This month's Atlantic Monthly isn't that good, but there are a few gems in it, like this response by Caitlin Flanagan in the Letters to the Editor section. Flanagan apparently wrote a piece critical of Planned Parenthood. P-Squared complained with letters to the editor, and Flanagan responded. Although I don't agree with everything she says (for one, she respects the organization, whereas I find it little better than a prep school for Brothel U), the bulk of her response was so hard hitting, it could've been written by Dawn Eden:
Whoever is writing the copy for teenwire.com clearly has an abiding and vivid interest in the sex play of minors. The site instructs kids on anal and oral sex; it tells boys that they can reduce nocturnal emissions by engaging in sex play with a partner; it includes a glossary of slang terms, which I have no desire to repeat here. Children are welcome to address questions to the teenwire.com experts. One had been asked to engage in cyber sex, but didn't know what it was or how to do it. Teenwire.com helpfully gave her the 411. A fifteen-year-old girl seeking to initiate a sexual relationship with a twenty-year-old man was told that some states have “double standards” about this sort of thing, and that she should “Call the office of the attorney general in [her] state to find out what the laws are there” to learn if the liaison is legal. Clearly, the organization has developed a new mission, one that includes participating in the increasing sexualization of our nation's youth and performing a role best described as “sexual advocacy.”
“Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession,” Margaret Sanger wrote, “the woman today arises.” What the Planned Parenthood of my youth offered to me and to millions of other young women wasn't just contraception; it was something more along the lines of human dignity. An organization that receives 32 percent of its funding from the federal government, whose Web site advises teenyboppers to try chocolate condoms to make oral sex more fun, doesn't give us or our children dignity, or anything like it. It reduces the noblest of causes to something squalid–or worse, something shameful.
