The Modern Sexual “Martyr” - by R. J. Snell

In Crisis

According to Christianity, we are made for communion. Created in the image of a God who is Divine Communion, we are made to give ourselves to and for others. Without Eve, for instance, Adam could not enter into the communio personarum and so was not fully able to bear the image of God.

A recent Esquire piece by John H. Richardson, “The Martyrs of Sex,” sees it quite differently.

With an ear to scandal, Richardson intones a litany of martyrs—Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, David Petraeus, Anthony Weiner, and others—all sacrificed to “our hypocrisy and denial.” Patron saints of adultery, each reveals that “sex, be it adulterous or premarital or deviant or polyamorous, is a good thing … sex itself is the moment of grace.”

As is often the case, grace is rejected, locked out of “the invisible prison we build for ourselves,” although adultery is “a glorious terrifying truth that bursts through our barriers if we have the vitality to rebel,” lifting ourselves “up into an exaltation we still refuse to understand.”

Men are “geldings of civilization,” wives “indentured … into the role of prison guard … slowly killing” the vitality of the male in the name of social order. And just as Nietzsche proclaimed priestly morality to be cruel, so too we ought to pity the wives/prison guards, for “no free person would choose such a role … [t]heir cruelty is in direct proportion to their own suffering, as cruelty usually is.”

We’ve chosen civilization when we ought to have “declare[d] ourselves as gods,” instead allowing “mean little scolds who drag us down from the throne and tell us we are hateful, our desire is hateful, that our essential vitality is a sin.” Unlike “healthier societies,” we’ve enforced “denying that vitality” so to fit “into the three-piece suit of civilization.” In doing so, “it makes liars of us … we always make our dilemma worse by getting everything backward.”

The noble and bold include sexuality “in their definition of power … part and parcel of why the great become great in the first place.” The wives of the great know this: “Of course I knew what he was doing. I celebrate him! That’s the man I married, that’s why I married him, for the vital fire you pretend to despise.” So why do we geld our godlike status, our nature as “Big Dog”? Nothing is accomplished except “the ugliest need born of … civilization … declaring that which is most beautiful to be filthy, that which is most natural to be unnatural.” A “rage for order always invites destruction,” and the only way to avoid destruction is to destroy order, “to open the prison doors of civilization and finally learn how to live free.” Civilization or life, one cannot have both.

Modernity Brings Alienation When Nature Replaces God 

As articulated by Luigi Giussani, founder of the international Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation, earlier periods had “an unfragmented conception of the person … the figure of the saint as the exemplary image … who has realized the unity between himself and his destiny.” The unity of sanctity, however, was expelled from our ideals during “the great change” of modernity. Offering a brief history, Giussani explains how Humanism offered instead “the divo, the successful man who relies on his own forces.” No longer was the ideal “projected … towards something greater” than the individual, an adherence to the “Voice of an Other,” but was instead achievement, accomplishment. But once worth was loosed from the objective love of God, “instead consigned to the mercy of fortune, what then?” Fortune can be resisted, perhaps, wrestled by the very greatest of men, but time levels all mountains, overcomes all heroes, and humanism imbibed the tragic sadness of the ancients, “that sense of ultimate limitation,” the failure, in the end, to “lift myself above the earth.”

Unable to adequately ground worth in the divo, transcendence “must come from something else, something greater,” and, says Giussani, the Renaissance identified “the ultimate source of creativity … with nature.” From nature springs the “impulsive, the spontaneous, instinct,” now equated with the good. “Do what you will,” declares Rabelais, “because man is, by nature, driven to act virtuously,” which is, at the same time, “a subtle but real hostility to … a God who says yes or no, who seeks to regulate, to prune human instincts.”

