What Socialism, Pacifism and Sex Have in Common

What do these three things have in common? It is a very simple principle:

"each can be very good in its proper place, but highly destructive when
allowed to flow into contexts for which it was not designed."

Let's take them one at a time.

First, sex is easy. Natural reason tells us that sexual activity is oriented to and leads to procreation and that marriage naturally is the best context for procreation to occur. A child is best off with its biological parents. So it is hardly surprising that every culture has some form of marriage based on the mother-father-child triangle. Sex belongs in marriage and every serious form of natural law or religious morality affirms this conclusion. But sex outside marriage is destructive of personal communion, social stability and children.

So we have in human sexuality a very good thing as long as it remains in its proper context. Yet that very good thing can become perverted, twisted and destructive as soon as it bursts its channels and floods into promiscuity or adultery.

Second, socialism is in many ways a high and noble ideal. As practiced by small, disciplined, voluntary communities, for example, monastic ones, it can be a good way of life. Socialism is not bad except when it bursts its natural bonds and becomes an ideology which is imposed by coercion on society as a whole. I would go so far as to say that coercive socialism is as bad as coercive sex.

Socialism is utopian in the sense that it is incompatible with the fact of original sin. The reason that socialism always leads to tyranny, poverty and atheism in this world is because of the tragic flaw in human nature - not because of the idea of socialism itself. As an idea, it is wonderful. But when implemented in a society of fallen sinners, it becomes horribly destructive.

Third, pacifism is also in many ways a high and noble ideal. As practiced by small, disciplined, voluntary communities, for example, the Amish or monastic orders, it can be a good way of life. Pacifism is not bad except when it bursts its natural bonds and becomes an ideology which is imposed by coercion on society as a whole. I would go so far as to say that coercive pacifism (i.e. the government adopting a pacifist stance on behalf of a population containing both pacifists and non-pacifists) is as bad as coercive sex or coercive socialism.

I call pacifism for modern nation states "liberal pacifism" to distinguish it from the vocational pacifism which has taken various forms in the history of the church. Twentieth century liberal pacifism is rooted in liberal Protestant theology, which is to say that it is Pelagian and Progressive in its character. This kind of pacifism makes war more likely because it encourages Christian countries to disarm and not practice deterrence and it corrupts theology by highlighting the worst features of heretical understandings of human nature and history. It even reconstitutes the doctrine of God by denying Divine wrath and judgment in the name of defining God by means of the abstract principle of non-violence supposedly derived from Jesus.

One other feature that all three of these things have in common is that they are all highly attractive to sentimentalists. All have an enticing, naivety about them that draws us to them as ideals. We see the pull of the passions at work in sex and often tragic results flow from naive young girls mistaking aggressive lust for romantic commitment in their boyfriends. Yet, I for one, would not want completely to reject or condemn romance.

Socialism and pacifism are romantic notions that, like sex, make one feel good. That is the secret of their attractiveness. Affirming pacifism and socialism, especially in the exuberance of adolescence, is like a drug that makes one feel pure, innocent, superior and at one with all things. It is a substitute for genuine love for mankind, which is always tempered with a realistic assessment of human nature and the limits of human and social perfectibility in this fallen world.

Real love sometimes disciplines, sometimes challenges, sometimes rebukes and sometimes accepts despite the on-going flaws in the beloved. Sentimentalism wants everything to be perfect all the time and is devastated by failure to live up to the highest ideals one can imagine. For this reason, it tends to be destructive of personal relationships and social bonds.

All of this is to say that love is opposed to sex, socialism and pacifism whenever they overflow their banks and escape the boundaries meant to contain them.

Am I against socialism, pacifism and sex? No, as long as they remain in voluntary, limited, contexts and are not imposed on others without consent. I affirm them as goods but recognize that all evil is the perversion of and lack of the good.

The West-Schindler Debate Over Concupiscence in the Theology of the Body

David Delaney at the blog Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex has posted a summary of an article that will appear in the December Homiletic Pastoral and Review on the debate over the correct interpretation of concupiscence in John Paul II's Theology of the Body. I will give a few excerpts from the summary and then offer some comments from a Reformed, Evangelical perspective in red in between quotations.

_________

"The ongoing Theology of the Body debate between Christopher West and his critics (including Alice Von Hildebrand, David Schindler and Dawn Eden) is an important one. For those not familiar with it, I suggest reading David Schindler’s initial open letter, Christopher West’s public response and Dawn Eden’s thesis. West’s public response correctly identifies the primary issue; concupiscence. It, at least in part, underlies most of his critic’s concerns." [For those unfamiliar with this debate the above links are a good introduction. A bit of searching on Google, however, can lead to more relevant articles.]

"Schindler claims that West’s understanding of concupiscence is deficient because he neglects to understand “that concupiscence dwells ‘objectively’ in the body, and continues its ‘objective’ presence in the body throughout the course of our infralapsarian existence.” Eden explicitly quotes Schindler citing the same concern.

West admits he may have under emphasized the “fierce” and enduring nature of concupiscence in the past. Nevertheless, he doesn’t retreat from his emphasis that redemption brings about liberation from concupiscence, and for good reason. The words come from JPII. West points to 15 references in the TOB catecheses in support of this. Accordingly, one of West’s central themes is “mature purity.”

West believes mature purity excludes continence. Rather than turning away from temptations, it is an achievement in which one no longer need turn away." [West is here teaching something quite recognizable to anyone familiar with the Reformed tradition; we have encountered it before in the Wesleyan and Holiness traditions of sinless perfection.]

"West correctly interprets John Paul II’s demand that we can and must cooperate with grace in order to overcome concupiscent temptations. We have to demand self-mastery from ourselves in each and every temptation, explicitly demanding we orient our will toward the authentic good. For example, when tempted to reduce a woman to her sexual value because he notices the shape of her body, a man must demand of himself that he see and affirm her as created by God for her own sake. He must endeavor to recover the habitually threatened spousal meaning of the body (TOB 32:3). West rightly emphasizes this point." [John Paul II, in his section: "The 'Heart': Accused or Called?" (pp. 301-321) rightly emphasizes the fact that Jesus calls us to sanctification rather than simply using the law to lay bare our sin, guilt and need of grace. From a Reformed perspective, we would say he is embracing what Calvin called the "third use of the law," that is, as an aid to living a holy life.]

