Have Sex

Our text today is, yet again, one of my godless commandments⁽¹⁾ namely: Thou shalt enjoy the flesh of others, respecting their own desires as well as thine and taking responsibility for any consequences thereof. Some people may argue that we don't need a philosophical imperative to have sex, but I would argue that we humans could use a positive and universal imperative about sex.

Let's face it: without sex we're very likely to end up screwing someone else in any number of unpleasant, non-sexual ways. Ever wondered whether the history of Iraq might have been different in the last four years if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had gotten laid, but good? Besides, none of us would even be here without sex!

All right so the matter of principle is not so much whether, but how one should have sex. The commandment puts forth two conditions that I suspect are universally necessary for ethical purposes:

1. We must engage in mutual pleasure giving as well as receiving.
2. We must take responsibility for the consequences, such as pregnancy and disease.

These two exhaust the totality of ethical requirements that apply universally to all men and women of all religions or degrees of non-belief.

In the first, your pleasure is equated to the pleasure of another. You have a legitimate claim to receive pleasure and there is nothing wrong with desiring sexual pleasure and obtaining it; but the consequence of that is the duty to be concerned with and desirous of giving pleasure -- which is a pleasure all its own.

In other words, sex is not just for you: it's for you and the other person -- who is a person, not a toy (except, obviously, in the case of masturbation with toys, about which ... later). This also excludes all forms of sex for power (this is the definition of rape), money, or anything other than giving and receiving of pleasure.

There's something about us mammals that is relieved and assuaged in the feeling of full frontal nudity, skin to skin, with someone we chose to so so voluntarily -- nay, eagerly. This is why masturbation with toys falls short, except in times of necessity, other than to provide temporary release -- in a sense, it's not really sex.

Secondly, sex is a path to reproduction and a way to get diseases and even a way to express particular feelings about another, to the point of sometimes being called "making love." When we have sex we risk becoming parents, becoming ill and even dying, or becoming sentimentally entangled with another person.

We can be called upon to give a response -- in other words, responsibility -- for our action, by stepping up to motherhood or fatherhood, which is usually a role that lasts a lifetime. We can be faced with giving or receiving a terrible disease -- and telling all others who may be or have been exposed to us in similar ways, "get checked for X because I have it."

Last but not least, I've been told there are hormones similar to those that induce bonding between parents and children. These are stimulated with sex to the point that all sex has some emotional and psychological consequence.

None of this draws a straight line to the altar, nor to deciding whether to have or abort a child, nor does it cure a single disease or broken heart. The point of responsibility is not some formal piece of paper or law nor a textbook answer. Responsibility is needed because, precisely, we live in an uncertain world.

In such a world we must answer to ourselves and our fellows, especially those with whom we have sex, for our actions.

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⁽¹⁾ PS to George, this is the ninth (there are ten).

Sex as a Language

In the last half century or so, it seems, our society has swung from utter abandon in pursuit of sex of every tawdry, extreme and bizarre form, to outright rejection of sex, either with tablets of law from a mountain top or in expressions of sexual indigestion.

Chani, aka Thailand Gal, had this to say in response to my post yesterday:

I am incapable of being a slave to other people's needs, especially someone's sexual needs.

By all means, give up being a slave to someone's sexual needs. But must we forget that sex is a language -- like Thai or English or French?

A better analogy might be a special purpose computer language. Xbase. (I'm not really a techie, I just can do a reasonable imitation.) Few people still program in Xbase, although it's very sturdy and useful to handle databases.

Theoretically, you could write a compiler (a program to make programs) in Xbase and you could create a computer game. But why would you want to?

Xbase, originally dBase later Clipper and other variants, was invented in 1978 to go directly and intimately to the core of the information in a database, to build relations between sets of data, to link up what is often not obvious or easy in a deceptively simple way.

Like sex.

Technically, you could have sex with goats or design a robot to fulfill your every fantasy, but why would you want to?

Sex is a special purpose language that involves seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. (And, let's not forget, that off chance of reproduction.)

The combination of thought, word, mime and physical contact meld into a whole new dimension of contact with the core of another person. At the same time, we shed the layers of our selves. Then, at a powerful ego-barrier-destroying instant we all associate with intense pleasure, we have an exchange of being occurring that defies logical comprehension or comparison.

Sex is the language of love between two peers.

How to speak such a powerful language? In window shopping for love, look but don't touch, wrote Snoskred a few days ago. Touch and listen to the soul, responded Genevieve.

Chani reminded me that I've already expressed my dislike the idea of shopping for love (here), when I attempted to speak about love as an absolute value.

Yet my original question a week or so ago was whether love occurred one at a time, whether two or more might be touched by love. All in light of the idea that "The One" is largely a chimera (on this Chani's observations seem to match mine, although I have not quite abandoned the possibility).

One answer is to keep a certain distance. Another is to take a little nibble, as of a canape.

Yet another is the approach Leonard Cohen expressed in an interview aeons ago, in which he compared sex to a form of communication. Might we not be able to have several sexual conversations going? This would not be window shopping at all.

One is not intending to "buy" anything, but to share something of oneself and to receive from another, to practice the phrases, the verbs, the syntax of the complex language of love. If all of us could experience an all-connecting orgasm together, wouldn't wars cease, dog-eat-dog competition end, hatred dissipate?

This is not an invitation to a worldwide orgy. (Although ... what are you doing next Saturday?) No, seriously.

I repeat: Sex is the language of love between peers. We are not all peers. Sex should be an expression of equality, of similarity or complementary polarity, of abandonment and trust in another. It is often an instrument of oppression, a stand-in for power, a soft-touch leash.

In the end, sex between everyone and everyone else is not appropriate. But neither is no sex between anyone.

Thou Shalt Partake of Sex

What if, instead of mortification of the flesh, abstinence, avoidance, belts and locks and scarlet letters, our religions and reigning ethics had an imperative principle to seek to slake fleshly desires, to engage in carnal pleasure, to seek out every lickerishness, to open the doors of every bedroom and heap praise on the randy hearted?

You'll say that's why they invented the Internet and its seemingly endless parade of porn.

But, no, I mean an imperative: something like "remember that thou keep holy the sabbath day," yet for sex. Certainly our bodies drive us to extremely silly and oft-reckless behavior in response to the stimuli that cause sexual arousal.

To provide an example of a philosophical version of the drive was my intent in penning the ninth of my godless commandments four years ago:

Thou shalt enjoy the flesh of others, respecting their own desires as well as thine and taking responsibility for any consequences thereof.

Today these words feel as unsatisfactory as they day I wrote them, especially since the underlying notion behind this set of ethics I have proposed, is the universally agreed notion that prizes human survival.

From the point of view of survival, sex is principally reproductive. We spawn ... for what? It's not the oft-cited notion that our children are there to have someone to care for us in old age -- ha!

To my mind, the biological point of reproduction is to replace each individual within a species after death, and to provide sufficient replacements to withstand environmental pressures against the species continued existence. If we spawn in large enough numbers, the worst catastrophe won't wipe us all out.

Not for nothing individuals in some species die after reproductively successful sex. The praying mantis female bites off the male’s head immediately after, sometimes during, sexual intercourse. Perhaps it was in a related sense that the dualistic, sex-conflicted English Victorians called orgasm "the little death."