Consequently, the last centuries bequeathed a legacy convinced “that success is what makes life worthwhile; that nature merits our complete trust (i.e., instinct is exalted); and, finally, that reason can bend nature … in accordance with its every wish and command.” For men and women so formed, freedom comes to be understood as “abandonment of one’s self to nothing but the force of one’s reactions, instincts, fancies, and opinions,” in stark opposition to “adhering to what is real … to being.” Enslaved to this distorted account of freedom, it’s unsurprising to find conflict between the individual and civilization, for civilization’s claims and limits must be understood as deeply restrictive of freedom. Civilization, so understood, must be overcome to maintain the natural, the free, the noble. Or, as “Martyrs of Sex” puts it, there’s no “vitality left after all the social and personal castration that we enact every single day of our miserable slavish self-denying lives.”

Note the “cultural bewilderment,” as Giussani terms it, in such statements. In declaring undifferentiated freedom the absolute goal, “man is powerless to be man” insofar as he is “free for nothing.” Consequently, the celebration of natural vitality alienates, cementing freedom as deep estrangement, for “if man is so free as to be the measure of reality, he is condemned to an abysmal loneliness … a stranger to everything that is,” particularly to culture and civilization, which cannot but appear as stultifying.

While Richardson presents his vision as one of vitality and life, just as Nietzsche did, Giussani sees through such façades, noting instead “spiritual sickness … the loss of the taste for living.” True, sickness is couched in the language of life, power, or strength, but this is “temper tantrums in the fact of being.” The freedom they seek is estrangement, “cut off from any relationship with things, with others,” and even with themselves. They speak life, they live death.

This last statement needs more explanation, I suspect.

Christianity Rejects Moralism and Proclaims Communion with God 

What is morality, sexual or otherwise? How this is answered decisively shapes, I should think, whether civilization is viewed as alienating and enervating or a source of life and joy. As loving embrace with Another, or a slavish martyrdom.

Giussani states that “moralism is the forced adherence, voluntaristically stressed, to the ideals of humanity approved by the dominant culture,” which “requires a guilt-inducing conformism.” Richardson would agree, claiming his a noble attempt to throw off the shackles of culturally induced guilt in the name of vital freedom and power, and, moreover, identifying the Faith as a (the?) noxious host for much of the guilt and hypocrisy.

But the Faith is not a moralism. It does not force, it is not voluntaristic, and it pays scant heed to the ideals of dominant culture. Moralism posits norms and rules for action—commanding this, obliging that—while Christianity proclaims communion.

The Faith values freedom to act, of course, but its understanding of action is non-reductive, refusing to limit the meaning of action to the rules or strictures of a social group. Instead, human action has an origin not of its own making and a purpose far outstripping the measure of man. We act because we seek some good; we seek, it seems, because we lack; our restlessness and longing reveals our desire for fulfillment, for meaning, for the good we lack. We sense, too, that the good intended is rather more than this or that particular object of desire—the raise, the house, the toy, the sexual conquest is not enough, not “full enough” to satisfy that completion for the sake of which we act. (Richardson knows this, thus professing power or greatness rather than sexual satisfaction as his fundamental motivation.)

Our desire is excessive, it would appear, always going beyond the particular objects, always reaching farther than our grasp. We desire complete fulfillment. In the Christian articulation of this experience, our desire is for God, and, moreover, our desire takes the form of love. That is, we seek relation: loving, intimate union—communion.

Christian action springs from a loving desire for communion, and in love of God the basic principle of Christian morality takes its meaning—Love your neighbor as yourself, which is to say, nurture, allow, and do not impede as others freely seek communion. Absent the loving reaching out for communion, however, morality becomes moralism, “something that derives from laws and from the coherence of an understanding of life validated by power.” So understood, “moralism always points an accusatory finger at man.”

If this is true, then Richardson is not entirely incorrect in viewing civilization as a yoke, for, as Giussani articulates, unless “one’s behavior flows from the dynamism intrinsic to an event to which one belongs [like love of communion],… it is an arbitrary and pretentious selection … among which the choices most publicized by power will dominate.”

