Keeping the escape hatch open: Middle-aged men and casual sex (BC Courier Times, 4/9/08)

Last year marked the 200th anniversary of British parliamentarian William Wilberforce's efforts to end the slave trade. While it may have gone “under the radar” for a time, widespread degradation and “sale” of human beings flourishes; it is now called “human trafficking.”
Trenton Congressman Chris Smith authored and championed the first anti-trafficking legislation.

As per the U.S. State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report 2007, “[Human trafficking] deprives people of their human rights and freedoms, it increases global health risks, and it fuels the growth of organized crime... [Each year,] approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders, which does not include millions trafficked within their own countries. Approximately 80 percent of transnational victims are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors. The majority of transnational victims are females trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation.”

Tom Cruise once assured us that prostitution wasn't all that bad with “Risky Business.” Richard Gere and Julia Roberts did a similar favor with “Pretty Woman.” With “Mighty Aphrodite,” Woody Allen showed prostitution to be good for a few laughs. Men who made fortunes publishing pornography, such as Larry Flynt and Hugh Heffner, are treated as wise elder statesmen by the media. Society seems invested in the notion that commercial sex is — if not benign — at least victimless.

As per Joe Parker, RN, “People used in the sex industry often need medical care as a result of the ever-present violence. They may need treatment for infectious diseases, including AIDS. Survivors frequently need mental health care for post-traumatic stress disorder, psychotic episodes and suicide attempts. About a third end up chronically disabled and on Social Security. The sex trade plays an active role in promoting alcohol and drug problems... As many an old cop will say, "Anyone who thinks prostitution is a victimless crime, hasn't seen it up close.' ”

Last year, New York's governor signed an anti-trafficking law, which raised patronizing prostitution to a Class A misdemeanor. As per Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times, “The big worry now among those working to stop trafficking is that the Spitzer scandal will add to perceptions of prostitution as a "victimless crime.' ” In response to those who say that “Prostitution is inevitable, so we might as well legalize and regulate it,” Kristoff cites the Netherlands: “legalization nurtured a large sex industry and criminal gangs that trafficked underage girls, and so trafficking, violence and child prostitution flourished rather than dying out.”

How could a man who attacked prostitution show such hypocrisy? Certainly, each of us falls short. Yet, it is telling to look at the core attitudes of Wilberforce, Smith, and Spitzer. Wilberforce and Smith shared/share a passionate belief in the sanctity of each and every human life. Smith is co-chair of the Pro Life Caucus in the House of Representatives. As per a December 2005 piece in New York Magazine, “one of every ten abortions occurs in New York... New York is the abortion capital of America.” Not satisfied, Eliot Spitzer was championing the so-called “Reproductive Health and Privacy Protection Act,” which aimed to even further liberalize New York's abortion laws.

In the current International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, researchers explore one relationship between abortion and attitudes toward sex. After a wife or girlfriend has an abortion, researchers Coleman, Rue, Spence, and Coyle found men to have more casual attitudes about multiple partners and sex with strangers. Other research questions are begging to be asked. For example, are middle aged men who exploit young women more likely to support abortion? Are middle aged men who support abortion more likely to exploit young women?

According to the research wing of Planned Parenthood, the average cost of an abortion in 2001 was $468. According to the USDA's Expenditures on Children by Families 2006, annual expenses on a child could now be expected to range from $8,060 to $16,750 (Not even a drop in the bucket compared to what that child's eventual college expenses will be!). Are men who engage in casual sex more likely to support abortion, keeping open an “escape hatch” from an “inconvenient pregnancy” and parental responsibilities?

Unless built on a foundation of respect for all human life, anti-trafficking measures seem doomed to flounder.

"Ideas on Marriage in Heaven Vary with Faiths"

A Letter to the Author

While surfing the net, I came across your "Ideas on Marriage in Heaven Vary with Faiths" <http://newsok.com/article/3162596/1194050204>. I hope that you won't mind my offering comments.

