PrintMarch 22, 2009
Condoms don't protect souls
I was so angry when I read about the attacks on the Pope that I cleaned up my room. Really. If these attacks continue I'll be cleaning up last night's dishes.
The Pope is right to advance the truth that AIDS is a "tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, and that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which aggravates the problems."
As a bachelor, of course, do I really need another lesson on how to put a condom on an organic banana? No. Indeed, I openly wonder if sex educators are getting off on this kind of stuff. In How to put on a condom correctly! , however, the sex instructor informs me how to place a condom on an erect cucumber, which is great practice if dating a male rhinoceros.
Secularists, to be sure, believe that abstinence and monogamy are unrealistic, as opposed to fisting and foursomes. But a recycling sermon is always welcome: "Latex doesn't break down in water, so don't flush it, and it certainly isn't biodegradable," warns one educational site "so don't put it into the compost - even if it is filled with ‘organic matter.'"
Got that?
You'll notice that liberals embrace the Don't Theology when their precious political cushions are at risk. "Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't watch Fox News. Don't Read Ann Coulter's Guilty. Don't drive to work." Miraculously, though, the Don't Theology becomes simplistic when Evangelicals, Catholics or Mormons encourage their daughters to abstain from sleeping with street gangs.
More interestingly too, secularists claim that condoms are indestructible and great protectors, but what does that really mean? Seatbelts also protect drunk drivers, so what's their point? And what happens when good condoms turn bad?
A behind-the-scenes peek in the real world reveals an alternative narrative to the Hollywood noise machine. Observes Dr. Judith Riesman:
"For, it turns out that while STD infections are a principal cause of women's sterility, chronic disease and early death, condoms afford girls and women categorically no protection from seven of the eight STD's studied, even when used faultlessly 100 percent of the time."
And: "Condoms may curb gonorrhea in heterosexual intercourse - but only for men!"
Is abstinence, in particular, more realistic than promiscuity or less so? Is Christianity more realistic than Oprah or less so? Is the Pope wiser than Madonna's "Sticky and Sweet" tour dancers?
In the Christian tradition, real believers have the audacity to believe that condoms don't protect souls. The adulterer doesn't need rubber, he needs a heart check.
Cast against Judeo-Christian ethics, then, the secular Left's worldview appears very simplistic, very schizophrenic, and above all, very costly. As Charles J. Sykes explains in Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, Or Add (p.173):
The same educationalists who insist that children must be protected from the traumatic and scarring influence of dodgeball blandly insist children can take HIV in their stride. And all the while they are blasting away at taboos, inhibitions, scruples, hang-ups of the young, they insist that they are not violating childhood, but ‘empowering' children.
Hollywood thinks it knows better than us -- and can afford the pills. How? By rarely, if ever, acknowledging that Jesus Christ knows more than Elton John. By rarely, if ever, questioning the condom industry. By rarely, if ever, admitting that that Christians are right. (Newsflash: Sexual promiscuity and poverty are lovers.) By rarely if ever, thinking outside their studio boxes.
And, if after millions of dollars, quilting workshop marches, embarrassing propaganda movies, and street booty exhibitions, thousands of San Francisco's gay men don't know how to put on a condom, then doesn't that suggest the Pope is right?
