It's true. Deep down, leaders in the anti-abortion movement really just want to punish women. "Saving the babies" is their cover, their friendly crowd-pleasing message. They clearly don't actually want to prevent any actual abortions. Because they want to get rid of birth control too.

But then, from this perspective, the pill began to do terrible damage. "I cannot imagine any development in human history, after the Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the pill," Mohler [president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary], continued. "It became almost an assured form of contraception, something humans had never encountered before in history. Prior to it, every time a couple had sex, there was a good chance of pregnancy. Once that is removed, the entire horizon of the sexual act changes. I think there could be no question that the pill gave incredible license to everything from adultery and affairs to premarital sex and within marriage to a separation of the sex act and procreation."

Got that girls? You are evil, fallen, if you want to have sex and not get pregnant.

(And a big, ahem here, their rhetoric decries sex without procreation as reducing people to "bodies," but I can't help feeling that they are reducing me to less than a human body, to an incubator, a life-support machine for a potential fetus.)

Now, these people seem kind of crazy to me. They seem like that guy in Dr. Strangelove who keeps going on about "precious bodily fluids." But if all they wanted was to convince people who already followed their wacky worldview to eschew contraception, they wouldn't be any worse than people who believe in astrology, or homeopathy, or the inerrancy of the Pope, or anything else I don't personally believe in. People are free to believe that having lots of sex infuses them with mystical energy, or that God wants them to have twelve kids, or that total abstinence is the gateway to Heaven, or whatever. It's still a free country.

Except these guys have something -- ambition, hubris, ego -- that makes them want to force the rest of us to appear to share their worldview. Like if an Amish cult took over and outlawed electricity. They don't want it to be a free country. They want it to be a country according to their own design. They have political schemes, and their schemes have no room for those of us who simply don't agree with them.

Even if you don't like abortion, if you are a woman, or if you like women, these people are not on your side. Shun them.

PS: The title is a Franz Ferdinand quote.