"In general, West is correct about that which John Paul explicitly teaches in this regard. However, I think that he seriously errs when he leaves JPII’s explicit words to concretely apply TOB. . . . Ultimately, West’s view about liberation from continence contradicts Catholic tradition; something John Paul II never does. Rather, John Paul synthesizes the tradition with new insights from phenomenological personalism, though mature purity is not a new insight. It is an articulation of St. Thomas Aquinas’s anthropology." [I think Delaney is exactly right in drawing this conclusion.]

[Here Delaney clarifies the difference between John Paul II and West. Note carefully:] "What John Paul II actually means by liberation is from the “constraint of the body” which arises with the advent of concupiscence (TOB 32:2). The constraint of concupiscence makes authentic total self-gift virtually impossible (TOB 32:6). He also uses constraint to describe the instinct of animals who cannot but follow their urges (TOB 14:6). Something like constraint to instincts is what happens to the man of concupiscence. This constraint is insuperable until the advent of Redemption. However, liberation from this constraint is not the same as near immunity from concupiscence for those who have become “pure” as West puts it.

John Paul holds to tradition saying that “immediate continence,” together with self-mastery and habitual temperance are all simultaneously needed to live the ethos of redemption (see TOB 49:4, 53:5). Continence is “a definite and permanent moral attitude, …a virtue” (TOB 124:4; emphasis mine). He doesn’t say continence can ever be set aside." [There is a huge difference between saying that, in this life, we can overcome the tug of concupiscence and make the sincere gift of the self to the spouse, on the one hand, and saying that we can, in this life, become free of the tug of concupiscence altogether. One is victorious Christian living by means of the filling of the Holy Spirit; the other is sinless perfection. Note: what I am calling "victorious Christian living" does not involve the disappearance of temptation; it involves deliverance from the power of sin but not the presence of sin. The freedom from concupiscence that West talks about is not part of the progressive sanctification, but part of glorification (or final, competed sanctification), which happens only at death or the return of Christ and involves having a resurrected, glorified body. It is not that what West wants is not part of salvation; it is just that it is unattainable in this life. If Delaney is right in his arguments, the upshot is that John Paul II is closer to the Reformed doctrine of sanctification than to the Wesleyan-Holiness doctrine, as well as being a good Thomist, as Delaney stresses.]

A final comment is that my Reformed position is informed by the Evangelical stress on the transformation of character and so is closer to that of Jonathan Edwards than to certain strands of the Reformed tradition which are highly suspicious of experience and reject revivalism. This makes me closer to John Paul II than some Reformed theologians, but not closer to the Wesleyan-Arminian-Holiness tradition, as I hope this discussion shows.

Personal Sex is Healthy Sex

This article is a heartening attempt to put sex in its place. By that I mean to put sex into focus as an expression of the rational person, rather than letting one's identity be defined by instinctual drives or passions. Only thus is sexuality made moral. The author, Melinda Selmys, argues that sexual orientation is not immutable at all and can be changed. She writes in "Reorienting Sexuality"

If you have undergone modern sexual education, followed the gay-marriage debates on television, or simply unconsciously imbibed the sexual ethos of this culture, you are probably familiar with the idea of sexual orientation. This is the theory that every human being has an innate, fixed set of sexual attractions either for the opposite sex, for their own sex, or for both.

This is the Western understanding of homosexuality that has developed over the course of the past couple of hundred years. It was first formulated around the time of the French Revolution, and gained currency with the rise of the psychological sciences during the twentieth century. For about a hundred years now the fundamental point of disagreement has centered around the question of whether same-sex attraction is a biological trait, or a psychological disorder. At the moment, most gay-rights rhetoric assumes the former (though this is by no means universally believed within the gay community) while most conservative organizations assume the latter.

What remains unexamined is the assumption that this is an accurate way of envisioning human sexuality in the first place. There has been some work by feminist and lesbian scholars suggesting that female sexuality, at least, is more fluid than “biology” suggests. The terms “LUG” (Lesbian Until Graduation) and “hasbian” both bear tribute to the fact that some women experience same-sex attractions at a particular point in their lives, and then transition into a heterosexual identity without suffering any psychological upheaval. Other women may comfortably embrace a heterosexual identity and lifestyle for years, only to have same-sex attractions arise late in life.

"I was certain that I was a lesbian"

I fell into the former category: earlier in my life, I was certain that I was a lesbian. I was secretly involved in a lesbian relationship for years, and my attempts to date boys on the side ranged from dismal to disastrous. I found physical intimacy with men uncomfortable at best. When I became a Catholic, I still believed that homosexuality was immutable, and I did not believe in “praying away the gay”. It came as something of a surprise, therefore, when I found myself falling in love, and being physically attracted towards a man.

All this is pretty common knowledge, though pro-sexual revolution activists endeavor mightily to conceal it from the gullible. But it is near the end of the article that Selmys gets really interesting as she proposes an explanation for what happened to her:

For me, as for others, it was a matter of other things being more important than sexuality. My ideological and philosophical identity was always the most fundamental aspect of my self; when my ideology shifted, my sexuality followed it quite naturally, without any need for bizarre or damaging outside interventions.

Obviously this is not the case for everyone, but it is common enough to seriously undermine the idea of a fixed sexual orientation. . .

Sexual orientation cannot be reduced either to biology or to psychology, because sexual attraction cannot be so reduced. Attraction is a complicated matter. People are attracted to others who share a similar sense of aesthetics, to people with similar ideological convictions, to those who resemble characters from movies or books that are personally appealing, to those with whom they have close emotional relationships, and so forth. We are not like animals whose attractions are based solely on the length of the dominant male’s eye-stalks, or the color of his plumage.

"We are not like animals" - surely this is the beginning of wisdom in all matters sexual. And the idea that "other things are more important than sexuality" is surely blindingly obvious to all except those for whom the sexual aspect of life has become inflated grotesquely.

The real and most fundamental psychological disorder is not homosexuality but rather one in which the impersonal aspects of sexuality (instincts, drives) take over and submerge the personal aspects such as morality, respect and friendship. This can afflict both heterosexual and homosexual persons and, unfortunately does afflict millions of people today. For such people, sex does not rise to the level of a personal relationship; it never rises higher than animalistic urges.

In a fallen world the basic human task is to humanize and personalize our sexuality rather than letting sub-personal drives impose themselves on us and prevent our relationships from rising to the level of the personal.

Good for Neal McDonough Having a Bit of Self-Respect

Actor Neal McDonough has recently been in the news for turning down roles in movies that involve sex scenes for two very good reasons: (1) he is married and (2) he is a Christian. See here for a story and for some crazy comments.

People seem to think he is a hypocrite for doing scenes involving violence and not ones involving sex. They are quite confused. To portray a gunman in a movie shooting someone is to be acting, that is, pretending to kill someone. No one actually gets killed. Everybody knows that.

