One flesh

I wrote several years ago complaining about Augustine's take on sex: he only had a concubine, not a wife, and thus probably lacked full appreciation of the matter. Wanting privacy isn't the same as shame.

Another aspect came to mind today. Genesis said and Jesus emphasized that "the two become one flesh." I'm a bit protective of my flesh, and I don't want my internal organs exposed to the day and the inspection of outsiders. (Surgery is a big deal!) It interferes with the mutual operations of the organs, and leaves the self in an inharmonious state, not an organic whole. If two are one flesh, an outsider likewise leaves their "one flesh" in an inharmonious condition, not a unified whole.

I've heard it claimed that a couple is "one flesh" in their children, which is no doubt true in some sense, but not, I think, the main meaning. Paul wasn't writing about having children with prostitutes.

art lawsuit

Althouse noted that one of the "performers" in an old exhibit at MoMA was suing. I'd heard of the exhibit some time ago--it sounded "modern art" level stupid. A gallery door was partly blocked by a naked man and naked woman, and visitors had to "squeeze" between them to get in. There was another entrance to the gallery, but I assume there was social pressure to "experience the art."

The man is suing the museum on the grounds that they did not protect him from groping--sexual assault. 14 years after the fact seems a little late in the day to complain, of course, and thus there seems to be reason to doubt his sincerity. But there might be another way of looking at it.

Just as clothing communicates things to other people, adults being naked outside of specific circumstances (doctor's office, group showers, etc) communicate sexual interest. So the situation is intended to be a sexual one, albeit with some implausible deniability ("This is ART, you fool!"). And if the man and woman are so close to the visitors that one has (remember the social pressure) to make contact with them, this seems a bit like unwanted sexual contact: a sexual assault.

It seems a bit unusual for an "assault-er" to complain about reciprocation. Although active groping does ratchet it up rather more than a notch.

Joy

AVI has been thinking along similar lines.

There's an apparent paradox here. Most of the greatest joys in life come from being able to use the gifts you've been give to serve people you care about.

Nobody likes being treated as a servant.

18 months

Quilette reviews a rather grim memoir of what happened to a marriage when a man decided he was a woman. It's her telling, of course, but I've no reason to believe it isn't largely true. "You’re polished like a doll, now veiled like a widow, perfumed like a corpse."

I'll probably not look for the book. Reading about it is hard enough.

Training for futility

AVI has had a morphing post about Tinder up for a few days--if you haven't read it recently you'll probably find more there now. The links at the end of the Day 8 section testify to some odd side effects of the tool and its algorithm--few find long-term relationships, and a surprising number are already married.

Genes/gifts provide us with a framework and the power to do things (sing, run races, find a mate) but the culture and our training shape the result. I was born with an aptitude for analytical thought, but I'd mostly be flailing around if I hadn't been trained, and some ways of training would be less than useless.

"You fight the way you train." You love the way you train too.

Tinder seems to help train its users for futility, if the links in AVI's post are true. A large fraction seem to end up concentrating on superficialities (not very stable) and practicing extremely short-term relationships (insofar as rutting with strangers is a relationship). Many claim they are trying to find a life partner. Clearly the Tinder training doesn't seem to help; if the stories are true it seems to make it worse. "Why" is another question, though some of the issues seem obvious enough.

The numbers for users "in a committed relationship" suggest that Tinder's attraction doesn't have much to do with finding a life partner. They already have one, and are looking for something else, and Tinder promises it--though maybe not explicitly.

Statutes that were not good

because they had not complied with My ordinances, but had rejected My statutes and had profaned My Sabbaths, and their eyes were on the idols of their fathers. I also gave them statutes that were not good, and ordinances by which they could not live

That's one of those tough sections. The best I come up with is that God gives us all logic, and if you follow the logic of your sins to their conclusions, it leads to stupidities: new rules that don't just double-down on evil but extend it in new directions.

Individuals who double-down on sins do tend to shift into greater sin, but the "statutes" aspect seems to apply more clearly to cultures than to individuals, since "rules" develop from groups. The picture I get is of a land where some are faithful and sensible, but the majority cling to syncretism and and from it learn the practices and logic of pagan sacrifices and rituals--in the Ezekiel case including human sacrifice.

We easily see the effects in our society of elevating particular principles to the status of a unique value--the result is Chesterton's virtues gone mad, and when gone mad, gone evil.

With that in mind, it isn't hard to look back at the last century or so and begin to see how Romans 1 isn't as arbitrary as it seems--we've had the misfortune to see it in action.

