This post is a smattering of thoughts about one thing: Sex. (Yes, the title is for attention, and it worked, because you’re reading…)
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Is that really all we care about? Is that why we believe what we do about certain things? Some people seem to think so:
Unfortunately, an event designed to promote understanding, justice, and mutual care for all students has often stirred up protest from certain Christian groups who can’t seem to separate advocating respect for GLBT teens from their own issues about sex.
I guess it must just be easy to dismiss opposition as a “sexual hangup”. What is it about sticking to millenia old teaching that coincides with biology (and common sense) that makes people say, “This isn’t deep enough…there must be something else behind it.” And then, how does the answer come to be something so simple and shallow as hating sex?
Even things that don’t really have to do with sex get labeled as hangups, so that they’ll be easier to dispense with, like abortion. But is abortion really about sex? No, it’s about who has the right to take life. Is abstinence about sexual hangups? No. If everyone abstained before marriage, we would have no more unwanted teen pregnancies. The spread of STD’s would stop. Abortion rates would fall. And those are just the social and political advantages.
There are some of us who do have issues when it comes to sex, but we aren’t limited to conservatives and evangelicals. Take the stance of some liberal and “sex-positive” groups and their insistence that we “take the dirtiness, the shame, guilt and menace out of sex, to set ourselves free,” while they lecture us “about [our] repression and the futility of monogamy.” I think there might be something going on there.
Here are a couple of great quotes related to the issue at hand:
And since I began living in San Francisco, I’ve come to realize that the only people who’ve ever made me feel really, really bad and guilty about my sexuality were the self-described sex radicals who wagged their fingers in my face and lectured me about my repression and the futility of monogamy. [...]
You can pile pleasure on pleasure on pleasure, I think, but it may never equal joy. From metroactive.com
Regnerus’ ultimate conclusion is not all that surprising. What really matters is not which religion teenagers identify with but how strongly they identify. After controlling for all factors (family satisfaction, popularity, income), religion matters much less than religiosity. Among the mass of typically promiscuous teenagers in the book, one group stands out: the 16 percent of American teens who describe religion as “extremely important” in their lives. When these guys pledge, they mean it.
“Even Evangelical Teens Do It,” Slate.com