On the other hand, sex scenes are essentially films of two people engaging in immoral sex acts. In committing such acts the person is sinning regardless of whether it is being filmed or not. If it was a case of pretending to be sexually involved, as in going into a hotel room where the camera does not follow, it would be acting, that is pretending. But actually taking off your clothes and touching someone in an arousing manner and the point of the whole exercise being to watch two actual people making love to each other - that is not pretending or acting. It is sexual immorality - for pay.

The equivalent of the sex scene is the snuff movie - that is, the filming of the actual killing of a person. Once we have been desensitized enough, this would no doubt be put forward as entertainment just as sexual relations for pay have been. But both are morally reprehensible and degrading to human beings.

Good for Neal McDonough. May his tribe increase.

Sex as Glue

In a fine article, "Is Sex That Important?" the NT scholar John Nolland, Academic Dean of Trinity College, Bristol, uses a striking and effective metaphor for sex by comparing it to glue.

"To put it crudely, saying ‘the two will become one flesh’ implies that sex is for gluing two people together into a single unit. In other words, sex makes its own vital contribution to the formation of the psychosomatic unity of husband and wife. A man and a woman well glued together is God’s pattern for the main kind of fundamental human unit within society.

I say ‘God’s pattern for the main kind of fundamental human unit within society’, because Scripture elsewhere makes it quite clear that there are particular people and people in particular kinds of situations for whom singleness not marriage is their proper state of being.

If sex is the glue for marriage, then sex outside of marriage is using the glue in the wrong way.

. . . snip . . .

To make his particular point Paul points to yet another kind of unitive activity. He talks about the uniting that happens when we become Christians. We are united to Christ. ‘United to the Lord’ is how he puts it in v 17. ‘Your bodies are members of Christ’ is how he puts it in v 15. Also in v 17 he says that one ‘becomes one spirit with [the Lord]’. This last piece of language ‘one spirit’ is specifically intended to be a counterpart to the Genesis language of marriage as ‘one flesh’.

Paul is clearly after a sameness and a difference between the kind of unity involved in sex and that involved in being linked to the Lord. To say that one is physical and one is spiritual would partly catch the difference, and would be well reflected in Paul’s juxtaposition of ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’.

For Paul, however, ‘flesh’ is not just physical. It is rooted in the materiality of our bodies, but it catches up as well attitudes and values and impulses that we would be more inclined to describe in psychological terms and in terms of the whole person.

This is profound and theologically responsible exegesis. Thinking of sex as glue helps us conceptualize how and why sex outside of marriage is so destructive, when sex within marriage is so healthy and life-affirming. I especially applaud his clarity on the NT meaning of the word "flesh" and the way that he shows how this word does not permit us to interpret sin and sanctification in a way that allows us to focus on the spirit only or on the body alone, but only on them as two aspects of one being. Clearly, a realist metaphysics is implied here in which the being of the person is more than disembodied mind or the sum total of the choices made by the will. One is reminded of John Paul II's theology of the body at this point.

He also (without mentioning them in particular) demolishes the misleading rhetoric of certain left-wing Evangelicals who call themselves "Red Letter Christians" and claim that their preoccupation with socialist politics and lassitude toward sexual morality is justified by appeal to the words of Jesus. Aside from the hubris of implying that the rest of the Church is somehow beneath them because they alone have the priorities of Christ and the theological error of interpreting the words of Jesus as more inspired and more authoritative than the rest of Scripture, they also happen to be wrong on a simple, factual level.

"One kind of index is to compare how often he talked about sexual matters with how often he talked about other matters. I choose for comparison Jesus’ teaching on love and Jesus’ expression of concern for the poor. Nobody doubts that Jesus cared passionately about these two areas.

So what do we find? Fourteen references to love, thirteen plus a couple of extras for concern for the poor and twenty-six references to matters concerning sex. Maybe sexual issues did matter quite a bit to Jesus!"

Read it all here. It is brief, thoughtful and theologically excellent. HT to Virtue Online.

Another Reason Why Abortion is Bad for Women

A story in the Globe and Mail today reports that the scientific evidence for abortion being a risk factor for breast cancer is a blow to fanatical and irrational political correctness.

"Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott issued a release this week to say he had been vindicated by the National Cancer Institute for making the controversial claim that there is a link between induced abortion and breast cancer. And Mr. Vellacott may be right.

Three years ago, the Saskatchewan MP helped to bring an American doctor and activist to Parliament Hill to tell Canadian women that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. It turned out that the doctor, Angela Lanfranchi, was speaking from a defined religious point of view that had little apparent basis in science.

And, at the time, the link between the procedure and the disease had been discounted by the National Cancer Institute in the United States, the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (and their U.S. counterparts), as well as the Canadian Cancer Society and the Canadian Breast Cancer Network.

But a study released last fall (available here but only for a fee) by the respected Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute in Seattle by a number of distinguished cancer experts including Louise Brinton, the chief of the Hormonal and Reproductive Epidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute lists induced abortion as being “associated with an increased risk for breast cancer.” Background documents further suggest that it increases the risk of the disease by 40 per cent."

The story is a fair and balanced one that makes the Liberal Party look like irresponsible fanatics more interested in covering up the truth than protecting women's health. They called the Prime Minister to disavow Vellacott's statements. But since when can a politician alter scientific studies by fiat? Actually, contemporary liberals try to do that all the time, which reveals the anti-reason and anti-science basis of radical feminism, the pro-homosexuality movement and the anti-traditional family group.

Life Cycle News reports it this way:

"U.S. National Cancer Institute researcher Dr. Louise Brinton, who was the chief organizer of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) workshop in 2003 that persuaded women that it was "well established" that "abortion is not associated with increased breast cancer risk," has reversed her position and now admits that abortion and oral contraceptives raise breast cancer risks.

The study found that "a statistically significant 40% increased risk for women who have abortions" exists, and that a " 270% increased risk of triple negative breast cancer (an aggressive form of breast cancer associated with high mortality) among those who used oral contraceptives while under age 18 and a 320% increased risk of triple negative breast cancer among recent users (within 1-5 years) of oral contraceptives," also exists.

This means that women who start using OCs before age 18 multiply their risk of TNBC by 3.7 times and recent users of OCs within the last one to five years multiply their risk by 4.2 times.

"Although the study was published nine months ago," stated Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, in a press release, "the NCI, the American Cancer Society, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and other cancer fundraising businesses have made no efforts to reduce breast cancer rates by issuing nationwide warnings to women."

