Friday, July 19, 2013

Culture news: The sexual revolution, defend it if you can

I recently came across this piece written by Anthony Esolen two years ago.  He makes an interesting and very common sense argument against the sexual revolution.  We are told that what happens in the bedroom between two consenting adults is private and doesn't concern anyone else.  Yet the very nature of sex is that it impacts the common good of society as a whole.

He writes:
About trivialities, the law should have little to say. But our sexual behavior is far from trivial. In fact, the same people who, in one way, claim for it such triviality that it must fall beneath the notice of the law, in another way, exalt it as the lodestone of human life, such that any curtailment of sexual autonomy must strike to the very heart of our beings. We cannot have it both ways at once. Indeed, I can conceive of no other thing more deeply determinative of what a society will be like, or even whether it will be a genuine society at all, than our folkways regarding men and women, their courtship, their marriage, their duties to one another, and their raising of children. Sex—both the distinction between man and woman, and the act that unites man and woman in the embrace that is essentially oriented towards the future—is a foundational consideration for every people. When we ask, “Will a man be allowed to have more than one wife?” or “Will husbands and wives be allowed to divorce at will?” or “Will unmarried people be encouraged to behave as if they were married?”, we are asking, whether we understand it fully or not, “What kind of culture, if any, do we want to share?”

Esolen goes on to note the ways that the sexual revolution has harmed the common good of our society. We can pretend that sex is a only a private thing between two consenting adults.  But the world around us that this has created says something very different.

2 comments:

  1. Do you have the link to the original article?

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  2. Weslie, Sorry I forgot to put in the link. It is there now.

    ReplyDelete