Whose purity is purer?

My dear old friend Amanda Marcotte has issued a warning about certain people in the natural food industry.

Some of them are (gasp!) right wing. Which means that if you are going to buy organic food, you should be very careful.

For all the good stuff in the organic food movement, there’s also a sector of people that get into it that have strong reactionary tendencies. That’s because organic food isn’t just about real world environmental issues. It also touches on some people’s concerns about “purity”—this outsized, irrational fear of moral contamination—-that is fundamentally reactionary. The uptight prudery of the right is all about this purity obsession. On the misogynist, sex-phobic right, there’s a lot of talk about “natural” sexuality, an attempt to gain control over their deepset fears about impurity by creating rigid rules about non-procreative vs. procreative sex. On the right, there’s a lot of fearfulness of medicine and science that also stems from this, though unsurprisingly the needs of women, children, and lower income people tend to be the ones first sacrificed in the name of being “skeptical” of modernism and science.

There’s a strong streak of “purity” politics on the left that shades into reactionary politics, and unsurprisingly, women, low income folks, and children are the ones expected to carry the heaviest burden for it. The anti-vaccination folks, the people that are hardcore attachment parenting people, the unschoolers, and the anti-GMO people: These are all movements that are associated with the left, but are reactionary purity panics at heart.

I definitely see her point (and I have to admit to being amused) but I’m a little disappointed that she didn’t mention the native speciesists and plant fascists. These people adhere to the quasi-religious belief that only animals and plants which were here at the time of Columbus should be allowed to be here, and the rest (dangerous others, of course) should be eradicated, poisoned, and burned. I think it is fair to conclude that if being obsessed with purity is right wing, then these puritanical environmentalists are clearly far right nutjobs.

As are those who believe in ranking humans according to how long their ancestors have lived in a geographical place. Proclaiming that “indigenous peoples” (because their ancestors were here before Columbus) are the betters of later arrivals has to be at least as “conservative” as the ancestry-obsessed Daughters of the American Revolution who thought they were purer and therefore better than Italian and Irish immigrants.

Too bad we can’t judge people on their impurity.

I’d ask rhetorically whether there is such a thing as an impuritan, but like any such thing you can think of, of course there is.