Because it works.

When Paul Ryan delivered his address to the Republican convention, many commentators – even one from the Fox News organization – pointed out that it was quite possibly the biggest pack of lies ever delivered by a politician since Joe McCarthy’s 1950 speech in West Virginia. Some would have given McCarthy the nod for truth on the grounds that he appears to have actually believed that the phantoms no one else could see in the State Department were actually there. Of course, Ryan also believes that he ran a sub 3-hour marathon so it is quite likely that he too has a rich fantasy life where he has a little 28 room, 11-bath cottage in Galt’s Gulch. The thing is that although facts like how fast you have run a marathon or whether your budget will ever be balanced without dismantling Medicare, Social Security, Food Stamps may seem to have a liberal bias, they can have an equally conservative bias if you happen to be conservative and even more so if you are numbered among the “antennas to Heaven” crowd of uber-Christian conservative Christians (like the ones in Todd Snider’s song. Consider, if you will, the humble condom.

When I was in high school (Class of ’69) condoms were hard to obtain if you were a high school student. This often led to comical exchanges between drug store clerks who mistook a request for “some rubbers” as a request for pull-on overshoes especially when the clerk would ask “What size?”. So many young men were forced to fall back on those obtainable (in 5 “vibrant” colors) from vending machines in the men’s rooms of a local gas station and sold “for prevention of disease only”. Now, of course, they have their own aisle at Wal-Mart, Target, and at least 3 feet of shelf space in most grocery stores. Okay, maybe not in your town but here in Snake Collich, Pennsyltucky it’s difficult to avoid them. Clearly, the local merchants have decided that making condoms available to young people is good for business. After all, they not only reduce unwanted pregnancies, they also reduce the spread of serious, life-threatening diseases. What’s not to like about condoms? That’s the liberal point of view – it focuses on the end result which is judged to be a good one. If you are of the opposite opinion which starts with the firm opinion that anything which reduces the risk of extra-marital, hetero-sexual hanky-panky is in and of itself bad because extra-marital sex of any kind (including the non-hetero variety) is evil and therefore making condoms difficult to obtain was a good thing and the current ease of access is due to the moral decline of our nation and that in order to return to a state of moral order, condoms and any other form of birth control, must be controlled.

A recent study (you can read it here if you’re prone to insomnia) looks into this matter more closely and concludes that conservatives tend to believe that condoms simply don’t work. The study put it this way: “..the more participants endorsed the belief that condom education was morally wrong even if it prevented pregnancy and STDs, the less they believed that condoms were effective at preventing these problems, and the more they believed that promoting condom use encouraged teenagers to have sex.”

Republicans lie all the time and get away with it is because their core constituency is just like Elder Price (in The Book of Mormon) who “just believes”. Even when the news media points out that Paul Ryan is lying, his followers continue to believe him.

Don