It still isn't quite enough of a key to unlock all of Ezekiel 16:49-50,52 for me. I still don't quite follow what restoration Sodom and her daughters are supposed to have (Moab and Ammon?), but if the original characteristic sin was arrogance and indifference to the poor, maybe that could have developed into the vileness displayed in Genesis. Perhaps that was their penalty--to embrace what they should have known was wrong.

Dimble: "Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse" The knowledge that his own assumptions led to Frost's position combined with what he saw in Frost's face and what he had experienced in this very cell, effected a complete conversion. All the philosophers and evangelists in the world might not have done the job so neatly.

Illusions

"So all his manhood's strength and pride One sickly dream had swept aside."

AVI has been thinking about the effect of the abstraction of social media on children. First thoughts, "Is development missing something?", and Grim's thoughts on disembodied sex. Perhaps the physical environment isn't that attractive.

Puberty is confusing enough when there are clear sex roles ("What do I say?"), but without them, and with the understanding that there's no reason not to have sex--isn't the pressure and confusion going to be even higher? We have little lectures now and then about "your right to say no" but I don't think those make much headway against fashion.

If I try to imagine myself as a teen girl (it takes some doing, obviously), I think I can see the interest in declaring for a new gender variety that can turn off the pressure, and for hanging out electronically.

For a boy, maybe porn is a big deal. Real people don't seem to act much like the porn actors. If the boy is young enough, will he recognize himself in the male actors in the ubiquitous porn, or will the action seem alien and arbitrary? "If that's what a man wants and I don't, maybe I'm something different." Even boys can be put off by the expectation for sex. And some find the physical environment hostile--because they don't quite fit or because ideological parents or other kin disdain boys, or some such. I'd guess the pressure is worse for girls, but I can imagine boys getting confused too.

Clearly this confusion is new--suicide rates are up, not down with greater acceptance of "gender diversity." If this was something that had haunted humanity since forever, and only our wonderful enlightenment had discovered the truth, you'd expect the reverse.

Sex roles

I'm not an expert, except perhaps in the sense of having lived through it myself, but puberty is awkward and confusing enough even with society's help. When the guidance is "You decide your life" or worse, when people who profit from your confusion get the magaphone, it is surprising as many kids turn out as well as they do.

With roles, you start out a boy or a girl, with the understanding that eventually you'll be a man or woman. Thanks to the roles you have a formal idea of what that means, but not a visceral one--yet. When you hit puberty, you have categories for the new feelings, and ways to understand and express them. Generally along with the roles come social rules for interacting with the opposite sex, and a path toward marriage and social frameworks to help you be a parent and grandparent. A few people have troubles with the roles, because they're from the tails of the distributions, but for almost everybody the roles mostly just work. If you aren't cut out for marriage, there are often roles for that too--sometimes religious ones and sometimes other "secular" insofar as that concept is even defined in your society family support roles.

But without anything clear, all you know is that you aren't quite the person you thought you were. If it is all your choice, what do you choose? You're too young to know the trajectory of any of the choices.

I'm fairly smart, though not always wise. When I started out in marriage I didn't have a firm handle on what things were going to be the most important long term. I'm not sure I would have taken advice, but roles are more embedded in "what everybody knows." "What everybody knows" is harder to argue with. And you can probably think of people who would have had a less bumpy start with clearer roles too.

Depending on how flexible those sex roles are, some folks would be squeezed hard. If men's roles involved not just willingness to protect your family, but regular fighting against each other, I'd not do well. Perhaps in some really dangerous era it's essential to be ready to fight at the drop of a hat, or be willing to help spear a lion for the tribe, but that would be a little exaggerated for our place and time. (I didn't do wonderfully well in sports either.) Some flexibility is important. But roles need some rigidity too: the parents are supposed to take care of their children, and only serious disability excuses them. And men and women are objectively different, no matter what the fashionable madness claims, so their responsibilities (roles) will, on the average, differ--and a little collective experience (tradition) can tell you how. Of course in a pinch you do what you have to.

Augustine and sex

I forgot one comment I'd meant to make on City of God and remembered it today.

Of the Shame Which Attends All Sexual Intercourse. Augustine never married. He had a concubine that he loved, and had to give up for his engagement, and another while waiting for his fiancee to come of age. He eventually broke off the engagement and sent away the other concubine. I wonder if that may have skewed his description of sex. "This right action seeks the light, in so far as it seeks to be known, but yet dreads being seen. And why so, if not because that which is by nature fitting and decent is so done as to be accompanied with a shame-begetting penalty of sin?"

