Sex politics roundup

I only have a few minutes to blog right now, so here are just a few pointers to recent articles of interest:

• The New York Times opines against pharmacists who refuse to dispense contraceptives and birth control pills.
• Michigan voters legislatively defined marriage as a relation between men and women. It turns out, many of those voters didn't know they might've also been voting to strip same-sex couples of benefits they'd been receiving for years.

  In November, Michigan voters, along with those in 12 other states, approved legislation to define marriage as an institution between a man and a woman. On March 16, Michigan's attorney general, Mike Cox, took that one step further, ruling that passage of the constitutional amendment meant that gay and lesbian state workers should be ineligible for health benefits for their partners in future contracts. ... "I do not believe that the voters of Michigan would have passed this amendment if they knew that it would mean taking away health benefits from same-sex partners," said Kari Moss, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which has filed suit against the governor in an effort to overturn the attorney general's interpretation. Advocates for gay rights have argued since the amendment's passage in Michigan that proponents operated a kind of bait-and-switch on voters, pretending that they wanted only to strengthen the traditional concept of marriage when they were actually intending to roll back the rights that gay Americans have won over the decades.

• Teens who pledge abstinence are just as likely to get STDs as teens who don't, and they're much more likely to have kinky deviate sex. Bill Maher says funny things in Salon.

  Yes, the "What do we tell the children?" crowd apparently decided not to tell them anything. Because people who talk about pee-pees are potty-mouths. And so armed with limited knowledge, and believing regular, vaginal intercourse to be either immaculate or filthy dirty, these kids did with their pledge what everybody does with contracts: they found loopholes. Two of them to be exact.