Allah has picked a fight with several feminist bloggers over his perception of their perception of anti-woman sex politics.

As we’ve discussed here before, nearly every argument that comes out of the feminist camp depends on bad-faith assumptions about their opponents’ motives. Jill, for example, never tires of reminding us that what the pro-life movement is really all “about” is controlling women. Concerns about dead babies? Just a big smokescreen for misogyny and uterus-harvesting. . . .

The more doctrinaire or powerful a conservative is, the more conscious his misogyny is assumed to be. For those less doctrinaire and powerful—well, they might not be evil per se, but at the very least they’re acting according to a false consciousness. . . . If you could dig deep into our unconsciousness, you’d see we’re all just cheerleaders for the patriarchy too.

I suspect, however, he and his cohort would not be accused of controlling women and hating women’s sexuality if they didn’t consistently take positions that served invariably, and often exclusively, to control women and punish their sexuality, irrespective of any impact on, or relation to, the issue of “dead babies”.

The anti-sex right is consistently anti-contraception and anti-sex-education no matter how much evidence mounts up that that contributes to unplanned pregnancies, and to abortion. Many of them are opposed to condoms and HPV vaccines, because they are beside themselves at the thought of actual sex and are not moved from that position by little things like AIDS and cervical cancer. They demand the right both to control and to judge women’s sexual behavior, not merely determining how and whether women can prevent or terminate unwanted pregnances, but also whether they (the right-wingers) personally will allow women to have access to legal medications for doing so. Prominent anti-sex activists refer to women as “murderers” and “baby-killers” for having abortions; some have proposed criminal penalties for women aborting unwanted pregnancies. Some have actively promoted “shaming” for unapproved sex as a cultural practice; others – including the recent past Director of the President’s Council on Bioethics – have encouraged “courting” and fathers’ determination of daughters’ marriage choices for adult women. Right-wing organizations often actively distort information about sex (James Dobson’s Web site claims that rape cannot result in pregnancy), and actively seek to prevent young people from learning simple facts about sex and contraception. More and more legal efforts are made every day not only to prohibit abortion but to intervene in pregnancy, forcing women to carry pregnancies to term even when abortion is legal, or punishing women for their behavior while pregnant. Right-wing groups are promoting “covenant marriage” to prevent straight women from leaving bad marriages, and “defense of marriage bills” to prevent lesbians from entering into good ones. They have demanded fathers’ vetos over abortion, and abandoning careers for full-time homemaking as a preferred life for mothers.

It’s possible that the people who do all these things are sincerely concerned about fetuses – in fact it seems clear they like them far more than they like the women in whose bodies the fetuses reside – but every one of their policies can be explained by hostility to women and women’s sexuality, while many of them are irrelevant to sex, and many of them are actively counterproductive from the perspective of reducing abortions. The only reasonable conclusion is that they hate women more than they hate abortion, and in fact there is little evidence that they really hate abortion anyway (since all their anti-abortion positions can also be explained by misogyny, while some of their anti-woman positions are incompatible with a strong commitment against abortion).

When they stop acting like misogynists, they’ll stop being accused of misogyny.