The Sexual Revolution Is Doomed
An ancient philosopher once remarked that nature is the first thing that is and the last thing we know. The evidence of earth, sea, and sky, the rhythms of the physical world, the alternation of day and night, and the succession of the seasons provide a constant awareness of the cycles of nature. In the Book of Genesis, God creates nature before man. He creates day and night, separates the waters from the dry land, divides the firmament, and establishes the flora and fauna before making man in His image.
As a part of nature, man participates in her seasons and cycles: "For everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted" (Eccles. 3:1-2). Nature is the first thing that is. "Be fruitful and multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue it," man is told in Genesis. Like the rest of creation, man and woman are enjoined to be fertile and bountiful. They are designed by the complementarity of their bodies and their natures to be united in marriage and to found families that will educate children in manners and morals through the love and discipline of a father and mother. Chastity, courtship, marriage, fidelity, and generosity with life are all parts of God's design and nature's course.
The perennial teachings of the Catholic Church support this natural order and divine purpose. God created them male and female, which is one reason why homosexuality is forbidden. God said to be fruitful and multiply, hence one reason why contraception is evil and small families are not the ideal. Marriage is instituted for the mutual assistance of man and woman and for the rearing and education of children, and thus we have a basic reason why divorce is impermissible, fornication is immoral, and all use of sexuality outside marriage is sinful. Life comes from God ("And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul"), and so it should be obvious that abortion is intrinsically evil.
One of the characteristic errors of modernity is its ill-advised proclamation of its liberation from nature's laws and God's plan. The sexual revolution has profoundly and willfully misunderstood nature's intricate order and God's subtle wisdom. For example, the best preparation for marriage is a life of chastity and modesty — the practice of the temperance and self-control that marriage will require. Violating this preparatory period of a person's life. Planned Parenthood indoctrinates the young into premarital sex through its dispensing of contraceptives, and assaults their inherent modesty by its aggressive and explicit portrayal of sexual activity in all its variations. But sex education from kindergarten to 12th grade is unnatural. It shows no respect for the period of innocence or latency that protects children from prurient curiosity about subjects they are not emotionally or psychologically prepared to understand. It inundates young minds with information about anatomy and physiology that is devoid of moral content.
As the Catholic Church teaches, the young are to be educated in the virtues of temperance, purity, chastity, and modesty prior to marriage. Courtship naturally precedes marriage and allows for couples to know each other and learn of the other's background and history, for marriage is a union of families as well as individuals — a social act that contributes to the common life as well as the personal union of a man and woman seeking happiness.
The Church calls for a lengthy courtship ("marriage preparation") in which the man and woman become acquainted with each other's character and temperament, and discuss delicate issues such as family size, financial status and income, and moral and religious ideals. Couples who fall in love and consider marriage must recognize the reality of money as a factor in marriage. They must realize the social dimension of marriage, fully comprehending that they are not only marrying the other person but also associating with that person's family and relatives. Couples must also acknowledge the moral aspect of marriage, respecting the character and admiring the virtues of the chosen one. Nor can they neglect the truly romantic aspect of marriage: their enjoyment of the other's appearance, presence, company, and conversation — all of which transcend mere sexual desire. Courtship is an essential stage in love that explores the mystery and secret at the heart of true mutual attraction.
Modern culture, however, no more honors the significance of courtship than it respects the virtue of chastity for the young. The widespread — in some circles even recommended — habit of unmarried couples living together destroys the meaning of courtship as a preparation for marriage. Carnal knowledge replaces knowledge of the person's mind, heart, soul, and character as the foundation for marriage. The easy availability of contraceptives in high schools and colleges also corrupts the meaning of courtship. Men and women are viewed as instruments of passing pleasure rather than as persons deserving of respect, dignity, and honor. Whereas traditional courtship reserves sexual pleasure until marriage, viewing sex as a nuptial right that must be earned with the public promise of eternal fidelity and a lifetime of commitment, the sexual revolution with its propaganda about "safe sex" has made sex a recreational pastime available to anyone. Courtship can nurture the budding and flowering of love and can open the heart to offer the gift of self, but "living together" in contraceptive sex destroys the meaning of love as total surrender and the irrevocable gift of one's self to another.
