Death by Sex

By John Mallon

As anyone involved in the 12-Step recovery culture knows: "Denial is not a river in Egypt." It does, however, appear to be a river flowing through present-day Western Culture. A recent study from the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections showed that one in 100 American deaths is related to sexual behavior.

Sexual ideologues from Planned Parenthood to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) relentlessly pound away with frantic urgency on the need to dump condoms and contraceptives into American high schools and developing countries. Yet, as was recently noted in this publication, the Philippines seems to be doing just fine with an emphasis on fidelity within marriage and chastity outside of marriage. The Philippines has a healthy fertility rate but virtually no AIDS.

Yet, the situation in the Philippines has the UNFPA apoplectic. Despite the good news they must rush to the rescue with contraceptives. They must stop the Philippines from proving their ideology wrong with what most civilized people — including those in the developing world — have known instinctively all along: Good morality is good medicine.

Let me state it even more clearly: 1. You can die from sleeping with the wrong person. 2. If Catholic teaching on sexuality were taken seriously, let alone obeyed, there would be no AIDS crisis. Period.

I made these statements in a college newspaper 20 years ago at a Catholic university and one of the Deans of Students looked at me as if I had uttered a racial slur. It is considered bigotry to state the obvious when it contradicts modern sexual ideology.

To cite another example of the "conventional wisdom" of sexual ideology: The Boston Globe in a Feb. 18 editorial entitled "Better Choices," states, "Access to reliable birth control is an obvious way to reduce the need for abortion . . . but religious conservatives have blocked making even condoms available in high schools." What the Globe writers don't understand, like many sexual ideologues, is that contraception is the gateway to abortion, not a preventative. In the adolescent mind especially, contraception, including condoms, creates a false security to indulging in risky behavior that involves a great deal more risk than simple pregnancy.

Without imputing motives to anyone several questions come to mind. How much risk are the sexual ideologues willing to expose the young to in order avoid the truth that sexual activity is not merely a recreational activity or means to relieve tension? And that to engage in it recklessly is simply dangerous and wrong? And that there is a connection between the dangerous and the wrong? That their goal of creating a sexual utopia has resulted in disillusionment, alienation, sickness and death?

Does it occur to them that a sense of guilt may be the soul's natural warning system to danger rather than something imposed from the outside by religious stiffs? Do they think pangs of conscience are a mere social construct that must be overcome on the way to "sexual freedom"?

Eliminating religion-based morality may seem the pathway to this utopia but it has led to a culture of addiction, which is to say enslavement. Building on St. Augustine's statement that "Our hearts are restless, O God, until they rest in you," C.S. Lewis, in his classic book, "The Four Loves" points out that whatever is not God, which we turn into a god, becomes our addiction and enslaves us. St. Thomas Aquinas said, "No one can live without joy. That is why a man deprived of spiritual joy goes over to carnal pleasures."

One need not be a believer in order to see the truth of this. This is simply observable common sense. Sexual expression in its right context is for love, health and life. Misused, it results in loneliness, sickness and death. How many lives are the lemmings of sexual ideology willing to trash for their doomed cause?

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Mallon is contributing editor to Inside the Vatican magazine and an editorial consultant and contributor to The Daily Oklahoman editorial page.  This article was reprinted from TheFactIs.org- click [here]