A recent Rock the Vote campaign charges young people to withhold wanton sex from those who oppose current initiatives for health care reform. The video campaign, already capturing 40,000 plus viewers on YouTube, is filled with an indecent display of sexuality in the interest of gaining a captive audience. While it seems some people have taken time to listen to what Rock the Vote is saying, it does not seem that the liberal minded group has really advanced any meaningful position.
Aside from lacking any substantive argument, Rock the Vote's new campaign attempts to enroll the youth in a campaign to withhold sex from those who oppose health care reform. At the end of the video, they offer the following pledge:
We pledge ourselves to the health and liberty of young Americans and to government for the people. We pledge to educate ourselves, to stand against those who fight us, with mind, body, and spirit, and to never [having sex with] you if you are against us. We will vote against you, work against you, and once again, just in case you forgot, never ever, never ever, never ever, never ever [have sex with] you.
To be frank, the nature of their pledge is grotesque and utterly absurd. First, it does not seem that withholding sex in the interest of health care reform would have any meaningful effect on the vote; that is, it doesn't seem that either the allegedly sex-starved youth, or individual members of the Senate, will abandon their current positions on health care reform simply because a radical group is "holding out for health care." Secondly, when one attempts to make the health care debate a matter of sexual leveraging, as opposed to rational inquiry, they reduce the credibility of their argument.
Through their campaign, Rock the Vote displays a certain position on sexuality, namely, that it should be used as a tool-- in this case, to change the current political landscape. And this is perhaps the biggest problem with their position. The arguments are rhetorically innocuous, yet they indirectly proliferate a sexually liberal mentality. And only in a culture of young people inordinately attached to, or even expectant of, "hooking-up" would the withholding of pre-marital sex be viewed as a threat to the opposition.
Rock the Vote draws upon the idea that licentious sex is actually a benefit that we rightfully share in, and in so doing, they obscure the real purpose of intimate, bodily expression. It is not as though young health care reformers are encouraged to withhold intercourse for the sake of modesty or decency, or some greater good such as marital fidelity. They are told to withhold sex because they can frustrate the desires for lawless sex outside the marital context; and insofar as this is the case, they indirectly affirm that inordinate expectation for non-committed sex.
What's worse is that intimate, bodily expression is portrayed to be a tool justly utilizable even for political gain. This is the contemporary view of sex: sex is an instrumental means and thereby can be implemented for all intents and purposes. Commonly, in the pre-marital or extra-marital context, sex is used as a tool for pleasure or a perceived sense of interpersonal union. Though insufficient in formulation, there is at least a recognition of some of the genuinely good aspects of sexuality.
In the case of the Rock the Vote video, sex is so removed from its appropriate context that it can purportedly and justifiably be used for political gain, regardless of a consideration for its authentic character or inherent goods, such as personal union, embodiment of marital commitment, and directedness to new life
Yet again, this should not come as a surprise. The claim that intimate, bodily expression can be used in the interest of political gain is a logical consequence of treating sex as an instrumental tool. When sex is treated as a mere means, the ends for which it ought to be utilized aren't inherent to the kind of act in question; rather they vary with respect to the desires or purposes of the individual. In this case, it just so happens that the end is achieving some point of health care reform.
In the end, not only does Rock the Vote fail to be (logically) persuasive, but their demonstration of indecent content, and attempt to use sexuality as a means to effect political change proliferates a false ideology that is opposed to authentic social progress.