Certainly, also, reproduction was what Pope Paul VI was thinking about in 1968 when he issued the immensely imprudent encyclical Humanae Vitae, reaffirming Catholic docrtine's opposition to artifical means of contraception.

Still, then and now critics in and outside scientific circles have noted that even animals don't engage in sex merely to reproduce. Sex also serves to cement social bonds.

Regular sex with a caring partner, or three, is also recognized among humans as a significant factor in one's happiness, one's degree of patience and tolerance toward others. Doesn't the world seem rosy when one walks out into the street from the arms of a good lover?

Remember, then, to partake, now and then, prudently, with willing and able partners of an appropriate age and suitable health.

Remember, also, that sex has consequences, from irretrievable affection to parenthood to death. Clicking sex into operation, as with software, carries with an implied end-user license agreement. Read his or hers carefully because, even if you don't, the other person's EULA kicks in immediately -- as does yours.

All this notwithstanding, dare to give yourself to another in one of life's most pleasant endeavors.

Predatory Men, Predatory Women

Chani's use of the phrase "predatory sex," referring to propositions of admittedly questionable taste, brought to mind recent comments in a post-marriage support group in which I serve as a discussion facilitator.

We were talking about dating and three women told of similar approaches by men. "I have never been asked for a date [since the marriage breakup]," said the one who expressed it best, "but I have been asked for sex several times."

What I found most appalling about this was the manner in which the approach was made. One man told the woman he was approaching that she was "so hot" he was already masturbating about her!

In what barn have these guys learned their etiquette?

Of course, men and women alike are drawn to sex with one another. Both fantasize about it and now and then do something about fantasies privately. (See here if you don't believe that, yes, Virginia, women do, too.) But there's an invisible boundary between what is private and public.

Many American men have given the rest of us a bad name by stepping over that line.

Similarly, less talked about because ... I don't know why, women are perfectly capable of stepping over boundaries in ways that are predatory, sometimes even over the felony line. Trust me on this.

Granted, most women do not mix up violence with sex, most women derive power more surreptitiously than men (millennia on the slave side of the master-slave relationship, Hegel might have said), but just like men, women can objectify, exploit, use and abuse other people in relation to sex.

The same three women who complained about being asked for sex, for example, did not think it even necessary to offer to pay half for dinner (even though refusal is almost certainly guaranteed). They assumed that -- by virtue of what, other than their sex? --they had an automatic entry to a man's wallet. Yet all of them would have assumed that they had the right to decide if and when they would kiss the man.

Let's take this off the table so there is no confusion: I am not proposing for an instant that a dinner buys sex (kissing to whatever).

However, anyone who thinks that the mere act of dressing up tantalizingly and putting on cosmetics (many purchased for their romantically suggestive brand names) deserves a free meal needs to think about what kind of reasoning would justify such a conclusion. It looks to me like sex buying dinner, although I'm open to alternatives.

The point is that both men and women are predatory in that we search for mates like hawks.

Traditionally, men have taken the active part of the hunt and women have tried to draw circles and arrows around themselves to be "found." The distinction between active and passive roles does not erase the mutual desire to find one another and mate.

Of course, there remain boundaries that neither one should cross. Some of these boundaries are clear and spelled out in codes of law, others are unwritten (yet not immutable) social norms.

Less explicit customary limits attach to groups within society (caste, class, ethnicity, etc.). In a society with such a large variety of subgroups and such ease of travel from one to the other, inevitably some misunderstandings will arise.

If the people of the opposite sex you encounter are all crossing your boundaries, I would suggest that you are simply in the wrong circles.

Oh, Those Gay and Lesbian Sinners!

A couple of weeks ago I visited Foundry Methodist Church (aka Hillary's church) and got into an argument over 2008 United Methodist General Conference resolutions reaffirming the incompatibility of homosexual behavior with Christianity to the point of exclusion from church membership and ordained ministry.

Although I currently view myself as a heterosexual non-Methodist agnostic, the issue strikes me as emblematic of a divide that cuts across Christian denominations and goes even beyond religion to attitudes about laws concerning sexuality, family and marriage. Yet I am of two minds in this matter.

On one hand, I find it difficult to argue that homosexual behavior is not judged morally wrong by Christian doctrine. Although the sayings of Jesus in the gospels are silent on the question, the book of Leviticus and various epistles of Paul are quite emphatic and unequivocal in their outright moral condemnation of same-gender sex.

Speaking of those who "detain the truth of God in injustice," Paul describes people such as among whom "women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy." (Romans I 1:26-27)

In his 1st letter to the Corinthians, Paul adds: "Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom of God." (I Cor 6:9-10)

Moreover, in a broader philosophical sense, I would find it difficult to defend the notion that homosexual behavior is, generally speaking, desirable and worthy of encouragement.

Given that male genitals "fit" more easily with female genitals and that the essential biological function of these organs is reproductive, it is hard to argue that the homosexual use is not, at a minimum, a tad inventive and contrived. The socially, politically and economically desirable use of genitals is for the propagation of the species through male-female contact.

This need not be the only use. Indeed, more than one male-female contact is usually needed for impregnation. Moreover, continual nonreproductive contact fosters emotional bonds that make for extended biological networks that nurture the young.

Yet, is sex an expression of love and are not lesbians and gays entitled to express their love for one another? I agree that sex can express love, quite pleasurably, but precisely because it is such an urgent bodily need, I wonder whether it is the best, most complete, most selfless and truest expression. Elsewhere I defined love "as an emotional appreciation of others and other things for themselves that leads to disinterested loving." (See my post here.)

Sex may well oil the path to disinterested loving, but is sex, of any sort and in any circumstance, the one and only roadway and, thus, an inalienable aspect of what a human being necessarily must experience in order to live in dignity? Only an unqualified affirmative answer yields a forthright, philosophically positive endorsement the philosophical value of all sexual behavior, no matter what.

This does not mean -- insofar as I would argue -- that gays and lesbians belong back in the closet.

Christians seeking to exclude gays and lesbians from their churches and church offices had better re-read their New Testaments. What need do people in their Sunday finest have of a redeemer, if they are all sinless and pure? To this question Jesus answers succinctly: "I came not to call the just, but sinners." (Mark 2:17)

The important point that many Christians miss, in the mad dash to imitate everything they hear around them, is that from the perspective of Christian doctrine, not only is everybody sinful and fallen (yes, even babies ... especially babies!), but this is a good thing.

"O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer," Christians have sung for centuries in the Easter vigil Exultet. So, if you argue that homosexuals are sinners, then you have to welcome them and accord them a place of honor in any truly Christian church! (See an interesting discussion of the idea here.)

Similarly, whatever makes homosexual behavior problematic in a broader philosophical sense does not seem to warrant legal sanction or discrimination against people who engage in it. Just because a particular behavior is not the most natural imaginable, it does not follow that it should be illegal, or a bar against employment.

There is no secular or philosophical logic to the notion that legal marriage -- a contract between two people planning to engage in cohabitation and sexual congress on an exclusive and long-term basis -- requires a man and a woman. You can argue that "the Bahble" says this or that until the cows come home, but legally it won't wash in the United States. The U.S. legal bible is the Constitution, which expressly forbids the state to favor religion.

To be fair: the Methodists did not wander half so far as I have. Insofar as I can tell, they did two things.

First, they reaffirmed the wording in the denomination's current Book of Discipline that "The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching" (Paragraph 161.G).