Richardson Mistakes Moralism of Distorted Civilization with Christian Love 

Ours is a deeply fragmented and contradictory civilization, exalting the bold conqueror, deifying authenticity, instinct, and self-importance, while simultaneously condemning inequality, naked aggression, and open disdain for the weak. Of course men like Richardson experience alienation and angry estrangement, for he’s been commanded to seek freedom as the purpose of life, especially to follow his own unique nature and proclivities—which urge him to hit, to rut, to achieve, to overcome, to dominate—while the very same culture insists also that he be nice and privilege the voice of the marginalized. He’s had enough of the fragmentation, choosing his nature over the gentler voices, and in this way striving to bring his splintered self together, to be fully human again. It’s a temper tantrum, but can the culture provide him anything better?

Giussani warns of the Church failing mankind, offering merely “a narrowed moral horizon, the boundaries of which are those stemming from the dominant conception of the life of the society.” When this happens, the Faith “ends up becoming a pretext for some concern or other that wins the consent of the mentality in power.” If we merely scold Richardson but cannot show the way of love we risk perpetuating the fragmentation, choosing moralism rather than love, siding with the narrow concerns of this or that element of the disintegration.

We’ll create martyrs, as Richardson thinks them, those who, in the name of their own dignity and wholeness, however misconstrued, revolt against the incoherence and arbitrary shame foisted upon them by a distorted civilization, and these noble martyrs will be unable to distinguish the Faith from the bent culture, and not without some cause.

Instead of moralism, Giussani notes, Christianity “must offer the living God. Not the god of the dead, or of human intelligence, but the living God,” an “all-embracing fact.” And since God is communion, and since the all-embracing, full desire of our restlessness is love of this communion, the living God is offered and known as “the experience of a great love.” Only love coheres, only love unites our splintered selves, only love orients morality towards our full humanity as beings for communion with ourselves, with others, and with God. Only love is credible.

Somewhat strangely, then, we must be saints so as to avoid creating martyrs.

Is Sex Just Like Race?

In Public Discourse

by Matthew J. Franck

July 8, 2011

Race and sex play qualitatively different roles in our interactions with each other, making sex rationally relevant to our social and political policies in a way that race is not.

After one year as president of the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., John Garvey took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to announce a change in his university’s policy for housing students on campus: a return to all-male and all-female residence halls, and the gradual elimination of mixed-sex buildings. According to the Washington Post, Catholic University first changed to “co-ed” housing over two decades ago and currently houses both sexes in eleven of its seventeen residence halls—though men and women remain in separate floors or wings, unlike the latest fashion of shared suites, bathrooms, and even sleeping quarters at some universities.

President Garvey’s stated reason for separating the sexes into their own buildings, starting with the incoming freshmen in the fall of 2011, is to combat the pattern of binge drinking and “hooking up” among the students, and the consequent risks to body, mind, and soul of these behavior patterns. He made no claim that separate living arrangements would magically cure the ills he diagnosed. But why contribute to the problem when you can at least foster solutions?

It ought to be surprising that Catholic University ever experimented with co-ed housing. But this essay will not be about the University’s decision to reverse course on student residential policy. It will instead be about a revealing remark made by one of the opponents of the decision.

Elsewhere in the District of Columbia, at George Washington University, law professor John Banzhaf announced that he intended to sue Catholic University for sex discrimination under the District’s Human Rights Act. Banzhaf, a formidable nuisance as a litigator, told Inside Higher Ed that separating the sexes was like a return to the old evil of “separate but equal” in racial segregation:

“Suppose a university decided that there would be less racial tension if all the blacks were in a black dorm, all the whites were in a white dorm,” Banzhaf said. “Each one is, quote, getting their own dormitory, and maybe some of them would be happier that way. But surely no one would suggest that it’s lawful.” The statute does not require that a certain population be disadvantaged for an action to be illegal; the simple act of segregating the genders is enough, Banzhaf said.

