I’ve been running around with my hair on fire for a year now. I’ve been writing “Straight Rights Updatesâ€� in Savage Love in a desperate attempt to convince heterosexuals that religious and social conservatives aren’t just interested in oppressing gay people. The war over gay marriage and the never-ending attacks on gay people, parents, and sex may get all the press, but the American Taliban has a big, scary, anti-sex, anti-pleasure, anti-freedom agenda for America’s straight folks too. They want to ban abortion, they want to block access to birth control, they oppose truthful/useful sex education, they want to prevent the morning after pill from being sold over-the-counter, they oppose the 100% effective vaccine for HPV (which would save the lives of 4,000 American women every year), they want to do away with no-fault divorce, and on and on. On March 23, I wrote :

The GOP’s message to straight Americans: If you have sex, we want it to fuck up your lives as much as possible. No birth control, no emergency contraception, no abortion services, no life-saving vaccines. If you get pregnant, tough shit. You’re going to have those babies, ladies, and you’re going to make those child-support payments, gentlemen. And if you get HPV and it leads to cervical cancer, well, that’s too bad. Have a nice funeral, slut.

Ironically enough, the American Taliban’s agenda is also pro-abortion—as we’ve recently seen. By working to make contraceptives harder to come by and by promoting “abstinence educationâ€� programs that convince young people that contraceptives are ineffective and/or evidence of immorality, the American Taliban is responsible for slowing the decline in the abortion rate. If things keep trending the way they are now, the American Taliban may succeed in driving up the numbers of abortions in America.

But that’s a price they’re willing to pay, it seems. Because the American Taliban’s beef isn’t really with abortion, but with non-procreative heterosexual sex. You might think that the folks who’ve been screaming and yelling about abortion for thirty years would not want to do anything to encourage people to have abortions—which is precisely what depriving people of access to birth control does. But, again, the American Taliban isn’t so much anti-abortion as they are anti-sex. Oh sure: they don’t want to see straight women getting abortions, but what they really don’t want to see (or hear about) is straight people having sex—unless they’re married and not using contraception.

So after raising the alarm for months, I was intensely gratified to pull the The New York Times Magazine out of the paper this weekend and see the cover story: “The War on Contraception.â€� Russell Shorto’s brilliant feature—it’s also a long feature, and yes you should read the whole damn thing—walks readers through the American Taliban’s plans to deny birth control to heterosexual Americans. And why would they want to do that?

In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they want to change the way Americans have sex . Dr. Stanford, the F.D.A. adviser on reproductive-health drugs, proclaimed himself “fully committed to promoting an understanding of human sexuality and procreation radically at odds with the prevailing views and practices of our contemporary culture.” Focus on the Family posts a kind of contraceptive warning label on its Web site: “Modern contraceptive inventions have given many an exaggerated sense of safety and prompted more people than ever before to move sexual expression outside the marriage boundary.” Contraception, by this logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality) and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage.

It may be news to many people that contraception as a matter of right and public health is no longer a given, but politicians and those in the public health profession know it well. “The linking of abortion and contraception is indicative of a larger agenda, which is putting sex back into the box, as something that happens only within marriage,” says William Smith, vice president for public policy for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. Siecus has been around since 1964, and as a group that supports abortion rights, it is natural enemies with many organizations on the right, but its mission has changed in recent years, from doing things like promoting condoms as a way to combat AIDS to, now, fighting to maintain the very idea of birth control as a social good. “Whether it’s emergency contraception, sex education or abortion, anything that might be seen as facilitating sex outside a marital context is what they’d like to see obliterated,” Smith says.

But it’s not just pre-marital sex they’re after. The American Taliban doesn’t think married couples should use birth control. Some choice quotes from Shorto’s feature:

“We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion,” says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. “The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set,” she told me. “So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception.”

“I cannot imagine any development in human history, after the Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the pill,” Mohler continued… “Prior to it, every time a couple had sex, there was a good chance of pregnancy. Once that is removed, the entire horizon of the sexual act changes. I think there could be no question that the pill gave incredible license to everything from adultery and affairs to premarital sex and within marriage to a separation of the sex act and procreation.”

This is for the apathetic straight people out there: If you care about heterosexual freedom—and not just the right of heterosexuals to have pre-marital sex, but the right of married heterosexual couples to decide whether, when, and how many children they’re going to have— go read the entire piece , and then start making some noise. And don’t think these are just some anti-sex religious wackos—as Shorto reminds us in his piece, the Bush administration listens to these wackos and is appointing wackos to important positions in the FDA and all over the federal government—and let’s not even think about the federal judges Bush has already appointed to life-time positions.

This is some serious shit, breeders. You’re being attacked. Fight back.