Strange Bedfellows

"Oh, you scarlet jezebel, surely you must fear the wrath of my mighty trunk now!" (Image courtesy of Fucking Dungeon.com

One of the phenomena that I find most puzzling is that some bondage fans are socially conservative -- most amazingly, some bondage/DiD site WEBMASTERS are conservative. Not just conservative in terms of wanting the government to be kept small and unintrusive, but SOCIALLY conservative.

It puzzles me because one of the things I know about social conservatives (or religious conservatives as they are also called -- for almost all purposes, they're pretty much the same) is that if they ever got any serious political power they would proceed to lock up anyone who posted or consumed sexual bondage imagery.

You may reasonably argue that social conservatives had a great deal of political power under the Bush Administration, but I would respectfully disagree. If they had power, they didn't get a whole hell of a lot done with it. They got a few conservative Catholics (hence anti-abortion) judges appointed to the Supreme Court. They got some Federal money diverted to religious charity and educational programs. They got child porn thoroughly outlawed (I would argue that dislike of child molesters and child porn is so widely distributed in our society that you can hardly call it an issue that belongs to any political persuasion, but it's part of religious conservatives' agenda, so I'll give them that).

Other than that, not a whole hell of a lot got done for them. Abortion didn't get outlawed. Roe v. Wade hasn't been struck down ... yet, anyway. The wall between church and state remains intact, except for a few tiny cracks like the Federal funding for faith-based charities mentioned above). Homosexuals are allowed to run free. (OK, they're not yet free to marry, but this is a very recent social conservative battleground and maintaining the status quo on it hardly represents any kind of advance for religious conservatives -- it's more of a holding action.)

Most especially, in terms of censoring every kind of porn except child porn, the social conservatives have been very nearly complete failures. This is partly the result of the accident of history that is known as 911, because prior to 911 the religious conservative Attorney General John Ashcroft was readying a major anti-porn initiative, but then was forced to throw all of DoJ's resources into chasing down actual criminals rather than people who were just too sexy to be allowed to run free.

I'll concede that over the past eight years the social conservatives did a LITTLE more than break even in terms of their goals, but only a LITTLE more. They have had nothing like the power that, say, the mullahs hold in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia. The American social conservatives' wishes do not tend to become law as the mullahs do in their respective countries, but continue to be pretty much ignored.

That said, the Republican Party and most especially its social conservative wing has been solidly opposed to freedom of expression with regard to sexuality for many decades. They've been behind every major censorship initiative the federal government has taken, and quite a few that it hasn't. If there has been on certainty in politics over the last 70 years, it's that social conservatives love to censor and hate sexual imagery.

The social/religious conservatives hate VANILLA sexual imagery, hell, they hate SOFTCORE vanilla sexual imagery. You can IMAGINE how they feel about bondage imagery. (They hate hate HATE it.)

And if they had the kind of power that the mullahs have in their countries, you can be sure that every last bondage-related website webmaster in the country would be either out of business, in jail, or headed that way, along with every last sexually-oriented site webmaster.

So, being a bondage site webmaster and a social conservative are contradictory, to say the least. Basically, you're promoting the agenda of people whose agenda includes putting you in jail.

Un-fricking believable.