Why Religious Fundamentalists Are Sex Obsessed

There's a reason that religious fundamentalists of both the Christian and Islamic variety share a common obsession with sex.  It is all about control.  Control of people's lives and, at least in the minds of the theocrats, control of people's thoughts.  Thoughts that might lead the populous to over throw the theocrats' influence and control, especially political control.   In Iran, the religious extremist government is waging a war against women who fail to wear head covers.  While utterly different on the surface from the American Christofascists' war on LGBT citizens, the root motivation is the same: power and control - and thought control so that the masses don't begin to release that they are being sold a bunch of fairy tales that help keep their religious elite in power.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at both the sex obsession of Iran's rulers and how it translates to American Christofascists.  Here are excerpts:

Welcome to Operation Spider 2. Yes, Iran’s War Against Hair even has a code name. In a sting led by no less significant a unit than Iran’s cybercrimes division, eight other models were arrested and charged with “promoting western promiscuity.” State prosecutor for cybercrimes Javad Babaei confirmed that his unit was focused on Instagram and is concerned with “sterilizing popular cyberspaces.” Many of the country’s leading models have reportedly suffered this clampdown. They are accused of promoting "immoral and un-Islamic culture and promiscuity.”

As moderate political forces continue to gain ground in Iran’s educated city centers, establishment clampdowns against “Western promiscuity” are becoming more visible, and more desperate. 

A desire to restrict any of these voices is a desire to control. When enforced on others, religion becomes nothing but a tool of power and control. Sexuality, in particular, obsesses male theocrats more so than any other topic. 

Whether in Iran and Saudi Arabia, where women’s dress is government enforced, or in Syria and Afghanistan, where Islamist terrorists seek to enforce it, or across Muslim-majority nations more generally, sexual expression has fast become a dividing line for fundamentalists harboring presumptuous assumptions about a “pure” East and a “promiscuous” West. 

Oddly, hundreds of years ago it was the opposite. A Europe in the Dark Ages, plagued by the Inquisition and conflicts caused by religious intolerance, placed a similar premium on sexuality. Back then, it was the East that European Orientalists fetishized as overly “promiscuous,” while the West valued its prudishness. The one common factor is a correlation between the rise of theocratic demands anywhere, and restrictions on sexuality.

In this way, sexuality has become the axis upon which enlightened values and progress have pivoted between nations. Sexual freedoms have become a litmus test between open societies and closed ones. The drug that dogmatic ideologues are usually addicted to is control, and the thirst for control almost always manifests itself in sexual control. This is why the subject of sex among women, gays and “unmarried” youth fascinates extremists of all bents. And it is why—regardless of our gender or sexual orientation—the struggle against controlling sexuality should preoccupy us all. 

What Dennis Hastert Tells Us About Sexual Predators

While Christian Right extremists and the Catholic Church hierarchy consistently try to depict LGBT individuals as sexual predators who lurk in restrooms and other places seeking to molest children, these claims, like so much that comes from the lips of these "godly folk" are lies.  The truth is something very different, including the fact that most child molesters are heterosexual males. And in the context of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, having been raised Catholic and been an altar boy in the 1960's, I would argue that much of the abuse was due not to the alleged homosexuality of abusive priests, but rather the near psychotic obsession with repressive views on sex and sexuality within the Catholic clergy that created truly emotionally and psychologically disturbed individuals. The requirement of priestly celibacy only intensifies such dysfunction.  Indeed, it took years of therapy for me to overcome the brainwashing I received as a child and youth growing up Catholic. A piece in Chicago Tonight looks at the true profile of sexual molesters in the context of Dennis Hastert's admitted abuse of some of his students.  Here are excerpts:

Former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert is going to prison for violating federal banking laws.

But at his sentencing yesterday, Hastert acknowledged that he sexually abused students during his time as a wrestling coach in far west suburban Yorkville.

Hastert's high-profile disgrace has renewed questions about the nature of sexual predators and what parents and communities should know about them.

Char Rivette is the executive director of the Chicago Children's Advocacy Center, which coordinates the efforts of child protection staff, law enforcement professionals and medical experts in dealing with an average of more than 2,000 child sexual abuse reports each year.

“In general, a common profile is that the perpetrators are known to these children. Over 90 percent of children who are sexually abused are abused by someone they know,” Rivette said. “It’s not rape by a stranger, it’s generally someone who has developed a relationship with this child, and usually their parents also, and who creates scenarios and contexts within which they can successfully groom and find situations where they can act out against these children.”

According to Rivette, Hastert might not fit the description of an outright psychopath or pedophile. But his apparent state of denial at Wednesday’s sentencing is common for an abuser.