I think he suffered a failure of the imagination here--perhaps he should have asked some married friends about the matter. Wanting Privacy ≠ Shame. For that matter, Embarrassment ≠ Shame. Even something as simple as writing poetry suffers tremendously when other people hang around--in fact it can feel embarrassing for others to see it "half-done" and "in process."

Of course there can be plenty of reason for shame if those involved are not entitled to be involved, or are indulging cruelty or vice. But the basic marital act is a husband and wife giving themselves to each other, not to kibitzers.

Joshua Harris

I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. So far nothing, so I figure I may as well comment.

I never read any of his books. I Kissed Dating Goodbye wound up on our bookshelf somehow or another(*), but the Book of Mormon and the Bhagavad Gita sit there too, so you can't conclude much from its presence. On inspection, it isn't there anymore. Maybe it was a loaner.

I gather that IKDG was about maintaining purity, which in our super-sexualized culture is challenging. Any support our kids can get--and adults too--is useful.

The focus on "dating" seemed a little over-the-top; rather like "putting a hedge around the law." Not that I'm always averse to putting a bright line in the sand; I wrote a little about how that might have played out in the era of Judges.(**) Since I hadn't actually read the book, I didn't feel comfortable in judging it--especially since I was laboring under the delusion that he also wrote I Gave Dating A Chance (that was Jeramy Clark). But I was dubious--I suspected overreaction.

Maybe there were useful suggestions in the book. I can think of a few suggestions on my own(***): "date" in groups. Find something besides entertainment that you can do together--you learn more about people when they're a little stressed hauling prickly brush out of a widow's back yard than when they're dressed up at a restaurant. (Maybe I should charge for advice.)

If the news stories were correct, there were some problems in the pastorship, and then he got into some marital difficulty, and now has decided not to call himself a Christian any more. I thought one of the main points of Christianity was the opportunity and the power to have sins forgiven and get up and soldier on again. Maybe you learn something different in seminary.

Some say he got too famous too fast and too young. I could believe it. “I have lived a sort of backwards life. Without meaning to, I have experienced life out of the normal order and sequence of events.” He became a senior pastor at age 30, and was only 23 when he published his famous book--he didn't marry until 24.

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(*) So did The Prayer of Jabez: I think somebody gave that one to us too. I never read that book either--it seemed disproportionate to the material, and I generally react against fads.

(**) The names in that piece are horrible. I tried for realism, and I shouldn't have.

UPDATE:(***) Added a phrase to clarify.

Harassment

When I see a persistent problem, I often try to look for what reasonable things might be being twisted to feed it.

I suspect that if you surround a man with deferential women with no other attachments visible, over time the man will tend to gravitate to either the father or the husband model--it's hard to be friends when you're the boss. And if it's the husband model, it may be hard to avoid feeling entitled to take liberties with your "harem" to which you are not actually entitled. The boss chasing the secretary around the desk has been a staple figure for ages.

It gets complicated becuase if the man's position is powerful it is no trick to find women who "will to greatness dedicate themselves." Of course consent by itself doesn't confer entitlement, despite the current philosophical fashion.

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Interlude: exhaustive list of observations at work.

The man I ended up working for after Prof. Cline left had a disproportionate number of women as grad students. My memory is iffy, but I know he had three and may have had four. Given how low the fraction of women in particle physics in the US was at the time, this was pretty dramatic. They were all at about the same point in their studies, so I figured they knew each other before, and when one decided they all joined with her. I didn't worry about it--not my business. I was not then, or for most of the rest of my career, involved with mentoring or advising students.

Several years later I learned third hand that two of the profs (since retired and/or died) had been notorious womanizers until some unspecified event (intervention?), and that the prof I worked for had a reputation for treating women well. Another prof (since died) seemed to treat everyone well--seemed to treat students like family--but wasn't on one of the most famous experiments. A few other profs were on experiments that were winding down (and therefore less attractive) or perhaps had less good people skills.

One attractive woman (actually, they all were) set off my "risk, flee" alarms for reasons I never quite pinned down. She ended up suing one of the profs, but I never learned the details.

Once I found myself in a lab with three other men (two senior to me) and a secretary. The conversation was benign, but the vibes were all wrong. It felt like a dominance scenario, and the secretary looked a bit like a deer in the headlights. I figured the best way to break the spell was to announce that I had work to get back to and leave. Dunno if it worked, or if it needed to--maybe my vibe-meter was out of calibration that day.

