Arizona Senator John McCain initially supported the Blunt Amendment, a measure that would have allowed individual employers to choose whether they wanted to allow employee health plans to cover birth control. Recently, however, he seems to have changed his mind regarding controlling women’s reproductive choices.

Last weekend, McCain appeared on Meet The Press, where David Gregory asked him about a bill introduced by an Arizona senate committee that would allow employers to demand that employees furnish proof that they were not using the contraceptive pill provided by employee health insurance plans to prevent pregnancy in order for them to approve their coverage. This is the segment — with a transcript below:

David Gregory: Are you concerned at all to see the focus — certain elements of the Republican Party on social issues? In your own state of Arizona, there’s this contraception bill that even the governor has said would put women in the uncomfortable position where they had to say to their employers why they wanted contraception, and why it should be covered — is that a bad road?

John McCain: I am confident that that legislation will not reach the governor’s desk and if it did it would be vetoed.

Gregory: It’s the wrong legislation.

McCain: Well, it certainly does not reflect — in my view — the majority view of the people of Arizona.

Gregory: Do you think that there is something of a war on women among Republicans?

McCain: I think we have to fix that. I think that there is a perception out there because of the way this whole contraception issue played out — we need to get off of that issue, in my view. I think we ought to respect the right of women to make choices in their lives and make that clear, and get back onto what the American people really care about.

Let’s hope the rest of the party isn’t far behind.

Header image by Rona Proudfoot.

Having a few foreigners on staff requires us to do a bit of explaining when it comes to American politics. Usually, any questions posed to us are answered rather quickly, and we take great pleasure (and pride) in seeing their faces light up with understanding. However bizarre our way of doing things may appear, one thing is clear: democracy is of the utmost importance in the United States. No matter where they come from, foreigners understand and respect that.

But there is one question we just haven’t been able to answer to our satisfaction — at least not without exposing the absolutely disgusting hypocrisy of people who claim to be interested in preserving the beautiful tradition of freedom and autonomy that this country represents. The question was posed simply enough: “The conservative party’s devotion to preserving the life of the unborn is admirable, but their concern seems to only extend to the unborn. Why are people so devoted to life in the name of God treat the very children they have saved as unnecessary burdens on the state, to be excised like so many malignant tumors?”

The question had arisen shortly after an article on Mother Jones had started to make the rounds around the newsroom, one in which the conservative presidential candidate Rick Santorum, stated in no uncertain terms that the nation is “falling apart because of single moms.”

Santorum believes that welfare is “paying” people to have sex. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but his emphasis on single mothers makes his point clear: welfare pays women to have sex. The Republican party wants to take away the oral contraceptive pill, make abortion in every instance illegal, and force women to carry even still born children to term, at the risk of their own lives. Essentially, they want to take away a woman’s ability to decide when she starts a family — or make any other reproductive choice for herself.

And they also want to penalize the result of having no choice as to when they start a family once they do. Per Santorum, the cause of crime in this country is directly related to the number of single-parent households and the only way to stop it is to no longer assist them financially. Not only does he have plans for welfare, he also believes it is essential to eliminate the head-of-household exemptions provided for unmarried parents filing taxes, while tripling the exemption for parents who are married — so long as they are man and wife, not any other configuration.

The answer to the question was quite embarrassing, for obvious reasons. It has become quite clear that the conservative party doesn’t actually care about the unborn children they are fighting so hard to preserve. If they did, they would understand that education and access to healthcare and day care are essential. But they mock education and hate the idea of providing healthcare or any other form of help, and they rail against women who try to raise children on their own.

This clearly isn’t really about creating better lives for people, but creating a society in their image, regardless of what doing so will have on personal liberty, privacy, and society as a whole. Put simply, these individuals are an embarrassment and a threat to this country and everything it stands for. Please known that they do not speak for all of us.

Header image by Gage Skidmore.

The Huffingtom Post has a great video of best-selling young adult author Judy Blume speaking out about reproductive choice in women, hoping to remind this generation what it was like to have no options in her time. It’s a needful reminder — we have the vote and we need to use it, to remind the government that we need to have authority over our bodies and ourselves.

Whether we would ever get an abortion ourselves if it came to that, whether our church supports the use of contraceptives — these should be our choices for us to select according to our consciences and our faith, not for someone to decide for us.

This is a transcript of what she says:

I don’t understand why young people think feminism is a bad word. Maybe they just don’t know. They don’t know. They don’t know what it was like to worry all the time about getting pregnant. To be terrified even within our marriages. That was such an enormous fear. There was nothing you could do about it, except a back alley kind of abortion — and that could kill you.