“Obviously Hastert was a coach, a teacher, a citizen of the community and he had to know that deep-down what he was doing was wrong and harmful and inappropriate,” she said. “Yet he was still compelled to do these things, so he must have come up with rationalizations to just kind of get him through this and allow him to do this without the guilt, without the shame, without the understanding that what he was doing was harming these children.”

When it comes to the survivors, Rivette said, it’s also common for them to not speak out and to feel shame or guilt.

“If you are able to disclose and someone believes you, it’s a big key to actually getting trauma treatment and actually moving on. If you don’t, what I see is a lot of emotional struggles throughout life, a lot of inability to form healthy relationships as an older adult, really a lot of struggles with substance abuse,” she said.

But Rivette said the good news is that we’re getting better at addressing these issues in the wake of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal and now Dennis Hastert.

To stop sexual abuse of children, the first step is knowing who the predators are and not falling prey to animus based lies or psychotic sexual dogma.  It is also important to recognize that all too often the real predators are the very ones seeking to demonize and stigmatize others. I don't think it is a coincidence that sexual abuse by conservative Christian clergy is common despite all of their rantings against sex and sexuality.  The more they condemn something, the more likely they are to be the ones engaging in it or fantasizing about it. 

Why Are the Deeply Religious So Obsessed with Sex?

One thing that binds right wing evangelical Protestants and right wing Roman Catholics is their obsession with all things sexual - especially sex that involves pleasure.  A piece in Salon has excerpts

from the book "The Illusion of God's Presence" that looks at looks at religion's obsession with sex.

One of the book's conclusions is that  the deeply religious suffer from what might be called stunted emotional development - infantile emotions, if you will.  This explains not only their obsession with sex which on the one hand they view as vile and dirty even as they desperately want to indulge in it, but also their fear of thinking for themselves and a desire to be able to "check off the boxes" to prove their future in Heaven.  The end result is a schizophrenic approach to sex where while condemning sex and matters sexual, both the Catholic clergy and conservative Protestant clergy engage in much higher than average levels of sexual abuse and infidelity.  Here are highlights:

Why does the creator of this infinitely vast universe care so much about what we do with our sexual organs as adults? Why is lust considered sinful? Why was Jesus born of a virgin, and, according to Catholics, his mother also? Why did the early Shakers not only practice celibacy, but also dance naked? Why do religious fundamentalists oppose not only abortion, but also the most effective means of pre­venting it, contraception? Why do televangelists rant about the evils of adultery, pornography, masturbation, fornication, and homosexuality, only to be caught with their pants down doing exactly those things? Why is religion so obsessed with sex?

As the core of a believer’s religious love of God, the innate model colors religious experience with infantile emotions. The more intensely pious the believer becomes, however, the greater the risk that these emotions will spill over into other parts of the evolutionary hack. The sparks really fly when the infantile emotions of religious fervor breach the levee and pour into sexual territory.

Perhaps this is to be expected, considering that novitiates are told that their celibate life to come is the price paid for the privilege of being wedded to Christ. But celibate nuns are not the only ones whose image of God is painted in sexual hues. . . .

The big problem here is that, despite this intrusion of the sexual, religious emotion remains primarily infantile, with God normally in the role of a greatly exalted parent. Sexual feelings for this parental figure therefore activate the incest-avoidance system, an innate mechanism that generates feelings of disgust and revulsion at the prospect of sex with close kin. . . .  The predictable result of this conflict is an obsession with controlling or prohib­iting sexual behavior, coupled with an almost irresistible drive to violate those prohibitions. How these people deal with this conflict—as individuals and as religious institutions—determines the variously entertaining or tragic manifestations of sexual obsession in religion.

If these ideas are right, then we should expect sexual misbehavior among the clergy to be significantly greater than in comparable secular professions, and several studies bear this out. Two surveys of predominantly male American Protestant ministers found that more than 12 percent of respondents admitted to having sexual intercourse with a member of their congregation other than their spouse. This is roughly double the incidence of sexual intercourse with clients committed by male clinical psychologists and physicians. The studies also hint at a more general problem of sexual conflict, guilt, and obsession. One of them found that 37 percent of Protestant ministers admit to the vague sin of “sexual behavior inappropriate for a minister.” Responses to other questions in the study suggest that at least some of these transgressions involve sexual fantasy, viewing pornography, and masturbating in private—acts of negligible consequence or moral weight in the broader society.