As a student, and grad student, and post doc, I was on the "less socially ept" end of things--and to this day find parties hard to enjoy. I've not found an unambiguous way to convey a compliment or that I admire someone--and have pretty much given up any efforts in that line unless it is very straightforward.

That's probably a shame. (I do compliment X's work to Y when I can, and try to keep "gossip" positive.)

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Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me now that many women dress to excite admiration but not lust, attention but not interaction. As long as isn't overdone, that seems innocent and proper all around--try to be admirable, and have the good character to recognize and admire the good in others. In a less socially chaotic society there can be rules to buffer the reciprocal contact, which could convey the respect or admiration without requiring commitment. Think of "a tip of the hat"--no demand for a response: unless the tipper happens to be the someone she wants to address.

That's a corner example and not enough even for this simple case--they say women dress for other women, and men certainly want to be admired by men as well as women. But you get the idea, I trust. It represents a more formal society, with more social rules--but who proved that was a bad thing? I've been around Aspies long enough to think it would be a huge improvement.

Some of the harassment and molestation stories say the bosses do more than just take liberties--some of them are into seriously weird dominance patterns. This isn't a kiss or a squeeze he's not entitled to, but things done to prove that you are inferior. I've heard that President Johnson used to have talks with people while he was sitting on the toilet--and probably not because he was so terribly busy that every second counted. The only recent example that seems printable is Franken's mock groping picture. He was pretending to molest his "toy," not for any pleasure he could get out of it but so people could see what he could get away with. I'm not familiar with his humor style, but if that's an example I don't want to be.

Are things better than they were fifty years ago? It's hard to be sure, but I'd guess in some ways yes. It hasn't been socially acceptable to "chase the secretary" and I'd bet that's had at least some impact, though not much at higher levels of money and power. At those levels I'd bet things are worse. And the word I hear is that BFI HR policies tend to hammer the less powerful men who run afoul of someone's ire. It is gratifying to see some of the high and mighty being addressed for the first time.

I've a simple touchstone for what I judge acceptable: How would I want my daughters to be treated in this position?

Permit me to doubt that the solution is to have women as managers. Women are not more virtuous than men and they go in for dominance patterns too. If you haven't seen it already, you probably will.

Illusions

The buzz last week was Barna group: Porn perceived as "'Being less risky than actual sex' ... among both teens and older adults". Creating your own reality?

He shook his head. "No," he said, "our handicaps are all different, and the race is equal. The Pharisees can even catch up the woman with the mites. Those who do not insist on Gomorrah."

She said: "Gomorrah?" and the chill of the word struck even through her contemplation. She remembered the unanswered question of her vision: What of them that have not? As if the answer had been reserved for these lower circles, he gave it. He said: "The Lord's glory fell on the cities of the plain, of Sodom and another. We know all about Sodom nowadays, but perhaps we know the other even better. Men can be in love with men, and women with women, and still be in love and make sounds and speeches, but don't you know how quiet the streets of Gomorrah are? Haven't you seen the pools that everlastingly reflect the faces of those who walk with their own phantasms, but the phantasms aren't reflected, and can't be? The lovers of Gomorrah are quite contented, Periel; they don't have to put up with our difficulties. They aren't bothered by alteration, at least till the rain of the fire of the Glory at the end, for they lose the capacity for change, except for the fear of hell. They're monogamous enough! and they've no children--no cherubim breaking into being or babies as tiresome as ours; there's no birth there, and only the second death. There's no distinction between lover and beloved; they beget themselves on their adoration of themselves, and they live and feed and starve on themselves, and by themselves too, for creation, as my predecessor said, is the mercy of God, and they won't have the facts of creation. No, we don't talk much of Gomorrah, and perhaps it's as well and perhaps not."

Related but not the same

Next to a car dealership on East Washington Avenue sits an enterprise whose sign sports scissors and the name "Lust BeautyWorks".

Am I alone in thinking this a trifle muddled?

There seem to be at least three attributes that get confused: sexy, attractive, beautiful. A few minutes thought should bring to mind women who are clearly more of one of the three but not so much of the other two. (I'm a man. Women can probably find men that fit similar categories, but I won't try to predict how that would work out.)

"What does he see in her?"

You know what I mean, I hope. A woman who doesn't seem to be particularly beautiful but people like to be around her--she's attractive. Another seems to radiate sex appeal, but seems unable to hold onto conquests reliably. And there's glamorous types who excite admiration and envy but aren't the first choice for dreams.