Banzhaf may have a case under the D.C. Human Rights Act, or he may not. That will be for others to decide. But this parallel of his, between race and sex, is what should catch our attention. His argument, as a matter of justice and moral right, is only as good as the proposition that sex is just like race when it comes to our treatment of others. Banzhaf is sure that if it would be wrong to separate the races into different dormitories, even into facilities of identical quality, it would be equally wrong to separate the sexes.

But is sex just like race? Let us take it as given that justice demands a legal order that is, as the first Justice Harlan put it 115 years ago in Plessy v. Ferguson, “color-blind,” taking no notice of anyone’s race when it comes to his status or treatment in law and public policy. Would we say, in the same way, that the law should be “sex-blind,” taking no notice of the fact that some persons are men and others are women?

Even the Supreme Court has not gone this far. In perhaps its furthest-reaching sexual equality decision, United States v. Virginia (forcing Virginia Military Institute to admit female students in 1996), the Court still maintained that an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for treating the sexes differently would pass constitutional muster, in circumstances where racial distinctions would not. Considerations of privacy, safety, decency, and the virtue of members of both sexes would seem to be sufficient justification for separating the living accommodations of young men and women in college. The possibility that a policy of separation might run counter to the desires of many college-age men and women might only prove the justice of it.

And none of these considerations, turning on the risks and probabilities of sexual activity, with all the spin-off concerns about alcohol consumption, sexual assault, pregnancies and possible abortions, disease transmission, and plain old-fashioned “relationship problems,” would even merit our attention if we were asking whether the races should be separated. The best Professor Banzhaf can do is imagine that “racial tension” might be employed as a ground for separating the races. Our problem, when it comes to mixing or separating the sexes, is a bit more complicated than that, and begins with something rather the opposite of “tension.”

Banzhaf’s blithe parallel, however, of treating sex just like race is lately a favorite rhetorical turn of the campaign for same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court ruling cited by those making this argument is Loving v. Virginia (1967), in which the justices unanimously struck down the law of that state (and, by implication, those then remaining on the books in fifteen other states) against “miscegenation,” or inter-racial marriage.

The state of Virginia attempted to defend its policy by arguing, among other points, that the law treated both races equally, since it forbade whites to marry blacks, and blacks to marry whites, and assessed penalties under the law without regard to the race of those convicted. One hears similar defenses of marriage as a conjugal union between a man and a woman when the argument is made that the law treats heterosexual and homosexual alike, securing identical marriage rights to persons of either sexual orientation—to marry someone of the opposite sex. Is this formal-equality argument valid in both cases, or neither, or in one but not the other?

Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the Court in the Loving case, saw through the state’s claim to treat the races with formal equality when he noted that because the law prohibited “only interracial marriages involving white persons”—not, for instance, a marriage between a person of African descent and one of Asian descent—it was evident that the law was “designed to maintain White Supremacy.” In like vein, the advocates of same-sex marriage treat the argument that “gays and lesbians too can marry persons of the opposite sex” as a cruel joke, and focus on the fact that they are not permitted to marry the persons they wish to marry. Thus, their complaint runs, there seems to be some “Heterosexual Supremacy” at work in the determination to preserve marriage as it has always existed, as a union of man and woman.

As Chief Justice Warren pointed out, the anti-miscegenation laws of Virginia and other states “proscribe[d] generally accepted conduct if engaged in by members of different races,” and thus interfered with a “freedom of choice to marry” on grounds that were simply irrelevant to the marital relation: race, and race alone. If not for the laws against inter-racial marriage, a man and a woman of different races would have enjoyed the freedom to marry in the ordinary course of things, barring other difficulties that are relevant to the marital relation (age of consent, consanguinity, and the freedom of a single person who would not be committing bigamy by entering a new marriage).

