That's Not Freedom

I came across a talk by Sharon Eubank, given in 2014. She has been head of Latter-day Saint Charities since 2011, and since 2017 she has also been serving as a counselor in the Relief Society General Presidency. That is the worldwide women’s organization for our Church—in fact, possibly the largest women’s organization in the world, with about 7.1 million women. (Fun fact: Looking up bio information on her, I learned her dad was the weatherman while I was growing up. I remember him being very enthusiastic about upcoming snowstorms.)

Sharon Eubank
screenshot from here

She says,

There’s one thing that I’m going to personally reject, and that is the mistake of labeling promiscuity as, somehow, freedom.

This talk was given to fellow Latter-day Saints, so there is terminology that can be used in a religious setting that may not often be used elsewhere. She refers to a scripture in the Book of Mormon, following Christ’s visit to the people there. The scripture is 4 Nephi 1:16:

And there were no envyings, nor strifes, nor tumults, nor whoredoms, nor lyings, nor murders, nor any manner of lasciviousness. And surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God.

I’ll take a moment here to define a couple of terms not often used in our time.

Whoredoms: prostitution (sex in exchange for money), or, more simply, fornication of any sort, which means sex outside the commitment of marriage, including adultery.

Lasciviousness: characterized by expressing lust, lewdness, or wantonness, which means sexually loose or unrestrained.

In my religion, any sex outside of marriage—and any lasciviousness, which would include lustful contact of body parts usually kept covered—is a sin. That used to be the general understanding in the Christian world. But in today’s world, these basic definitions are mostly missing.

Back to Sharon Eubank. Considering that scripture verse led her to ask the question, “What would it be like if there were no whoredoms? What would that society be like?” And she came up with a list:

·       Teenage couples don’t get pregnant and have to get married to the wrong person.

·       Lives don’t get warped and stalled by sexual abuse.

·       There’s no fear of rape or violence.

·       There’s great security on the streets.

·       There’s no serial killers.

·       There’s no kidnappings.

·       There’s no market for prostitutes.

·       There’s no sex trade.

·       There’s no sexual slavery.

·       Spouses don’t have affairs and commit adultery.

·       Marriages stay intact, and children aren’t raised in the insecurity and the divided loyalties of divorce.

·       Cities don’t have seedy, creepy neighborhoods that are filled with adult theaters and deviant bookstores.

·       There’s no appetite for porn, and it doesn’t degrade the people who make it, or who watch it, and it doesn’t warp the sexual development of young people and rot the relationship between a husband and a wife.

·       There are no children being raised by a generation of women and painfully wondering where their fathers are.

·       And all of the energy and the money that goes into those activities above is available for something else.

A society that has no whoredoms has all those benefits. She adds, “How is that not more free and not more desirable? For women, for men, for children? How is that not?”

When you look at the ills in society, and you want a serious way to resolve, eliminate, or at least decrease many of them, having human beings make the conscious decision to limit sex to within marriage is nigh unto a magic cure.

Social science data agrees. We’ve known for a long time the formula for economic relief from poverty in the United States:

1.       Don’t have sex before age 20.

2.       Don’t have sex until after marriage.

3.       Stay married.

4.       Obtain at least a high school diploma.

There are more than economic societal goods that come from marriage. A good source is the Witherspoon Institute.  Back in 2006 I got their Marriage and the Public Good: Ten Principles. In the section “Evidence from the Social Sciences,” it summarizes,

In virtually every known human society, the institution of marriage has served and continues to serve three important public purposes. First, marriage is the institution through which societies seek to organize the bearing and rearing of children; it is particularly important in ensuring that children have the love and support of their father. Second, marriage provides direction, order, and stability to adult sexual unions and to their economic, social, and biological consequences. Third, marriage civilizes men, furnishing them with a sense of purpose, norms, and social status that orient their lives away from vice and toward virtue. Marriage achieves its myriad purposes through both social and biological means that are not easily replicated by the various alternatives to marriage. When marriage is strong, children and adults both tend to flourish; when marriage breaks down, every element of society suffers.

