Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon posted a real eye-opener the other day. Bottom line: It looks a lot like Republican strategists are trying to drop their long-standing anti-sex rhetoric in an attempt to stanch the bleeding

Frank Luntz—you know, the conservative genius of focus group testing of language, and therefore the architect of so many nasty, divisive terms the Republicans have put into circulation—is talking a lot about how this survey was conducted in the interest of unity. This tells me a few things, not the least of which is that save-the-party-by-talking-unity is something Luntz is pushing really hard.

But what’s additionally interest is that Luntz thinks we can find the common ground in the bedroom. Actually, if you watch the video, his ideas aren’t all that offensive. He’s basically arguing that while Republicans might be slightly more conservative on average than Democrats about their personal sexual behavior, the gap between the two is small enough to be inconsequential. But where I found myself agreeing with him is that he argues that the gap is small because people across the political parties are pretty liberal in their sexual behavior. The prevailing Republican attitudes under the Bush administration about sex—that it’s dirty and wrong and you should only do it when you’re married and birth control and abortion and changing partners are terrible and experimentation is wrong, etc.—are not actually shared in any significant way by workaday voting Republicans. Colmes has the survey up; you can check out for yourself.

Read the quote in context here.

Marcotte closes with a point that I think will probably always distinguish the New Red Menace from True Blue Americans

Personally, I feel a bit outside of all this. The Republicans might be willing to embrace condoms, porn, and blow jobs, but I’m working on a more radical project, to move people towards not just a freer view of sex, but a more egalitarian one, a world where women aren’t just holes to be fucked, but real people whose humanity counts. Sex positivity is part of that, but we need more than that.

I think that’s about right. Goodness knows there are enough progressives who can’t quite grasp the notion that women are more than U-Store-It managers for their own pussies, but the dirty Reds are just never going to get a handle egalitarianism in bed because they think about everything too much in terms of land tenure to ever give up the idea of pussy as property, or men as lease-holders, or sex as resource extraction.