The pastors, however, see it differently. Their religiously warped view of human sexuality is especially evident in “The War Within,” an account of one Protestant pastor’s tormented struggle with lust, published anonymously in a journal for Protestant clergy. Although he was married and regularly had sex with his wife, the author tells a sad tale of his obsession with various aspects of sexuality off-limits to good Christians. . . . He mentions only in passing a “repressed childhood” that may have contributed to his obsession with lust, but beyond that glimmer of insight he appears utterly blinded by his religious worldview to the essence of his problem: lust is healthy and normal, but a religious obsession with it is not. “

The most obvious culprit here is the Catholic obsession with the sinfulness of sex for pleasure, especially homosexual sex, along with a peculiar sexual proscrip­tion for clergy: celibacy. Intentionally or not, the celibate priesthood specifically attracts applicants who are at best confused or conflicted about their sexuality, and at worst deliberately seek positions conducive to sexual exploitation of the vulnerable. . . . . Aside from being an ineffec­tive sham, the doctrine of celibacy for the priesthood apparently attracts young Catholic homosexual men, either as a means of suppressing a sexual orientation they perceive as evil, or—in certain Catholic subcultures—as a safe venue for hooking up with other gays.

That struggle takes a darker turn among Catholic clergy, who are disproportionately likely to sexually abuse vulnerable children and adolescents. Catholic apol­ogists deny this, often citing a study that found that only 4 percent of Catholic priests sexually abuse minors. They argue that this is the same as in the general male population, implicitly suggesting that there is no special relationship between Catholicism and the sexual abuse of children. There are, however, several problems with this rationalization. One is that other studies find higher rates of child sexual abuse in the Catholic clergy, over 5 percent, and even that is likely to be an underes­timate given the reluctance of victims to come forward and the intense effort by the Catholic hierarchy to protect offending priests and cover up the scandal. Another problem is the specious comparison to the general male population. The Catholic Church claims to be a high moral authority—God’s representative on Earth—and its clergy are supposedly transformed by God into a special state of sanctity. If this were true, we should expect exemplary behavior from Catholic priests, especially with respect to the sexual abuse of innocent children, one of the most odious crimes imaginable.

If the Catholic Church really were what it claims to be, the incidence of child sexual abuse by priests should be zero.

These insights suggest some obvious fixes for the problem of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy:

·        drop the requirement of celibacy;

·        allow women into the priesthood;

·        eliminate the ritual of confession for children and adolescents;

·        accept homosexuality as a natural dimension of human sexuality.

Thus, the ultimate irony is that those who are the most screwed up emotionally and in terms of normal sexual/psychological want to be the ones to advise and control others in all things sexual.  It's like putting the patients in control of the insane asylum. 

GOP Anti-Sex Lunacy

Ever since the Christofascists hijacked the GOP base, the Republican Party has become obsessed with all things sexual and wants to regulate women's wombs and relations between same sex couples.  Meanwhile, of course, the Bible Belt has the highest divorce rate and the most unwed teen pregnancies.  Perhaps these "godly folk" need to spend less time monitoring the sex lives of others and pay more attention to their own screwed up lives.  A piece in Salon looks at the Christofascist sexual obsession and dysfunction that has overtaken the GOP and the delicious surprise in the effort to indict Planned Parenthood that resulted in the indictment of its detractors/slanderers instead.  Here are highlights:

It was a moment of justice so delicious that we need a new German word for it, as schadenfreude isn’t impactful enough. A Houston area grand jury was convened, under the orders of Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, to investigate allegations that Planned Parenthood was running a black market for-profit fetal tissue trafficking ring. After perusing the evidence, the grand jury exonerated Planned Parenthood, but then turned around and indicted David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, two of the people that helped create the hoax videos that took this lurid right-wing urban legend out of the world of email forwards and into the mainstream media.

The entire episode, however, is a stunning illustration of how far the Republicans have gone when it comes to embracing even the most ridiculous and fringe right wing causes.

That Daleiden and Merritt are facing criminal charges is, in itself, no surprise. The videos they made under the auspices of the Center for Medical Progress used heavy editing to make it seem like Planned Parenthood employees were saying things they clearly didn’t say.  Most notably, they made it seem like they are profiting off fetal tissue when they explicitly say in the unedited footage that Planned Parenthood does not profit off fetal tissue. That people who are willing to do something so deeply deceptive and unethical are also willing to cut legal corners is the least surprising thing in the world, . . . Their lies have also been implicated in the deaths of three people who were murdered by a self-proclaimed anti-choice warrior who cited the hoax videos as cause for shooting up a clinic.

What should be surprising is that Lt. Gov. Patrick, with the full support of Gov. Greg Abbott, were stupid enough to force this investigation in the first place. From the get-go, it was self-evident that the accusations against Planned Parenthood were false. 

It’s not just the red states that have gone all in on this ridiculous conspiracy theory. It’s become mandatory for every Republican candidate to pretend to believe that these discredited videos are some great expose, and Carly Fiorina got so excited about this that she just started making stuff up about what she saw in the videos. They’re lying about lies now, a veritable vortex of right wing bullshit.

This absurd situation perhaps became inevitable, however, when mainstream Republicans decided to embrace what used to be a fringe right wing campaign against Planned Parenthood.