You report that there is great disparity among "New Testament-based faiths," as to whether or not there will be marriage in Heaven. While some find a negative answer in Matthew 22:30, you report that some ponder Genesis 2 and cannot understand how there would not be marriage in Heaven. Yet, this question is clearly addressed in the New Testament. Like many people, I have not always felt comfortable with the answer.

While I’m not yet 50, the mere prospect of losing my wife – my soul mate, my best friend – troubles me. On a human level, I'd be absolutely lost. In general, men just don't seem to handle widowhood as well as women. It strikes me as a sign of God's mercy, that He so much more frequently calls husbands home first!

The Andrew T, for whom we named our son, was an exception to God's "husbands go first" rule of thumb. Widowed for nearly a quarter century, Uncle Andy used to say that his wife had been "miles ahead of him as a human being" (Just as an aside, I believe God gave Uncle Andy some extra time, to get his act together.).

Natalie Merchant has a very haunting song, entitled "Beloved Wife," in which she is the voice of an elderly widower:

• “you were the love for certain of my lifefor 50 years simply my beloved wifewith another love I'll never lye againit's you I can't deny it's you I can't defya depth so deep into my griefwithout my beloved soulI renounce my life as my rightnow alone without my beloved wifemy beloved wife....
  
  “my love is gone she suffered long in hours of painmy love is gonewould it be wrong if I should just turn my face away from the lightgo with her tonight?”
  <http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/nataliemerchant/belovedwife.html>

The pain of Natalie Merchant's old widower touches me deeply. Would it be OK for the old widower to just pack it in? Like a geriatric Romeo mourning his septuagenarian Juliet, would it be OK for him to turn his “face away from the light [and] go with her tonight?” Absolutely not! Yet at that profound moment of sorrow, it's understandable that the elderly widower might feel cheated to learn that his beloved will not be his spouse in Heaven. What a challenge it is to trust that God has something even more magnificent in store!

With their marriages, Christians are called to proclaim what Christ teaches about eternal life. While sometimes hard to accept, Matthew 22:30 is key to understanding Christ's proclamation: “At the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven.”

I'm a big, big fan of what's been called Pope John Paul II's "Theology of the Body" (TOB) <http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP2TBIND.HTM> - 130 or so addresses JP II gave during the first five years of his pontificate. While some speak of JP II's TOB as though it were revolutionarily different from what came before, TOB strikes me as really just a repackaging (beautful for all that) of what orthodox Christianity has always proclaimed about marriage and procreation.

Marriage and procreation are incredible, indescribable goods of monumental importance, intended to lead us to salvation. John Paul II began with a profound reflection on what Genesis teaches about marriage's indissolubility and moved from there to what the Sermon on the Mount taught about purity and from there to Matthew 22:30. Though men and women will not be married and will not bear children in Heaven, we will somehow be drawn even closer to each other, in God! With our present finite understandings, the awesomeness of this eludes our grasps. “What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, [is] what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9)! We are meant to see God face-to-face! My quotes are from Michael Waldstein's magnificent new translation of JP II's TOB <http://www.amazon.com/Man-Woman-He-Created-Them/dp/0819874213/ref=cm_cr-mr-title>:

• "we should go back to the words of the Gospel in which Christ appeals to the resurrection, words that have a fundamental importance for understanding marriage in the Christian sense” (11/11/81)


• [Marriage] “belongs exclusively ‘to this world.’ Marriage and procreation do not constitute man’s eschatological future” (12/2/81).


• "In the resurrection, the body will return to perfect unity and harmony with the spirit; man will no longer experience the opposition between what is spiritual and what is bodily in him. ‘Spiritualization’ signifies not only that the spirit will master the body, but, I would say, that it will also fully permeate the body and the powers of the spirit will permeate the energies of the body….This ‘eschatological experience’ of the Living God will…reveal to him in a living and experiential way the ‘self-communication’ of God to everything created and, in particular, to man....Eternal life should be understood in an eschatological sense, that is, as the full and perfect experiences of the grace (charis) of God in which man can share through faith during his earthly life” (12/9/81).


