Tales from the Hive-Plan B

Dr. Marc Siegal asks what should be a rhetorical question,

How many parents think it’s okay for a twelve-year-old girl to have unprotected sex and then decide on her own to follow it up with the morning-after pill?

It is not a rhetorical question because a Federal Judge has ruled that in his opinion society has "evolved" to the point that evidently, again in his opinion, teenagers and preteens are considered women simply because they can have children and thus should have equal access to the Plan B contraception.

The contradiction that these newly defined "women" can not even go into a R rated movie without an adult because some scenes may contain sexual activity or language judged too "mature" for children seems not to have dissuaded the judge  from this ruling. This is what happens when law fails to to be grounded in common sense, when defining bureaucratic rules are judged to be more important than the health of society.

But Dr. Siegal's question remains how many parents would agree that it is okay for girls to engage in the sexual activities that require the morning after pill and then obtain it over the counter? Dr Seigal answers this question with what most of us agree would be our judgement of such a parent.

If you find any parents like this, please contact social services right away

A parent who would promote the idea that their daughter ought to engage in sexual activity in their early teens and then take a pill to "protect" themselves from the consequences would be considered to be not only outside the mainstream but actually unfit. Yet here we are with a judge ruling and liberal's applauding a public policy which promotes just such behavior.

 I know many liberal friends and family members who probably agree with the ruling making the Plan B pill available without a doctor's prescription,  parental consent and over the counter.  But in no way would they agree that their child should engage in such activity or that they, as parents, should be deemed not to have a say in their child's sexual "choices". The disconnect here is both obvious and stupefying.

Why are they so disconnected? How is it that they recognize the ill affects of activities that they would not allow their own children to participate in, yet promote as public policy laws and regulations that make it possible for such activities to expand and make common place thus corroding parental and societal traditions and norms?

Perhaps the answer comes in another recent headline grabbing story.

I am referring to the controversial promotional spot made by college professor and political commentator Melissa Harris-Perry for MSNBC where she makes the "progressive" argument for child rearing.

"...we’ve always had a private notion of children, your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the household’s we start making better investments."

When it "takes a village to raise the child" familial love and responsibility is not only diluted, it ceases to be a major factor in the decision making process. If everyone is responsible for the child, nobody is. Public policy based upon collectivist responsibility makes everyone less responsible not more so.

When public policy prescriptions become divorced from core traditional family oriented structures, then it is easy to see the child not as someone's daughter or son, but rather as simply a member of the hive who needs to be controlled so as not to adversely affect "the collective." By viewing people as members of the collective rather than as individuals it has the affect of dehumanizing the process.

To the progressive mind the problem isn't that children are having unprotected sex, or that children are having sex at all, the problem is that they are a burden to the collective if they do get pregnant. Teenage pregnancy is a societal problem which adversely affects the collective so the progressive's solution is not grounded in parental control, but rather in collectivist control. "The kid is having unprotected sex, so let's give her a pill." End of problem

Young girls have always  made "mistakes", it is simply nature, but in the past "old fashioned" moral codes were such that the boy was expected to "do the right thing". Many a family, mine included, at least two generations maybe more, started this way. Now we are saying that there is no need to do the right thing since childhood sex is no longer the wrong thing, just something that needs a solution so as not to be a burden on the collective.

Is over the counter unrestricted use of Plan B a better solution to our daughter's "mistake"  than doing the "the right thing"?  I don't know, but I seriously doubt it.  It seems that asking children who engage in what we consider adult activities to take responsibility for their actions by doing the adult thing and raising the child in a family setting, or at least taking care of the child as adults are supposed to do for their offspring is better for society than a policy that promotes sex among children without consequences.  Or is sexual activity no longer considered adult activity? Then why the R rating at movies?

But the bigger issue here is that when you begin to make judgments and policies based on a collectivist view point, it becomes inevitable that those judgments and policies will cease to be grounded in reality. Policies will drift further and further away from the people they are intended to protect and serve.

You don't think so?

Real parents don't want their teenage daughters out having unprotected sex, or any sex for that matter, then "covering it up" with a pill that they can buy over the counter at the store, do they? Do you? Of course not, it is not the way parents feel and operate in the real world. But in the collectivist world, it makes total sense.

  While this collectivist  philosophy superficially seems to protect society and the child from "unintended pregnancies"  in reality it helps undermine the foundation of all successful societies, the family. What the family finds destructive, a judge has ruled must be promoted and liberals who would not promote such activities for their own children, cheer it on for the good of the collective, insanity.

Will young girls become more promiscuous  as the result of the unrestricted  availability of the Plan B pill? Given time it is very likely they will but I suspect  that sixteen year old boys will be purchasing Plan B pills in greater numbers than twelve year old girls and that too is the reality of human nature inside the hive or outside of it.


The naivety and shallowness of the liberal ideology is both  frightening and sad. To be so disconnected from the real world in which they live that they constantly promote superficial unworkable solutions for nearly every societal problem they encounter. Solutions grounded not in their own experience or in human nature, but in some hoped for Utopian vision of "what ought to be." In the real world we call this  unrealistic view, childish.

How is this disconnect even possible?  This policy based on hope rather than reality is possible because in the progressive's  world the individual is viewed as subservient to the collective.  But this too is not a true in  reality. In the real world self interest dictates peoples choices most of the time. People do not live their lives making choices and decisions based on what will be most beneficial to their neighbors, they make choices based on what is best for themselves and their family. Yet the progressive's would design a political system based on the premise that people should live their lives contrary to their ingrained and necessary human nature of self interest and self survival.

It is easy to see how people such as Melissa Harris-Perry who are so steeped into the progressive's collectivist view of the world that they would fail to see how disconnecting traditional parentage from society would destroy society, but one wonders how a judge could be so far removed from reality.