Meghan McCain says GOP needs to lighten up about sex

While she isn't exactly saying that Republicans should run out and buy oral sex mints, Meghan McCain, in her Daily Beast column, addresses the archaic and often harmful rhetoric of the GOP on sex.

This is something I know about firsthand. During my father’s 2000 presidential campaign, a reporter asked how he would feel if I became pregnant and wanted an abortion. He answered that it would be my choice, sending shockwaves throughout the party (because for the GOP there is only one answer, and obviously Senator McCain’s daughter shouldn’t be engaging in sex ever). I’d like to thank that reporter for single-handedly putting me through years of trying to reconcile the fact that when it comes to politics, no matter what you do or who you are, everything is fair game.

But seriously, here was a father, delicately navigating a question about his teenage daughter and being true to the kind of father he had always been, and the Republican Party was outraged. It didn’t matter that my parents raised me to know that, regardless of the mistakes I might make, they would allow me the dignity and courage to make my own choices. That’s the kind of trust my parents have always placed in their children—yet the GOP still needed to get involved and have a say in what I did with my body.

McCain reveals that the first time she ever heard about oral sex was in reference to Bill Clinton, and argues that the party needs to begin discussing better options about birth control and steer away from the Bristol Palinesque fantasy that is abstinence-only education.

If we can’t discuss birth control in addition to abstinence, and in a nonjudgmental way, kids will continue to make bad choices for lack of having access to informed, safe options. Not everyone shares the same beliefs, and more importantly, people don’t always react the same way to their circumstances. Which is why it is so important to encourage honest, open communication about the realities of sex within the party at large, and more specifically, between parents and their children.