I'm thinking here of public attributes. Plenty of women and men who don't stop traffic are more than adequately sexy behind closed doors. If not there'd be many fewer children born. And the old husband who says his old wife is beautiful isn't kidding--he sees better than the simpleminded public eye does.

Maybe magazine covers(*) make it clearer. (Since Borders closed I don't see magazine stands so often, so I'm not up to date.) Playboy's covers, at least the ones I remember, featured beautiful women with an air of "You're here. Dinner can wait." The beauty was from a rather restricted palette, but was always beauty. It was always on the far side of the line, into erotica, but with enough plausible deniability that you could, for a moment, kid yourself that it was mostly about beauty. Other mags posed their models in postures designed to emphasize secondary sexual characteristics, regardless of whether this was a beautiful pose or not. Sex appeal was the goal, though it sometimes looked too silly to be appealing. But when Jackie Kennedy was on a cover, she was always made to look glamorous: beautiful but not sexy, and not very approachable either--except when the image made her seem helpless and in need of a defender.

If that's not clear, how about Ginger or Mary Ann? Mary Ann was played to appear approachable and attractive, not just beautiful; Ginger played to appear beautiful and slightly artificial, and not approachable and attractive. (And beside me is a Dominican University alumni magazine featuring an airbrushed young nurse with an attractive friendly smile.)

If you are young and healthy it is probably easier to take shortcuts with clothing and styles to appear sexy than it is to try to look beautiful. Teens in particular seem prone to taking these shortcuts. (Compare high school pictures today with those from 80 years ago.) But I suspect that the women who frequent Lust BeautyWorks would prefer to excite admiration for their beauty rather than lust, at least from the general population. Though I could be wrong again.

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(*) "magazine covers" = superficiality squared

Dieting

"Reach for your mate instead of a plate".

Though I don't think you can reliably extrapolate from C. elegans...

Differing dreams

I wondered this evening if music ever appeared in dreams, and looked it up: apparently so, especially among musicians.

I wonder if this is something "trainable" or reflects a personality trait. I never dream of math or physics (or discover a benzene ring in my sleep), so what's in the dream isn't just a matter of what the interests of the day were.

Vision, always. Speech, usually--but not other noises as a rule. Touch--in only one category. Taste--never.

We've heard aplenty about the meaning of the contents of dreams. Does what kinds of senses are involved in a person's dreams tell us anything about him? (I'm not looking for stresses or pathologies here.)

Standards of beauty

The latest Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition is all over the newsstands, this time with three young ladies not dressed for any beach I've ever been to. But set aside fantasy for the moment.

Either my eyes are failing me or the three look startlingly similar. If they appeared only one at a time it wouldn't be so obvious, but together it seems as though they were picked as being the closest approximations to a single ideal standard of beauty, uniform from cheeks to cheeks. I recall pictures of a group of Rockettes who didn't seem as much alike as these three, and I'd have thought uniformity would have been a goal for that chorus line.

The last time I checked there was more than one way for a woman to look gorgeous. One wordsmith called the women Hefner surrounds himself with as "identi-kit playmates." Every flower has to look like a daisy... It seems a bit sad.

Since too-close inspection is unwise, I omit links.

At the click of a button

Notice the dates:

7 February, 2001

February 27th, 2008

04 March 2014

Same guy. Color me dubious. If this is a real effect it must be extremely hard to implement. Risky, too. And he must get pretty bored in the winter if his press releases are all in February.

Also note that "The patent office will accept an application for, and issue a patent without any proof of its effectiveness."

And what else is addictive?

A little late for inclusion in the previous post: Brain scans find porn addiction.

Compulsive users of pornography show the same signs of addiction in their brain activity as alcoholics or drug addicts, a study has revealed.

In the first research of its kind, scans showed that a central portion of the brain which is stimulated in drug or alcohol addicts also “lit up” when compulsive pornography users watched explicit material. There was no such effect in the brains of people who were not habitual users of porn.

I didn't bother registering to get the rest of the article. I'm trying to imagine the outcome of a study similar to Hart's. If anybody were able to know what they were doing, I think the subjects would show magnificent self-control. Even if matters were arranged so that no human would know, they'd probably still feel watched.

Near extinction

The Scottish wildcat is near extinction, with estimates from 300 to 35 left.

Their kittens look very much like the cute little kittens we play with, but I gather these will attempt to take your face off given half a chance. The people who lived in close proximity to wildcats did not acquire the same love for the creatures that people at a safe distance feel for such rare animals.

