternalistic agenda on everyone who doesn’t agree with their views.  The latest salvo in this war was fired by the Los Angeles City Council under the guise of business regulation: in this case the business of Pornography.

(From the Los Angeles Times)

…the Los Angeles City Council has given final approval to a city ordinance requiring porn actors to wear condoms while performing.

The 9-1 vote Tuesday marks a significant victory for the L.A.-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which has been rallying for years to protect the health of porn actors by asking agencies in California to mandate condom use during film shoots. In the past decade, porn shoots have been suspended several times after high-profile cases of porn performers infected by HIV.

“It’s a great day for the performers and safer sex in our society,” said an ebullient Michael Weinstein, president of the foundation, which has been waging a largely lonely battle for mandatory condom use for years. “This is the first legislative body to take up the issue, and the near-unanimous support is very gratifying.”

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is supportive of the ordinance, believing it to address a public health issue, a mayoral spokesman said.

Ok, I understand how this might spare the performers in the pornographic industry exposure to AIDS, Syphilis, the Clap etc.  However, how making a pornographic actor/actress wear a condom makes the rest of us safe from their STD’s is a massive leap of logic that would seemingly earn Weinstein a trip to a Vulcan run Talmudic Logic Re-training Camp.  It also treats adults in an adults only (except for Tracy Lords back in the day) industry as children who can’t make up their own minds.

Fetish porn star Lorelei Lei eloquently addressed the issue in a recent article for Salon.com:

Among performers I know, there is a mix of opinions as to whether they mind actually using condoms on set themselves – a different question than the one of a legislated condom mandate. Some, like Nina Hartley, who is also a sex educator and has training as a nurse, are strongly opposed to using condoms at work, believing that they may actually increase likelihood of STI transmission. Personally, I’m not opposed to using condoms during my shoots – in fact, I already do. I became a condom-only performer in 2010, after eight years of working non-condom. But during my time as a non-condom performer, I never once contracted an STI on set that condoms would have prevented, and truthfully, I’m not sure that condoms actually keep me safer than testing alone. Further, I would never want to work on a set that required condoms in lieu of STI testing. The company I’ve worked for since 2010 is a fetish company, and as such, there is less emphasis on penetration in most of the scenes I shoot – meaning that I worry less about what Nina Hartley oh-so-glamorously calls “friction burn.” 

Thus a question to Mr. Weinstein and his health fascist ilk e.g. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: you’ve managed to help regulate smoking, food, sex and now voyeurism.  Are you going to join with the religious right and demand Roe v. Wade be overturned because they’re aren’t enough regulations of how adults choose to live their lives?  Of course these are the same people who like to cast the Protestant fundamentalists as proto-Taliban who want to control people’s lives through religion.

Health Fascists aren’t concerned about our immortal souls/essence/beings; they’re concerned about our Cholesterol numbers and keeping the heart arteries clean.  And they’ll make sure you stay healthy and leave a good-looking corpse even if they have to put you into Health Re-education Camps to do it.