Secondly, they approved by a 763 to 38 margin a resolution stating that "All United Methodists, clergy and laity, are bound to an honest covenant in both word and deed and that no clergy, active or retired clergy including Bishops, or lay members who consistently try to overturn the wording of the Discipline on homosexuality shall be fit for appointment and for membership in The United Methodist Church." They gave as a rationale the statement that "Homosexuality distorts the meaning of Scripture, grace, law, and regeneration. Gay activists continue to push their exclusivism by striving to abolish those opposing [views]."

Insofar as I am personally concerned, I would not have batted an eyelash if they had changed the name of their rulebook to "Book of Discipline & Bondage." But I am put off by the arguing.

On the pro-gay side, I hear much frothing about the "sinfulness"and "heterosexism" of the position that prevailed; from the anti-gay side, I am aghast to read that "homosexual practice" is among the things "that come from the devil."

I see problems with both. Now you know why.

What if DSK didn't do it?

Since I've already offered a plausible scenario showing that Dominique Strauss-Kahn could have raped the maid in the hotel (see here), it's only fair to consider the opposite. Again, this is speculation: I have no "inside" information and I have read the story mainly in The New York Times and a few snippets elsewhere.

The odd thing here is that innocence is harder to imagine.

The only scenario that leaves DSK completely innocent would presume that the maid was actually attracted to an unknown, portly, late-middle-aged man of whom she must see dozens every day and actually asked to give him oral sex. There is one woman I know who finds DSK irresistible and, if the maid is from francophone Guinea, perhaps she recognized him from some French celebrity magazine and made a play to become a mistress — or wife no. 4. A maid can dream, no?

Not likely. See Maureen Dowd on that here.

I'm sure there are many inconsistencies in the police evidence, probably minor details, but the defense is prudently keeping its information until trial; or perhaps they are negotiating with what they have. We don't know.

In France, as I understand it, many suspect that Nicholas Sarkozy, or someone acting on his behalf, had something to do with this. However, that's a tough row to hoe. How did the Sarkozista conspirators know that DSK would go to New York? Was the mystery woman whom he wanted to impress with his suite (see my previous post) in on the conspiracy? How did they locate the precise maid who would clean the precise room and convince her?

Assuming unlimited resources and a few magic wands, yes, it could be a conspiracy. But it's not likely.

Everything we in the public know is that something of a sexual nature happened involving DSK and the maid. The only plausible exculpating story, with variant endings, is still a bit unsavory. Here goes.

Let's imagine that DSK asked the maid for oral sex in exchange of $1,000-plus, or some other sum impressive to us ordinary mortals. He probably had a roll of Benjamins with him. They agreed. This is still illegal sex for money, but in New York City it's probably not worth dragging someone off a plane, the perp walk, etc., and whatever one thinks of the practice — it's not legally rape.

This is plausible. The idea of a man forcing his penis into an unwilling woman's mouth — just one good bite away from serious, perhaps irreparable, damage — strikes me as highly implausible. That part has to have been legally consensual.

But then, as often happens among accomplices, a disagreement occurred. Perhaps she was not proficient at oral sex or perhaps she demanded more for continued sex in bed. "I will scream rape!" she threatened.

He laughed at her. "No one will believe a tramp like you." A scuffle ensued.

Or ... ending no. 2:

She felt humiliated, even with the money, and she decided play her trump card. We know from the NY Post, that Rupert Murdoch rag, that the maid may have AIDS. "I have AIDS and I have just passed it on to you with that little 'love bite' you liked so much," she says with a madwoman's laugh.

Faced with a death sentence that only could be called poetic justice, he was stunned, terrified, then angry and the Wrath of Strauss-Kahn (my phrase!) emerged. A scuffle ensued.

This could be plea-bargained out of court and prison. At least, I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

Heart Market News: SLTR Dips on CZX Surge

Turns out that, as with Microsoft and Yahoo stock, relationships with folk of the male persuasion are really vehicles of investment. So, at least, says a consensus of women, often expressed in a sentence such as "I'm investing in the relationship."

That's not how a small, admittedly unscientific poll of men felt at a recent discussion group I attended. When in a relationship, we men argued, men rarely have a particular end result in the future.

From what I have heard, however, a woman has almost certainly been thinking of marriage at the first kiss, or at least a stable long-term relationship (ticker symbol: SLTR*).

In the quest to amass shares, some women will entirely modify their looks, behavior, readiness to engage in sex. They will smile benignly at behavior that they abhor and sacrifice preferred entertainment in the quest to buy more shares at an increasingly ascending price.

Using this dollar-averaging approach, the female romantic investor aims to acquire a controlling interest in SLTR, with claims to a majority on the board, and an eye to reaping sizable dividends.

Men usually hear of the entire investment scheme when it goes sour: "I invested umpteen years in this relationship." (So that's why the curlers came out and the rolling pin got wielded and the bedtime headaches popped up as soon as she had the ring on her finger!)

To be fair, as women point out, men all have getting to bed in mind, or a friends-with-benefits arrangement, in other words, casual sex (CZX). However, the men counterpose, that's not a long-term goal or an investment strategy.

Yes, I've heard about the guy who argued that he deserved a romp in the hay because he paid for dinner. Frankly, I've never met him. Guy: if you have to argue that you bought the right to sex, you've already lost the argument.

What man is so utterly incapable of sparking an interest with strategic romantic timing in mind that he is reduced to unlikely barter? And when did the language of the stock market and the meat market merge into romantic thinking?

Did Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher have the 1987 movie Wall Street subliminally pumped into the bedrooms of women all across the United States and the former British Commonwealth? I recall hearing that the gerontocrats in the Soviet Politburo cheered during the end credits at their private screening of the movie.

Did Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky replace Gideon Bibles in every hotel room with a copy Candace Bushnell's novel Sex and the City? I found the book so horrifically cynical I could not stomach reading it through to the end.

Silly me, I thought a relationship had to do with a state of connectedness, closeness or even family relatedness. A state that simply is, because one cannot help it. Not a set of stepping stones to the altar or to bed.

It is a state of being with another person that, sadly, sometimes ends. Or is interrupted. Or sours. Other times it happily brings people to physically coalesce or marry. It's not a game, with orgasm or marriage as the goalposts.

On first dates I have paid for dinner because I like to eat. Also, because I have hated to deal with either the math of check splitting or the risk of ruining my digestion with the discovery that she is a greedy, conniving chiseler. I like my romantic evenings free of unpleasantness.

To my mind, sex expresses feelings of affection and attraction. Moreover, weddings make the most sense when the couple intends to raise a family together (see here).

Whereas investing involves the outlay of money or capital in an enterprise with the expectation of profit, there's no profit in romance and relationship. It's all loss. You lose your head and heart to someone else's charms, real or imagined.

Love is its own reward.

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* I was unable to find an actual company with the ticker symbols used here; if one exists, no reference to it is intended.

To Want, To Need, Perchance To Love

With only 14 shopping days until Christmas, a correspondent inquired as to the difference between needing, wanting and loving anything from a PC game to a trip to the Bahamas to true love and to a peaceful world. The season of shopping and greed ... um ... peace and love ... is over, but not the question.

As I see it, we need very little. Water, air, food, shelter from the elements and clothing. If we do not wish to survive, we do not even need these.

