have not been concerned with rape, sexual assault of the young, humananimal contacts, necrophilia and a number of the "truly bizarre and wierd" kinds of sex, which most of us, I am sure would wish to avoid for ourselves and others.
Most of our politicians, our police, our social workers, and our ministers. keep on saying that Americans find the behavior forms we have previously cited as objectionable and therefore we must maintain our old puritanical attitudes against sex. But might we not ask, just WHO is really objecting? Surely the multitude of people-and that includes the vast majority of usare not objecting, because the statistics show we are participating in the very thing we are said to object to. Then perhaps that is exactly the answer-we are sexual hypocrites because we are dabbling considerably in what we consider forbidden, and we are afraid that if we don't condemn it loudly enough, someone else will suspect we are doing the things morality says we shouldn't!
That can go on and on, with one of us afraid of another about these things until a formidable cloud of neurosis and guilt can-and does-form to confuse us all. When all of us are a little sick about our own sex, and our own human weakness-or better, our human nature-to conform to what we are supposed to, then we find that Society itself is sick and we, individually and collectively, are a part of the disease. The disease isn't sex, itself, but our attitude toward it.
Our varied sex behavior forms are so widespread, have existed so long in human history, and have resisted law and the threat of burning in hell for so long that perhaps it is time to admit they are NOT weaknesses of the flesh, and not some flaw in the nature of man, and not some devil's way of causing us to offend God. They are not even a Communist conspiracy, because recently Russia admitted having the same problems! Here, I suggest that the varied forms of sexual behavior are simply a part of nature. I urge others to regard them so. I remember Dr. Kinsey once said that the only unnatural sex act is that which one cannot perform. Then let's start accepting the fact, and chuck into the rubbish can a lot of the prudish nonsense the anti-sexualists are feeding us.
In this vein, a woman from Brooklyn wrote to Time magazine in 1955 and said:
"What married people do in bed is no more the business of lawmakers than it is the way they cook their eggs when they get up. The general American attitude that conventional sexual intercourse is the only "proper" expression of sexual desire-and worse, the legislating of that attitude-is a hangover from the Puritan fathers, from whom so few of us descended. The prudery and naivete of such an attitude must make us a laughing stock
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in nations of more wisdom and maturity." And so it does.
Here we could mention that the heterosexual variations mentioned above, as well as private homosexual expressions, are not outlawed in most na tions of Western Europe, but for the most part are outlawed with a ven geance only in the English-speaking Christian world and Germany and some parts of the Iron Curtain sphere. And actually the number of people shackled with this particular yoke of antisexuality includes only about 25% of the world's population, East and West!
This is not to say that the Western religions-the Jewish and the Christian-are totally anti-sexual. Our quarrel is not with these more liberal elements, but with the more restrictive ones.
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Oddly enough, Protestantism, which hatched the most puritanical and anti-sexual codes in centuries past, is today a nesting place for some of the most liberal attitudes toward sexual morality and behavior. While the official Roman Catholic position still holds the function of sex is procreation and that sex is not to be indulged in for pleasure alone, a growing number of Protestant clergymen are subscribing to the view expressed by Theologian Dr. Seward Hiltner, who believes that no conflict exists between the flesh and the spirit of man. He says that since man is a "whole or total being, sex is good if it serves the fulfillment of man as a total being."
In the book, The Bible and the World of Dr. Kinsey, Dr. William Cole, a professor of religion at Williams College, put it even more strongly: "There can be no quarrel with the secular world at this point (about sex being good and not evil in itself). It is right and the church has been wrong. Sex is natural and good... it is attitudes which are good and evil, never things. Those who take the Bible seriously must stop apologizing for sex. They must begin with a concession to the secular mind, granting that which is natural,
"In its efforts to prevent irresponsible procreation, Western Civilization has used the device of what Freud called the walls of loathing, guilt and shame. On the whole this method of social control has worked reasonably well, but a price has been paid for its success-the price of sexual perversion, which is most often the product of fear and anxiety... the method of moralism has been weighed in the balance and found wanting, partly because it moves in a wrong direction, and partly because it based its case on fear.",
David Boroff, writing on Sex and Religion in a national magazine, said, "Much of Protestantism no longer wishes to be identified with repression and puritanism
Professor Roger Shinn of New York's Union Theological Seminary has added: "Repression is a Christian heresy." He went on to say that "In
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