I went to an all-girls public high school. Two of the top girls were pregnant at graduation and those hasty marriages and having babies just changed their lives. For ever. It’s not a romantic thing. That’s why I hate that teenage — whatever reality show that is on reality television — teenage mothers. I mean it’s not — it’s not romantic. It’s not fun. It’s tough.

The above video features women reading out quotes from prominent members and supporters of the Republican Party. The following is a transcript:

“Forcing women to have an ultrasound before an abortion is justified because they already made the decision to be vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.” — Republican lawmaker.

“The agenda of Planned Parenthood includes sexualizing young girls through the Girl Scouts.” — Representative Bob Morris, Republican

“If we’re gonna pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.” — Rush Limbaugh, Conservative talk show host

“A woman impregnated through rape should accept that horribly created gift, the gift of human life. Accept what God has given you and make the best of a bad situation.” — Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, Republican

These aren’t our words. They’re all real things said by prominent members of the Republican Party. Judging by their comments, the GOP must have a serious problem with women. And until the Republicans get over their issues, we women have got a serious problem with the Republican Party.

You don’t get any more anti-gay than the Family Research Center (FRC), which launched a new campaign recently to save marriage by combating “fake” (i.e., gay) marriages in the United Sates.

“2012 could be the ‘tipping point’ year in the battle for marriage,” their website reads. “The Left has launched the deceptive ‘Commitment Campaign’ to mislead Americans and impose affirmation of same-sex ‘marriage’ — fake marriage — on every state, county, city, school, and workplace. Family Research Council needs your immediate help to tip events for marriage by exposing and opposing the Left’s campaign, which could stop fake ‘marriage’ permanently.”

“FACT!” the site fear-mongers in bright red font. “School children will be indoctrinated. Fact! You will lose religious freedoms. Fact! Lives will be ruined by deception.” This is the video they currently have on their site:

As the news site LGBTQ Nation points out, the FRC’s vitriol is nothing new:

The FRC has had a long history of demonizing the LGBTQ community, which has led to its designation by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a certified “hate group.”

The FRC has claimed that gay activists “work to normalize sex with boys,” seek to “abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order,” and support anti-bullying programs solely in order to promote homosexuality.

In recent weeks, as marriage equality laws have passed in the Maryland and Washington state legialtures, coupled with judicial rulings that have declared anti-gay marriage laws in California and the federal “Defence of Marriage Act” (DOMA) as unconstitutional, the FRC has reacted by ratcheting up its extreme rhetoric.

In the words of the FRC:

Family Research Council believes that homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large, and can never be affirmed. It is by definition unnatural, and as such is associated with negative physical and psychological health effects. While the origins of same-sex attractions may be complex, there is no convincing evidence that a homosexual identity is ever something genetic or inborn.

Header image by Ludovic Bertron (Flickr).

Here at Sex and the 405, we have heard many rumors about the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) since we started reporting on their war on pornography, chief among them that they opposed research into an AIDS/HIV vaccine. Not content to become part of the gossip mill, we decided to dive into the allegations.

When our editrix asked Lori Yeghiayan, associate director of communications at AHF, whether its president Michael Weinstein does not support further development of an HIV vaccine, she responded: “no, that’s not accurate. There was a time — this was probably about five years ago that we had put out an argument about not spending exorbitant amounts of money on clinical trials for a vaccine when it was not really producing results. Not really basic research but actually clinical trials in several countries with thousands of people and that there had been several failures with the vaccine search in that way so we had made an argument about putting money into proven efforts, which is treatment. We are for basic research into HIV and HIV vaccines and new drugs and all that. It’s not accurate to say we’re against it.”

Okay. That makes perfect sense. But just to be sure we had all the information we hit up Google. What we found, from AHF itself, was disheartening.

On May 5, 2008, the 11th Annual Conference on Vaccine Research was scheduled to convene in Baltimore, Maryland. A little over a month before the conference, an editorial (which has since been yanked) appeared on Baltimore Sun in which AHF President Michael Weinstein and AHF Chief of Medicine Dr. Homayoon Khanlou wrote about the futility of continuing to fund vaccine research. The editorial, which remains on RedOrbit.com reads:

To control AIDS, funding must be invested in strategies that work: effective prevention efforts, routine testing and universal access to treatment — and not spent on expensive vaccine research that over 20 years has yielded little of promise other than discovering how not to make an AIDS vaccine.

The latest round of vaccine trial failures (including a large-scale Merck trial halted when the vaccine turned out to have possibly increased subjects’ risk of acquiring HIV) has added to a growing consensus in the scientific community that an AIDS vaccine is a decade or more away, if one can be developed at all.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), recently stated: “We have to leave open the possibility … that we might never get a vaccine for HIV.” That view was shared by leading AIDS expert David Baltimore, who conceded last month that the scientific community is no closer now to discovering an HIV vaccine than it was 20 years ago.