My correspondent, who is French, of course, says we need sex. I'd question that. I'd agree to the stipulation that we probably need some form of affection in our lives.

Mais, oui, we often want sex and want sex often. But need? What will happen without sex? We'll be a little irritable? We'll squirm? We'll soil our bedsheets? That's about all I can think will happen. Not exactly the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

We want everything under the sun, but especially what we see others enjoying (in commercials). We want convenience and well-being and ease, but we also want the things that will make us feel so much more powerful, handsomer, desirable. Hence the market for sports cars.

Want is our problem. We desire much we do not need for our survival or even our well-being, whereas necessity, true need, is the mother of invention. The less we need, the more we merely want, the less creative and more consuming we become.

Is it absolutely necessary to leave so many office buildings lit up at night, sucking in energy for no one to enjoy? Of course not.

Do we need purified water in bottles? Are purifiers? Do we need meat every day, three full square meals, ample desserts? Do we need a closet with umpteen pairs of shoes (OK, women do), suits, shirts, jackets and coats? Do we need a home with several regularly unused bathrooms, a yard, a two-car garage?

Of course not. Yet that's the normal North American dream.

I spent the bulk of my adulthood in a two-bedroom apartment that was at maximum legal occupancy (two adults, two children), without television or a car. I may have taken the odd vacation here and there, but I spent many of them on my balcony, reading detective novels in long summer days.

I was the "poorest" in my leafy neighborhood of million-dollar homes of Washington wonks and journalists. In the global village, however, I was undoubtedly a potentate, what with running water and electricity (not to mention a computer). About four-fifths of humanity do not have any version of these "necessities."

At the risk of sounding self-satisfied (I now have a TV, a car and an under-occupied apartment), the way of life into which I once stumbled was modest enough that the world -- and I mean every citizen in the globe -- could conceivably aspire to live as I did without a huge drain on resources. A (much needed) redistribution would have done the trick.

Sell one CEO's Gulfstream Jet (about $57 million) and you could get four-bedroom apartments for several African villages. Hell, several U.S. towns.

But -- aha! -- who's going to be the first to step forward? How do we let go of our wants and focus more precisely on our real needs?

For that we need love. The love we all want, the love we all want to give and are sometimes too scared to part with, the love others need and deserve.

Might we worship a God of the sex to which we are attracted?

Several women have given me hell for using "her"* for God, arguing that they cannot conceive of a female deity. These women are more traditionalist, of course, than the ones who have cheered me on, taking credit for my usage.

But this set me thinking ... is there a God-like sense of authority or influence or appeal in the opposite (or in the case of gays and lesbians, the same) sex? Could religious devotion be a form of sexual energy?

That latter idea fits with my experience of mature, celibate men in religious life whom I knew to speak of the "BVM" (the blessed Virgin Mary) with a fervor and attention that one lavishes on a beloved, particularly in the first blush of a romance. This is a classic example of what Freud meant by sublimation: the sex drive transmogrified into another form of intimate involvement.

Nuns who take final vows have long been held out to become figurative "brides of Christ." Look at the left hand of any woman in a Catholic religious order and you'll see the wedding band. It's not there to shoo away men who might otherwise hit on them, as most nuns do not frequent bars.

Coming back to the great unwashed majority who are not living under vows of chastity or celibacy, I wonder if somehow to a woman brought up to respect men as the head of the household and so forth, a male God makes eminent sense. Deity as "other." Similarly I wonder whether loving God would make more sense if there were something akin to sexual attraction involved.

Thus a she God for men and a he God for women.

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* I do not contend that God has a sex. However, to offset the use of capitalized masculine pronouns for God for the past 20,000 years or so, I have begun to use uncapitalized feminine pronouns, a practice I plan to review in about 20,000 years.

Passion meets a Pope

The topic of this pope's first encyclical letter Deus est caritas, reminded a friend of the 1931 song by Jean Lenoir, which has recently been sung memorably by Quebecois chanteuse Renee Claude.

Parlez-moi d'amour,
Redites-moi des choses tendres.
Votre beau discours,
Mon coeur n'est pas las de l'entendre.
Pourvu que toujours
Vous répétiez ces mots suprêmes:
Je vous aime.

(Speak to me of love / Tell me again tender things / Your beautiful colors, / My heart won't tire of them. / As long as you always / repeat these majestic words: /I love you.)

Only the French could sing so bold a declaration without blushing. Yet I fear they are right: every woman wishes to hear entreaties of love, however purple. Every man shakes and quivers at the consequences. All of us still like to be liked and love to be loved.

So it's cleverly seductive of Papa Ratzinger to chose love as the subject of his first lecture.

Predictably, the pope spends the bulk of his letter urging upon his church a greater sense of charity (caritas), the love he deems best, but he begins -- and catches my eye -- in his attempt to tame Eros, the Greek god of love, the form he likes least. In outlining the various forms of love, of course, the pope lags by decades behind the Anglican C.S. Lewis ' work The Four Loves which explores family love, love among friends, erotic or romantic love, and altruistic or self-giving love -- in Greek: storge, philia, eros, and agape, respectively.

In the Greek conception, it was not God who was love (or the image of love) as Ratzinger states in his opening, but loving that was divine. Divinity meant freedom from the chains of Fate and mastery of one's own destiny. What modern psychiatrists call the break of ego boundaries at the point of orgasm, from which bursts forth a torrent of sensations, feelings and thoughts that convey a sense of freedom, unity with another, pleasure and more, is what the Eros myth is all about.

"In the [pre-Christian] religions," Ratzinger asserts, "this attitude found expression in fertility cults, part of which was the 'sacred' prostitution which flourished in many temples ... this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it. Indeed, the prostitutes in the temple, who had to bestow this divine intoxication, were not treated as human beings and persons, but simply used as a means of arousing 'divine madness': far from being goddesses, they were human persons being exploited."

Ratzinger cleverly elides the fact that cultic sex -- which is inappropriately called "prostitution" given the modern connotations of the term -- was often understood as a god-human sexual encounter conceptually similar to that implicit in the story of the Catholic Church's own divinely impregnated Virgin Mary. To top it off, Ratzinger, has the temerity to adopt an ersatz "feminist" stance -- Women's Ordination Conference, take note! -- in stating that "the prostitutes in the temple ... were human persons being exploited."

Need we note that Ratzinger is the very man who tried to infallibilize Pope John Paul II's letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (On Reserving Priestly Ordination To Men Alone) -- which Papa Wojtyla pointedly declined to do himself? Oh, the crocodile tears Ratzinger sheds for the exploitation of the priestesses of the very same female sex he does not deem worthy of ordination in his own religion!

To critics of the Church's anti-sex catechetics and teaching, Ratzinger offers another deceptive admission: "Nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed."

You think that's an admission? Think again. He's pointing to manicheism and other views that he can safely distance himself from because august church bodies of the past have declared them "heretical."

In sum, Ratzinger would have you believe that the same religion that burned witches and insists on denying that women can serve as priests has fought sex in the name of concern for the dignity of women. This is true, so long as you understand that implicit in the bargain of Ratzinger-minded Catholics is that women abide with the confines of, as the German slogan had it, Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). Ratzinger the pope doesn't quite come out and say it.

Ratzinger does make a stab at connecting his domesticated eros with the somewhat different notion of agape. That's another excursion for another day.