The liberals who resist all limits on scientific and technological interference in human reproduction accuse conservative of being anti-science and anti-progress. But adjusting the bodies of women for the convenience of men in such a way as to cause them to die young of cancer is not progress. They confuse technology with science and blithely assume that anything a scientist can do should be done just because it is technically feasible. From test tube babies to cloning and surrogate motherhood - if it can be done technically then it is automatically enlightened to do it and anyone who opposes doing it is called anti-science and other names. The reality is that the Pill has contributed to a technological and social revolution that has brought great harm to women, families and ultimately to society as a whole. Both the Pill and abortion hurt women and if anyone is "liberated," it is not women but promiscuous men.

In the future people will look back on this period of history and shake their heads over the way women's bodies had to be butchered, medicated and invaded all in the name of sexual promiscuity. They will wonder why the late 20th and 21st centuries were so dominated by the worst of men and why there were no real feminists to defend the health and bodily integrity of women. They will also wonder why science could be so often suppressed in the name of an irrational and death-dealing ideology, for the sexual revolution is the spear tip of the culture of death.

It is time for men to stand up and take responsibility by not pressuring women to engage in practices like hormonal contraception and abortion that harm them. If men were willing to be responsible in their relations with women, then women would not feel pressured to do what they now feel society expects of them. But women also have the responsibility to say no to the strong social pressure to be sexually available even at the expense of their own health.

_________

UPDATE: You might want to check out this link to a blog on "About.com" which is owned by the New York Times. So it is hardly a "right-wing pro-life organization." Also, Jill Stanek has a good summary of the political fall-out so far from the new NCI study. Women should be up in arms about this manipulation and deceit and they should be burning their birth control pills on the steps of the big pharmaceutical companies that have gotten rich off their exploitation.

A Miracle: the TTC Stops Short of Promoting Adultery!

According to the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Transit Commission has rejected ads from the sleazy, on-line company that tries to make money out of promoting and facilitating adultery (AshleyMadison.com)

The ads were to be plastered on the sides of buses reading: "Life is short. Have an affair."

This anti-social, money-grubbing, women-hating, home-wrecking, anti-children (but for some inexplicable reason still legal) "company" has recently had its ads pulled from the Super Bowl Game and a billboard in New York's Times Square was taken down after a hotelier threatened to burn it down otherwise. If the law won't stop such evil, a public outcry must be raised. If any organization deserved to be driven underground and universally condemned, it is this one.

One of the points to take away from this incident, however, is that the TTC could only do the right thing by being somewhat inconsistent with the working morality of contemporary, Western society. The limp rhetoric of "tolerance" is exposed as inadequate as the moral basis of a civilized society by the reaction of the company's CEO:

"But AshleyMadison.com CEO Noel Biderman says the Toronto-based company, which boasts more than five million members on its site, is just trying to promote its brand.

“I think there's these notions out there that people think of infidelity as quote-unquote ‘wrong,' as quote-unquote ‘immoral,' ” he said. “In this day and age and, in this era, creating those morality judgments is not equivalent to a tolerant society.”

He thinks that if we don't tolerate lying, cheating, adulterous affairs promoted as "fun" by a bunch of immoral money-grubbers, then we are not tolerant. Well, the lesson here is the the Ten Commandments are a solid basis for a free and just society, but the liberal creed of "tolerance" is not.

Sex and the iWorld: A Brief Review

A new book by Dale S. Kuehne called Sex and the iWorld: Rethinking Relationships beyond an Age of Individualism (Baker, 2009) is worth reading for several reasons. The author is a professor of politics at a Catholic liberal arts college and a pastor of Emmanuel Covenant Church in Nashua, NH. So he writes from unique position on a highly controversial topic.

1. Modern Individualism Warps Our Sexuality: One notable feature of this book is his critique of modern individualism. He is perceptive in his analysis of the morality of the world of modernity. He identifies what he calls "three taboos," which seem to me to function analogously to the way the Ten Commandments functioned in the pre-modern world and continue to function in the Church. The three taboos are:

1. One may not criticize someone else's life choices or behavior.
2. One may not behave in a manner that coerces or causes harm to others.
3. On may not engage in a sexual relationship with someone without his or her consent. (p. 71)

When you lay it out this way it is amazing how thin and weak the sexual morality of modernity actually is (and how it corresponds to the thinness of the modern concept of the self). And it is amazing how many sexual perversions can be seen as morally acceptable under this scheme. For example, there is no real reason to ban incest, homosexuality, polygamy, polyamory, bestiality or swinging. And when it comes to pedophilia, there is a lot of wiggle room with regard to the age of consent and re-definition of "harm," "coercion," and "consent." But this is the morality of modernity. Keuhne is right to trace all this back to the individualism of modernity and to thus show that the problem is much bigger than just sexual morality itself.

2. Sex is Only One Way to Express Love: Another interesting feature of this book that I found very encouraging is the more modest estimate of sexuality that Kuehne exhibits. He does not think that having sexual relations is necessary to human fulfillment. Full stop. Period. Now, that is a radical thought in the modern world and very politically incorrect. He thinks one can have a full and meaningful life with close friendship, emotional intimacy and deep satisfaction without sexual intercourse. He writes:

"The more intimacy we have with God, the more we are able to receive his love and then share that love with others. We receive love spiritually when we are intimately connected with God, and as we grow in the ability to be intimate with him and enjoy his love, we also can grow in our ability to be intimate with and love others. The greater our capacity for intimacy, the greater our capacity to receive love and share love.

Sexuality is not an important part of this equation, not because sex is a bad thing but simply because sex is not an essential aspect of the deepest and most fulfilling relational life that is found in a spiritual connection with God and others. Since we are physical beings, it is not surprising that love and intimacy have a reflection in our physical experience. Neither is it surprising that love and intimacy trigger many drives within us, including our sexual drive. Yet it is important to realize that the thing for which we ultimately yearn is not sexual and sex is not the means to find it . . . Engaging in sexual intercourse but never developing our capacity to love and be truly spiritually intimate with anyone, including our sexual partner, is a danger for all sexual relationships, including marriage." (169-70)

I find this approach to be very compassionate toward those with disordered drives (i.e. what is called a homosexual orientation) because it is saying to such people that the world lies when it says that you are doomed to loneliness and a non-fulfilling life because you cannot marry. Celibacy is not worse than death because sex is not the meaning of life.

