On 7/19/06, Jim Guinee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
My earlier point was not to debate the morality of sex outside of marriage
as much as the social problems that would diminish greatly if sex was
indeed confined to marriage.
It seems that when you argue "Wouldn't it be great if we could...?"
someone immediately steps in with "Yeah, like that's going to work!"
Well, that's in part because we don't all agree that "it would be
great if we could...".
In this case, if you mean "wouldn't it be great if all sex were good
frequent sex within stable, happy, loving marriages that never fall
apart, and if everyone were able to find such a marriage", then, well,
sure, I guess (though I would not expect everyone to even agree with
that, and wouldn't blame people who didn't).
But if that's what you mean, you're asking for a number of miracles,
and if your plan to make it happen is to start by working to restrict
sex to marriage and pray for those miracles to happen, then here in
the real world, it would most definitely not "be great". In fact
you're a lot more likely to get more commodization (is that a word?
Making it into a commodity?) of sex and of women, "honor killings"
(and now forced "honor suicides"), children sold/taken as brides, etc.
Sure, you can legislate against some of that, but the overall
commodization of sex is an inevitable product of attempts to restrict
sex to the marriage contract (and yes, the Pope has that exactly
backwards in his pronouncement of a few months ago. He is simply
wrong).
If you think you have a more concrete plan to make those miracles
occur then I'm sure that the rest of us would love to hear it. Keep in
mind that the divorce rate is high among the fundamentalist religious
groups most devoted to this model for sex and marriage, so if there is
a plan there, it sure doesn't seem to be working. And I don't see
anyone addressing the other miracles at all. I think this is clearly
just a lot of wishful thinking - "let's restrict sex to marriage, and
if that doesn't work for some people, we'll just blame it all on
them". That wouldn't "be great" at all in my book.
The arguments against sex outside of marriage mentioned earlier -
sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies - can be
directly addressed. It WOULD be great if we did that, rather than
wasting all of this effort trying to get everyone to chase the same
pipe dream without considering the consequences.
Paul Smith
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