Redefining Queer

First of all, Dan Savage rules:

Straight Rights Update Earlier this month Republicans in South Dakota successfully banned abortion in that state. Last week the GOP-controlled state house of representatives in Missouri voted to ban state-funded family-planning clinics from dispensing birth control. "If you hand out contraception to single women," one Republican state rep told The Kansas City Star, "we're saying promiscuity is OK." On the federal level, Republicans are blocking the over-the-counter sale of emergency contraception and keeping a 100 percent effective HPV vaccine—a vaccine that will save the lives of thousands of women every year—from being made available.

The GOP's message to straight Americans: If you have sex, we want it to fuck up your lives as much as possible. No birth control, no emergency contraception, no abortion services, no life-saving vaccines. If you get pregnant, tough shit. You're having those babies, ladies, and you're making those child-support payments, gentlemen. If you get HPV and it leads to cervical cancer, well, that's too bad. Have a nice funeral, slut.

What's it going to take to get a straight rights movement off the ground? The GOP in Kansas wants to criminalize hetero heavy petting, for God's sake! Wake up and smell the freaking holy war, breeders! The religious right hates heterosexuality just as much as it hates homosexuality. Fight back!

It’s not that they hate heterosexuality—it’s that they hate anyone who has sex for any other reason than babymaking. We don’t need a straight rights movement; we need a Sex for Pleasure Movement! Lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgendered folks, single folks, married couples who are deliberately childless, married couples who just don’t want kids yet or have enough already—all of us are queer now. We want the right to have sex how we want it, when it want it, with whom we want it. We want control over making love and making babies, and our decisions are no one else’s goddamned business.

We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it—and get out of our pants!

And a personal aside to the Republican state rep who told The Kansas City Star that handing out contraception to single women is saying that promiscuity is okay… If you withhold contraception from women, I’ll take that as a reversal of the GOP’s position on blowjobs. You can’t impeach all of us!

(Hat tip to Jessica at Feministing.)