Puritan attitudes toward healthy, co-operative sexual expression = married sex only = fewer fatherless chidren = less poverty = less crime = lower gov't spending/taxation. Not to mention the number of communicable diseases associated with sexual incontinence.
I think puritan attitudes towards sex served this Republic very well indeed and it is a pity we have abandoned them.
Lets not forget loveless marriages held together by gynophobic family law and by the husband's absolute power to control and abuse his wife as he sees fit. Ever seen the bridle scolds that were popular in the puritan period? The cliterectomy tables? How about the pear gags? Know where the phrase "rule of thumb" came from? As for fatherless children, an end to the welfare state would put an instant choke on it. Puritans had illegitemate children just like everyone else, and no one knows how many, because the statistics have only been kept in the modern era, when the rise of the welfare state turns the illigitimate rate, and male abandonment rate from other causes, into background noise.
I think puritan attitudes towards sex served this Republic very well indeed and it is a pity we have abandoned them.
Not likely. The puritan agenda might be a boon to households run by rich, well-educated alpha males who may have been writing the idyllic dialogs on this subject at the time. But it must have sucked big-time for more marginally endowed.
I feel quite safe in suggesting that Puritan attitudes did not prevent illigitimacy amongst the poor, it just punished it severely. As for "less poverty" and "less crime" then in the puritan era--based on what evidence?
When it comes to statistics we actually know, absolutely nothing holds a candle to the rise of the welfare state for producing broken homes and child poverty.
What the puritan attitude produces, since it adheres to modes of behavior that are repressive of healthy natural inclinations, is produce unhealthy denial that can lead to dangerously perverted attitudes in the men who do not win the fight to become the alpha male of a family and neighborhood, and such epics of denial as has caused millions of people to think that public displays of half-naked writhing pubescence in aid of men committing mayhem on each other is just good clean puritan fun.