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So true and so important.

Permit me to use this as a pretext to pass along a good quote from my favorite philosophical giantess, Elizabeth Anscombe:

“Those who try to make room for sex as mere casual enjoyment
pay the penalty:
they become shallow.
At any rate the talk that reflects and commends this attitude
is always shallow.
They dishonour their own bodies;
holding cheap what is naturally connected
with the origination of human life."
G.E.M. Anscombe
Contraception and Chastity (1975)

Wow ... many thanks for posting that quote.

We live in a society where sex prevails ... as evidenced by the endless commercials for ED. One gets the impression that ED is a plague and needs to be addressed, even by those men who are suffering from prostate disorders. Children pick up on these commercials. A while back, when a friend asked her children what they wanted for Christmas, her 6 year old son responded "those blue pills".

This reminds me of a passage from G.K. Chesterton's St. Francis of Assisi, in which the author observes that the pagan world had entirely corrupted sex, to the extent that the concept of the permanent, exclusive, and life-giving relationship of a man and woman was lost. He wrote that the period of the "Dark Ages," from the end of the Roman Empire until the flowering of European Christendom, post-A.D. 1000, was like a continent-wide purging and penance.

It was, he said, as if the Church went into a cave, like St. Benedict, and fasted and prayed and scourged itself, until finally they emerged with clean flesh and pure hearts. They could look at stars and see lights placed by God, not frolicking pagan deities. They could look at a garden without ever thinking of Ovid's Metamorphoses. They could enjoy music without remembering bacchanalia or satyrs' revels.

Chesterton said it better, of course, but I'm sure you get the point. I think this will have to happen again ... a conscious rejection of "this we have now," until men and women love children more than they love their genital pleasure, until people can have clean bodies, minds, and hearts again.