Sex and Right, Part 1

I was a sophomore in college when I first heard the opinion that anal sex between a married man and woman is an abomination. Mind you, I was raised a fundamental Baptist. And I was a fundamentalist among fundamentalists. I was well versed in all the rules against sexual deviancy -- no porn, no pre-marital sex, no adultery, no raping, no entertainment of lascivious thoughts, no guys and girls sitting alone in a car, no looking at a woman below the neck, etc. Three things that were never preached against, though, were (1) masturbation, (2) contraception, and (3) anal sex between a married man and woman.

There seems to have been a three-shelf hierarchy of rules and prohibitions:

A. At the top were those things that should be preached against, condemned, and prohibited or regulated by law, like homicide, abortion, drug and alcohol abuse, psychoactive drugs in general, homosexuality, lewd behavior, etc.;

B. Next were those things that should be preached against and condemned, but not banned by law, like unBiblical religions (including those based on versions of the Bible that aren't faithful translations of the Textus Receptus), sending your kids to a public school, or lying naked around the house; and at the bottom,

C. Those things that should be left entirely up to the parents, like how many times a kid should be spanked for using foul language, whether the kids should be homeschooled or sent to a Christian school, whether it's appropriate to see musicals, whether there should be a TV in the home, whether the girls should be allowed to wear pajama pants around the house or whether they should wear ankle-length night gowns, and whether the parents may dance alone together behind closed doors.

In other words, as a fundamentalist, I had the liberal notion that some parts of my life are other people's business and other parts are "between me and God". I wasn't the only one who had this idea. After one particular man's wife had their eighth or ninth live birth (live birth, that is!) the pastor of the church congratulated them from the pulpit and plainly said that how many kids that couple wants is entirely their own business. (It is rumored that the man wanted twelve children, and from what I hear his wife has reached his goal.)

Of course, different people have different ideas of what things should go into which shelf. And they have different ways to go about placing things into the different shelves. This is why I'm writing this series -- to examine how people place different things into different shelves.

One way some people do it is teleology. They look at what an act tends to bring, and infer that it is meant to bring that, that it's designed for that function, and that performing that act in a way that goes against that purpose is an abuse of the act. What does sex bring about? Babies! And so, an essential purpose of sex is to make babies, and "any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin." According to the Catholic Church, married people are perfectly entitled to enjoy sex, so long as they're making babies while they're at it.

Since anal sex goes against the procreational purpose of sex (a woman can't get pregnant from it), it is a sexual perversion, and -- according to the Catholic Church -- belongs either in shelf A or B. Other sexual acts which go against the procreational purpose are masturbation and sex with contraception. Yes, according to the Catholic Church, using a condom, pill, or shot is sexually immoral, even if you're married.

The only passage of the Bible that comes anywhere close to mentioning the procreational purpose rule is the story of Onan. But God struck Onan dead, not because he released somewhere other than a woman's vagina, but because he rejected his God-given duty to beget children with his dead brother's widow.

The lesson to take home for now is this: if we want to use theological and scriptural reasons to place something in shelf A or B and not C, then we have to at least understand that there are different kinds of theological and scriptural reasons, and that more than one of them are wrong.