 Anti-choice activists have long hated Planned Parenthood, believing that its sex-positive vibe and mission to make sex education and contraception easy to get was going to turn this country into a biblical Babylon.

This isn’t the only evidence that the anti-contraception fringe is calling the shots now. Republicans have used the fact that Obamacare requires insurance companies to cover contraception without a copay as a pretense to throw a nationwide fit, making wild accusations that they’re being forced to pay for playtime for a bunch of sluts.  

Just a few years ago, the idea that someone would use her insurance to pay for birth control was non-controversial for Republicans, just as it was non-controversial for the government to give money to Planned Parenthood so they can offer low cost Pap smears and birth control pills. But all it took to demonize a service that nearly all women, including conservative women, use was to declare that it’s “liberal” and link it to Obama.

If you want to know how politicians who want to shut down the IRS or ban Muslims from traveling into our country became mainstream Republican presidential candidates, look no further than this. If a bunch of wackos who want to shut down access to contraception, a service used by nearly all women, can get make their agenda a priority, any fringe belief has a shot.

Quote of the Day: Catholic Church Neurosis on Sexual Issues

The New York Times in its opinion section has a debate going on the Catholic Church and marriage that includes allowing gay marriage and ending priestly celibacy.  One of the position statements made is by Daniel Maguire,  a professor of moral theology at Marquette University who was ordained a priest in 1956 but left the priesthood and later married and now has two children and seven grandchildren. He is the author, most recently, of "Christianity Without God: Moving Beyond the Dogmas and Retrieving the Epic Moral Narrative."  Here's the pertinent quote:

Peter, whom some consider to have been the first pope, was a married man according to the Bible. Had popes and priests followed his lead who could doubt that we would have a different church today?

Christianity strayed from the healthy sexual joy that Judaism offered in its poetic Song of Songs. Instead, influential neurotics like Augustine, who binged on sex in his youth, cast the negative shadow of his penis-obsession on the subsequent Christian view of human sexuality. The result? Women were a threat to the officially celibate male leaders; this poisoned the hierarchical attitude toward women. This is not the whole story of Catholic sexism, but it is a part.

The more one reads about the Church's 13th century "natural law" and  its obsession with all things sexual, the more one discovers that some of the "leading Church fathers" were seriously mentally ill.  Augustine is but one of the cavalcade of neurotics.   These psychologically disturbed men would have gotten along well with nutcases like tortured, self-loathing closet  cases Rick Santorum and Ken Cuccinelli.

More False Hopes For Change in the Catholic Church?

I recently noted that columnist/blogger Andrew Sullivan seemed to be reaching a point of realizing that the Roman Catholic Church is not only incapable of change, but seems headed on an anti-gay jihad as gay church employees are fired and married gays are denied the sacraments and told that they must divorce their legally wed spouses if they wish ti return to the fold.  Yet there remain those who continue to cling to the misbegotten hope that Pope Francis will usher in change and halt the Church's slide into irrelevance with more and more American Catholics even though officially NOTHING has changed to date doctrinally and Francis has yet to fire some of the reactionaries in the Church hierarchy.  A case in point is a column in the Washington Post which wants to believe that the appointment of Bishop Blase Cupich as the new archbishop of Chicago is the harbinger of needed change.  Sadly, I think the column is little more than a lot of wishful thinking.  Here are excerpts:

Leaders can make decisions that signal big changes in the political, religious and ethical landscape. In naming Bishop Blase Cupich the new archbishop of Chicago, Pope Francis did just that.

Cupich, now the bishop of Spokane, Wash., has been described in media accounts as a “moderate” within the Catholic Church. Temperamentally, this is exactly what he is, an advocate of dialogue and civility. He’s also wise about rejecting labels.

He has been a courageous voice inside the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops against a culture-war approach to evangelization and politics that pushes so many away from the Gospel.

He has also been as tough as any prelate in his candor about the church’s profound failures during the sex abuse crisis. “Catholics have been hurt by the moral failings of some priests,” Cupich wrote in 2010, “but they have been hurt and angered even more by bishops who failed to put children first.” He knows the church will never get beyond this scandal until it’s obvious to the faithful that the hierarchy understands how deeply Catholicism was marred by institutional sin, not only by individual crimes.

His appointment will have an impact beyond the Catholic Church because it tells us a great deal about the role Pope Francis wants the church to play in American life. Cupich played this down, too. “I think he sent a pastor, not a message,” he told reporters.

But in his case, the pastor is the message. Because of appointments made by Pope John Paul II and, to a lesser degree, Pope Benedict XVI, the bishops’ conference has moved to the right over the past quarter-century. Many conservative bishops have expressed uneasiness or even skepticism about Francis’s leadership — notably his rejection of the idea that issues such as abortion and homosexuality take precedence over economic justice and care for the marginalized. Francis has also caused discomfort by insisting on a church that accompanies people on their journeys rather than expending most of its energy condemning and judging them.