At the core of everything Ratzinger is saying about eros, it seems, is the fear that strikes the heart of a powerful white septuagenarian upon coming across the unfettered passion in the words "Je t'aime" (I love you).

The Singleton Paradox

Are you as surprised as I am to learn, as I did from the Online Etymological Dictionary, that the first documented use of the word single, in the sense of an unmarried or unattached person, dates back to no later than 1964?

Other modern variants single-parent and singles bar are attested in 1969. Back in the time of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh, the term was singleton, attested in 1937, per the online dictionary, a serviceable electronic alternative to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology on my bookshelf.

Clearly, there's a change of attitudes involved.

In the 1930s and earlier, the people who came to be called as singletons were regarded also as spinsters and old maids if they were women and bachelor or stag if they were men. After a certain age, perhaps the late 30s (when women face what one of my favorite singing folkies, Christine Lavin, called the "biological time-bomb"), they were both regarded as odd, often deemed to be closet homosexuals, whether or not they played for the other team.

Yet here come the Boomers in the 1960s and their single years, and -- kazaam! -- it's suddenly a new state associated with the setting of seduction in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

In search of a new word, the older one serves best. The purpose of the search is to define a concept a friend brought up, the notion of singlehood (attested here on 2007?) as a positive, as a circumstance defined by other than un-something.

My friend declares that she is a happy singleton. At middle age she confesses she never had a boyfriend. Considered entering a convent until she decided that she could be single without having someone bossing her around.

As for sex, she never felt any need for "all that." I admire what I recognize as an honest, principled stance. She said she would like to start singles clubs that weren't about meeting someone of the opposite sex.

However, as I discovered, she cheats: she lives in the bosom of an extended family, next to siblings, married and single, and nephews and nieces, all of whom apparently care for and undoubtedly express their caring in ways uniquely meaningful to one another.

The reason most singles go to dances and clubs is the absence of precisely such a community of caring, which brings on various aches and itches.

There's the obvious itch of sex; I believe she doesn't experience it, but such a situation is rare in my experience. Then there's the ache for the warmth of another human being; we are mammals, we need a touch, a hug. Lastly, and not least, there's the hankering for conversation with a peer (or a reasonable facsimile thereof).

While I earnestly appreciate my friend's view, which echoes recent comments on Thailand Gal to the effect that she is no longer interested in sexual relationships (or the other team), there remains the matter of finding the balm for what are very legitimate aches and itches.

Volunteering, for all that it does fulfill psychologically and what some call "spiritually," is not the answer. When you go out and focus on others you do forget yourself and feel exhilarated to discover that you have more to give than you imagined. Then you come home and there is no one there with whom to share your high.

The monastic communities of Christianity, the ones I know best, were -- in part -- attempts to envelop single people in the purpose of giving themselves over to others and Someone. On the whole, my experience tells me that they largely failed. In place of affection and touching, they put prayer and states of "spiritual ecstasy" -- forcefully banning "particular friendships" in the convent or monastery.

One need not read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose to know that monasteries are beehives replete with the capital vices -- lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Hell knows little that is worse than a monk wronged.

As a modern alternative, a number of people I know have also evolved long-term relationships in which neither moves in with the other, yet each remain available to one another. This is becoming quite common.

Others have developed a family of friends. This is not my forte.

Still others claim -- note my skepticism -- that there really are such things as cybernetic "communities."

All in all, not a single satisfying one (pun intended). There needs to be a positive restatement of the singleton state as a way of living that need not be merely not something else.

Here I get stuck.

Why? Because it comes down to the essence of who we are as individuals, which is the paradox stated earlier in developing my ethics of survival: we are utterly alone, yet we cannot survive by ourselves. (See here and here, among others; or click on the "ethics" topic.)

The Irish rebels known as Sinn Fein (literally "we ourselves, often translated as "ourselves alone") are themselves now trapped in the maws of the human paradox as they engage in power sharing with the Unionists.

Perhaps that is the singleton paradox: to be alone with others. Or not.

Acceptable Prejudices?

Are there acceptable prejudices? Should some be acceptable? Is it merely "politically correct" to speak about the unacceptability of prejudices? These questions cannot be answered without recognizing the impact upon them of the Reagan-Thatcher era, begun 38 years ago now.

Such a perspective is missing in what started as a post by the Raven Maven, followed by a trail of comments and blogposts, rounding up with Chani's own very good essay pointing to the issue at hand. (Pity I wouldn't be welcome at BlogHer to meet all these bloggers, if I could even go.)

We cannot even begin to ponder these questions, and why these questions arise, without stopping to consider the mindset that led that great liberal Richard Nixon to issue Executive Order 11478 in 1969.

The order expanded Lyndon Johnson's EO 11246, which among other things, required all government contractors to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin." Nixon made it apply to the government itself.

That's the origin of the affirmative action policy, which began to be attacked as the very essence of "political correctness" in the Reagan-Thatcher era.

The premise of the attack was that discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin -- now illegal -- had ended and that prejudice was a thing of the past. People arguing for respect toward human diversity were simply attempting Orwellian thought control and the banning of free speech.

Yet here comes Chani to tell us that not only is prejudice alive and well, but it is applied to people well beyond the categories allegedly protected by law -- the biases Randy Newman meant to expose in his song Short People. He goes from "Short people got no reason
to live" to "Short people got no reason to love."

Now isn't that the story of all of us?

Indeed, in this arena George Orwell is famously misunderstood about his grasp of the political weight -- in the broadest sense -- of language. He explains this in an essay I give to read to every reporter I hire: Politics and the English Language.

Let's break it down another way. Prejudice (from the Latin prae-, before, plus judicium, legal proceeding) is, in essence, to judge before the facts are in for reasonable evaluation.

We all prejudge many things. We prejudge that there will be a tomorrow because there was a yesterday, for example, even though strictly speaking we don't actually know there will be a tomorrow. That's a reasonable prejudgment, nonetheless, since experience provides us a mountain of facts; but it's what Francis Bacon called an incomplete induction, even if it is the basis of science.

With people, however, especially people who are not like ourselves, of whom we don't really have a huge experience, or whom we don't really know, we develop biases. We are even biased for or against people we know well: the favorite child or niece who is always expected to get A's or the spouse or lover whose thoughts and next word we sometimes think we know.

The problem with voicing or acting on these biases is that they can be mistaken and that someone will get hurt as a result for no good reason.

Can we reasonably hold it against (or in favor of) someone being born into a rich family, with a constitution that tends toward becoming overweight, possessing gray matter that spins at many terahertzes faster than the average computer chip, let alone characteristics such as color, ethnicity, sex or national origin? (We do know, don't we, that "race" does not scientifically exist?)

Can we be so certain that what we intuit or guess -- and I am an intuitive, say the tests -- is correct enough to risk causing another person pain? Even if it were correct, would it be worth it?

Just because being overweight is a factor in disease and even death, does that mean that people who are heavy deserve to be called names? Has anyone lost weight, become beautiful, smarter, whiter -- characteristics associated with success -- because of insults?

The term "politically correct," however, in its post-Reagan-Thatcher usage is all about ridiculing these questions as inane.

The concern about the alleged shackles of keeping to what's PC is really about denying that our societies remain mired in prejudices, biases and discriminatory speech and action -- it's too "PC," after all, to note that women earn less than men or blacks less than whites, and that this is not just happenstance but by social design.