Viewing sex as not essential for intimacy means that we do not need to leave marriages in which our needs for intimacy are not being met. For millennia people have found intimacy in friendship, the extended family and in the church. Marriage can be permanent because it does not bear the full responsibility for meeting all our needs. And yet nothing in this book could be taken to imply that marriage is not a wonderful thing that is rooted in creation and affected by redemption as part of God's plan.

3. The Theology of the Body: This is the first (or maybe the second) book written by a Protestant that actually quotes approvingly from John Paul II's wonderful writings on the theology of the body. I taught this material to my marriage class this Fall and it was very well received by Evangelical students who found it biblical, deep and convincing - unlike the shallow and tentative teaching they had received so far in the Evangelical church context. I predict that more and more conservative Protestants will discover this deeply spiritual and authentically biblical teaching in the coming years. Kuehne's emphasis on relationships as the alternative to modern individualism likely derives at least in part from the theology of the body.

All in all, I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in coming to a deeper understanding of human sexuality in a Christian perspective and to anyone interested in understanding the modern world better. It is a fairly accessible work for students, laity and pastors.

If Roman Polanski Wore a Roman Collar

The Roman Polanski story is all over the internet and the other media. What a sad and sordid mess. Margaret Cabiniss has what I think is the final, definitive word on the utter hypocrisy of the pedophile's defenders in Hollywood, France and other gutters. She writes an article entiled: "If Roman Polanski Wore a Roman Collar" and she nails it. She is indebted to a post by Father Thomas Reese over at the Newsweek blog "Father Polanski Would Go to Jail," which is well-worth reading.

The only good that might come out of this (other than a long sentence in a tough prison for this unrepentant, repulsive, excuse for a man) is that it flushes out the people who, by supporting Polanski reveal themselves to have absolutely no moral credibility on anything from now on. Let's keep a list.

You know you are in trouble when Woody Allen is in your corner.
You know you are in trouble when Hollywood rallies to your support.
You know you are in trouble when the French intellectual and artistic class is on your side.

The biggest joke is the reflexive anti-Americanism that becomes the excuse for everything that is wrong with the world. Did they forget that Obama is now president? Didn't his apologies for everything make is all right? Or is it really America that they hated all along and not just President George W. Bush?

The Case for Early Marriage

The cover story for Christianity Today (Aug. 2009) is "The Case for Early Marriage" and features a story by Dr. Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of Amderican Teenagers (Oxford, 2007), which sounds good and which I have ordered from Amazon as a result of reading this story.

Regnerus argues that one of the basic reasons for rise of extra-marital sex in modern culture is the biologically ridiculous gap between puberty and age of marrying in modern culture. Age of first marriages has risen in America from 21 for women and 23 for men in 1970 to 26 for women and 28 for men today. Puberty takes place earlier than it did in pre-modern societies due to better nutrition etc. and therefore a gap of over a decade exists between when humans come to sexual maturity and the age at which most marry. Marriage actually occurs at the precise moment a women's fertility starts a slow decline (late 20's). This is a recipe for moral failure. We are fighting the healthy reproductive urge most people have and Regnerus' studies show that we are losing that fight as far as overall statistics are concerned. It is also a recipe for an epidemic of infertility problems, which we are currently experiencing.

But Regnerus is not calling for Christians to throw in the towell and join the culture in embracing casual, pre-marital as the norm. He has a different solution. Encourage earlier marriage. The statistics for teen marriages are not encouraging because they have a higher failure rate, but if you eliminate teen marriages from the picture earlier marriages (i.e. in the early 20's) have no more chance of failure than later ones.

Delaying marriage unnaturally (to the late 20's) not only has the effect of encouraging pre-marital sex, it also cuts down on fertility. The casual sex people have in their teens and 20's often leads to sexually transmitted diseases which can impair fertility. And fertility declines starting in the late 20's and accelerating after the late 30's. So many people put off marriage off and the decision to try for a baby (or several babies) until it is too late.

Surely, Regnerus is correct in discerning that the best way to approach this problem is to work with, not against, nature and re-structure social expectations so that society bends to accommodate nature. For Christians this may have several implications.

1. Parents may have to help young married couples financially in the first few years, especially if education must be completed.
2. Churches should be ready to help young couples practically with showers, counselling, mentoring, etc. Marriage is a good thing.
3. We all need to resist the materialism that lures us to put consumerism ahead of human relationships and family.

Nobody is saying it is going to be easy and this article does not have all the answers. But surely this basic insight - encouraging earlier marriages - is part of the overall solution.


In response to the article, Read Mercer Schuchardt, professor of media ecology at Wheaton College has some trenchent things to say in support of the general thesis. I want to quote him extensively because he says some things so well that need saying:

"Imagine a species that, for the first 5,600 years of recoreded history, arranged its cultures so that when youth began to grow the bumps and curves that signaled biological adulthood, the culture said, "You are an adult now," and welcomed them to adulthood's responsibilities and freedoms. . . . Now imagine that species enlightenened by the blessings of the Industrial Revolution. Advances in media and technology made a way to achieve longer life spans, lower infant mortality rates, and 2,300 square-foot homes with more TV's than children. With biology the mother of neither necessity nor economic life, it soon lost its role in religious and political life as well.

Born into this vast technopoly, today's child understands her world primarily through mass media. Thanks to media's total-disclosure nature, she will be a world-weary 72 year old by the time she reaches 12, but she won't have the maturity of a medieval 12 year old until about age 36. Ages 12 to 22 will be spent in mandatory survival training called higher education. Regardless of her primary course of study, her secondary course, undertaken when she is biologically fittest and physically strongest to raise children, will be the ironic but ironclad dogma that she must never consider having a child until she is economically, psychologically, and spiritually a fully realized autonomous self. If, after a decade of ingesting this dogma, she still has the desire to become a mother, she can only have at most two children.

If life's most meaningful work for couples is raising children, then it's a cynical system that requires the false choice between having children young, when a large family is physically possible but financially hard, or waiting until they can afford a large family, when fertility has dropped. Technology, it turns out, is a harsher taskmaster than biology, offering a world where the best form of birth control is economics, the best predictor of income is education, and the best deterrent to having children is guilt over failing to give them the very best a consumer society offers.

Meanwhile, the ocean of sorrow continues to fill with the tears of those who are childless or heartbroken by the lie that tells a woman she is free to be anything she wants, so long as she is a man about it."

Chastity and Resentment

In chapter 3 of Love and Responsibility Wojtyla says that chastity is a virtue in need of rehabilitation and explains why by referring to Max Scheler's concept of "resentment""

"Scheler saw a need for the rehabilitation of virtue because he discerned in modern man a characteristic spiritual attitude which is inimical to sincere respect for it. He has called this attitude 'resentment.'"

