Most of us are aware that the virtue of chastity (sexual responsibility, not prudery or repression but self control) has fallen on bad times. We see the human wreckage all around us, resembling the litter left on slum streets. U.S. marriages end on average seven years after vows announce an intended permanence until death do us part. Trial marriages, which are rationalized as divorce preventatives since the couple sees how the other is in prolonged cohabitation, produce a higher percentage of divorce for cohabitants. It seems they cannot meaningfully argue difficulties for fear that one might walk out since there is no legal bond, leaving the other with the rent. So they swallow anger. Besides, they are already on record as complicit in breaking one of society’s lesser conventions about living together. So it is much easier to break the bigger one against divorce.
Pandemic scourges of over a dozen sexually transmitted diseases like herpes or HPV or even AIDS among straight people sweep coast to coast, with 40 percent of U.S. females between 16 and 25 afflicted with one or more. No doubt their male partners have comparable rates, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released only female casualty numbers. Promiscuity rates go far above 40 percent, however. These are only those without protection — or luck — who are calculated here.
With such rampant promiscuity, you would think more people would be reporting more happiness. The sexual revolution made possible by the pill in 1960 held that personal satisfaction, released from hide-bound religious inhibitions, would cover the land and deliver participants from strictures that had bound their unfortunate ancestors. It would pave the way for a society of less violence, spousal abuse and, believe it or not, abortion. On that score, one of the Roe v. Wade judges of the high court was astounded a year after the 1973 decision that more than a dozen American women availed themselves of the now legal operation. Imagine his astonishment when abortion soared to one in three U.S. pregnancies soon after. One in three U.S. women has had one, many a second.
Those unfortunate ancestors could have spoken for eons of human observation of the dance of sex. They could have narrated that every time promiscuity flourishes, so does venereal disease. They could have documented how an abandonment of marital fidelity invariably leaves bruised and injured people, notwithstanding films and novels whose intent is not to educate but to profit from the sale of movies and paperbacks. They could have preached that when you play with fire, you can get burnt. Aloe, anyone?
This is not to suggest that some golden age of purity ruled before the pill, when far more people regularly went to church. In the 19th century, the second most common occupation for American single women after that of governess or nanny was prostitution. Today, the Department of Justice reports that the average age of entry into prostitution is 12 to 14. Such exploited children are jailed for crimes committed on them while their pimps — and 75 percent are controlled by procurers — go largely unpunished.
What kind of man — I use the word loosely— can abuse a child for such selfishness? But as Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” observed, “If there is no God, then all things are lawful.” Certainly a return to the God who in love created sexual love might get some of the multitude of victim practitioners to investigate the wisdom of choosing one partner, then marrying, and only then having intimacies. The sequence is key. We don’t see this quite nearly enough. A recent statistic says that 52 percent of U.S. births result from parents married to each other. The person who accidentally shoots himself or herself in the foot is to be pitied. Perhaps he or she should have been more careful with the gun, or perhaps he or she should not have even had one. But how would you consider the one who intentionally aims and fires at first one foot, then the other?
Not too smart? Trying to defy physics? Or maybe trying to deny the personal experience of the exquisitely painful shot at the first foot? Abandon the regular practice of one’s faith — no doubt because one sees that it is inconsistent with one’s abandonment of chastity — and one can reliably expect an unhappiness not documented in our youth’s entertainment. And we ask why so few youth attend church.
It’s in our human mechanics: either chastity or eventual grief.
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