sdb@tekecs.UUCP (Steven Den Beste) (07/18/83)
Larry Bickford has asked some evolutionist to explain why so great a pleasure
as sex is tied to reproduction. I will turn that question around: Why are
female humans sexually available during the majority of the time that they
are not fertile? If sex is only for reproduction, then one would think that
God would have made us like dogs who only can and will copulate when
the female is fertile.
I suspect Larry's question was rhetorical, but there is a serious answer.
The likelihood is that a gentle orgy around the fire every night was a
way of keeping the intensely social and intensely feisty human savages
together. (By the way, homosexuality would serve just as good a purpose,
especially if there happened to be a temporary imbalance of numbers between
men and women.) If sex only happened when a woman was fertile, the men of the
tribe might kill each other, but in any case would not cooperate well the next
day when they needed to hunt. If sex happens all the time, all the men
can "get some", so the tribe stays together to the benefit of the species.
I would like to hear Larry's answer to my question.
I strongly agree that the emphasis should be on LOVE rather than SEX. However,
Bickford assumes that LOVE can only exist within a marriage; further he
assumes that birth control techniques are foolproof. I have loved someone
and been sexually involved with her, and we did use birth control. In
our case it never failed, but that has happened to others. (One guy I
know just got a second kid. Both were accidents due to failure of birth
control. In their case they decided they wanted both and haven't regretted
it.)
In the case when I was involved with someone, it turned out that we were
not compatable enough to marry, so we have moved apart and become loving
friends. This person is still very important to me.
I feel that for a marriage to really be successful, that the people should
have been sexually involved before they married, to find out if they
were sexually compatable. (It turned out that we were not - one of the
reasons we broke up.) I have watched too many marriages where the people
only became sexually involved after the wedding break up for this reason.
Sure, they were in love, but it wasn't enough to get them through such an
important crisis. (I suppose Bickford would say that they weren't enough
in love - Love solves all. Such an argument is a tautology by defining
Love. The problem is that the definition is functional - you can only
tell if it was really love by hindsight. Sigh...)
The happiest marriages I have seen were the ones where the people
cohabited for a year or two before finally getting married. At that
point they KNEW that they were compatable in ALL ways. To live with
someone is vastly different than dating them, regardless of how long
or how intensely.
What is the upshot of this? If the people cohabit or are sexually active
before marriage, and this sexual activity is NOT just hedonism but deliberate
acts of love, and if their birth control fails through no fault of theirs,
then the decision to marry has been made for them by default. This is one
HELL of a bad reason to get married - and marriages made this way are definitely
NOT made in heaven! (My uncle drank himself to death after his wife
left him. Seems they got married for this exact reason.)
There are several important issues about abortion, but the one I find that
religious types never deal with is: Is it a decision that each person must
make for themself? I think the answer is an unequivical YES. Circumstances
change and so do the moral issues involved. Bickford talks about his
relatives who raised a deformed child. Another of my uncles has a son
who is mongoloid - and despite how hard he tries and how much they love
him, he is not a blessing. He should have been aborted. They are quite
old, and at this point, so is he. He is in his late thirties now, though
with the mind of a 5-year-old, and they are in their seventies. When they
die he will live the rest of his life in an institution - a fate I would
not wish on anyone. (So why don't I take him in myself? Frankly, I have only
seen him three times in my life. I am not willing to dedicate my life to
him. Maybe that makes me selfish - but then, I suspect that Bickford doesn't
have an adopted mongoloid child either. There are MANY in institutions in
this country, and their lives are not good ones.)
Indeed, this is a source of much hypocrisy on the part of those who are
religious: "Deformed and mental deficient children deserve lives too."
Great - where were you when they were offered up for adoption by parents
not strong enough to care for them themselves?
There are occasional people who are strong enough and have enough love
to raise deformed children or mental deficients, for instance the DeBolts
in California. Such people are in a very real sense living saints; the
problem is that they are a lot more scarce than the children that need
them. I know I am not strong enough - hell, I don't think I could handle
a NORMAL child yet, which is one reason I am not yet married.
Bickford brought up only one more point that I felt should be dealt
with, and I apologize for putting it under a title such as this, because
it hasn't got anything directly to do with sex - overpopulation. He
says word to the effect that the world is not overpopulated - there is
plenty of food for everyone. Well, unfortunately, food isn't all it
takes to live. In fact, the world IS overpopulated. We are rapidly
exceeding the capability of the world to produce the other resources
that are needed. A good example is the most common fuel used on earth:
wood. In many areas of the world, the need for wood has exceeded the
sustained-yield capabilities of the forests, and the forests are coming
down. This has resulted in serious erosion in places like India and
Algeria. There are other resources such as minerals where we have
already exceeded the world's capacity - which is one reason why much
of the world exists in abject poverty. Even if the economic problems of
distribution of wealth could be solved - there simply is not enough
in the world for everyone to live like Americans do. Even more
important than resources is waste - we are rapidly approaching the
capacity of our eco-system to absorb the wastes we produce, with less
than a quarter of the world's population living at our level. If the
population of the world increases further, most of those new people are
condemned to abject poverty. I suggest that there are enough people now.
What possible use could more serve?
Worst of all - we compete with other creatures for living space and
resources. Every time our population increases, we must move into
areas where other species live. This is happening in Africa right now,
and represents the greatest threat to the Gorilla population there.
Do we have a right to completely utilize the Earth? Shouldn't we leave
a little for the other animals?
Steve Den Beste
[decvax|ucbvax]!teklabs!tekecs!sdb