Yes, and it's too PC to note that tall, thin people fare better in the job market, therefore financially, therefore romantically and generally in many aspects of human fulfillment. The tall, thin guys -- and I'm tall -- get the bucks, the gals and the happiness. Or was Robert Redford, as a star, plump and short? Isn't Danny DeVito cast as merely a modern buffoon?

That is why I am less concerned with whether something is politically correct than whether it is philosophically true and valid. There are no prejudices that are ever fully acceptable to any thinking group of human beings.

We should be curious and brave enough to submit all our prejudices to critical reason, and our reasons to our heart and our hearts to purity of will.

(This post is retroactively part of Julie Pippert's Hump Day Hmm and BlogRhet's "Let's Talk About Race, Baby" week long initiative.)

Les Scandales Politiques Américains

In the manner of Art Buchwald's famous column explaining Thanksgiving's Day to the French, which was reprinted every year for decades after its 1953 debut, I would like to explain to readers of Le Monde why Mark Sanford is news in the USA.

Here's the QPFD (les questions démandés plus fréquentes -- or frequently asked questions):

Q. Quelle hypocrisie ! Dans un pays avec ce taux de divorce, les affaires extra-conjugales seraient-elles rarissimes ? (No translation needed, just imagine a French man with handlebar mustache and beret dropping his paper on the outdoor café table as his arms raise with indignation demanding vengeance from the heavens.)

A. My dear François, extramarital affairs are not all that uncommon in the USA and the divorce rate is high. The real puzzle, however, is the fact that all surveys (sondages) since Kinsey's have found that men cheat (tromp) more than women, leading me to wonder whether adulterous women take on several lovers to offset the imbalance (déséquilibre). (Hence Sanford's trip to Argentina [la terre du tango] in search of illicit love.)

Q. So they are normal men. But being punished they want a revenge on their fellows, what a nice mentality!

"Normal" in France, as I understand it, involves presidents who must either have suitable number of mistresses (maîtresses) to stay in power or else wives who are incurable man-chasers. Unfortunately, my friend Pierre, that happens only in France.

Q. I wonder whether the notion of lying is always used for sexual stuff, no? The reason or the cause of Clinton's problem has always said to be because he lied (not because he had sex with Monica) which appears to be a wide hypocrisie. Do you have other examples?

Lying (mentir), my adored Fifi, isn't always about sexual things (les choses sexuelles). I'd bet that Clinton subscribed to the school of thought that what Monica did to him and his cigar did to her was not "sex." To him these deeds did not encompass the act that the Founding Fathers (les Péres Fondateurs) had in mind when they referred to "sexual Congreff" (l'Asamblée carnale), where we got the tradition of lobbying (le lobbying).


Q. Why private life has to do with politics? OK the guy had not to boast and to defend about familiy values, right, but we think that if politicans's private life was respected, there will be much less problems.

Jacques, Jacques, Jacques! This is the land of the Scarlet Letter (la Lettre Écarlate). If Republicans didn't make hay (le foin) out of the immorality ascribed to everybody else, on what platform would they ever be elected: balanced budgets? peace and prosperity? fair taxes?
As if!

Q. Et Abe Fortas ... had he to renounce because he lied about his payments. Or was it merely what we call "délit d'initié", when someone has hidden interest ? (Which is not lying.)

Ah, ma belle Louise, you have studied our history well. But here lying about money is still lying. Especially about money (l'argent), which is ten times more important than sex.

Q. I have always been very suprised that apparently all Americans finally accepted Bush lying about the supposed weapons; nothing happened to him as it happened to Clinton. He lied. OK he lied. Too bad. Period. End of the story. That is why I dont really believe that lying is such unforgivable in the USA.

Hmm ... interesting point. Nothing happened to Clinton, either, now that I recall. It was Gingrich and Livingston, the Right Wing nut witch hunters (les chasseurs de sorciéres de l'Aile Droite noix) who had to quit because of their affairs (liaisons condits).

Q. Irangate. That sounds to be a very complicated story, but lying does not seem to be the main fault, was it?

Sorry, but I was out of the loop, Michélle.

The One?

A correspondent asks whether it is possible to love two people at once. My response is to wonder whether it is possible to love just one, famously "The One."

Let's set aside the various kinds of love: for family, for friends, erotic or romantic, and altruistic or self-giving -- in Greek: storge, philia, eros, and agape. I wrote about this here.

Defining love, classifying it, moralizing about it, are all distractions.

We all know what love is, most prominently we notice its absence from our lives, our communities, our world. The question about loving two need not be circumscribed to romantic love, although it most often is.

Still, I wonder whether it is possible to love just one person.

Might there not be one person with whom it is a joy to discourse about the economy, politics, literature? Another with whom a shared meal, perhaps cooking for or being cooked for by that person, is a sheer delight? Could not another offer a storybook home, replete with children? Yet another share an interest in tennis or boardgames?

Why must these affinities and shared pleasures lead to the bed, or merely the sofa, or skinny dipping, in only one instance?

All right, we carry the Judaeo-Christian monkey on our backs. Adultery is wrong because ... it muddied up paternity for the purposes of inheritance during the period in which property was almost exclusively held by men. That's not what God allegedly told Moses, nor what the rabbis and priests want you to take home with you after you've helped fill the collection plate.

But it happens to be the best explanation for a moral imperative so widely contravened.

Yes, surely, there's also pregnancy and disease, but there's also birth control, safe sex and medicine. Besides, didn't I just finish pointing to the sofa (or the back seat of a Dodge), the quintessential locale for making out of a non-penetrational nature?

Must every expression of intimacy, desire, pleasure in another necessarily end up with an exchange of genital fluids? Isn't kissing and embracing just as necessary for the sanity of mammals?

Might there not, then, be two or three bed partners, five or six sofa partners and ten or eleven merely hugging and hand-holding partners, each with a different set of emotional, intellectual and activity affinities?

Admittedly, this is a question more often raised by a man. Just as my correspondent's question is most often raised by a woman.

Yet even the most Puritan of women experience a range of physical intimacy -- from sex to kissing, embracing and even just touching -- with a very large set of concentric circles of people. In contrast, the serially monogamous male usually is physically intimate with one adult at a time, perhaps a few children.

Women will often admit that they wished they could be lesbian, as they share so much with other women, even though for sex they desire a man, preferably one man. Why couldn't a community of women sexually share a man? Or why couldn't a community of women share a community of men?

Why couldn't a community of men share a woman? The woman would be too lonely; a community of men is an unsentimental, competitive, relatively Spartan environment.

With the divorce rate what it is, with relationships in general so ephemeral, with the reality that it is unlikely that one person -- The One -- will amply satisfy another emotionally, intellectually, physically and so forth, shouldn't we rethink the couple paradigm?

Yes, Virginia, it is possible to love two people at once, intensely, honorably, lovingly. Indeed, I doubt that it is possible to love just one, happily ever after.

Catholic Charities? Not!

Thursday, my busiest day, I couldn't write a post on The Washington Post front page news that the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington threatened to discontinue the services to the poor provided under contract with the city if the Washington, D.C., City Council approves a gay marriage bill. I howled with laughter.

Funniest of all was listening on the radio to the spokesman of the local Catholic Charities talking about tenets (I swear it sounded like "tenants") in syntactically awkward statements that conveyed the distinct impression that he didn't know what the word "tenets" means -- let alone what the tenets of Catholicism are.

