And No One's Getting Fat Except Leon Kass

[WARNING: the post contains TMI. If you don't care (most of you), read ahead. I will let you know when it's starting and ending]

I had so much blogging I wanted to do over the course of the day, which is always a bad thing, because then I can't focus when I actually sit down to write.

So let's start with Leon R. Kass's The Death Of Courtship, as excerpted on the Focus on the Family website. I encourage you to read the full three parts, but since I don't expect you to suffer for pages upon pages, I'll just give you my reaction and some snippets.

Kass's piece clarified two already-pretty-clear things for me:
1) THAT I am naturally a pretty conservative person.
2) WHY I cannot tolerate people who identify as politically and socially conservative.

TMI STARTS HERE
We'll start with the first. As most people who read this blog know, I dig gay porn. I read and watch it a fair amount. I'm the first person in a group of friends to strike up a conversation on masturbation, and I encourage people to explore their desires, both latent and accessible. I have no moral objection to people using drugs to the point that it does not really hurt themselves or others.

But for me, the talk is the walk. I don't hook up with people who aren't my steady boyfriend. I appreciate romance. The only illegal drug I've tried is one shot of absinthe, and I'm not even sure that that's still illegal. I've never been properly drunk. In many ways, I'm doing much better on the conservatives' demands than most of their children are. And in the ways I'm not? (You know, the pornorgraphy, incessant self-abuse) I'm feeling the effects they talk about.

Just as people now have some trouble enjoying fruit properly because they've experienced freaks of nature such as Rolos and Spree, the standards of whom I'm off-handedly physically attracted to have gone up enormously due to a little too much Lane Fuller in my life. Coincidence? Who knows. And I probably should have read Dan Savage's advice on "varying technique" in masturbation when I was five, but it's a little late for that. I have become erotically desensitized in all respects. Point to the right.
TMI ENDS HERE

So for my first quote from Kass I go to this utterly obnoxious but not-entirely-without-merit blurb:

"The change most immediately devastating for wooing is probably the sexual revolution. For why would a man court a woman for marriage when she may be sexually enjoyed, and regularly, without it? Contrary to what the youth of the sixties believed, they were not the first to feel the power of sexual desire. Many, perhaps even most, men in earlier times avidly sought sexual pleasure prior to and outside of marriage. But they usually distinguished, as did the culture generally, between women one fooled around with and women one married, between a woman of easy virtue and a woman of virtue simply. Only respectable women were respected; one no more wanted a loose woman for one's partner than for one's mother."

Yeah, I'm wretching too, don't worry. But hidden in that drivel is a point: There probably is an unbalance between men who will want to marry if extramarital sex is easy to obtain and women who will want to marry if extramarital sex is easy to obtain. Note I said "unbalance," not "no men will ever want to get married and all women will." Just "unbalance." If the only way you can have an actual relationship that involves sex is by getting married, you will have an overwhelming proportion of both sexes who want to do just that. While extramarital sex is pretty completely accepted (as it is now), most women will want to have extramarital sex, and then at some point settle down with a husband. Most men will want to have extramarital sex, and then at some point settle down with a wife...but it's a smaller most! I think. And if you think I'm being heterosexist, I am. But I said "most." So I'm still right. I think. And it's not so much "heterosexist" as "totally self-centered."

So in the current situation, for whom does it suck? Meeeee. Ussssss. Well, not all of us. I can't predict whom it won't suck for and whom it will suck for. But this does mean there will be leftover women. Which is annoying and unfortunate for those women.

So we should change things! We should make laws! We should stop prescribing the pill, and make abortion illegal, and teach abstinence only education to prevent promiscuity and force people to have the families I want them to!

No we shouldn't.

And that's where I finally hit number 2: I hate social conservatives (except Steve Schwartz). OK, so some impulses I have are completely different from theirs. I don't think there's anything even remotely wrong with homosexuality...although that not being a choice sort of invalidates the comparison, in my eyes. But I wouldn't think there's anything wrong even if it weren't. I don't think there's anything wrong with having an abortion (see my semi-offensive post from a few days ago), but that's because I don't believe in the abstract notion of the soul. And of course I don't think there's anything wrong with random sex or drug use or everything else Kass criticizes, it just makes for the world that he correctly describes, and that's not the world that works best to my advantage.

And that's completely my problem.

Sure, I can advocate for a culture that more suits my needs if I believe it will more suit the needs of many others. But the presumption, the gumption it takes to want to LEGISLATE that culture? That's just offensive. The fact that Kass (did I mention he was Bush's bioethics advisor 2001-2005?) could write this is unfathomable:

"While some programs also encourage abstinence or non-coital sex, most are concerned with teaching techniques for "safe sex"; offspring (and disease) are thus treated as (equally) avoidable side effects of sexuality, whose true purpose is only individual pleasure. (This I myself did not learn until our younger daughter so enlightened me, after she learned it from her seventh-grade biology teacher.) The entire approach of sex education is technocratic and, at best, morally neutral; in many cases, it explicitly opposes traditional morals while moralistically insisting on the equal acceptability of any and all forms of sexual expression provided only that they are not coerced. No effort is made to teach the importance of marriage as the proper home for sexual intimacy."

That's because sexual education is supposed to teach you. It's supposed to teach you facts. Teachers teach facts (and strategies and ways of thinking about things but hush, teachers, I'm talking about sex ed, not calculus or philosophy). My other radical opinion in life is that teachers generally shouldn't teach morality beyond keeping order in their classrooms. Yes, telling a kid not to call another kid "faggot" qualifies as keeping order. Of course this is a balancing act, but I don't think teachers should even tell their students that giving to the poor is the right thing to do. And I think this mostly so it doesn't get us into binds like these problems with sex ed. If teachers can tell their kids to volunteer at a soup kitchen, they can tell them not to sleep with someone 45 minutes after they meet. Sure, I see the difference between these types of morality, but many people don't, and those many people are the ones we have to deal with.

And along those lines, I don't think the government should legislate ideals. I think the government should pass only enough restrictions to keep people from destroying each other. What does this make me sound like? A Republican. Yes it does. And to be frank, I think I have some conservative small-government impulses also. But, while welfare programs cost money, and taking money is a restriction in some sense, welfare programs aren't at all restrictions in the same sense as a prohibition on abortion would be. It's more of an allowance, even though it's "big government." And I think it's important we do good things when we can. And we can.

All right, it's late and I'm starting to eke into the land of gibberish (Gibber, I suppose). I'm not editing this, so be kind. Some things would have been edited. Buenas Noches!