"Resentment arises from an erroneous and distorted sense of values. It is a lack of objectivity is judgment and evaluation, and it has its origin in weakness of will. The fact is that attaining or realizing a higher value demands a greater effort of will. So in order to spare ourselves the effort, to excuse our failure to obtain this value, we minimize its significance, deny it the respect which it deserves, even see it as in some way evil, although objectivity requires us to recognize that it is a good. Resentment possesses, as you can see, the distinctive characteriatics of the cardinal sin called sloth. St. Thomas defines sloth (aceida) as 'a sadness arising from the fact that the good is difficult. . . Resentment, however, does not stop at this: it not only distorts the features of the good but devalues that which rightly deserves respect, so that man need not struggle to raise himself to the level of the true good, but can 'light-heartedly' recognize as good only what suits him. . .

Chastity, more than any other, seems to be the virtue which resentment has tended to outlaw from the soul, the will and the heart of man. A systematic case has been built up against it, which seeks to show that it is not beneficial but harmful to human beings. . . But chastity and continence are seen above all as dangerous enemies of love . . . Christianity regards this tendency as one of the results of original sin." (143-4)

It was interesting to read in yesterday's The Toronto Star a perfect example of resentment, as described in 1960 by this "out of touch old cleric." An article "How 'Virginity' is a Dangerous Idea: The Author of a New Book Argues Against Purity Cults." The article begins: [My comments in black within square brackets]

"There is a moral panic in America over young women's sexuality – and it's entirely misplaced. [Panic? What panic? This is an imaginary crisis. Let's see what her purpose is in inventing such a panic.] Girls "going wild" aren't damaging a generation of women, the myth of sexual purity is. [So the porn industry is the friend of women; does anyone outside that multi-billion dollar industry believe that? And sexual purity is dangerous? No one ever died of virginity but plenty die every year of promiscuity.] The lie of virginity – the idea that such a thing even exists – [interesting, she is claiming that no such thing as verginity exists! What planet is she just in from? And why would she expect us to believe that existing things are unreal just because she says so?] is ensuring that young women's perception of themselves is inextricable from their bodies, and that their ability to be moral actors is absolutely dependent on their sexuality. [The 2nd century church father Irenaeus would say: "Ah, Gnosticism, are you still having trouble with that old heresy?] It's time to teach our daughters that their ability to be good people depends on their being good people, not on whether or not they're sexually active." [So being sexually active is the new euphemism for fornication and adultery! And sexual immorality isn't immoral because I say so. Got it.]

One's first reaction, upon reading this article, (purportedly written by a woman), is to wonder if it is a scam. Is it a commissioned piece for the pornography industry disguised as a news story? Is it what passes for "feminism" today in the Toronto Star? If so, it sounds more like advertising copy for Penthouse magazine model recruitment campaigns or for the "Girls Gone Wild" conglomerate that makes (a lot of) money by convincing intoxicated young women to expose themselves on camera. Very empowering, that. At the end of the article it is time for "True Confessions."

"My reasons for wanting to write this book weren't entirely altruistic, however. I was once that teenage girl struggling with the meaning behind my sexuality and how my own virginity, or lack thereof, reflected whether or not I was a good person. I was the cruelly labelled slut, the burgeoning feminist [So feminism = being sexually loose?] who knew that something was wrong with a world that could peg me as a bad person for sleeping with a high school boyfriend while ignoring my good heart, sense of humour and intelligence. [So she committed fornication and feels that society (or perhaps the Church?) is cruel to view her as morally guilty. I suppose that God and the moral law should just change to please her? Does it get any more pathetic than this?] Didn't the intricacies of my character count for anything? The answer, unfortunately, was no, they didn't. [The intricacies of my character - ah yes; isn't everyone allowed one pet sin? Who is God to condemn me!] It was a hard lesson to learn, and one that too many young women are dealing with nationwide."

What a perfect example of modern resentment against the virtue of chastity. It reminds me of Chesterton's comment that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, but found difficult and not tried. Interestingly, just as Wojtyla predicted, the sinner who finds virtue too strenuous tends to blame the Church, the Law, the moral standard, (anything!), except him or herself. Through a curious moral inversion, the Church and the Bible become the problem. There is nothing wrong with me. If God just wasn't so strict, it would be easy to be good. Resentment against traditional sexual morality has been building over the past forty years and is now reaching the point of active persecution of those who refuse to abandon biblical morality.

Update: For another take on the spiritual blindness of Jessica Valenti, the author of this article, see Dawn Eden's thoughtful post here.

Procreation and the Sexual Revolution

In his book, Love and Responsibility, published in Polish in 1960, Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, provided a critique of the main ideas of the sexual revolution and re-stated in modern, philosophical terms, the rationale for the Christian vision of love and marriage. I will try to re-state it as clearly as possible.

In Chapter 1 of this great work, he does some rather technical work that establishes a terminology with which he can undertake his constructive work later in the book. First, he distinguishes between two usages of the verb "to use." The first meaning of "to use" is the straightforward case in which one person employs another person as a means to an end. Wojtyla agrees with Kant that to a person must always be an end and never merely a means. Persons must always be subjects and never be reduced to the level of objects. So when a man seduces a woman gains sexual pleasure from the use of her body only to drop her as soon as the conquest is over, he is using her. This is what often happens in the casual sexual encounters of today's "hook-up culture."

The second meaning of the vert "to use" is more complicated. It occurs when two people decide it is in their mutual interest to allow the other use of their bodies for the purpose of each individual gaining sexual pleasure from the other. In such a case, each uses the other as a means to his or her own end. The fact that there is consent and reciprocity does not change the fact that the relationship is based on a utilitarian ethic and so never rises to the level of a personal act. The two persons do not treat each other as persons for each is merely a means to the other's end. The relationship is based on what each gets out of it; it is ultimately selfish and inherently unstable. As soon as one decides that his or her "needs" are no longer being met, the relationship is in danger of being ended.

Another reason why the relationship is not really personal is that the two persons give themselves to the other with reservation and are not really ontollogically changed by the giving and receiving of the gift of the self. The fact that the focus is on what I get out of it means that I remain in charge of myself even though I give my body to the other person. This kind of relationship is what we call "affectionate sex" as opposed to "casual sex" and characterizes the boyfriend-girlfriend relationship in which people mistake mutual use for real love. But many marriages never rise above this level either.

