I once read that a large part of the republican agenda is to punish women for having sex.
No they are perfectly fine with sex. Its birth control and abortion they hate. And at one point there were even protests against the use of condoms.
Its pretty simple, they despise people for trying not to have children.
But aren't Republicans big proponents of abstinence-only sex education? That's practically the opposite of being fine with sex.
I had the great displeasure of having a conversation with a man who pretty well elucidated the bald-faced standards at the heart of this ideology. It is perfectly normal, if not
actually virtuous, for all men to want to have sex with any women all the time, the virtue part being not acting on it. It is utterly immoral for women to so much as think about sex at any time, and should only have sex with their husband so he doesn't go crazy. Any deviation from this pattern is ultimately the woman's fault for wanting it in the first place on some level and therefor not doing enough to stop it from happening, up to and including rape. And because all (human) life is sacred and God always finds a way
if you deserve it, and there is no such thing as medical complications (because any doctor who says there is just hates life) carrying the pregnancy is always the only real option.
That's certainly an absolutist position that would frighten many conservative people when you fully elucidate it like that, but when you start poking people for what they actually hold true, you find out
lots of people really do hold absolutist positions. They just don't realize it because they've never had a reason to voice out loud everything they believe about one subject and follow through all the implications.
What they refuse to acknowledge is that, for a large segment of the non-religious teen population (and even portions of the religious teen population) that doesn't work. Has it had an effect on their thinking? Absolutely not. They'd rather have kids remain ignorant and uninformed (and getting pregnant) than informed and not getting pregnant. They argue that teaching kids about safe sex results in more sex.
Actually, ever statistical analysis taken of the results of different sex-education curriculum over the last fifteen years or so has shown that people who get abstinence-only education are considerably more likely have pre-marital sex and higher rates of teen pregnancy. I'm willing to grant that it's probably not a 1:1 correlation, abstinence-only attitudes are most common in low-income areas where teen-pregnancy and such would be more common regardless. But yeah, it's hideously short-sighted and almost effortless to disprove. Try to do so with one of its proponents, and you'll get an answer with some variant of, "Well it doesn't matter how bad every other parent in the world is, my kid's going to grow up right like I did(n't)."