Belgium needs a sex ban, suggests Senator Marleen Temmerman
Some push for bigger compromises and deeper concessions when dealing with political impasses. A senator in Belgium has suggested that the government overcome its political deadlock with an entirely different tactic: a ban on sex.
Marleen Temmerman, a Belgian senator and gynecologist, suggested that there be "no more sex until a new administration."
Belgium has not had a government for eight months.
"By going on a sex strike we can protest in our thousands, quietly but effectively. Liberals, Catholics, Muslims or whatever: abstain from sex until the new administration is posing for an official portrait on the steps of the Royal Palace," Temmerman, a member of the Socialist Party, wrote in a column published in Belgian daily De Standaard.
Belgium's center-right New Flemish Alliance party won the election in June but has not agreed to a coalition with rival parties yet.
The party called the sex strike idea, "extremely stupid."
The nationalist party seeks independence for the country's Dutch-speaking North, and efforts to create a federal government with parties from the French-speaking South have gone nowhere.
Temmerman responded that people should learn to have a sense of humor.
"I see two different groups of people here. You have people who see the humor who can laugh about it. And you have people who don't see the humor of it at all," she said.
The Belgian senator is not the first to suggest banning sex as a political tool. Women in Kenya went on a sex strike in 2009 to force a political solution. Within a month, a deal was struck.
And women in Colombia launched a campaign "of crossed legs" in 2006 to persuade gangsters to give up their guns.
"They say that if we don't drop our weapons, they won't be with us anymore," a local gang member, who called himself Caleno, told CBS News in 2006. "We need our women, and you'll change for your woman."
Read more from GlobalPost about the political impasse in Belgium.
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