But Warren’s reasoning makes no sense except on the tacit presumption of another consideration, so integral to the marital relation that in 1967 it did not occur to him to state it, although it is implicit in his phrase “generally accepted conduct”—and that is, that the two persons free and capable of marrying are a man and a woman. Virginia and other states, in their anti-miscegenation laws, had interfered with a natural relationship by introducing something—race—that was at right angles to it. To rule out bigamy, or to regulate the age of consent, or the degrees of permitted consanguinity—all these place conditions on the freedom to marry that are oriented toward the fulfillment of marriage’s purposes. But introducing race into those conditions injects another purpose—racial “purity”—into the institution, forcing it to serve an end alien to itself. When unmarried, unrelated adult men and women choose to marry, they enter into a relation that is good in itself, a relation of opposite-sex individuals capable of the kind of union, and the only kind of union, that naturally produces offspring. The laws of marriage can and should facilitate, regulate, and solemnize this relation, and provide that it endure. But when political authorities permitted some marriages, and prohibited others, on racial grounds, they were interfering with it in pursuit of goals foreign to its nature, and acting unjustly in two ways, both in their racial discrimination and in changing the meaning of marriage. They were, in short, instrumentalizing marriage as a tool of state policy rather than honoring its nature and fostering it as what it is.

The advocates of same-sex marriage attempt a Loving-style “freedom of choice to marry” argument when they challenge the laws now in place to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples. In its 2009 ruling in Varnum v. Brien, for instance, the Iowa Supreme Court noted that in 1998 the state legislature had acted for the first time to “define marriage as a union between only a man and a woman.” The court went on to say that “except for [this] statutory restriction,” the same-sex couples applying for marriage licenses would have “met the legal requirements to marry in Iowa.”

But such a statement is flagrantly facetious. The Iowa legislature did not introduce a new, orthogonal consideration into the law of marriage in 1998. It did not, in fact, make new law at all, but only codified an age-old understanding, consistent with the nature of marriage itself, precisely in order to ward off a bizarre new challenge hitherto unheard of—the applications, and litigious responses to denied applications, of same-sex couples seeking to marry. Only the determined campaign of those who would redefine marriage had prompted Iowa legislators—and by now, the voters in 30 states who have amended their constitutions—to say anything at all in the law about the sex of those who are permitted to marry. In the normal course of things up until the last two decades, the law did not bother to state a “restriction” that was understood to be no restriction at all but merely a natural fact: men and women get married, but men and men or women and women do not.

Today it is those claiming a specious “freedom to marry” who make a claim at odds with the institution’s nature and alien to its purposes. It is they who would instrumentalize it by a redefinition, a destroying and remaking, that puts marriage to a new kind of work in the service of state policy. For race and sex are not, in the final analysis, really just like one another at all. Race is an interesting cluster of facts about ancestry, history, culture, and geography; we can let it get in the way of human relations by making too much of it, or thinking about it in wrongheaded ways. We can, and for many purposes should, let it alone entirely.

Sex, on the other hand, is fundamental to our relations with one another. We cannot let it alone. We cannot wish away its normal fruits of attraction, passion, and the generation of offspring, or its intimate connection with virtue and vice, wisdom and folly. Catholic University’s President Garvey is right to treat the relations of the sexes in the college population as a matter of the utmost moral gravity, justifying measures that would be intolerable if race were the difference under consideration. So too, in the debate over marriage, we must not be led astray by farcical assimilations of sex to race, as though differential treatment along those two dimensions were exactly alike, when they are not.

An Airport Encounter - by Archbishop Timothy Dolan

As I was waiting for the electronic train to take me to the terminal, a man, maybe in his mid-forties, came closer to me. "I was raised a Catholic," he said, "and now as a father of two boys, I can't look at you or any other priest without thinking of a sexual abuser."