For Wojtyla, the truely conjugal act is a personal act when it occurs in a relationship ordered by the "personalistic norm." For this to occur the two people must treat each other as persons, rather than as mere means to selfish ends. How can this happen? To get at Wojtyla's answer, I find it helpful to think about Aristotle's definition of friendship. Friends have common objects of love and interest. To be a friend is to share a common goal or concern or value. In such a case, one is not using the other for one's own selfish interest; rather, both share the same goal and work toward it. St. Augustine uses this idea of "common objects of love" to define the difference between the city of man and the city of God.

Wojtyla suggests that a man and a woman enter into marriage with the common goal of procreation and this is what draws them together into a common work. Procreation here must be understood broadly as the conception, birth, raising, educating and nurturing of children in a Christian home so that they eventually embrace a personal and mature Christian faith and themselves establish Christian families of their own. Such a work is inter-generational, life-long work and involves being immersed into a web of relationships that henceforth define one's identity; one becomes not only wife or husband, but also father or mother, uncle or aunt, grand father or grandmother etc. One's vocation is deterimined in large measure by this common goal and one's life is lost in the pursuit of it.

When a husband and wife make procreation in this sense their common goal, certain occasions require that one of them submit him or herself to the other, while other occasions demand that both submit themselves to the common goal. But even when the husband is called upon to submit himself to his wife it is for the sake of their common goal, and the same is true when she is called to submit herself to him. Neither uses the other for his or her own selfish ends; rather the two are joined together in working for a common end. Ironically, this kind of relationship is far more "egalitarian" than relationships that remain stuck at the second level. (Jesus apparently was right that it is only by losing our lives that we really find them, which is a paradox those stuck at the level of utilitarianism can never grasp.)

In order for the standards of the personalistic norm to be met, the common goal must be (1) objective, (2) good and (3) freely chosen. Procreation, the transmission of life, is an objective good and it is freely chosen when people enter into the covenant of marriage. Procreation, therefore, is the common goal that raises the marriage relationship to the personal level. It is what allows the husband and wife to engage in sexual relations without using one another and so it is what allows them to relate to each other as persons. It is only when this happens that Wojtyla is willing to call the relationship love. To reduce love to the level of the utilitarian use of another's body for the fleeting pleasures of physical and emotional intimacy is to reduce love to a sub-personal level and love must be personal to be itself.

This is why procreation must be integral to and central in the marriage relationship. True love is fruitful and open, not sterile and closed in upon itself. True love is not pleasure; pleasure can never be more than a by-product of true love. The sexual revolution is the attempt to de-couple sex from reproduction, love from procreation, pleasure from the context of a personal relationship. Fornication, cohabitation, adultery, divorce, "same sex marriage," "trial marriage, "open marriage," serial monogamy, polyamory, and prostitution are all ways of separating procreation from sex and none of them makes sense except in the context of the contraceptive mentality.

Contraception, it seems, is the crucial factor in training us to conceive of sex as non-procreative and therfore the point at which we begin to conceptualize sub-personal sex as a good, rather than a temptation. It is, of course, only an illusion of the good and not a real good. But the fact that people today conceptualize sub-personal sex as a good goes a long way toward explaining why chastity and the Christian vision for marriage are so hated - and why modern society is so enamoured with artificial contraception.

The Promiscuity Ethic versus the Chastity Ethic

The battle today over the shape of marriage and family in the Western world is not really between pro- and anti-same sex marriage. It is actually between advocates of two mutually exclusive and competing versions of sexual ethics: the promiscuity ethic and the chastity ethic.

The chastity ethic is the traditional and Christian view that holds that sex is for marriage and marriage is an inter-generational institution for the raising of children and the disciplining of immature and selfish individuals toward the goals of maturity and mutual service. As such this vision of marriage forms the foundation for a society of free people who do not require support, indoctrination and heavy-handed direction in the details of life from the government and a class of professional planners and social engineers.

The promiscuity ethic is a 20th century phenomenon that holds that people should have sexual relations freely with anyone at all as desire dictates, rather than being constrained by the limits imposed by life-long, exclusive marriage relationships. The promiscuity ethic views all requirements for sexual self-discipline as "repression," which is basically the myth that you will die without sex. This ethic produces people who live in a perpetual state of adolescence and who are incapable of restraining their appetites and governing themselves. So accompanying the extreme hedonistic individualism of this ethic is an openness to the "nanny state" or "welfare state," which encroaches on the natural rights and responsibilities of the family in order to bring order into the chaos produced by permissiveness and personal irresponsibility. So the state begins to support children financially, determine how they will be educated, lay down detailed rules for how they will be entertained, indoctrinated and disciplined (or more likely not disciplined).

Now, there have been times in Western civilization when family life and sexual morality have broken down in ways similar to the present time, as for example in 18th century England or revolutionary France. But the novelty of our time is that such family breakdown, increased petty vices and crime, high suicide rates, public indecency and indolence is heralded by the deep thinkers of our intellectual and chattering classes as "progressivism in action."

The promiscuity ethic is seen in two main effects: no-fault, casual divorce and same sex marriage. Behind these two major social revolutions lie a view of sexuality as a trivial thing that we share in common with the animals. Young people are assumed to become sexually active at puberty and remain sexually active throughout their lives regardless of marital status. Sex is seen as being "like taking a drink of water," that is, as a natural function no more personal than eating or defecating.

It always was Christianity that has held a high view of sexuality, viewing it as something personal and human, something not reducible to a mere bodily function. Christians believe that sex reveals something of the nature of God when it is practiced with chastity and self-control. The total giving of the self to another and the union of two persons in matrimony is seen as imaging the Triune God, as Genesis 1 teaches. Any society that holds a high view of marriage will attain a level of humanistic values that other societies never can attain. The Christian influence on society in this regard is extremely valuable.

The chastity ethic holds that sexual self-control is possible because persons are created in God's image as rational and moral creatures capable of making choices. The virtue of chastity allows the person to make a gift of the self to the other in such a way as to join the other in a joint pursuit of a common good, that is, children and family. The virtue of chastity is necessary all through life because to be committed to one's husband or wife in the project of marriage, including child-rearing, will mean giving up sexual gratification for varying periods of time due to the exingencies of life.

The virtue of chastity makes sexual union a personal union, rather than a mutual use of one another's bodies for gratification. Such a personal union is not closed in upon itself, but is open to the transmission of life, which means more than we usually think of as procreation. It means the raising, education and nurture of children in the faith so that they come to a personal, mature, Christian faith of their own and eventually marry and establish Christian families of their own. This is a life-long, inter-generational project and not something fleeting, temporary or reversible. Immersion in such a project is a school of character and an aid to sanctification. It is also a witness to the reality and nature of God.

