Now that the Senate is poised to pass its subsidy for the insurance industry, it’s time to move on to other topics.

What, you didn’t notice the insurance industry stocks skyrocketing today?

Anyway, one of My Colleagues had the misfortune of covering Scott Roeder in court today. You remember Scott. The rightwing nutcase who shot Dr. George Tiller to death in the lobby of his church.

Roeder wanted to use the “necessity defense,” claiming that he killed Tiller to prevent the deaths of thousands of “preborn children.”

Because of the fact preborn children’s lives were in imminent danger, this was the action I chose. … I want to make sure that the focus is, of course, obviously on the preborn children and the necessity to defend them.

Fortunately, the judge said no way. But it makes me wonder what part of “Thou shalt not kill” he doesn’t understand. Of course, the bible, that wonderfully contradictory text that Christians in particular view as infallible,  has plenty of killing, long after Moses dragged those stone panels down off the mountain. And nobody ever questioned it.

After reading My Colleague’s story, I got to wondering. Why, I wondered, don’t these morons spend more of their time and energy trying to prevent unwanted pregnancies?

This would make sense to me. I have no particular love for abortion, but until women can say no and mean no, until girls can trust that their fathers, uncles, brothers and cousins won’t be sneaking into their bedrooms at night and threaten to kill them if they tell, until women no long feel they must submit to their husbands and boyfriends regardless of their own feelings or even economic circumstance — until women truly have control over their own bodies — abortion must remain an option.

But the most extreme of these lunatics — the Scott Roeders, the Randall Terrys, the David Gunns, the Paul Hills and Eric Rudolphs — aren’t the least bit interested in that. In fact, they’re largely opposed to contraception as well, something I’ve been talking about since I woke up into the real world in the 1970s. What do you think all the “no distributing condomns” nonsense is about? Or their hatred of Planned Parenthood?

They don’t want contraception because, well, they believe that only a man and a woman married to each other should have sex, and then only for procreation.

The thing that glares when considering this fact is that nearly all these folks are men who seem to have a pretty odd view of sex. In fact, I’d have to say that their anti-abortion and anti-contraception antics are but symptoms for a much deeper conflict in their own beings.

They hate sex.

Now, for sure it has a lot to do with controlling women. And children. Actually, they think they own their women and children. That’s where the whole idea of marriage came from — can’t just have women running around having sex with whoever they want. When that happens, you end up with a lot of children who have no idea who their fathers are, and a lot of fathers who can’t live forever through their children.

And, you end up with a buncha women who aren’t shackled to their husbands and children. Hence, marriage and all its “faithful” rules.

Not that there’s anything wrong with faithful partners in a monogamous relationship. If that’s what both truly want. But when the boys make up a bunch of other rules about what women can and cannot do with their own time, well, then you get women who believe they must marry — and consequently do whatevert their husbands want — in order to survive.

And their husbands hate sex. Maybe it’s because they fear women have teeth in their vaginas just waiting to lop off a penis. Or maybe its because they never allowed themselves to think of sex as anything but that nasty thing you have to do to have children.

Now, I know a lot of men have learned that.  And some of those crazy guys have too. Look at Mark Sanford and John Ensign and Tiger Woods. But they’ve all got the one thing that to them is more important than sex — children to bear their names and carry on their legacies and wives to do their bidding. Well, maybe not so much for Sanford and Woods. Jenny and Elin seem to not take it too kindly that they’re expected to play the marriage game but their husbands aren’t held to the same standards.

But it all comes down to this garishly awful idea of sex we have. That it’s something dirty, something awful, something not to be spoken of and certainly not to be done without purpose.

Even those of us who know better still fight those almost inbred thoughts about a very natural act — even if it really were just for procreation, it’d still be a perfectly natural act.

But I don’t think sex feels so damn good just to make us feel guilty about engaging in it. And that’s what rightwing nutjobs can’t get their libidos around. They’ve had centuries of conditioning,  and now the “truths” behind that conditioning are being shown to be nothing but bullshit.

Must be really frightening. It’s never fun to find out you’re dreadfully wrong about something, and these guys are dreadfully wrong about their entire lives.

They hate sex. And they can’t stand to see people who don’t, to see people who actually enjoy that very natural act. So they must do everything they can to make sex unenjoyable. And the only way they know to enforce their beliefs on women is to force us to bear the consequences of having sex — to bear their children, and raise them.  If we don’t want to do that, well, our only choice is to not have sex.

Obviously, I’m not addressing gay sex here — that’s what sodomy laws were designed to prevent, but we all know what happened to those. And in Texas, no doubt.

It all boils down to this, though —  in a sane world, if you don’t like abortions, don’t have one. If you don’t like same sex marriage, don’t marry someone of the same sex. If you don’t like atheists, don’t become one.

Unfortunately, our world at the moment is not very sane. There are still far too many people who think that allowing others to have choices infringes on their rights to believe whatever nonsense they want to believe.

The truth of it, though, is that allowing others to have choices proves the fallacies of their beliefs. That sex is bad. That women and children are property.

That all humans, not just them, have the right to live their lives as they see best.