Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
A recent Teen Vogue article promoting anal sex has sparked national outrage and a growing movement to have the magazine pulled from store shelves while the magazine tries to defend itself with the usual liberal name-calling, indecencies, and Catholic-bashing.
Fox News’ Todd Starnes is reporting on Teen Vogue’s response to parental outrage over a “how to” article on anal sex for teens entitled “A Guide to Anal Sex” published in their June issue.
Written by self-described sex educator Gigi Engle, she tells teens, “This is anal 101, for teens, beginners and all inquisitive folk. . . Anal sex and anal stimulation can be awesome, and if you want to give it a go, you do that. More power to you.”
As Starnes points out, the original article forgot to include any references to practicing “safe sex” but later amended the on-line-only article to include a sentence calling condoms “non-negotiable.”
Unfortunately, they left out the part that condoms are only designed to provide safety during vaginal intercourse – not anal sex.
And what is their response to the justifiable outrage over this irresponsible and dangerously misleading article?
To call all critics “homophobic.”
Phillip Picardi, the magazine’s digital editorial director, sent out a flurry of tweets complaining that the magazine had been “inundated with hate mail saying we promote sodomy and want teens to get AIDS.”
He then tries to divert attention away from the sodomy-promoting article by erecting a strawman: “How can you expect young women to not get pregnant without access to reproductive health care?”
What does anal sex have to do with getting pregnant and having access to reproductive health care?
Picardi continues his confused tirade by attacking the Catholic church, accusing his Catholic school of being “guilty of endangering all of us by sheer omission of FACTS. EDUCATION doesn’t equal ENCOURAGEMENT.”
He goes on to complain that he “also had a teacher tell me gay sex was a sin in God’s eyes.”
He then resorted to the favorite liberal talking point.
“The backlash to this article is rooted in homophobia,” Picardi wrote. “It’s also laced in arcane delusion about what it means to be a young person today.”
The grand finale to his tirade was to tweet a photo of himself kissing a man while flashing the middle finger.
Unfortunately for Teen Vogue, parents are experts at dealing with precisely this kind of high school temper tantrum and are hardly put off by a finger-wielding Catholic-bashing bigot.
One of those parents, Elizabeth Johnson, also known as The Activist Mommy, launched a national campaign to urge local stores and public libraries to pull Teen Vogue from bookshelves.
“I was truly flabbergasted,” Johnston told Starnes on his new radio show. “They should not be teaching sodomy to our children,” she said. “This is not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue. This is not a conservative issue or liberal issue. This is a parent issue.”
She added: “This has nothing to do with homophobia. This is about parents protecting their children from perversion.”
Thus far, more than 10 million people have viewed a video of Johnston burning a copy of Teen Vogue in her backyard.
Not exactly good publicity but why should a product that belongs in the trash get anything better?
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