Divorce destroys the permanence necessary to marriage as an inter-generational project. Same sex marriage is inherently non-procreative. Both are ordered to the fulfillment of the desires of the individual, rather than to procreation. Therefore both ultimately destroy marriage in the traditional sense and trivialize sexuality. Promiscuity is essentially the trivialization of sex. The sexual revolution of the last 40 years is doomed to self-destruct eventually, just as certainly as was the Soviet Union, and for similar reasons; both are built on a flawed anthropology. Human beings were made for better and the human spirit will eventually rebel against trivialization and de-personalization.

Christianity has few gifts more precious, beneficial and profoundly humanizing to offer the wider society. For the Church to conform to the increasingly nihilistic, hedonistic, individualism of the late modern West, instead of maintaining this counter-cultural witness, is tragic. It is nothing less than a failure to be salt and light in the world and a failure to seek the peace of the city in which we are exiled. The task of the Church is conservative insofar as we are speaking about conserving the family as the bedrock of society and the institution that civilizes citizens and humanizes life in the world. For those who pay close attention to the witness of the Church in this area, the Gospel of Jesus Christ will appear clearly as Christians live the Christian life out in the context of sex, marriage, children, and family. "You are the light of the world." (Matt. 5:14)

Chastity: The Foundation of Love

Here is a very good (and brief) article by Robert Colquhoun on chastity at:

He defines chastity as:
"The virtue of chastity is a power that controls one’s sex drive to place it in the service of authentic human love according to one’s state in life."

He explains that chastity is more than simply not having intercourse:
"It is possible to technically remain a virgin whilst not living a chaste life. Even within marriage, John Paul II stated that man can commit adultery with his wife if he treats her as an object to satisfy instinct. Catholic acts of morality depend on the object chosen, the intention, and the circumstance. (CCC 1750). "

The Christian virtue of chastity is much neglected even among Evangelicals. Modern people no longer believe that the sex drive is even under rational control and think that promiscuity is inevitable. They do not distinguish between instinct on the level of the body and the rational power to make moral choices on the level of the soul. To speak of "a power that controls one's sex drive" makes no sense to modernists because they do not believe we have such a power. The sad part is that if I do not have the power to control my instincts, then I can never use my body to express authentic love. Even when I want to have sex with you, it just means I have instinctual needs that I want to use you to meet. It can't mean that I choose to love you and give myself to you completely as the one to whom I commit my life. Without chastity, sex is thus separated from true love.

Should Parents Encourage More Teen Sex in an Attempt to Lower Teen Pregnancy Rates?

Teen pregnancies have been rising in the UK and a public debate has broken out over the recent tragedy of a 12 (now 13) year old boy who got a 15 year old girl pregnant after her mother left them home alone. The Labour Government, that instrument of decisive action, waded into the breach with - I kid you not - a pamphlet. (See a previous post called "Parents told: avoid morality in sex lessons.") The pamphlet advised parents not to make sex into a moral issue when talking to their children. (Apparently, some were tempted to do so and the Government had to act.) Obviously, the Labour Government, being a socialist government after all, thinks morality is to be avoided at all costs in all matters sexual. Heavens, you might cause the children to rebel! But, think about it. If they have no rules, how can they rebel? This is pure genius! Why has no one come up with this before now? I guess it took a socialist government and many, many highly trained, social scientests to come with this new scientific, foolproof parenting strategy. No word yet on when the Government plans to abandon attempts to moralize about homophobia and racism, but the sooner this happens the faster we will be on our way to a perfect society.

Today, we are treated to a wonderful headline that makes the Times sound like Seventeen magazine: "Teen Sex: Should You Allow Sleepovers?" Have a bunch of "valley girls" taken over the news room? I can only suppose that any day now we will have an exclusive interview with Gordon Brown in which the burning question of the day will be girls asking him how to deal with the trauma of when your braces get caught in his sweater and other such critical concerns. Or maybe a panel of female cabinet ministers could discuss questions like: "Will I get a bad reputation if I don't go all the way by the second date?" and "Should modern girls expect him to pay for the condoms out of his allowance?"

The article suggests that it is a real parenting dilemma to decide whether to allow some boy to stay in your 14 year old daughter's room all night or not. Hmm . . . How best to prevent pregnancy? More sex or less? It's so hard to say - flip a coin. It sounds to me like some kindly soul should call the author of this article and explain clearly - perhaps using short words - where babies come from.
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article5834488.ece

Let's see if we can take this daring and edgy journalism to the next level of edginess and daring. Should parents try to keep their children from having sex or ensure that they are "doing it" before junior high, just to make sure they are ready for junior high? Should parents have any rules about members of the opposite sex, dating etc. and if so should they include methods of contraception? Should parents enforce any boundaries or would that be "Victorian" (gasp!)? Should fathers take their 12 year old sons to whorehouses instead of sporting events for their birthdays? Should mothers go one step further and rent their daughters out to neighbourhood boys? (It could provide extra income during recessionary times and . . . it could pay for the trips to the whorehouses too.) Should parents leave morality out of the sex advice area altogether or should they insist that virginity is a moral deficiency? So many tough questions - so few obvious solutions.

Maybe if the mainstream media and the government get stumped, they could call the editors of Seventeen or maybe Playboy. While they are at it they can pick up a few tips on good policies for getting that virginity rate down to zero, along with the stock market.

Further Thoughts on the British Governments's Stand Against Teaching Children Basic Morality

Further to my post yesterday about the British Labour government minister telling parents not to teach their children right from wrong when it comes to sex, the thought occurs to me that the government is actually promoting child abuse. It is a matter of parental duty to teach children the Ten Commandments and to instil the golden rule in them. It is not an option or a trivial matter; it is a matter of basic, fundamental duty - a matter of right and wrong.

It also occurs to me that it is astounding that, precisely at the moment the government displays its lack of concern for the moral, physical and emotional health of children in such a blatant and obvious way, it also sees fit to instruct parents on how to go about raising children. This is evidence of a degree of moral blindness that indicates a willful and rebellious rejection of the moral order and God. It is proof that this government has lost all semblance of moral legitimacy and deserves nothing but scorn from those it presumes to rule.

This is not even matter of concern limited only to Christians. It goes beyond that. It is a matter of basic humanism and decency. No major religion in the world and few agnostics actually believe that sex is a completely amoral area of life. This government consists of people who are not mature enough to be trusted to babysit for the evening, let alone govern a modern nation-state. There is stupidity and there is evil; a mixture of the two is lethal.