Yet Another Sex Article

I am getting very sick of "sex talk." Too much theory, not enough practice! St. Paul's admonition "let some things never be spoken of among you" provides a convenient excuse for opting out of the always mildly salacious discussions frequenting the topic.

I suppose such talk is necessary, after all, and I think the Touchstone article by R. V. Young, The Gay Invention is quite useful, concisely covering the linguistic and conceptual history of homosexuality.

A few extracts and commentary:

St. Thomas thus points out that while even simple fornication is “against properly human nature, of which the act of generation is ordered to the appropriate education of children,” sodomy is “against the nature of every animal” because it is not aimed at generation at all.

This finally makes the "against nature" description of such acts make sense. The rationale also applies both against a contracepted act of fornication and a contracepted marital act. Perhaps this means the contemporary adulation of homosexuality is linked on a very deep level to the wide acceptance of contraception, because even married people no longer aim at begetting children in the consumation of their married life. Elsewhere Thomas decribes self-abuse as a sin sometimes called the sin of effeminacy, further revealing a possible deep consistency behind the course the pornoculture is taking.

But in our consequentialist age, who wants to argue against distributing contraceptives to kiddies or the HIV positive because contracepted acts are inherently sodomitical and that unprotected fornication is a "less grave" mortal sin than the "protected" kind? I'd be tempted to make such an argument just to shock. However, the newly-found reverence for sodomy is better explained if one thinks that mainstream America has itself been practicing sodomy even in the marriage bed.

Lest one think this too radical, it has been reported that Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, advised Paul VI that the reasoning behind the condemnation of sodomy collapses upon declaring contraceptives compatible with Christian marriage.

Another conclusion: it seems a contracepted marital act cannot consumate a marriage.

A further point of interest from the article:

The first edition of the OED (1933) lists sporadic usages of “gender” for “sex” from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries, but notes that such usage is “now only jocular.” The second edition (1989) adds this to the entry: “In mod. (esp. feminist) use a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes.”

Though there is a way of thinking in merely biological categories that should be avoided, the flight from the biological is getting really ridiculous right now, especially with the advent of transhumanist nutjobs.