Mr Ross Douthat of the
New York Times--
to whom some congratulations are due--has a
column and a
blog post along similar lines to my post about
marriage as a sign and witness to the culture. I agree with some--but not all--of his analysis on this one. For example, he's right in the concluding remarks to his column:
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Ross Douthat wrote:
Obviously, social conservatives don’t like seeing their tax dollars flow to an organization that performs roughly 300,000 abortions every year. But they also see Planned Parenthood’s larger worldview — in which teen sexual activity is taken for granted, and the most important judgment to be made about a sexual encounter is whether it’s clinically “safe” — as the enemy of the kind of sexual idealism they’re trying to restore.
Liberals argue, not unreasonably, that Planned Parenthood’s approach is tailored to the gritty realities of teenage sexuality. But realism can blur into cynicism, and a jaded attitude can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Social conservatives look at the contemporary sexual landscape and remember that it wasn’t always thus, and they look at current trends and hope that it doesn’t have to be this way forever.
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The problem is that in the same article, he makes a distinction between "types" of pre-marital sex:
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Quote:
But there are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one day. Then there’s sex that’s casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill considered.
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This mars an otherwise good column which is being rather poorly treated by his readers: though this should come as no surprise given who his readership is.
In any case, from a strictly cultural perspective, this distinction might make sense. It might be admissable that sex with somebody you love and care about (and are considering marriage to) is preferable to the casual sex of the hook-up culture. At the very least, it is "safer" in the consequentialist mindset which sees as the only adverse effects of premarital sex a higher risk of spreading STIs or out-of-wedlock births. On the other hand,
cohabitation and premarital sex do increase the odds of divorce--which is obviously bad from the perspective of the social or cultural conservative who is saddened by such things even on the purely consequentialist grounds of the ill effects of divorce on the children.
Going a step further, since Mr Douthat is a Catholic, he should know better than this, even if he is trying to write to a broader audience by appealing to cultural or socio-economic considerations only*. Pre-marital sex, formerly known as "fornication," is and always has been a serious sin according to Catholic moral teaching. From the viewpoint that marriage is a sacrament and thus a sign in our Church, even pre-marital sex (that is, sex in anticipation of marriage) is not to be celebrated, because it
distorts the meaning of both sex and marriage. Sex is the consummation of love, but the pre-requisite to this to for the spouses to love each other completely.
But this completeness of love means having first made an unreserved (and unequivocal) commitment to each other--as in, "for richer or poorer," "in sickness and in health," and "until death do you part." The act of intercourse is meant to be a consummation of the marriage, a renewal of the vows; thus even pre-marital sex attempts to renew a thing which has not yet taken place, and is a sign between the would-be lovers of something which does not yet exist (namely, the bonds of marriage). Thus, pre-marital sex, even between a relatively "stable" and "loving" couple intent on marriage is the consummation of a lie; indeed, in some ways the lie is worse than that of casual sex, since the latter is at least willing to admit that if sex does not belong exclusively within the bounds of marriage, then it really doesn't belong only to couples who are "in a relationship," either. The pre-marital sex of the otherwise stable couple does more to thwart the witness of marriage than the casual hook-ups**, because the latter do not attempt to blur the distinction between marriage and mere "relationships," however stable.
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*To be fair, this is perhaps the price he has to pay to be the "
Apostle to the Cultured Despiser," as Mr Mark Shea so eloquently puts it.
**And lest people be confused as to what I mean here, I should add a short explanation. I'm not try to argue that "pre-marital" sex (that is, sex in anticipation of marriage) is necessarily worse (or better) than the casual hook-ups: both are forms of fornication, and both are sins as such. Each is bad in its own way, and certainly from the cultural vantage divorced (pun not intended) from Christian moral teachings, the hook-ups are for the most part worse. With that said, "pre-marital" fornication undermines the witness of marriage in a unique way which hook-ups do not, in that we tend to brush them aside as being less serious. The attitude becomes that pre-marital sex is ok since the couple are in a supposedly loving and stable relationship. The problem is, not every loving or quasi-stable relationship is a marriage, and sex itself belongs only to marriage. By condoning (or partially condoning) pre-marital sex, we weaken the case to be made against the hook-up culture as well. If the consecration of marriage isn't necessary for sex to be morally permissible, then why insist on it being between two people in a long-term though unconsecrated relationship?
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This post
originally appeared on my
Equs Nom Veritas blog, and can be viewed there in its original form.
Tags: Culture Marriage Culture-of-Life