Read more

Entre Sexo e Género

por Pedro Vaz Patto

In Público – 05. 02. 2011

Tem sido noticiada a proposta dos partidos de esquerda para que na redacção do artigo 13º da Constituição da República, onde se consagra o princípio da igualdade e não discriminação e se faz referência ao sexo como um dos motivos de discriminação arbitrária, essa palavra seja substituída por género. Tornou-se corrente, na verdade, a expressão igualdade de género para designar algo que anteriormente era designado como igualdade entre sexos ou igualdade entre homem e mulher. Não se trata, no entanto, de uma simples e anódina actualização linguística. É bom alertar para o alcance ideológico da modificação: exigem-no a honestidade e transparência próprias de uma democracia autêntica. Uma questão fracturante está longe de merecer o consenso alargado próprio de um texto constitucional.

Estamos perante uma agenda de afirmação ideológica. Está em causa a afirmação da chamada ideologia do género (gender theory) e a sua tradução no plano legislativo. Parte esta teoria da distinção entre sexo e género. O sexo representa a condição natural e biológica da diferença física entre homem e mulher. O género representa uma construção histórico-cultural. Há apenas dois sexos: o masculino e o feminino. Há cinco géneros (ou até mais, de acordo com outras versões): o heterossexual masculino e feminino, o homossexual masculino e feminino e o bissexual. O sexo é um fato empírico, real e objectivo que se nos impõe desde o nascimento. A identidade de género constrói-se através de escolhas psicológicas individuais, expectativas sociais e hábitos culturais, e independentemente dos dados naturais. Para estas teorias, o género assim concebido deve sobrepor-se ao sexo assim concebido. E como o género é uma construção social, este pode ser desconstruído e reconstruído. As gender theories sustentam a irrelevância da diferença sexual na construção da identidade de género, e, por consequência, também a irrelevância dessa diferença na relações interpessoais, nas uniões conjugais e na constituição da família. Daqui surge a equiparação entre uniões heterossexuais e uniões homossexuais. Ao modelo da família heterossexual sucedem-se vários tipos de “família”, tantos quantas as preferências individuais e para além de qualquer “modelo” de referência.

É um novo paradigma antropológico, uma verdadeira “revolução cultural” que representa a ruptura com a matriz judaico-cristã da nossa cultura («Homem e mulher os criou - afirma o Génesis), mas também com um dado intuitivo da razão universal (A espécie humana não se divide entre heterossexual e homossexual, mas entre homens e mulheres – afirmou a propósito o político socialista francês Lionel Jospin).

Pretende-se impor esta ruptura desde cima, desde as instâncias do poder. Ela não surge espontaneamente da sociedade civil e da mentalidade corrente. Pretende-se transformar através da política e do direito essa mentalidade. E o que está em causa não é um aspecto secundário, mas referências culturais fundamentais relativas à relevância da dualidade sexual. Admitir que a Lei sirva propósitos destes, numa pretensa engenharia social, revela tendências mais próprias de um Estado totalitário do que de um Estado respeitador da autonomia da sociedade civil.

Objectivamente Falso

Hoje, numa entrevista ao semanário SOL, o Senhor D. Jorge Ortiga, Arcebispo de Braga e Presidente da Conferência Episcopal Portuguesa, diz o seguinte: “Ao olhar para o passado do PR (Cavaco Silva), vejo que desempenhou a sua missão dentro daquilo que a Constituição lhe permite e também numa linha de defesa dos valores e interesses de todos”. Ora esta afirmação é objectivamente falsa. De facto, ao promulgar “leis” injustas como a que admite a procriação artificial, o congelamento e experimentação letal em pessoas humanas na sua etapa embrionária, a clonagem das mesmas; a que liberaliza o aborto até às 10 semanas; a que “legaliza” o pseudo-casamento entre pessoas do mesmo sexo e a que retira aos pais o direito de educarem os seus filhos expondo-os obrigatoriamente a uma deformação sexual perversa nas escolas o presidente atacou os valores, designadamente os não negociáveis, e cooperou formalmente na agressão sanguinária às mais vulneráveis, indefesas e inocentes pessoas nascituras através dos mais de cinquenta mil abortos, feitos ao abrigo dessa “lei” e também da incontável multidão de pessoas embrionárias chacinadas em laboratórios terroristas e, ainda, através da dissolução da família fundada no matrimónio indissolúvel entre um homem e uma mulher e do arrebatamento aos pais do direito a educarem os seus filhos.