Of the four most politically potent posts in the American hierarchy — the archbishops of Boston, New York, Chicago and Washington — Chicago was the first to come open since Francis’s election. In naming Cupich, the pope sent the strongest possible hint that he wants the American church to move in his direction.

There is more to the column and I truly would like to believe that the author is correct, but I will not be holding my breath.  The only thing that will bring real change to Catholicism is the massive exit of Catholics who are fed up with the Church's hypocrisy and the sexual obsession of neurotic old men in dresses.

Can The Catholic Church Survive In America?

The caption to this post is a question asked by Andrew Sullivan who, unlike myself, has clung to the fantasy - at least in my view - that somehow the Roman Catholic Church will evolve on issues of sex and sexual orientation and slow or stop its death spiral in Europe and America.  Like many, Andrew has grasped at various statements of Pope Francis in an effort to convince himself that much needed change is coming.  However, despite some of the positive things Francis has said, the reality is that absolutely NOTHING has changed to date in terms of the Church's official dogma in terms of relegating women to second class status, the never ending obsession with controlling women's wombs and keeping gays as forever disordered. Personally, I see the Church as being incapable of changing unless there is a wholesale sacking of bishops and cardinals and even many reactionary priests.  Should Francis try to engage such an approach, I truly hope he has a food taster and some trusted body guards so that the Curia doesn't have him conveniently die.  What seems to have finally slapped Andrew up on the side of the head is the vicious actions being unleashed against an elderly gay couple in Montana.   Andrew reviews the ugliness of the Church's actions which are increasingly driving Catholics to simply walk away from the Church.  Here are highlights from Andrew's post which represents an epiphany for him:

I used to believe – and a part of me still does – that the question of homosexuality was not that big an issue for Catholicism. Gays are only a tiny minority of the population at large; the power and beauty of the church’s core understanding of heterosexuality sustains most people’s interest and commitment; and the central teachings of Jesus – of forgiveness of sins, redemption, charity, mercy – are so much more important than issues relating to human sexuality and romantic love.

When I was asked – with mind-numbing regularity – how I could remain happily gay and a Catholic, I answered honestly that, for those very reasons, I could live with institutional dissonance, as any thinking member of a hierarchical church has to, from time to time. But I think now that I misread a couple of things – and that the whole question may be a much bigger deal than I once believed and hoped. Here’s a story that underlines the problem:

A Catholic church in Montana has told two gay men that they can no longer receive communion simply because of their gay marriage and, in order to do so again, they must file for divorce. The two men, Paul Huff, 66, and Tom Wojtowick, 73, have been together for over 30 years and were married in Seattle in 2013.

The controversy has now led to the bishop intervening and holding a meeting with 300 parishioners to air views. The bishop claims there is polarization in the congregation over this and is now mulling the decision to bar the couple from the sacraments and from participation in their church – unless they get a civil divorce and sign a statement supporting civil marriage as exclusively heterosexual. Yes, the church is now in favor of divorce as a condition for being a Catholic! If that sounds perverse, you’re not wrong.

Here’s the problem: maintaining doctrinal orthodoxy requires penalizing two men, aged 66 and 73, who have been committed to each other for thirty years and are pillars of the local community.
If the church upholds this kind of decision, it is endorsing cruelty, discrimination and exclusion. Pope Francis’ view is that this is exactly the kind of thing that requires the church to exercise mercy not rigidity. But allowing a married gay couple to sing in the choir as an act of “mercy” would merely further expose the fragility of the church’s thirteenth century views of human sexuality. 

None of this is compatible with the core moral teachings of the church – about fairness, truth, compassion, forgiveness, mercy and inclusion. And this is clear to large numbers of Catholics – especially the younger generation who will rightly view this kind of decision as barbaric and inhuman. There is only so much inhumanity that a church can be seen to represent before its own members lose faith in it.

What was once a blemish can become a defining wound. It has split one small parish. It may slowly wreck the whole church.

As noted in posts in connection with The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies, the Church suffers from an extreme neurosis when it comes to homosexuality.  Thankfully, more and more Americans are coming to recognize the sickness/mental illness that this neurosis constitutes.