Twenty years of research and the fact remains: a vaccine against a retrovirus, the family of viruses HIV belongs to, has never been successfully developed. It is highly unlikely that there will be an AIDS vaccine — certainly not by any current standard definition of the word.

Having met the public’s criticism of his position, Weinstein elaborated on his position in an editorial for the Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks later:

There are not just two or three AIDS vaccine candidates that have failed. Every AIDS vaccine candidate to date has failed. Leading scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Dr. David Baltimore, have even gone so far as noting that we are no closer to the discovery of an AIDS vaccine today than we were 20 years ago.

In fact, not only have all the AIDS vaccine candidates failed, the latest was hurriedly pulled from clinical trial after the vaccine was found to actually put people at a significantly increased risk of contracting HIV. Twenty-seven years into the AIDS pandemic, countless billions in taxpayer (and private) vaccine funding later, and our leading researchers can’t even meet the most fundamental tenet to “do no harm.”

[...] Currently, the AIDS vaccine establishment continues its taxpayer-funded, repeatedly unsuccessful search for a preventive AIDS vaccine while an alternative many have seen work on multiple levels — successful antiretroviral treatment as both treatment and prevention — goes unchampioned.

This is why the AIDS Healthcare Foundation believes that it is time to pull the plug on U.S. taxpayer financing of the search for a vaccine, and leave it to private donors to back what has been and continues to appear to be a fruitless goal. To continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a government-funded search for an AIDS vaccine in the vain hope of success someday while millions worldwide suffer and die is simply unacceptable when other currently available strategies offer practical — and effective — alternatives.

Dr. David Baltimore, incensed by the name-dropping that linked him to Weinstein’s indictment of the “vaccine establishment” responded in an editorial co-written with Dr. Seth Berkley, a medical epidemiologist and CEO of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI):

This very pessimistic view of the possibility of success in the vaccine quest is a misreading of the situation.

Yes, the Merck trial of an experimental vaccine failed to show efficacy. But it was not a failure as a trial. It had a hugely important outcome: We now know one preparation that will not work as a vaccine. Before this trial we knew only one other direction that had failed, so our knowledge has doubled.

Knowing what not to do is useful because it informs further research. Of course, we would rather have successful trials that tell us we are going in the right direction, but AIDS vaccine development is hard, and negative trials are not a surprise. Because the trial was so professionally accomplished, we can trust its results.

Now what we need are more such trials of materials different enough from the Merck materials that we can learn something from them. The job of the research community is to make the judgment of what materials fit this criterion. But to give up at this point would be criminal. Luckily, the cool heads in the AIDS research community are not giving up — they are searching for new directions. There is a healthy debate about what those directions should be. But to our minds, we need more human clinical research, not less, if we are to find the magic formula that will protect people against AIDS.

Not to be outdone by the Nobel Prize winner, Weinstein returned to the Los Angeles Times opinion page condemning efforts to develop an AIDS vaccine as “self-serving.” He writes:

The search for an AIDS vaccine has lost its scientific purpose and turned into a self-serving quest.

How else to explain the remarks found in David Baltimore and Seth Berkley’s “Keep funding the AIDS vaccine”? Saying simply that “AIDS vaccine development is hard” is not a credible response to recent criticism leveled at the ballooning U.S. budget for AIDS vaccine research and the meager results it has produced. The argument is particularly weak when you consider that nearly $1 billion in public funding is poured annually into this fruitless quest, while millions globally lack access to the revolutionary, life-saving AIDS treatment that was developed more than 12 years ago: antiretroviral medication.

We understand the desire to make treatment available to those affected by HIV and AIDS worldwide, but to actively campaign to kill all public funding for an HIV vaccine is unconscionable. And speaking of self-serving, here’s a question we leave with you: does AHF provide the above-mentioned unchampioned treatments for HIV and AIDS?

The answer, from the AHF website: “Our healthcare centers offer thousands of clients — many of them uninsured — the finest HIV-centered primary care, and our pharmacies specialize in HIV medications. Our researchers conduct trials of the newest drugs and treatment protocols to improve patient quality of life. Through Positive Healthcare, our managed care program in California and Florida, we provide HIV positive Medicaid recipients extra tools to manage their disease.”

Image of test tubes by Horia Varlan.

Los Angeles is now the first city in the nation that requires performers to use condoms while shooting porn in areas that require permits. The Mayor signed the ordinance pushed by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation on Monday. The law will go into effect 41 days after the City Clerk posts the ordinance publicly.

You can read the complete coverage about this on the LA Weekly. But for those of you who prefer the simple version, here’s a summary:

– The ordinance claims the adult industry is responsible for the ongoing epidemic of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and the HIV/AIDS crisis in Los Angeles.