Nature's design encourages marriage through the normal attraction between men and women. The end of courtship is marriage, and the purpose of marriage is the founding of a family and the continuation of the human race. "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make an helpmeet for him," God says in Genesis, establishing marriage as a divine institution. The modern world, however, does not promote the naturalness of marriage as the norm or ideal. Feminist ideology cultivates the independence of women, condemns marriage as a patriarchal institution oppressive of women, regards the role of father as superfluous or unnecessary, and condones artificial insemination rather than conjugal love. "No-fault divorce" easily deconstructs marriages and presents the illusion that marriages are only episodes in the lives of atomistic individuals. Fatherless kids and single mothers are the result. An entire generation of youth will soon deduce that marriage is nothing special or sacred. The privileges of matrimony are freely available without courtship or commitment, without vows or sacrament. Contemporary culture has denatured marriage.
Within marriage, nature's course and God's commandment call for fruitfulness and generosity. In Psalm 127 children are a blessing:
Behold, sons are a gift from the Lord;
the fruit of the womb is a reward.
Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are the sons of one's youth.
Happy the man whose quiver is filled
with them.
Pope John Paul II writes that the greatest gift to a child is the presence of brothers and sisters. Large families teach sacrifice, generosity, patience, and humility; they educate children in the social virtues — the ability to relate to people of all ages and to feel at home in all kinds of company. Large families, however, are the exception rather than the rule today, as many Western nations are suffering negative growth, with populations barely replacing themselves.
Modern feminism denigrates motherhood as a vocation and exalts the career as the source of a woman's highest fulfillment. Consumerism, materialism, and a high standard of living necessitate a one- or two-child family in order to allow for two careers and two incomes. The option of sterilization that physicians routinely offer to women after; childbirth further discourages large families and gives the impression that tubal ligation after two children is a normative, routine medical procedure. Federal income tax codes allow for child-care exemptions for only two children for two-income families, but the large family with one income and a full-time mother at home receives no such benefits — another antilife message. Students in "health" classes in public high schools hear about the exorbitant cost of raising a child and are shown films depicting the labors of childbirth. This may instill in them a fear of the natural and a skepticism about the gift and miracle of life, while they receive no education in the meaning of marriage and the blessings of large families.
As unnatural as the artificially small family is the divorced family. The stability and security of children and their emotional and psychological health require both a father and a mother, whose combined influences help to form balanced, integrated personalities. Children blessed with two loving parents in an intact family usually thrive socially, academically, and morally, while children of divorce often suffer in all of those areas, feeling unwanted, neglected, and unlovable. "It was not so from the beginning," Christ said to the Pharisees who tested Him on divorce, explaining that God's purpose in marriage requires indissolubility and the promise of eternal fidelity.
This aberration from the natural norm is so desirable to the modern world that the baneful effects of divorce on children are blindly and persistently denied. Maggie Gallagher's incisive The Abolition of Marriage cites several studies on the proliferation of divorce. First, couples who cohabit before marriage have a greater likelihood of divorce. Second, the increased participation of women in the work force introduces temptations that endanger the stability of marriage: "Families in which both spouses work full time are far less likely to be poor, but also far more prone to divorce than families where mothers do not work or work part time." Third, academicians, lawyers, and judges — "divorce advocates," Gallagher calls them — classify marriage as just one among many types of "relationships" and "lifestyles." They idealize divorce as "a positive good, a type of freedom, an exhilarating choice, a lifestyle alternative."