There is no tenet on which to hide behind in this case. No one is asking the Catholic Church to declare that a civil marriage between people of the same sex is sacramental, much less to host such a ceremony. In fact, archdiocesan officials are standing on the quicksand of hypotheticals (see their own Web site) that, precisely in the light of their own alleged faith, simply do not wash, as follows:

What if an employee wants medical benefits for his or her same-sex partner?

You mean the Catholic Church even hires gay people? (Indeed, yes; more secretly guarded that the pedophile files -- pedofiles? -- is the number of supposedly celibate priests who have died of AIDS.)

All right, let's keep a straight face here. Where is it forbidden to provide the insurance benefits as required by law, even if it is more than you think you should pay?

Even in the direst Catholic condemnations of homoeroticism, of which there are many, the teachings are consistent in calling for charity (that is, loving kindness), always well beyond one's minimal duty. It's not like the Church has ever confronted massive and uncontrolled altruism and had to stop the excess of kindness.

What if a gay couple wants to adopt a child?

So? Do Catholic charity groups only promote adoptions and foster parents among people who subscribe to the entire code of Catholic Canon Law?

No Muslims, Jews or Protestants, whose standards of marriage and coupling, and a host of other moral and doctrinal ideas differ radically from those of Catholicism, may ever adopt or become foster parents through a Catholic agency?

What if same-sex couples want to use a church hall for for non-wedding events

You mean, like the Knights of Columbus in Silver Spring, Md., and several Catholic churches, a stone throw from the bishop's residence, rent their halls for dances for divorced people who obviously have the intention of coupling?

These three hypotheticals come from their Web site.

Allow me at this point to interject that I was once a board member of precisely the D.C. area Catholic Charities, during the tenure of Archbishop Hickey. I knew then and know now that these charities are only nominally "Catholic." Nationally, Catholic Charities USA estimates that between 45 and 55 percent f their funds come from the Catholic Church; and much the same is true locally.

The contracts with the District of Columbia are a way to raise revenue. Much the way most nonprofits actually make handsome amounts of money that results in the occasional scandal when some official gets too greedy, Catholic Charities, like the Catholic Church, is, in strict financial terms, a business.

Pace, Catholics! The same is true of every other religious organization or church. Some are more baldly money making, other less so.

Now if the Archdiocese of Washington wants to demonstrate its purity of belief in the evangelical counsels (feed the hungry, give to drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit those who are sick, etc.), let it do so without government contracts. Let it give out of its community's generosity, not that of the rest of us.

Let's go one step further: let the Archdiocese of Washington renounce the exemption that allows it to sit prime land and buildings for which it pays not a penny in real estate taxes. The church exemption diminishes the funds available for services to the poor -- and D.C. is a leader in generosity to the unemployed and poor.

Now those are policies and principles directly traceable to the words attributed to a Galilean woodworker of two millenia ago. Archbishop Wuerl may have heard of the man, he was known as Jesus of Nazareth.

How does a Christian support same sex marriage?

How does a Christian support same sex marriage?
 
I am now trying to become a Christian. But in the process of learning more about Jesus and the Bible, I found that the Bible actually does not support much of my political view. However, politics is a very important part of my life, so I really want to know if I can still retain my political views after I become a Christian. I do know that the Bible clearly states homosexual is one of the most serious sins. I want to know if it is OK for a Christian to support homosexual rights and how people who have a religion deal with the conflict between their religion and political view?

Nothing in the Christian faith requires that all civil and criminal laws of every country must conform to the teachings of the faith. Only believers must conform; and believers ought not to judge others (Matthew 7:1).

When Jesus was asked whether he thought it was moral to pay Roman taxes, he asked who was on the coin. Told it was Caesar, he said, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." (Mark 12:17)

So, embrace the faith with confidence that it will only demand of you to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. (Mark 12:30-31) That's hard enough, believe you me.

---

This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions in italics and their subtexts are not mine.

Sex trumps democracy with gay marriage but locked ballot boxes

It only dawned upon me in 2008 that the all-Monica news of 1998 was really a cover for the dismantling of safeguards against the reckless speculation that led to our current long economic slump. One would think we would learn, but here it is happening in front of our eyes all over again.

In the late 1990s, Bill Clinton was allowed Oval Office oral sex, which had no bearing whatsoever on national policy, in exchange for signing away the economy to big banks. Now, the same Supreme Court that gave corporations the right to buy elections has handed the white Republican South a get-out-of-jail-free card whenever its politicians want to win against the will of voters who are too dark, too poor or too liberal.

The Clinton presidential pen's ink was just barely dry on Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, as was the spunk on Monica Lewinsky's blue dress, when investment bankers were freed to go on the spree that eventually gave us the Wall Street crash of 2008. The 1999 law was the final nail in the coffin of the Glass–Steagall Act, the 1930s statute that barred the merger of banks, brokerage houses and insurance companies, which was one of the major causes of the Great Depression, as well as our current lesser one.

Similarly, this past week four white bigots on the Supreme Court, plus one hell of a self-hating Uncle Tom, gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, one of the signature legal achievements of the civil rights movement. The court effectively ended federal supervision of states with a historical record in living memory of denying the most essential democratic right to African-Americans, Hispanics, women or whomever fancy tickles them.

The powers that be are smart, no doubt about it in these allegedly post-racial days.

They gave us the Monica circus when they wanted to set us up for an economic free fall. Now, in exchange for a free hand to white Republican to suppress the black and Hispanic vote, they give us the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington outside the Supreme Court on Wednesday to serenade us with an unquestionably beautiful rendition of our national anthem.

Makes one want to sing those immortal words: O, say, can you see, how they screwed us again ...

The court opened the legal door another slim crack for gay marriage, very slightly, very indirectly, putting no finality to the issue in a majority of the states. They gave gays and lesbians the right to eventually have nasty divorces and rampaging child custody battles just like the heterosexual idiots who get a marriage license.

Woot! Woot!

Gay marriage will cure the creeping socioeconomic inequality and the coming vast underclass of dark, underpaid masses turned away at the voting station.

Does love come from above or Hollywood? Does it even exist?

In the 1970s there was an awful song "Caught Between Two Lovers" about a love triangle. More commonly there is a triangle, or many sided figure of loves that encompass the complex of feelings, thoughts, words and deeds between two people in a romantic couple.

From the time in which I genuinely believed that babies appeared miraculously when mommies and daddies loved (or felt gooey feelings toward) each other, I developed a view of love that was traditional among the celibate men and women who were my role models.

Love, as I came to conceive of it in my monastic and overeducated way, was the enmeshment of the physicality of sex into the gospel's agape of Teilhard de Chardin's Cosmic Omega.* It was a pseudo-trinitarian thing, in which the love of two persons was so real that it became an actual third person.

Hence procreation, meaning the human collaboration in the continuing divine act of creation, that is, the making of something from nothing. The carnal partnership in creation was always directed to a kind of love that had a moral and other-oriented dimension: an aspect of that oh, so difficult "love your neighbor as yourself."

One loved to see the other person happy on their own terms. If you truly loved someone else, you were happy for that person's happiness even if it came with someone other than you.

I only began to grasp what loving another as much as, or even more than, oneself was about when I had children, the first human beings for whom I would have given my life without question or hesitation. The human beings to whom I gave a sizable portion of my life and what I earned, without question or conditions, until I knew they could take care of themselves and lead their lives without giving much thought to Old Dad. The human beings who despite all I have given truly owe me nothing.