- This measure is tied to the acquisition of permits, so only performers who are shooting outside a certified sound stage are required to use condoms in scenes with vaginal or anal penetration.

- The ordinance makes no mention of protection during oral.

- The ordinance makes no mention of testing.

- Enforcement costs will be covered using the money filmmakers pay for permits. There is no mention of what entity will be enforcing condom use at shoots. The office of City Attorney Carmen Trutanich has doubts about the ability of the strapped Los Angeles Police Department to take this role and county health officials have raised concerns about regulating the industry through the Department of Public Health.

- The AHF plans to take condom enforcement to the county as a work-place license so that no matter where the shooting is happening or whether it requires a permit, all performers will have to use protection. In the meantime, they are talking with the mayor of Simi Valley, hoping they will adopt the L.A. ordinance. Other plans include taking the measure to San Francisco. AHF has vowed to follow the industry wherever it goes.

Read the ordinance yourself here.

Image of condoms by Robert Elyov, image of Jessica Janson from her collection.

KTLA is reporting that Playboy Playmate and former Baywatch babe Donna D’Errico was singled out by a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent while going through airport security at LAX for a full-body scan — and not because she looked like a threat, if you get our drift.

D’Errico was on her way to Pittsburgh with her teenage son when it happened.

“A male TSA agent took me by the elbow and said come with me,” D’Errico told KTLA. According to D’Errico, no one else was pulled out of the line for a scan. When she inquired why she was the only one selected for a body scan, the agent allegedly told her, “because you caught my eye and they didn’t.”

D’Errico said the agent pointed her out to other agents afterward, smirking, and she was not given the option to have a pat-down instead of a body-scan.

“I think these are young men and they hang out together and they’re buddies, and they see an attractive woman and they think, ‘hey, I’m going to give my buddy a thrill,” she said. She wants the TSA to take a closer look at their “randomized” system of body-scanning.

Someone should give her a pair of these for Christmas.

Their latest campaign, which pokes fun at the Transportation Security Administration’s new full-body scan measure depicts a security scan of a woman (all boobs, ribs and razor-sharp hipbones) in her bra and underwear, which reads: “Be Proud of Your Body Scan: Go Vegan.”
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We’re here to tell you that in moderation, you too can eat bacon and have a sexy security scan. Just kidding. We’re here to tell you that you’re beautiful just as you are.

In an interesting turn of events, major airports in the country have rejected the ad campaign at their security check-points. McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada, denied it on the grounds that it prohibits political ads, to which PETA Vice President Dan Matthews responded that PETA hasn’t taken a political position their airport security measures.

Southwest Airline rejected the ad in their in-flight magazine Spirit, saying it was too provocative. To that, Matthews said, “The airline may have canned it because the company is based in Dallas, the heart of the beef belt.”

We’re now accepting members for our People for the Ethical Treatment of Omnivores group.

You may remember Cyan Banister, one of the founders of the only venture capital-backed adult startup, Zivity. Well, according to the Associated Press, Banister and her husband donated $4,800 to Rand Paul, a Republican running for Senate in Kentucky.

Why is this a big deal? Because Banister is a porn-peddler and Paul is a Republican, of course!

Never mind that it makes perfect sense for sex-positive individuals to identify with a candidate who supports a more limited role for the government. This is a clear attempt by the opposition and the media to tip the scales in favor of Democrat Jack Conway, also running in Kentucky.

“A lot of Kentuckians would have a problem with a candidate accepting money from organizations that are tearing down the culture,” the AP article quoted Martin Cothran, who is a policy analyst for The Family Foundation of Kentucky. “We assume that when the Paul campaign finds out about this, they’ll return that money.”

We here at Sex and the 405 were disappointed with the statement issued by the Paul camp, which condemned pornography and, according to the AP, said it considers it degrading to women.

The campaign asserted that it “cannot be expected to run background checks on all 25,000 donors who share his stances on issues like balanced budgets, reduced federal spending, opposition to ‘Obamacare’ and the reckless behavior in Washington.”

This view is similar to that of Pennsylvania’s Republican Pat Toomey, who received a $4,800 contribution in November, 2009, from Scott Banister, co-founder of Zivity, and Cyan Banister’s husband.

“Many supporters do not agree with Pat on every issue,” Toomey campaign spokeswoman Nachama Soloveichik told the AP. “But they tend to share his belief that the government in Washington is too big, it taxes too much, and it is sticking future generations with far too much debt. We’re happy to have those supporters, even if we differ on some issues.”

Cyan Banister responded to the press brouhaha via e-mail, saying:

My point of view is that our country is in danger of losing some of its most valued freedoms. The Pauls have strong values that resonate with mine. I believe they support limited government, tax reform, are against nationalized health care.

No word yet from the Paul camp about whether they will return the donation.

Information from The Lexington Herald-Leader.