As mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin sought to have books she objected to removed from the city library.
While I was growing up in the "50s, the surest route to a book's financial success was to have bannered across the cover, "Banned in Boston;" so prudish was then that bastion of today's liberalism.
Perhaps the only ones unfamiliar with the near ecumenical zeal of the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) and other fundamentalist religious organizations to rid the country of the threat gay marriage poses to life on earth, as we know it (or would prefer to know it), are those who have been trapped in the same cave with Osama bin Laden.
(click here) What the headline refers to is a scratchy, black-and-white photo of John F. Kennedy, taken sometime in the "50s, aboard a yacht, as naked, nubile, nymphs take dives from the stern, into the water. Kennedy is lounging on a deck chair, seemingly nonchalant over the goings on.
The shame of it all! Gasp. Gasp. I just refuse to believe an unmarried, 30-something, sexually healthy male might ever entertain such utterly immoral entertainment.
Give me a break!
THE FACT OF LIFE: Whether plant, or fowl, or fish, or mammal, the single most powerful (and most important) force in the world is the compulsion to have SEX. And a lot of it. And, to avoid inbreeding, inbred flaws, with as many different members of the species as possible! Monogamy is itself a biological flaw.
Indeed, the only function of consuming nutrients is to first reach the point of sexual maturity, in order to have SEX! Then, to survive, in order to have more SEX! In humans, unlike most species, the pursuit of sexual pleasure is neither seasonal, nor is it ever much dormant. Whether Masters & Johnson, or every reputable research of the subject since, it is an undeniable psychological fact that every man and every woman enjoys watching porn. That is, forget the pretense to story, men and women alike like watching -- up close and real genitalia personal -- another couple, or couples, getting it on. The simple fact of life is that they become sexually aroused. Their recorded brain activity centers say so, no matter how strongly they want to deny it. It's an autonomic response. -- Grow up, will ya?
A SIDEBAR FACT OF LIFE: To all the Catholics and Mormons and conservative religious fundamentalists -- However "marriage," as a religious and governmental construct is a rather recent philosophic, social phenomenon, homosexual behavior and promiscuity are naturally occurring through most of the mammalian -- most emphatically, human -- order. Chimpanzees do it, naturally. Dogs do it, naturally. And so do people, naturally. Engage in homosexual conduct. That's because every species is composed with both male and female hormones. In fact, without testosterone, the male hormone, no female will have a "normal" sexual drive. (Normal, in this instance being defined as that which falls within the three middle quintiles of a bell curve population frequency distribution.) -- Grow up, will ya?
ABOUT "MARRIAGE": Bob Feller, the fast balling, Hall of Fame hurler for the Cleveland Indians, had a reputation for having a thing for the ladies. Willingness, not the circumstance of whether they were married, was the deciding issue. One time, the pitcher was asked by a reporter whether it bothered him, being responsible for the breakup of so many happy marriages. Feller replied, quite accurately, "No man can break up a happy marriage." -- Grow up, will ya?
The proposition that "marriage," by nature or some other sanction, consists of a union between one man and one woman, has no evidentiary foundation in archeology, in history, or even in religion. (A pop quiz for all the religious moralists out there: How many wives does the Bible say that wise King Solomon had?) Furthermore, through the great expanse of Christendom, marriage between a man and "X' number of women was arranged, either by the parents or of the clergy. Additionally, it was almost always more a business transaction than even religious: How many goats was the daughter worth? Even in those rare societies where the fellow had a say, the woman did not. She was, like those goats, chattel, to be bargained for, and nothing with the slightest tinge of intrinsic worth. -- Grow up, will ya?
That said, it has only been within the past 150 years that anyone's government got involved. And when it did, it was once again as much a business -- local tax revenue -- proposition, as it was a construct intended to advance the society. That still does not prescribe marriage as an institution with especial history to it. Sometime around 1790 BCE, in ancient Babylon, Hammurabi developed his code. Prior to that, there simply is scant evidence of any reference to "marriage." That's not even 4,000 years in the human trail that disappears into the dust some 1.2 to 1.6 million years ago. Marriage as something with sacred eternality -- Grow up, will ya?
Etc.:
There are two fringe groups that take strong exception to the facts of life and of history, and that wage ardent war on those facts: Those with deep seated, Freudian psychological deficiencies concerning their sexual dispositions, and those who are jealous of those others who seem not so encumbered. It's a tragic sickness, really, that oppresses and that is responsible for the most atrocious of human attitudes and behaviors. -- Grow up, will ya?
Ben Franklin observed that, "Where there is marriage without love, there will be love without marriage." It has only been within the past few decades that even our own government offices respected women. Prior to progressive divorce laws and, especially since the O. J. Simpson circus, criminal sanctions prohibiting it, a husband could berate and beat his wife with little fear of legal or even many social recriminations. But no man has the merest of ownership rights over "his woman" or his wife. He has no right to tell her what to do, or to feel, or to think, or what not to do or feel or think. She is 100% an individual, equal to anyone else, with a 100% right to -- so long as she is not infringing the rights of others -- to conduct herself as she, and she alone, decides. If she wants to "step out," he has every right to attempt moral suasion, but no right to physically restrain her, or to psychologically or physically punish her. Every effort by every man who has abridged, or sought to abridge, his partner's sexual behaviors has done so solely out of his own sexual insecurity. He's frightened to emotional and psychological death that he won't measure up to whomever his partner might encounter, and will lose her as a result. And if he loses her, he will in the bargain also lose both his felt rights to her body and sexual favors, to whatever economic benefits she brings to the partnership, and to some basic and real element of masculine emotional and psychological status. -- Grow up, will ya?
Therefore: This most recent brouhaha over a young and unmarried JFK is nothing more than the most recent, sick, attempt by sick conservatives to force a faà §ade that is an abject lie on every historical and physiological fact. It's got no more validity than had their weapons of mass destruction campaign. Rather, it says sadly so much more about them than it does anything else. -- Grow up, will ya?
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