I haven't really loved that way in any other context. If I had, I might have done more for many others. Given more of myself and my belongings, and so forth.

When I fell in love there was always the dimension of caring and responsibility, of giving. I did not fool myself that I loved every woman to whom I was ever attracted; nor did I fool myself that I was the most unselfish of lovers in the real love. There was lust, pure and simple; even in marriage, especially in marriage up to the late 19th century, there has always been a measure of social pressure plus convenience mixed in with the dash of romantic, other-caring love.

All these get mixed up. Toward the end in Hermann Hesse's novel "Narcissus and Goldmund," two childhood friends are reunited after having spent, on one hand a life of prayer and total giving, and on the other one of pleasure-seeking wanderlust. The monk does not shrink back when he recognizes that his friend has carved a statue of the Virgin Mary in the likeness of the first girl with whom the wanderer fell in passionate love.

In the world outside the monastery it is different.

Absent gods or a moral structure from above, knowledge or trust in anything or anyone but myself, I am an animal seeking to survive. Sex is good: it makes the heart race, the circulation improve, the attitude rise, the species continue. I have been hungry for it from every flower that offered it to me.

Wandering this world one lives are amoral little animals to whom everything is possible if it feels good. Indeed, if it feels good, it must be love. Or perhaps love is a potion to draw spouses who fit shopping lists, so that they satisfy all wants and all self-seeking.

People have an entrenched love of coupling. They have second, third and fourth spouses if they live long enough or are rich enough. Yet perhaps there is a different kind of love possible.

One that goes through lust and glückenfreude into a kind of cinematic love that is carnal yet kind, polite, educated and capable of uniting reciprocally two little bubbles into one. A love that has its element of selfishness in its survival seeking with someone who at core grasps me, my sense of being lost, of not belonging anywhere, of wanting desperately someone to clutch and witness my life and pleasure and despair.

That's very fine and good, but it is not the love conceived of in the monastery. It can't be. Love dreamed of in Hollywood is mostly makeup and sets and special effects — such as fadeouts.

After the credit rolls and the score is reprised, real life begins in the full glare of sunlight, where love is so elusive you will be forgiven for thinking it doesn't exist at all.

---

* Google it.

"The butler did it" and other Vatican follies

Anyone wondering why the pope's butler secretly leaked evidence of entirely unsurprising Renaissance-style corruption in the modern Vatican need only weigh the history of authoritarian power styles such as that of Joseph Ratzinger.

Think about it: the pope is the last absolute divine-right monarch. What caused the fall of so many of his royal peers, their dynasties gone? One lost his head quite literally, another was gunned down in a basement with his family. Lots more where that came from.

Just as surely as Freud was right that suppression of desires breeds sublimation and rebellion, a tyrannical demand of absolute loyalty from one's subordinates breeds intrigue, double dealing and ultimately the collapse of any respect for authority.

This isn't new.

Dictatorship was always short-lived. The original Roman dictators were given extraordinary powers to cope with emergencies, then unceremoniously dismissed by the Senate once danger was gone.

The authoritarian boss, mafioso, president, king or pope forces his (they're usually men) subjects to obey without question no matter what, setting off tensions between individual needs or desires and social duty.

Most people end up cheating a little or a lot, depending on their power and means. Eventually everyone is part of a wide circle of dishonesty and disobedience that wrecks the social fabric.

The elected parliamentary systems of governance by laws of Britain and North America have the longest continuous history since very ancient times precisely because they strive for compromise, a safety valve for dissenting minorities,  pluralities and the individual.

This is also why, like sex-starved teenagers, most people lie outrageously to themselves and others when their urges or needs are fiercely and unreasonably suppressed, persecuted or disregarded.

Yet this is exactly what Ratzinger set up the Vatican to do.

Thoroughly indoctrinated in top-down order as a Hitler Youth, he rose under the tutelage of the most authoritarian German bishops. When he finally went to Rome he was quickly dubbed "the Panzerkardinal" as he  steamrolled over anyone with whom he disagreed.

His entire papacy is a venture dedicated to reducing the  Catholic Church to the tight-knit, goose-stepping 10 percent of Catholics who obey every rule (or fake it well and self-righteously).

Even nuns aren't allowed to care about the poor, whom a Galilean woodworker of long ago called "blessed." They must fight abortion and s-e-x first!

It can't be done? Pretend. Oh, and make all the financial shenanigans behind the operation go away.

This authoritarian illogic is how, as even Cuba's Prensa Latina reported, Castro's comrades practiced "sociolismo" (partnership in misappropriation of state property or funds) rather than socialism.

This is also how conservative Newton Leroy Gingrich attempted to overthrow President Clinton for sexual escapades while Gingrich himself was cheating on his dying wife with a woman from a church choir.

What made the man I none-too-affectionately call Papa Nazinger think that his own wrongheaded fanatical agenda wouldn't become the refuge of scoundrels?

Maybe it was his butler's benign smile of submission.

Whither Romance

Playing with etymology I chanced upon the origin of the English word romance: it comes from the Old French romanz ("verse narrative"), related also to the modern French roman ("novel"), gaining its modern sense only in the 17th century. So is everything romantic at the core a fiction?

Did the relatively modern sense related to matters of the metaphoric heart, come to be accepted just in time for the industrial revolution to turn romance into prosaic mating?

Indeed, it strikes me that the industrial age brought about the most intense denial of such a scientific development in the form of something known as Victorian mores or customs, the Manicheism of the 19th century that survived into the 20th. The major change brought about by the sexual revolution, in whose ramparts I valiantly fought, was the beginning of an admission that a lot that happens with regards to romance is actually biological.

Romance involves a temporary suspension of the brain's critical functions, induced by what must no doubt be a flood of pleasure-inducing chemicals, so that we become convinced that this one other person, suddenly encompassed within our ego's expanding boundary, is astoundingly special and even necessary to our survival.

Thus, I would argue, the claim that certain public figures whose sexuality has become known are "sex addicts" is absurd. Once we have experienced it, we are all to some extent "addicted," or uncommonly willing to seek, the pleasure of romance.

The label gets flung at men -- Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, etc. -- largely because women have different biological goals.

Men are biologically set to impregnate as many women as possible, a goal that is fulfilled in sexual consummation. Women are biologically set to become impregnated, carry the potential human being to birth and then provide at least the indispensable nurture needed for the infant's survival, a goal that is best fulfilled in marriage or some form of long-term commitment.

Such a set of mechanisms explains why men move on quickly and women hang on.

Similarly, the pattern explains why men are eager to call a taxi right after orgasm, while women keep up the romance until they get a ring around their fingers. Biology also explain why the romance ends early in courtship for men and on the honeymoon's first night for women.

Women are just as "addicted" as men. Except ... can one really call what seems to me a natural process an "addiction"?

A therapist I know, who has no direct personal knowledge of either Clinton or Woods, claims that not only is there such a thing, but that the former president and the golfer are prime addicts. Funny, no women ever get mentioned, even though if there were such a thing as sex addiction, I might have postulated my friend, who is of the female persuasion, as an exemplar.

All of which is apropos of nothing more than writing a new post finally giving expression to an idea I have been mulling for some time. You may disagree. Of course, you would be wrong.