Women particularly are better off when society honors marriage and condemns sex outside of marriage. When you look at the list of societal ills, the reverse of Eubank's list above, you can see that women are more vulnerable to the large majority of them.

What if it could be made clear that the tradeoff to eliminate those societal ills would be chastity before marriage and complete fidelity after marriage? Because, if you’re not willing to make that tradeoff, you’re contributing to those problems.

But people can’t ever live chaste lives, you say? Not true. Scriptures tell us it’s possible. Those people in the Book of Mormon, mentioned above, plus there was an earlier generation, called the people of Ammon, who did it. And, in the Bible, there are the people in the city of Enoch. They all did it completely. Beyond that, every successful civilization in the history of the world has thrived only as long as they honored marriage.

Eubank says,

Yet we live in a world that says it’s not possible; you cannot expect those kinds of things from people. People will not react in those ways. This is just natural; it’s who we are. You can’t make those expectations. And yet our God has said, “I expect these things.”

Meanwhile, I came across a relatively new PragerU video with Lauren Chen, who does a podcast on The Blaze called Pseudo-Intellectual, aimed at millennials.

I’m sharing the 5-minute video in full, below. But I’d like to bring up a few of her points about marriage. She says:

I have no doubt the reason so many women get stuck in dead-end relationships is that it has become taboo—or, to be precise, not politically correct—for a woman to articulate what she really wants.

Which takes me back to marriage, and why women crave it. Here are three reasons:

Protection. Commitment. Love.

Nothing wrong with wanting those things. It is something women have wanted—and great societies have valued—for thousands of years. It is something men still want, too. Little wonder study after study shows that those in good marriages are happier, healthier, even wealthier than those who are not.

She suggests that women would be better off being clear about what they want, and then don’t waste time in a dating relationship that won’t lead to marriage.

While our society has done a lot to convince people that marriage isn’t worthwhile, she says we still all know better:

To someone who tells you that a marriage license is trivial, “just a piece of paper,” here’s a good response: If it’s just a piece of paper, why are you so reluctant to sign it? The answer, of course, is that no one believes that it’s trivial. Everyone knows it’s the most important decision you’ll ever make. So treat it that way.

As Sharon Eubank said, what the world has been calling freedom, isn’t freedom. It’s a recipe for societal ills. Self-control leads to freedom from all those societal ills. Who knew? Oh, yeah—every successful civilization in every millennium—including this one.

Stop Throwing Out the Baby

There are some ideas that have been around a very long time, experimented on, varied—and then it turns out the original was the best idea all along.

We’re about to talk about some truths that are very nearly lost in today’s society, because of unwise throwing out of ideas, simply because they’re old. And this has led to some literal throwing out of babies with the proverbial bathwater.

An article was brought to my attention that I thought might be worth reacting to. The piece is for an online forum called Human Parts, which I hadn’t heard of before. Gabrielle Blair writes “Men Cause 100% of Unwanted Pregnancies.” 

image from here

Technically, she’s right. If you go ahead and read her piece, be forewarned that it’s explicit—not in a prurient way, but still not something you want to have up on your computer screen with a nine-year-old looking over your shoulder.

Blair points out that men can cause pregnancy with every orgasm, while a woman can only get pregnant, all things being healthy, during about 48 hours a month. Nature is not equal.

She also accurately points out that contraceptives for women have lots of negative side effects. Meanwhile, the most common contraceptives for men, condoms, are cheap, plentiful, and free of side effects. But men don’t like them. Because they cause slightly less pleasure. Here’s how she puts it:

Imagine a pleasure scale, with pain beginning at zero and going down into the negatives. A good back-scratch falls at 5, and an orgasm without a condom is a 10. Where would sex with a condom fall? A 7 or 8? So, it’s not that sex with a condom is not pleasurable, it’s just not as pleasurable. An 8 instead of a 10.

Let me emphasize that again: Men regularly choose to put women at massive risk in order to experience a few minutes of slightly increased pleasure.