Marriage Equality and the Factually Challenged

Two different posts, one in the Huffington Post and the other in the Washington Post, underscore the idiocy and blatant ignoring of facts that are the norm among gay marriage opponents.  All of the opposition ultimately boils down to the Christofascists' obsession with sex and the goal of ideally banning all sexual activity except between heterosexual couples in their child bearing years. And even then, the couple best not enjoy the intimacy or engage in it for any reason other than to procreate children.  Otherwise, in the view of the fathers of the Catholic Church's "natural law" theory devised in the 12th century, they will be guilty of fornication.  The piece in the Huffington Post looks at the lies - there really is no other term for it - of those who claim that same sex marriage harms families/children.  The one in the Washington Post looks at how the Christofascist arguments - if they were to succeed threaten the marriages of some heterosexuals.  First, these highlights from the HuffPo piece:

Anti-gay campaigner John Eastman, Chair of the hateful National Organization for (sic) Marriage, says: "We keep making the argument of the importance of marriage, that it takes a man and a woman to make a child and that the state can't continue to redefine that if civilization's policy goal is to support families rather than water down marriage to be about any adult relationship. These judges keep saying that's not what marriage is. Based on what? It's like we're in Stalinist Russia." The mere fact that Eastman could say something so absurd is evidence that we are NOT "in Stalinist Russia."

It is useful to remember what happened there. You might remember things such as the massive string of Siberian concentration camps. Secret police would round people up to be convicted without evidence and denied any kind of reasonable defense. There was genocide in the form of a planned famine against Ukraine. Stalin invaded the Baltic States and began a campaign against Jews there. Millions were imprisoned, starved or executed; free speech was impossible, and political opposition banned. 

Eastman confuses losing a legal argument with not being allowed to make one. Given how NOM-types have been cheering anti-gay repression by Stalin Jr., Vladimir Putin, it is a bit hypocritical to whine about being victims of a Stalinist legal system.

The reality is that civilization has had many different policies regarding marriage and the purpose of marriage has continually changed. There was no one goal, but rather many goals.The Apostle Paul's view of marriage was it was inferior to celibacy, justified only if individuals were unable to resist evil sex. "NOW concerning the thing whereof you wrote to me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman. But for fear of fornication, let every man have his own wife and let every woman have her own husband..

The goal of marriage was legitimizing sex, of which children might be a consequence. It wasn't a pro-family inspiration, however; it was an anti-sexual one. John Witte Jr. noted that Paul's anti-sexual views became more and more widespread so that the "late Church Fathers... revealed an increasing preference for virginity, celibacy, and monastic chastity -- sometimes pressing their preference to the point of outright opposition to intercourse and even to marriage itself.

Eastman has argued same-sex marriage somehow undermines support for families and will "water down marriage." Eastman and his fellow campaigners never explain the magical process by which this takes place. How does preventing gay parents -- who are raising a family -- from marrying, "support families?" Do the means -- banning marriage -- lead to the goal of protecting families?

What does Eastman mean by families? Are older childless couples a family or not? Do young couples only become a "family" after giving birth? If the prime purpose of marriage is having children then many marriages are NOT legitimate marriages. Couples unable to have children, due to medical reasons or age, are not married. Some would argue it is Eastman who is changing marriage.

Eastman's comparison of the judicial system to "Stalin's Russia" is almost as ludicrous as the legal arguments he uses. NOM is factually challenged, in that they twist facts or just make them up to serve their ends.

Eastman argued the reason he is losing isn't because he's full of crap, but because a cadre of "activist political judges" are ruling against him. He claims Democrats appointed these judges, "This is just raw politics." Sadly for him, however, he is once again making up facts. Reporter Steve Friess notes, "just seven of the 22 federal judges who have ruled in the various cases since Windsor were appointees of Democrat presidents;" Republicans appointed the rest.   Nor should we forget that a Reagan appointee decided the Prop 8 case and Justice Anthony Kennedy, another Reagan appointee, wrote the Windsor decision. 

As I say so often, no one lies more - other than perhaps Vladimir Putin - than  the Christofascists.  The piece in the Washington Post picks up on the danger the Christofascists pose to many heterosexual marriages:

Why does this upset me so? Well, you see, I got married two years ago, a few days shy of my 60th birthday. My friends (and new husband) tell me I still look super awesome, and I can still do a pretty good downward dog. But the inescapable fact is that — under normal circumstances (more about that later) — I am way past reproductive age. I have the hot flashes to prove it. If, as Niemeyer says, the whole point of marriage is not the mere parenting of kids but actual biological reproduction, it is clear to me that he believes that my marriage is invalid. To opponents of gay marriage, marriage is all about breeding. Since my breeding days are over, it looks like, marriage-wise, I should be, too.

And it isn’t just Virginia. Kentucky used the same argument. So did Georgia. And Texas. This argument is surely going all the way to the Supreme Court.

Think of the implications of this, ladies. . . . . Marriage is thus not about friendship. Not commitment. Not companionship. Not even tax breaks. Just procreation. And love? I love my husband. I’m pretty sure he loves me. But according to the state of Virginia, without childbirth, what’s love got to do with it? Virginia has no interest in “licensing adults’ love,” Niemeyer quotes.

