"Perhaps Regina Marcia Benjamin should suggest teaching pro-abortion-rights bloggers that masturbation is part of human sexuality."

Says Meade, here, in the discussion of the ugliness of the mockery of the "masturbating fetus," and alluding to Benjamin's predecessor in the role of Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders, who was fired by Bill Clinton in 1994 for saying that children should be taught that masturbation "is a part of human sexuality, and it's a part of something that perhaps should be taught."

(She meant taught about, but there was much mockery, as people assumed or pretended they believed that she thought that school teachers should be showing children how to do it, as opposed to simply teaching that it's something that many people do, that isn't physically harmful, and that avoids pregnancy and disease.)

This mockery of masturbation is quite fascinating. I'm drawn to Scalia's notorious dissenting opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, in which he defended the state's power to criminalize sodomy:

State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices.

Imagine a state today attempting to prosecute the crime of masturbation. Of course, the defense would be the right of privacy, and the courts would hear masturbation described in the loftiest terms. It would parallel what we heard — over the past few decades — about homosexuality, which was initially viewed as a lowly or ridiculous matter that didn't belong in the treasured realm of constitutional rights.

Given the importance of privacy rights to the pro-abortion-rights bloggers, I think their laughing at the masturbating fetus shows the poverty of their understanding of the very rights they'd like to pressure others to believe in.

By the way, that much-produced theater piece "The Vagina Monologues" gets reverent about masturbation:

I lay back and closed my eyes. I put the mirror down. I watched myself floating above myself. I watched as I slowly began to approach myself and re-enter. I felt like an astronaut re-entering the surface of the earth. It was very quiet this re-entry, quiet and gentle. I bounced and landed, landed and bounced. I came into my own muscles and blood and cells and then I slid into my vagina. It was suddenly easy and I fit. I was all warm and pulsing and ready and young and alive. And then, without looking, with my eyes still closed, I put my finger on what had suddenly become me. 

As the Supreme Court said: "one's own concept of existence." Or as the commenter at the fetus-mocking pro-abortion-rights blog said: "'I fap, therefore I am'? Sounds like a plausible slogan for today’s GOP wankers. Jesus God." Exactly. Jesus. God. Cosmic.