She comes up with a rather radical solution: all men should get a vasectomy, which they can have reversed once they’re married and want to have children.

Yes, that’s radical. No, it’s not likely to catch on. Her point is that men ought to take on the responsibility, rather than women.

But here’s where we differ. She’s talking about which way men should go about mitigating the natural consequences of having irresponsible sex. That does nothing but perpetuate the actual root problem: men having irresponsible sex—and women allowing men to have irresponsible sex.

Here’s something that might seem mind-blowing for young people today: this issue has been part of the human race for all the millennia we’ve had the human race. That means people have had plenty of time to work out solutions. And there is one solution that actually works: absolute monogamy. (We've talked about the research of  Vico and Unwin before, here.)

That means no sex outside of marriage, and absolute fidelity within marriage. Not just for women, but also for men. In another word, that means chastity for both women and men.

Candace Owens (left) and Lila Rose on the Candace Owens Show
May 19, 2019 screenshot from here

This past weekend, Lila Rose, pro-life advocate, was on the Candace Owens podcast, and they had a conversation about this old idea of chastity. Lila Rose got married within the past year; she was a virgin up until marriage. She is 30. Owens is also 30. Her journey to conservatism comes from another direction.  She lost her virginity in high school. She lives differently now and regrets that:

Candace Owens: Because the person meant absolutely nothing to me, and I was doing it because I wanted to fit in. I was doing it because this was the normal thing to do, and you were considered weird if you didn’t do these sorts of things.  

And it’s not even just peer pressure from other students; it’s peer pressure from society. It’s everything that you’re seeing on TV. It’s everything that you’re being taught by your teachers.

Now I’m engaged. I wish I had waited. And that’s a really sad thing, and a weird thing, to say now, obviously, because I live a different lifestyle. But that guilt started creeping up on me before I got engaged.

Before I met my fiancé, I was in a relationship, and I had this conversation where I was, “I think I kind of want to recommit myself back to God.” And my boyfriend at the time said, “No.” Like, if you don’t have—  And this is when I knew something was really wrong. Right?

Lila Rose: Meaning, “I’ll love you if you have sex with me.”

CO: That’s what I heard.

LR: That’s not love.

CO: I think his excuse, what he said to me was, “Sex is how people connect.” Right?

LR: It is, but with someone that you’re going to love lifelong, and you’ve given everything to. It’s more than that.

It ought to be more than that. Think about the difference between giving sex to a man who isn’t committed to you, in the hopes that he might come to love and commit to you—and to earn this chance, you risk pregnancy (not to mention STIs) without his support, just for a hope. Meanwhile, to him it means nothing but temporary pleasure.

Compare that to sex with a man who has already committed to stay with you forever—and has declared that to the whole world with a signed covenant. Then sex becomes the enjoyable expression of that love and commitment, founding an actual family. The social science data shows that sex is better for married couples, and enjoyed more often, than it is for singles. And among married couples who are religious and attend church regularly, they have the most enjoyable sex of any demographic.

As Lila Rose points out, outcomes are better for both women and men when they wait for marriage:

Outcomes meaning, your relationship happiness, your economic happiness, physical health—because of STIs, the potential for pregnancy when you’re not prepared for it. So I think that—  First of all that’s just the social data on that. But from a spiritual perspective, if we think sex is just an act you do, right, and all that matters in consent—  It’s all about consent today, right? All you need to do is consent, and then you’re good, right? That’s the #MeToo movement: as long as there’s consent, that’s good. We need consent. But consent is not enough. Sex should be about love. It should be about commitment. It should be about responsibility. And it is built to be about children.

This next part I thought was most telling:

And it’s only because we sterilize it. I mean, we use women—  Think about it. All these women our age and younger are taking birth control pills. They’re being told, “You need to sterilize yourself. You need to shut down your hormones in order to be sexually available to men.” I mean, that’s what that message is.