Religion - The Driving Force Behind Anti-Gay Animus

As noted in several past posts, the jihad against homophobia did not arise until the Middle Ages and it began in Europe as a handful of ascetic - and I would argue mentally unstable - earlier Catholic Church fathers became obsessed with stamping out all things sexual.  As noted, even a husband and wife were to have sex ONLY to create a child and they were NOT supposed to enjoy it lest they be "fornicators" and damned to an eternity in Hell.  The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Society traces this neurosis and how it spread through the Church as the Vatican sought to enforce priestly celibacy - in no small part to keep control of Church wealth - and imposed rigid conformity with control by an ever more imperial papacy.  Once established within the Church, early missionaries took this neurosis with them around the globe and in time obliterated widespread social acceptance of homosexuality.  It wasn't just small pox and measles that these "servants of God" took to native peoples.  A piece by blogger friend Jeremy Hooper (we first met at the 2008 LGBT blogger summit in Washington, DC) looks at how this religious based neurosis about sex continues to motivate the anti-gay forces.  Here are some excerpts:

If there's any name that modern Americans associate with the wrong side of the marriage equality debate, it's Maggie Gallagher. She will likely go down in history as the most prominent face of that cause. Maggie got there early and she was really loud about it. The National Organization For Marriage co-founder essentially shaped the talking points that the "protect marriage" movement uses to this day.

And as I knew then, Maggie's advocacy and overall view on marriage was largely guided by the fact that she, like most everyone involved at NOM, is a deeply devout Roman Catholic. In her latest column for National Review, which she titles "Why Catholic Marriage Matters" and in which she argues that divorce and remarriage is a sin, Maggie makes this very canonical root very apparent. . .

It's pretty clear that if Maggie had never come back to the Catholic church (her mom left it when she was a kid), then she never would have taken on this pet cause. It's possible that she would have gotten involved, but it's not probable. Maggie makes it clear that her views on marriage—from who can enter it, how two people conduct themselves within it, and how they dissolve it (if they even can)—are much more informed by the confessional than they are by the constitution. 

So much of what those of us who have had the focused conversation about civil marriage equality have had to take on and refute has been a wholly (and hole-y) faith-driven viewpoint that movement masterminds like Maggie—and Robert George and Brian Brown and Salvatore Cordileone and Ryan T. Anderson and...—then back up and reshape into something they think they can sell to the public. They sell special exceptions for tax-subsidized Catholic adoption agencies as "religious freedom;" sell resistance to fair employment protections as "coercion;" they sell the denial of thousands of state and federal rights to certain couples, many with children, as "protecting marriage and family." But no matter the packaging, it's always a religious view. It's a moral stance. It's a personally-held conviction that they, the ones who choose to subscribe to a certain orthodoxy, then pit against the shared public policy of a nation with supposedly distinct lines between church and state. And increasingly, with Bishops acting like lobbyists and the NOM that Maggie co-founded pretty much operating as a wing of the Vatican, it's a very Catholic view.

In essence, marriage inequality doyenne Maggie and her merry band of devotees have demanded—stealthily and strategically—that we all give currency to specific convictions that may or may not have any weight within our life. And worse yet? They love to accuse us of only thinking of ourselves. 

Jeremy is right.  The selfish ones are the Christofascists who demand that others live by their rules in large part so that they can avoid facing the growing scientific and historic proof that they are living their lives based on myths concocted my ignorant herders from over two millennia ago.  The ultimate irony - and perhaps hypocrisy - is that super Catholic Maggie Gallagher, a former unwed mother, is married to a Hindu (I have nothing against Hindus and have many Hindu clients who from my experience are far, far more moral in their conduct than most "godly Christians" I encounter).  Maggie Gallagher's unwed pregnancy seems to have unhinged her and she bizarrely sought solace in Catholicism.  Then, because of her own personal demons, she sought to force all others to live by her neurotic moral code.  Sadly, she continues this agenda and works hand in hand by Catholic clergy who close their eyes to the rape and abuse of children and youths while seeking to punish those who have thrown off the shackles of the Church's truly Middle Age view of sex.

Why Are Republicans Going to War Against Birth Control?

The answer to the question poised in the captioned post is actually pretty easy; Christofascists now control the Republican Party and the Christofascists simply cannot stand anyone other than drearily married heterosexuals engaging in sex or worse, enjoying it.  Dan Savage summed it up well:

W]hy are conservatives fighting so hard to make contraception harder for women to obtain? Because they don’t think people—young people, poor people, unmarried people, gay people—should be able to enjoy “consequence-free sex.” Because it’s sex that they hate—it’s sex for pleasure that they hate—and they hate that kind of sex more than they hate abortion, teen moms, and welfare spending combined. Knowing that some people are having sex for pleasure without having their futures disrupted by an unplanned pregnancy or having their health compromised by a sexually transmitted infection or having to run a traumatizing gauntlet of shrieking “sidewalk counselors” to get to an abortion clinic keeps them up at night.

