Meghan Daum: Christine O'Donnell's Real Roots
[Meghan Daum is a columnist for the LA Times.]
...Admittedly, we don't yet have enough information to know whether the abstinence-only, anti-gay, anti-porn, anti-masturbation platform on which [Christine O'Donnell has] built her reputation has worked out as well for her in practice as in preachability. But O'Donnell is no Palin clone. For one thing, we know for sure that O'Donnell, who was born in New Jersey in 1969, is a bona fide member of Generation X. Even if she continues to come across like a wacky, sanctimonious wingnut, it could be in a distinctly Gen X way. And that may be one more way we'll begin to see that the "tea party" isn't as monolithic as it appears....
O'Donnell's public crusade against premarital sex, however, is...revealing, in that it sounds like it's coming from a place of real fear and distress. In a 1997 interview in the Washington Times, she said that after her antiabortion views got her booed at Harvard, she detected not anger but hurt in the crowd and "cried out to God to use me to touch that generation."...
...[I]n those pre-AIDS cocktail days, the standard message was that there was no such thing as totally safe sex, protected or not, and that it was only a matter of time before the disease ravaged the non-IV-drug-using heterosexual population. The free-for-all that baby boomers had enjoyed was over; the sex-positive, "Girls Gone Wild" sensibility of the millennials was years away. People were still getting it on, of course. But somehow it didn't quite feel like a "getting it on" kind of culture....
Read entire article at LA Times
...Admittedly, we don't yet have enough information to know whether the abstinence-only, anti-gay, anti-porn, anti-masturbation platform on which [Christine O'Donnell has] built her reputation has worked out as well for her in practice as in preachability. But O'Donnell is no Palin clone. For one thing, we know for sure that O'Donnell, who was born in New Jersey in 1969, is a bona fide member of Generation X. Even if she continues to come across like a wacky, sanctimonious wingnut, it could be in a distinctly Gen X way. And that may be one more way we'll begin to see that the "tea party" isn't as monolithic as it appears....
O'Donnell's public crusade against premarital sex, however, is...revealing, in that it sounds like it's coming from a place of real fear and distress. In a 1997 interview in the Washington Times, she said that after her antiabortion views got her booed at Harvard, she detected not anger but hurt in the crowd and "cried out to God to use me to touch that generation."...
...[I]n those pre-AIDS cocktail days, the standard message was that there was no such thing as totally safe sex, protected or not, and that it was only a matter of time before the disease ravaged the non-IV-drug-using heterosexual population. The free-for-all that baby boomers had enjoyed was over; the sex-positive, "Girls Gone Wild" sensibility of the millennials was years away. People were still getting it on, of course. But somehow it didn't quite feel like a "getting it on" kind of culture....