I’ve opened up this post so that I can make comments to myself as I read Liam’s post against mine. I’m going to post this, and a more juicy response afterwards.

I have just reached the part where Liam said that he is dissecting my post line by line. I was worried that this would happen, because I know that my opinion has invariably been clumped together with “I think abstinence is better than birth control” and “sex is a sin” and “parents should control the lives of their children in a totalitarian way”. We’ll see where this is going.

Liam was perfectly aware of the name of the journalist. Strangely, I had a copy of Imprint available to me. However, I could not bring myself to soil my hands with the newsprint a second time in a single day. For some reason, I thought Liam had mentionned her with nothing but fondness in the past. Apparently I was wrong. He screams for blood.

For the doctor-patient confidentiality, I will get to this sticky situation later. The whole doctor-patient-parent arrangement seems riddled with a dense psychosis. Up is down, backwards is forwards, and the logic is equivalent to cos(Pi/2).

Liam brings up the point that having contraceptives does not drive one to have sex. When he said that I was being hypocritical, I had immediately assumed that he was referring to my earlier post about parents believing the humanpapillo virus vaccine (or Hep B vaccine for that matter) would drive their children to have sex. I haven’t seen if he mentions that yet. I wanted to make a note of this while it is fresh. I realize that they are on the same line. But I have to argue that contraceptives are more intricately tied into the process of actually having sex, whereas HPV and Hep B exists in some lost dimension of space.

I will - however - agree that contraceptives do not drive people to have sex. People will have sex regardless. I know firsthand that the temptation of sex can easily overpower proper “safety regulations”. Apparently I have a horseshoe stuck up my ass or something.

Liam’s comments about uneducated women needing the pill is something that I expected. And I agree, in part. My disagreement lies in the degree of education that someone at that age might possess about the whole situation. And it isn’t so much about the sexual aspects as the medical aspect. But I’ll get to that in a follow up post.

” I don’t want them peopling the world with other idiots”

The above is an interesting quote from Liam. It ties into a post that I thought about but elected not to create because of the negative reprecussions I felt it would have. I decided to do this post instead. Interesting how I still ended up with a huge mess on my plate.

He brings up the video game versus contraceptive point. I also expected this, because I thought that the content of the two seperate debates (violent video games and contraception) would be mixed. My point is - as it was always - the idea of parents having choices made for them, the way parent-child relations are quickly becoming legislated or non-existent, and really the way the whole “parent” dynamic is becoming a moot point.

I was a little blown away by the fact that Liam took my dodging of authority thing in that sense. I wasn’t trying to imply that sex is a crime in anyway. Perhaps the order of my points was incorrect. I probably should have started with the distance between parent and child and used the Portland incident as an example of how it continues to get worse. The point of the no consequences point was to simply say that the more “outs” children have to avoid dealing with their parents, the harder it is for parents to get to know their children and trust them. This can make for even more paranoid parents. Which then results in those situations where parents call in to the university to find out what their child is doing classes or in the goddamn library. I seriously had a parent ask for that. As if we had a camera feed in the library to watch kids. “Yeah. Your son is banging two prostitutes with a whole collection of lovely STIs. Want me to stream it on to your computer, Mr. Parent?”

And so the problem continues.

I know being a parent is hard work. But the way the system is structured makes it even harder. That was the point. I don’t have a problem with providing contraception to people who need it. I have a problem with the problems that can result from this. Unfortunately, the contraception also stops other problems.

Expect this to be rewritten and presented for your viewing pleasure. And you had to post it on Thursday. I was watching The Office and having a good time when this showed up. Wednesday had nothing on Liam. Wednesday had nothing on… :’(