The Weekly Screed (#636)

Can Governor Walker 
draw the line at vaginas?
By David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Everybody’s got boogers.

Consider Queen Elizabeth, whom no one on earth has ever seen with a wrinkle in her gown or a hair out of place. But the Queen has boogers. Grace Kelly — not that we ever saw one, thank God! — had boogers. Boggles the mind.

I only mention this because I’m afraid that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, whose office is only three blocks away from here, might be saddling up his white charger, slipping on a Latex glove and coming after my boogers.

Well, not my boogers, specifically. Nor has Walker intimated any interest in anybody’s boogers. Not yet. But the governor and the Republican Party seem possessed with an unseemly (and growing) concern about the secret nooks and crannies of my — well… everyone’s body. They can’t seem to get their minds off the sort of corporeal activities that most of us would just as soon keep to ourselves.

Exhibit A: Walker just signed a bill, passed by the GOP-dominated legislature, that targets women suspected of harboring within themselves an unwanted embryo. These gals will be required by law to undergo an examination that exposes their bodies inside and out, pretty much from knees to nipples, to public scrutiny. The idea is to insert the Republican Party into a woman’s decision about having an abortion — which is really personal. Walker’s new law has already been suspended by a judge, possibly because it’s the sort of intrusion that makes second-hand nose-picking seem like a friendly gesture between strangers.

The judge’s logic is obvious: If the governor of Wisconsin, or Texas, or Kansas, has legal access to examine and regulate every woman’s vagina, vulva, labia, cervix, uterus, bladder, ovaries and fallopian tubes, then what’s to keep him from peering up my nose — or yours — and poking around for rogue boogers.

Imagine a law requiring all of us to “properly” dispose of our every stray greenie or face jail time. Picture crime scene labs across America profiling the DNA of every gooey deposit found under a seat in the metroplex or stuck to the walls of truck-stop rest rooms. Sends chills up my spine.

Consider the slippery slope! What if Republicans, drunk with the power to send thousands of innocent booger-abusers up the river, decide next to go after us for scratching certain parts of our bodies in full view of women and children? The Major Leagues would be decimated, especially if the law also covered public spitting. If GOP lawmakers further extended their regulatory reach to how often we change our undies, how we groom (or don’t groom) our toenails and what we do with ripe pimples, peeling cuticles and loose scabs, wouldn’t they eventually demand to know — in sickening detail — when, where and why every American smells his or her fingers? And whether we wash afterwards?

I know. Just by listing these possible crimes, I’m revealing a lot about myself. But isn’t that the point? Privacy isn’t really about whether we mention “jihad” on our mobile phones or look up how to build pipe bombs on the Internet. It’s about the stuff we do by ourselves when (we think) nobody’s looking.

Female lawmakers like to mock the Republican passion for controlling women’s vaginas by saying, “What if we started passing laws requiring men to reveal what they’ve done with their penises?”

An apt riposte, but it hasn’t registered. Guys like Sen. Vitter of Louisiana, Gov. Spitzer of New York and Congressman Weiner of Brooklyn have shown an brazen willingness to confess their penile indiscretions, blush fetchingly and plunge right back into public life. In Sen. Vitter’s case, this includes his fairly hypocritical efforts to regulate the vaginal activities of every girl in America.

But what if we were talking about not the vagina — which has been fraught with pious and political significance since Biblical times — but the thusfar neutral realm of the nostril? Until now, no one (except, possibly, the Farrelly brothers and Dave Barry) has articulated an ideology that covers the social significance of the booger. No politician, priest or physician or has ever fulminated on the misuse of the index finger. Boogers are so deeply private (and hard to photograph) that even the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News leave ‘em alone.

But what if suddenly, Republicans and devout Christians latched onto nose hygiene and proper booger disposal (whatever that is) as a “value” to be  instilled in every middlesex boy and girl and pursued with Puritan passion?

Or, listen. I’m having a colonoscopy in October. Anybody wanna watch?

Luckily for you and me both, you can’t — because it’s none of anybody else’s business, like boogers still are and abortion used to be.

But then… what if Scott Walker’s the one having a colonoscopy and Democrats sneak through a law requiring him to prove his lower GI health by filming the procedure and making it public? Well, he might object. Why?
Maybe because a camera shoved up your ass is really personal.

So, here’s my offer. How about, in America — home of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments (look ‘em up) — we remind our legislators and preachers that some things about people’s bodies, or people’s personal pecadilloes — especially those secret habits that would embarrass us a little (or a lot) if anybody knew what we were doing — should NOT be matters of public, political or moralist meddling. Let’s try to make a rule — or just enforce the existing rule — that the really personal stuff, from boogers to unwanted pregnancies, from earwax disposal to diaper fetishes, are immune, forever, from governmental peeking.

Let’s just say — and agree, and pass this on to the holier-than-thou among the blowhard class — that there a few intimate things in everybody’s life that are too terrible, or too icky, or too beautiful to share, even with the nosiest governor in America.