• “The resurrection is not, therefore, only a manifestation of life that conquers death – a final return, as it were, to the tree of Life, which man was distanced from at the moment of original sin – but also a revelation of man’s destiny in all the fullness of his psychosomatic nature and of his personal subjectivity....This ‘heavenly man’ – the man of the resurrection, whose prototype is the risen Christ – is not so much the antithesis and negation of the ‘man of the earth’ (whose prototype is the ‘first Adam’) but above all his fulfillment and confirmation” (2/3/82).


• “If someone chooses marriage, he must choose it exactly as it was instituted by the Creator ‘from the beginning’; he must seek in it those values that correspond to the plan of God; if on the other hand someone decides to follow continence for the kingdom of heaven, he must seek in it the values proper to such a vocation. In other words, he must act in conformity with his chosen vocation”….It is a characteristic feature of the human heart to accept even difficult demands in the name of love, of an ideal, and above all in the name of love for a person” (4/21/82).


• “a conscious and voluntary renunciation of marriage….is possible only when one admits an authentic consciousness of the value constituted by the spousal disposition of masculinity and femininity for marriage” (5/5/82).


• "The constitutive elements of the theology of the body are contained in what Christ says when he appeals to the ‘beginning’ concerning the question of the indissolubility of marriage (see Mt 19:8), in what he says about concupiscence when he appeals to the human heart in the Sermon on the Mount (See Mt 5:28), and also in what he says when he appeals to the resurrection (see Mt 22:30)….The ‘redemption of the body’…expresses itself not only in the resurrection as a victory over death. It is present also in the words of Christ addressed to ‘historical’ man….In his everyday life, man must draw from the mystery of the redemption of the body” (7/21/82).
  

Your article also claimed that some Christians believe that God selects a soul mate for each person, who "may be a person's earthly spouse or someone the believer would have chosen in life if he or she had had the opportunity to know the individual." I'm at a loss as to what you're referring and do not recognize it from the orthodox Christian tradition. To what is it that you refer?

I do firmly agree with you that "God has our best interest and happiness in mind."

Re: "Vatican: Use of Morning After Pills 'Fall Within the Sin of Abortion' - Will Catholic Hospitals Now Stop Using them for Rape Victims?"

I wish to thank you for December 18th's editorial. As you note, "In the December 12 document Dignitatis Personae, the Vatican has condemned the use of morning after pills as falling 'within the sin of abortion,' and thus being 'gravely immoral'....Bishop Elio Sgreccia who assisted in the preparation of Dignitatis Personae, noted in an interview with LifeSiteNews.com last February that there is no exception for rape." When the Morning After Pill is given to someone who identifies herself as a rape victim, it is my understanding that NOT even an ovulation test can guarantee that MAP is not working in an abortifacient manner. Use of MAP thus necessitates acceptance of abortion. As you note, "Some have suggested that there is a Catholic exception to the use of the morning after pill when dealing with rape victims....in a February interview...the then-head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Bishop Elio Sgreccia, said that there was no exception to the use MAPs." Simply put, the Vatican does NOT offer provisos for the supposed "moral" use of MAPs.In my home state, & in the United States generally, revisions appear needed to the Pennsylvania Bishops' "Guidelines for Catholic Hospitals Treating Victims of Sexual Assault" (1998), as well as directive 36 of the USCCB's "Ethical & Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services" (2001), to bring documents/practices in line with what the Vatican is proclaiming. To use a phrase from our national past time, we need our hierarchy (as well as our local clergy & diocesan officials) to "step up to the plate" and proclaim the truth. No doubt, it will NOT be popular.

3/4/08 letter to Cardinal Rigali

11/11/08 forward to the cardinal's secretary

12/13/08 forward to the archdiocesan respect life & family life offices