American courts began to grant unmarried "domestic partners" the marital rights and benefits (such as health insurance) that were formerly the prerogatives of legally married couples only, and in Supreme Court cases such as Trimble v. Gordon (1977) the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children was abolished in regard to inheritance — a further erosion of the importance of marriage as a social and civilizing institution. All attempts to promote the image of "the good divorce," however, founder upon the suffering of children who are starved by "father hunger." Says Gallagher:
It's an ache in the heart, a gnawing anxiety in the gut. It's a longing for a man, not a woman, who will care for you, protect you, show you how to survive in the world. For a boy, especially, it's the raw, persistent, desperate hunger for dependable male love and for an image of maleness that is not at odds with love.
The picture becomes very clear. At every stage of nature's design and God's plan for love and life, modern man has attempted to deconstruct the natural and divine order for marriage and the family. Temptations and seductions waylay modern man in all the phases of his life that precede and follow marriage. The world offers sex education, contraception, abortion, cohabitation, divorce, and sterilization. The artificial becomes the natural, and the natural becomes deviant. But still, as from the beginning, God and nature bid man to preserve innocence and modesty, to cultivate purity and chastity, to honor the vows of marriage, to be fruitful and multiply, to leave every conjugal act open to the transmission of life, to uphold the integrity of the body and not mutilate one's sexuality, and to trust Divine Providence.
Satan's war against Heaven has assumed this insidious form in the late 20th century — an attack on God as the Creator of life and on man's procreative power and woman's fertility. The separation of the procreative and unitive aspects of sex, the killing of preborn children in the womb, and routine sterilization all assault God as the Author of life. Unlike the heresies in the early Church, the religious wars of the 15th and 16th centuries, the conflicts between science and religion during the Enlightenment and the Victorian Age, and the world wars of the 20th century, this attack is upon those natural and divine institutions — marriage and family — that reproduce the image of God and fill the earth with the abundant fruits of love.
Proverbial wisdom teaches us that God always forgives, man sometimes forgives, and nature never forgives. The consequences of ignoring nature's laws regarding love, marriage, and life are momentous. Sex education and Planned Parenthood have unleashed rampant promiscuity among youth which, according to William J. Bennett's Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, has caused "a 400 percent increase in illegitimate births" in the past 30 years. From the over one million pregnancies occurring annually from teenage sexual activity come about 400,000 abortions, 130,000 miscarriages, and 490,000 live births, mostly to unwed mothers. And "about three million teens will get a sexually transmitted disease." Cohabitation, feminism, and two working parents increase the chances of divorce, and divorce takes its devastating toll on everyone, especially children. To quote Gallagher again, "in our schools, as in our streets, the collapse of marriage is nurturing a generation of children unresponsive to adult authority, prone to misbehavior, with emotional needs and psychological traumas that make it far more difficult not only for them to learn, but also for teachers to teach."
Legal abortion on demand has not only cheapened the value of life, but has also affected the economic stability of countries suffering negative population growth — not to mention the atrocity of the deaths of over 33 million preborn children in the U.S. since 1973. Contraception and abortion increase the chances of breast cancer and pose other dangers to physical and mental health, such as post-abortion stress syndrome. And small families deprive children of many wholesome friendships and the blessings that many brothers and sisters provide.
For all of his data bases and information highways, modern man, as he shuns the company of God, finds himself increasingly out of touch with nature. Since God speaks through the book of nature as well as the book of revelation — through the eyes of a child as well as through the Ten Commandments — not to know God is not to know nature or your own nature. Not to live in tune with nature or not to co-operate with her laws and rhythms is to substitute the ersatz for the real, the abnormal for the normal, and to choose sterility instead of abundance. To honor nature's laws and God's commandments is to reap a rich harvest: the fruits of marriage, the gift of children, the rewards of serving God and neighbor, the peace of doing God's will, and the joy of seeing nature as her Creator saw her: "And God saw that it was good."
Modern man deprives himself of the riches of nature's bounty and the abundance that God promises to those who keep His laws. In his pride man can defy or ignore nature, but "nature will out." As the Roman poet Horace wrote, "You may throw nature out with a pitchfork, but she will keep coming back."
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