People have been trying to exterminate them for over a thousand years, without much success, but now they finally seem seem to be going under.

The secret weapon? Undiscriminating sex.

They look like housecats, and it turns out they successfully breed with housecats, and as a result there are plenty of hybrids but not so many pureblood wildcats. One group of researchers was proposing to capture wildcats and isolate them in a breeding colony, but a) he's going to find it hard to keep volunteers intact and b) the population would have to be forever captive unless he can figure a way to explain to the wildcats that they should only have sex with other wildcats.

Contraception

Perhaps I should address what I think about contraception. You should already have determined that I oppose the use of abortion as birth control.

The answer is: that contraception is complicated.

I grew up in an era where there wasn't any question. It was in the air I breathed, so to speak, even in Africa: There's nothing wrong with contraception, especially for poor people. I didn't learn that from my parents (we never actually had the talk and they actually cared about the poor people), but the magazines and newspapers and books were all pretty unanimous. You can figure from that that I didn't hang around with a lot of Catholics or Muslims and that I stayed immersed in US media. For almost all the time Tom and I were the oldest of the kids in our compound, so there were no older teens to learn misinformation from.

The Pill made a big noise, of course, but I wasn't all that interested in the debates. I wasn't married, I was too shy for a girlfriend, and I didn't want kids, and that was that. Which meant, of course, that I didn't think there was anything problematic about contraception.

I eventually met a lady and she married me and said she wanted kids. Um. OK, fine.

Over five children and thirty years later it finally started to sink in how important this was and how valuable children were. A lot of things started to make more sense. Too soon old, too late smart.

Along the way I heard a lot more about the Pill and how it had changed America. Whether the commentator was celebrating or decrying the changes, each agreed with the others that the technology had changed culture. It was easy to see that some of those Sexual Revolution cultural changes had been disasters. But looking back at it now, I'm not quite as convinced as those pundits were that the Pill was the turning point. Several trends converged with the new technology to create a perfect storm.

At any rate, the next step came a few years ago when I decided that our church was failing the youth (and many of the adults) by failing to clearly explain what the faith was about, so I wrote a short book. (They weren't interested.) Part of the book was the history of the church and another was what made the denominations different. I'd read about other denominations before, but this was the first time I was trying to understand them empathetically rather than analytically, so that the kids would see the other sides' positions. (I know, once again too soon old and too late smart.)

The Catholics made a big deal about contraception, and I decided to learn why. There were surprises: In 1930 Anglican bishops decided there were sometimes grounds for using contraception. 60 years later Anglicanism had changed so much that not using contraception was deprecated in all the better circles (bad for the planet you know). Wow.

Another surprise was that the Catholic (and earlier, most denominations') position was more sensible than I thought. I would not have been persuaded had I read about it 30 years before, but I'd learned a few things about sex and children and value since then, and their understanding of sex made more sense.

The key seemed to be openness to life. I agreed that was central.

But.

It did not logically follow that sex always had to be open to the prospect of babies. And in addition, it was not hard to find cases where pregnancy would be very dangerous in one way or another, or there was disease, or where pregnancy could result in crippling problems; some quite close to home.

In consequence I tend to side with those Anglican bishops; at least the first generation of them.

The question that they and I face is how common are those grounds? People are notoriously prone to turning rare excuses into commonplaces, and I’m not immune to the temptation to self-justification. I don't have a clean answer to that, except that I'm pretty sure the extremes are incorrect. With 5 children I suppose we've lived a middle ground on that spectrum.

I'm not sure that was right. Nor am I staying up nights worrying that was wrong. I am worried when I see contraceptive use running to barren extremes around me.

So far I've been considering contraception within marriage.

I gather some unmarried Catholic girls and boys, understanding that premeditation makes a sin worse, would decline to prepare contraception and wind up pregnant. On one hand they are kidding themselves (pretending that flirting with sex isn't premeditation), and on the other they might take advice from Luther and sin boldly and repent thoroughly(*).

I don't want to see contraception pushed as a cure for social ills, and I worry about its moral hazard that encourages non-marital sexual activity. I won't go into why that’s been a disaster.

And the effort to compel people to support contraception against their religion is a serious imposition.

On the other hand, I do not want to see contraception banned either. The technologies (with some abortifacient exceptions) seem to serve legitimate ends.

If by some magic power I could turn back the clock and talk to those Anglican bishops, I don't know how I would advise them.

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(*) "Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong (sin boldly), but let your trust in Christ be stronger"