 But this obsession with pandering and prostituting themselves to the Christofascists is short sighted - in my view at least - when one recognizes how this war on contraception can quickly becomes perceived as a war on women.    And this war on women could well play into the hands of Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections.  A piece in Hot Air looks at how Republicans may be shooting themselves.  Here are excerpts:

Some core Democratic voters who were thus far chronically unresponsive to stimuli designed to get them enthused about the upcoming midterm elections, have been energized by the Supreme Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby. The left continues to wring their hands over last Monday’s Supreme Court decision; their reactions ranging from dismay over the establishment of an American theocracy to the decrying the outlawing of contraception altogether. 

Democrats want to lure Republicans into a fight over birth control with legislation to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision that ObamaCare may not require certain businesses to include contraception in their employee health coverage,” The Hill’s Elise Viebeck reported.

Democrats are expected to introduce the measures prior to Congress’s August recess as part of an effort to recalibrate the party’s election-year messaging. Their hope is to turn out female voters by casting the court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby as a strike against reproductive rights.

And that’s a fight conservatives may welcome. No matter how justified, no matter how righteous, no matter how wrong-headed their opposition may be; Republicans will be stepping into a trap of Democratic design if they allow themselves to be cast as the party opposed to all forms of family planning. 

[I]f Republicans get into a rhetorical war with Democrats over access to or the morality of various forms of birth control — from common contraceptives to emergency pharmaceuticals — it will play directly into Democratic hands by motivating their formerly dispirited female constituency. 

So far, Republicans have done a good job of failing to provide Democrats with a sound bite or course of action which plays into the War on Women narrative, but the party in power is going to push Republicans to their breaking point. Congressional Republicans would be better served by offering women a positive rather than a negative agenda on birth control which is a medical necessity for many women. 

While not addressed, the war on women also translates directly into the continued GOP war on gays who, like the "promiscuous sluts" fantasized about by Rush Limbaugh, are anathema to Christofascist who want sex to be miserable and aimed solely for procreation.   Personally, I hope the Republicans fall into the Democrat trap.

The Holy Guide to Coital Positions

The Roman Catholic Church's crazy obsession with forbidding almost all things sexual is not a recent development and one cannot help but wonder whether this obsession would have been so overpowering had the Church not been peopled for centuries by supposedly celibate men (the 1500's were full of Popes taking on young boy toys). What one cannot have often becomes a subject of obsession and repressed desire. I continue to believe that if the Church had had married clergy, not only would priests and high clerics have had more of a clue on common sense counseling of parishioners, but perhaps this constant obsession with sex would never have arisen. This article on The Smart Set from Drexel University would almost be humorous were it not for the fact that many people were no doubt punished because of the sexual obsessions and hang ups of the clergy. These clerics had real problems and sound like they had some very serious psychological issues. Here are some highlights:

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Somehow the human race survived the Middle Ages, no mean feat when you consider how much literature was out there condemning sex. Church thinkers like Saint Jerome announced that carnal relations were “filthy” even within the bounds of holy matrimony: “The wise man should love his wife with cool discretion,” Jerome opined, “not with hot desire… Nothing is nastier than to love your own wife as if she were your mistress.”

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In fact, this attitude eventually led the Church to legislate on the most intimate details of married life: In 1215, the cleric Johannes Teutonicus was the first to announce that there was only one “natural” coital position — what we today call “the missionary position,” a term that was coined in the 1960s — which was also optimal for conception. Attempting any other position was a mortal sin, Johannes opined, involving exotic and unnecessary forms of stimulation.

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Alexander of Hales railed against coitus retro, the rear-entry position, as a mortal sin, for it was coupling “in the manner of brutes.” St. Albert the Great [pictured above] discussed in detail four other forbidden positions: lateral (side by side), seated, standing, and anal sex. (Curiously, sodomy at this time was considered no worse if performed with a boy than a woman; it was not until 1533 in England that male-on-male “buggery” became a criminal offense).

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The handbooks listed recommended penance of bread, water, and abstinence for exotic congress. A consensus on the punishments included the following:

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Dorsal sex (woman on top): three years

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Lateral, seated, standing: 40 days

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Coitus retro — rear entry: 40 days

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Mutual masturbation: 30 days

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Inter-femural sex — ejaculation between the legs: 40 days

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Coitus in terga — anal sex: three years (with an adult); two years (with a boy); seven years (habitual); 10 years (with a cleric)

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Kudos to Bob Felton at Civil Commotion for finding the link to this bat sh**tery (to use Pam Spaulding's term).