There’s something really wrong with a society that values sterility rather than fertility.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s was not progress; it was the repeat of a rebellion that has occurred in every failing society in world history.

A young man who’s a friend on Facebook (used to be a missionary here in Houston—and he’s an eligible bachelor saving sex for marriage, and good looking, strong, and outdoorsy, so there are such men available, just saying) said this wise thing a couple of days ago:

You can judge a culture on how they treat their offspring.

In other words: High rates of abortion is evidence we are not committed. Not committed to those we express we love. Making the most intimate activity a lie. Taking advantage of others. Willing to take a life to justify a lie.

This is our culture.

Abortion has never been about empowering women; it has been about causing women to do unspeakable evil in order for men to have irresponsible sex without consequences.

Of course we need to be against abortion—which is used for a reason other than inconvenience in only about 4% of cases. At least 86% of women having abortions are unmarried—and of those, it’s hard to know what percentage are nevertheless because the man doesn’t want to support offspring. Married women are seldom selfish enough to kill their offspring when a man is willing to work out a solution to give that child a family.

The vast majority of abortions happen because a woman has allowed a man to have sex with her when he is not willing to stay with her and raise a child, when he is not committed to her or her offspring.

The sexual rebellion is touted as freeing men and women from the restrictions on sex of former, old-fashioned times. But look at what has actually happened. A woman used to have the support of society when she expected a man to respect her and wait for sex until after he had committed to love her and stay with her. Now women are expected to pretend, along with men, that sex is meaningless pleasure that they of course want to indulge in. Consider the idea that a woman is expected to “put out” if a man has paid for a nice dinner. She’s expected to give her body to him, risking all that nature brings with it, because he fed her one meal? That’s all she’s worth? And it’s a monetarily determined exchange? That’s what we’re supposed to believe is sexual liberation for women?

Compare this to a man respecting a woman’s reputation so much that he would never compromise her; he loves her and asks for her to marry him before he offers or expects sex in their relationship. And then they work together to have a happy family life together from then on. Not only is the woman happier—and freer from negative life outcomes; the man is also happier and lives a more meaningful life (with better sex as a bonus).

We don’t need men to come up with more and better ways to get away with irresponsible sex with women. We need men to respect and love women so much that sex is returned to its proper place within the sanctity of marriage.

This—men who never have irresponsible sex—is the answer to ending sex trafficking—and the pornography industry related to it. It would be the end to rape. It would be the end to abortion except to save the life of the mother when saving both isn't possible. It would be the end to unwanted pregnancies. It would nearly be the end to children raised without fathers in the home. It would bring about the end to more than 90% of poverty in our society.

Chastity is one of those simple but not easy solutions. But it is possible. Been there, done that, lived that life. And it is what we should be teaching.

Teaching birth control in schools, while failing to teach the meaning of sex, says, “Of course you’ll have sex; of course there are consequences, but our society wants to ignore them. So try these sterilization methods while you’re too young to know better.” And we shouldn't ignore that this approach doesn’t get good outcomes. More than half of women getting abortions were using some form of contraceptives during the month prior to pregnancy.

If you’re cynical enough—and about Planned Parenthood, which provides a large portion of sex education curriculum, this is a natural assumption—you’d think they were touting contraception knowing full well pregnancies would result, so they’d get more money from abortions.

Is more sex education in schools the answer? No! Heck no! We need real sex education, controlled by the parent, and preferably taught by the parent. There may be good programs parents can use. I'm told Utah recently adopted a good program, but I haven't seen it yet. If it's good, wouldn't it be best as a resource to parents? Churches can help. But promoting sex without morality is a bad experiment we need to end.

Nor do we need sexual repression. We don’t need to pretend it’s bad or disgusting. But we do need to celebrate it as the extremely important thing it is, and therefore keep it within marriage.

Let's stop, as a society, valuing sterility as a means of getting more irresponsible sex. And return to valuing fertility—which is a sign of health and vitality not only for women, but for all of civilization.

Chastity—for both men and women—leads to thriving civilization wherever it’s tried.