Acresce que o presidente podia ter recorrido ao poder de veto, podia dissolver a assembleia da república – uma vez que o regular funcionamento das instituições estava em causa em virtude do ataque prometaico aos mais elementares e fundamentais direitos humanos, podia ter renunciado ao cargo. Importa ainda sublinhar que a constituição não pode, de modo algum, substituir-se à consciência, ao direito natural e aos Direitos de Deus.

Ao expressar-se deste modo, o Senhor Presidente da Conferência Episcopal confirma nos seus gravíssimos pecados o “católico” (ele diz-se católico praticante!), induz os fiéis em erro, bem como as demais pessoas que lerem a entrevista. Por outras palavras, provoca um grave escândalo com consequências nefastíssimas na salvação das consciências.

Claro que pode dar-se o caso de o jornal não ter entendido e portanto não ser fiel ao que o Senhor Arcebispo realmente disse. Mas se assim for é necessário um desmentido rápido e formal.

Nuno Serras Pereira

12. 11. 2010

Love without Regret

Amor sin remordimiento (subtitulada en español) from Santiago Blanco on Vimeo.

My Slogan: “Practice Saved Sex!”

by Fletcher Doyle
I am a journalist and a convert. That sounds like an oxymoron.

Two years after joining the Catholic Church, my wife and I began practicing Natural Family Planning (NFP). I found that the chastity required to get through the periods of abstinence caused profound changes in me. I stopped daydreaming of swimsuit models, wealth and fame. I became grateful for all God had given me, most of all for my wife. My appreciation for her and all that she gives me grew, improving an already good 20-year marriage.

I was curious to find out if other people had been so affected. This is where the journalist and the convert converged. I interviewed NFP couples and read thousands of words on conjugal union and the effects of contraception on the relationship between men and women. So for five years I thought about nothing but sex, except during the hockey playoffs. This was a challenge to chastity, but the result was a book, Natural Family Planning Blessed Our Marriage: 19 True Stories (Servant Books).

Here is what I learned. When women took control of fertility with the pill and the IUD in the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, men said “cool.” Men's behavior changed, as they no longer felt responsible for their sexual partners. (This can be seen in the disappearance of shotgun marriages.)

There was an accompanying drop in commitment between men and women. Trust between the sexes fell because men no longer acted in expected patterns.

When you add in the increase in women's wages and the decrease in men's wages, you created couples who are neither financially nor sexually interdependent. This is why, social scientists say, the divorce rate doubled in that time frame.

NFP can repair the damage. Men acknowledge responsibility to their wives. Commitment increases because the couples know when pregnancy is likely before they make love. Their trust increases: she trusts he will fulfill his obligations when he assents to sex; he trusts she is making accurate observations of her fertility and is keeping him informed.

He develops a sense of awe in the way God made her, and she develops a sense of gratitude that he is willing to sacrifice his own pleasure for her sake. And both grow in their love and trust in God when they see the plan for sex and marriage that He built into their bodies. I have seen and experienced how using Natural Family Planning can make a difference in marriage. That should come as no surprise because it's God's way to practice responsible parenthood – it’s His design for life and love!



Fletcher Doyle is the author of Natural Family Planning Blessed Our Marriage , (Servant

Books).

World Congress Speaker Calls for “Monogamy Men” to Take Back the Culture

By Austin Ruse

(WASHINGTON, DC – C-FAM) Patrick Fagan, family scholar at the Family Research Council, told the World Congress of Families last week in Amsterdam that there are two competing cultures of sexual morality and that both have a profound effect on culture and public policy. Fagan called one culture “monogamous” and the other “polymorphous” and he warned that one is “snatching” children from the other. Read more