Monday

Feel but not fulfill

7 Comments June 2, 2008 – 8:10 am | Share and Save | Permalink |  Print This Post |

[Conrado de Quiros on sex outside marriage, and gay love. As usual with de Quiros -- beautiful, beautiful article. Here's an excerpt.]

“The idea of a couple, married or not, having sex in order to procreate is hilarious. It conjures the image of them hard at it (no pun intended for the male partner), enduring the ordeal, determined only like soldiers pinned down in trenches to persevere out of a sense of duty and finally to break through in one great rush. What a perverse and joyless act that is. I doubt any Christian, short of an ascetic, will fill the bill.

“Whatever happened to love? Whatever happened to ecstasy? Whatever happened to two people, straight or gay, bonded by feelings that cannot be expressed by words, needing to express themselves to each other by flinging themselves into each other’s arms and surrendering themselves into a consummation devoutly to be wished? Surely that is part of the magic of life?

“Which brings me to the argument that the Church is not proscribing against gays, it is merely proscribing against gays acting as gays, or that it is not demanding that gays do not get attracted to other gays, it is merely demanding that gays do not act on it. I don’t know about you but I found Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” to be an honest-to-goodness love story, ranking up there with “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” Gays do fall in love too, and what I figure is unnatural is to compel them on the ground that it is perverse or that they cannot procreate to abort it. There is nothing more natural than love in whatever form it takes. Sex is not overrated, procreation is. Demanding that gays feel but not fulfill is not Christian, it is sadistic.”

[Thanks to Mugen for the lead.]