William Saletan wants pro-choicers to declare war on abortion.

William Saletan is wrong. First off, where do we get off declaring war on a concept? You declare war on a country, not a concept (and no one even bothers with that sort of war anymore either — the U.S. hasn’t actually declared a real war since World War II).

Second, Saletan is ceding the moral high ground to the anti-sexers. As I’ve argued time and time again, the battle over abortion is really a battle about sex. “Pro-lifers” don’t just want to ban abortion, they want to ban sex. By playing along with their battle plan to do away with abortion, Saletan is taking a dangerous step towards their ultimate goal of banning sex.

Saletan justifies his “war” by claiming that abortion is not good — that no woman prefers an abortion to avoiding pregnancy in the first place. By this logic, we should declare war on all medical procedures. After all, everyone would prefer to avoid appendicitis rather than submit to an appendectomy, right? Let’s declare war on appendectomies!

Now, obviously it would be preferable if more women could avoid unwanted pregnancies. But really, aren’t unwanted pregnancies just one possible outcome of unhealthy sex?

What we really should be fighting for is more healthy sex. Just a couple of ideas to toss out here:

• Healthy sex is fun and natural
• Healthy sex is between consenting adults
• Healthy sex uses medically proven contraception
• Healthy sex relies on several methods to prevent pregnancy (where desired) and disease, including prophylaxis, abstinence, and communication between partners
• Masturbation is healthy sex
• Prostitution should be highly regulated or strictly forbidden
• Effective contraceptives and prophylactics should be freely available to all
• Enforcement of rape laws and education about rape should be dramatically increased
• Abortion should be freely available to all women
• Proven sex education should be a part of all school curricula, nationwide

Got any other ideas?

Technorati has a new feature: Explore. I wouldn’t have noticed it, except apparently someone used it to find Cognitive Daily. Just this moment, a Cognitive Daily post tops the list.

It’s different from tags, because (I think) instead of looking at the tags for individual posts, it looks at tags that users have configured describing their entire blog. Since CogDaily is tagged as “science,” and a couple people have linked to that post (and, I’m guessing, also because few other science blogs have bothered to so configure themselves), we get our moment of “fame.” Except that up until now, no one knew about the “Explore” feature.

I tried doing an Explore for literature and didn’t find much, again because I suspect few litblogs actually know about this feature.

Technorati must be doing at least some automated tagging, because I only tagged Cognitive Daily after I noticed we were listed in the Explore search. But litbloggers (and others) who want to get noticed might try tagging their blogs (you have to claim your blog first) and see what pops up.

Interesting profile of Jared.

Unfortunately the article doesn’t settle the debate Greta my kids and I were having the other day: what does Jared make?

You know who I’m talking about — it’s Jared. As the article points out, it’s really stunning to realize that America is on a first-name basis with someone so — well, average. I think one of the keys to Jared’s success is that he’s kept the weight off. He’s a living monument to the (probably flawed) idea that all you have to do to lose weight is visit your friendly neighborhood Subway. My problem, like most of America’s, I imagine, is that once I’m inside, I can’t resist ordering one of those subs that’s not “less than seven grams of fat.”

And make sure you put extra mayo on that.

Update: Greta assures me she would never debate such an issue, so apparently it was something I was discussing with the kids.