Last week I remarked something in an afterthought to a post:

....attempts to discourage something can nonetheless glamorize it just as much attempts to encourage it. Many a social ill (and many a social good, for that matter) has been encouraged and spread by persecution, and by attempts to stamp it out. To the extent that there is a promiscuous sex "movement," I think it thrives as a result of the forces which claim devotion to stamping it out and to a "showdown" against it.

(Similarly, Martin Luther King's movement drew strength from the attacks against it, while Anita Bryant transformed gay rights from a taboo subject to a dinner table topic by denouncing it on the cover of Newsweek.)

On the front page of today's Philadelphia Inquirer, Marie McCullough discusses this phenomenon (politically unintended reverse psychology) in a piece titled "Critics' focus on morning-after pill may spur use":

The Bush administration's opposition to emergency contraception seems to be doing wonders for awareness and use of the method.

Health activists have promoted the so-called morning-after pill for 15 years as a way to reduce unplanned pregnancies and the need for abortions. But only now is it catching on, partly due to media coverage of the Bush administration's efforts to thwart easier access to it.

"It has generated a ton of publicity, and that almost surely has a consequence of increasing awareness - and awareness is still the biggest barrier to use," said Princeton University economist James Trussell, a longtime proponent of emergency contraception.

But criminals against "nature" were convicted anyway, often by use of Latin phraseology.

Humans being monkey-see/monkey-do creatures, the unraveling of such vague and ancient unspoken taboos began inexorably when people started discussing them.

To illustrate by example, the following is as close as the Florida Supreme Court would come in 1921 to discussing oral sex:

....discussion of the loathsome, revolting crime would be of no edification to the people, nor interest to the members of the bar. The creatures who are guilty are entitled to a consideration of their case because they are called human beings and are entitled to the protection of the laws.

(Little did Justice Ellis know that he was referring to a future president of the United States.....)