Conservatives, Conformity, and the Anti-Sexual Revolution
Via Drum, this bit on some of the latest kookiness from the lunatics in the Bush administration. To summarize:
SEX BAD! SEX BAD!
These guys are convinced that sex is so dirty that it can ONLY be permissible to perpetuate the species. If you just think it's a cool and excellent part of the human experience...well...what kind of sicko are you?
So, remember folks: when you're engaged in non-marital or non-standard sex, you're not only having fun, you're striking a blow against the puritannical lunatics in charge.
So let's get out there and get kinky!
Go team!
Via Drum, this bit on some of the latest kookiness from the lunatics in the Bush administration. To summarize:
SEX BAD! SEX BAD!
These guys are convinced that sex is so dirty that it can ONLY be permissible to perpetuate the species. If you just think it's a cool and excellent part of the human experience...well...what kind of sicko are you?
So, remember folks: when you're engaged in non-marital or non-standard sex, you're not only having fun, you're striking a blow against the puritannical lunatics in charge.
So let's get out there and get kinky!
Go team!
posted by Winston Smith at
9:24 AM
18 Comments:
Al Gore: "Any force that tries to make you feel shame for being who you are, and loving who you love, is a form of tyranny over your mind. And it must be rejected, resisted, and defeated."
Damn, too bad the country didn't vote for Gore to be our president.
Oh wait...
I'm afraid you fell into the same canard that Hilzoy did recently about the theology of sex. (Her commenters did an OK job of correcting her misconceptions, but as usual I'd recommend Thomas Aquinas, whose distinction is between good and bad sex. (Procreation is not the sole purpose of the sex act, BTW; see his concept of fides (3.4.2), which is quite beautiful.)
It's the dirtiness of kinky sex that gets people off, of course, not its beauty or goodness. And altho your advice is tongue-in-cheek, you might admit it's not the sort of thing men tend to tell their daughters.
Yeah, the Catholic church denies it is hostile to sex, too. But its every policy related to sex is one of denial - much like the Republitaliban.
I'm just not feeling the love, lovable. "Republitaliban"? That's like descending into self-parody, man.
Well, I don't think we're talking about Aquinas here...rather, about contemporary fundies and suchlike. Though as I understand it, Aquinas is not exactly a liberal about these matters...
And, yeah, I'm not advocating telling kids about kinky sex. I'm just advocating kinky sex.
I mean if it pisses off the fundies then, hey, I'm willing to do my duty.
Yeah, I hear you, WS. I'm a rebel, too. I throw trash in the recycle bin. Up the establishment.
We shall revisit your position on all this when your as of yet unconceived daughter reaches 14. Or twelve, these days.
(As for Brother Thomas, he's not God and he's not always right. Just astoundingly often. Altho an apologist, he writes more for you than me, to the unconvinced than the convinced. Preaching to the converted is too easy a job, and unworthy of true talent---as we prove around here most every day.)
Oh mighty orthodoxy, let not any temptation to naughtiness tempt me...
tho I won't be having kids, I hope that if I did I'd have rather more sense than to teach them that sex was dirty and that I was their "high priest."
Sex isn't dirty. And no one will ever confuse you with a priest.
sure, we can say that sex isnt dirty and winston is certainly not a priest. but thats just because we have the luxury of not being his (hypothetical) 12 year old daughter who is being told otherwise.
the real victims of sexual puritanism are the children who are essentially being lied to by their parents.
Do you think so, j?
Is a child, a person, more likely to be harmed psychologically by puritanical parents or loveless sexual experimentation? (We shall leave out the teenage baby-making thing for now, altho it's eventually part of the equation.)
And for the record, as a self-professed Christian (let it be known I'm not a very good one and there are many who would toss me out), I would stand against any fundie who tried to dirty sex in his child's mind.
I would point to Aquinas, for instance, who is really worth a glance at least. He wasn't perfect, but none of us are.
Well, there's a happy medium, right?
It seems that you can err in these matters in at least two different ways. Some people are sucked into puritanism and miss out on something important about life. Some people are sucked into hyper-hedonism and sink down that sewer.
Seems like the thing to do would be to be honest with people about these two extremes. Sex is fun, but entails certain responsibilities (e.g. you've got to be honest with your partners and so forth.) There's a wide spectrum of morally permissible ways to conduct oneself sexually, but not just anything goes. One doesn't want to be a ho, but, on the other hand it's not very smart to wait until you are married to see what the whole sex thing is about.
If I had, say, a daughter, I think I'd be bummed out to see her on Girls Gone Wild. I think I'd be slightly more bummed out, however, if she decided to get married before she'd had at least a couple of friendly sexual relationships. Same basic thing goes for a son.
Anyway, seems like it's Aristotle we want to appeal to here--there's a mean to aim for, and that mean can be missed in at least two different ways.
Exactly right, Winston . . . not to mention that as far as I can tell, there are very very very few people openly advocating teen pregnancy, loveless sexual experimentation, and wanton debauchery, and quite a sizable number openly advocating a puritanical code of sexual conduct.
---Myca
sorry to come so late to the party. tvd is acccurate in saying that "Procreation is not the sole purpose of the sex act," but the church teaches that if a sex act is such that procreation is not possible, for example Clinton-Lewinski, then it is not a good moral act.
Link i found on the first google page i got.
Hmm, TVD, Republitaliban relates to Republican much as Islamist relates to Muslim - a subset, influential but a subset. Should I name names? Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Tom DeLay. Bill Frist panders to them, but that's nothing new. So does any Republican who wants to be a Presidential contender or any kind of power broker. That's why Rudy Giuliani, who's not one of them, can't possibly be the GOP nominee; hell, he has been photographed in a dress!
Whatever, LL. I'm still not feeling the love.
Myca, you're correct, but neither are women past child-bearing age discouraged from sex. In fact fides encourages it. My point is not to shtup dogma about sex on anybody, but to illustrate that its theology defies simplification.
Thomas has some beautiful things to say about it, and his "natural law" is pretty close to Tibetan Buddhism's, which depends on no bible, only reason.
I think psycho-sexuality is far more complex than we understand at this point, and I don't know if we're asking the right questions.
In this very frank age, I don't think we're frank about it at all, really. We're so fragile that we can only bring ourselves to discuss it with a certain brutality.
Via Drum, this bit on some of the latest kookiness from the lunatics in the Bush administration. To summarize:
SEX BAD! SEX BAD!
How did this thread get off on the theology of sex? I understand that the lunatics are pandering to a voting bloc that identifies itself as religious, but it’s still about the next election rather than theology.
.
Poor TVD, caught in loveless blogging experimentation...
Whatever, indeed.
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