Quote# 111917
Christians in general, and Catholics in particular, are portrayed as puritanical and anti-sex. This raises a question: if Catholics hate sex so much, then why did they historically tend to have so many children? As recently as 100 years ago, child rearing was considered the proper object of marriage and sex. The blue pill script – go to college, get a good salaried job, marry young and for life, have two or three kids – retains its staying power because it used to be sound advice. The manosphere exists in part because it is sound advice no longer.
Pope Paul VI, who reigned from 1963 to 1978, was in many ways a weak and vacillating man. His predecessor, Pope John XXIII, described then Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini as, “our Hamlet,” always indecisive to the last. In an uncharacteristically bold move, he published the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae in 1968 that reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s opposition to all forms of artificial contraception.
At this point, many RoK readers may be thinking, “I’m sure this is terribly interesting to you Levinson, but I’m not a Catholic and the pill and the condom have been great for my sex life. Why should I care about this?” You should care because Paul VI called it: the easy availability of contraceptives paved the way for no-fault divorce, unleashed hypergamy, and sodomite “marriage.”
Marriage Then
Most of us take atomistic individualism for granted, in contrast to the ancient understanding of man as the political animal. “Who are you to say what two consenting adults can and cannot do in private?” is taken to be an unanswerable rejoinder to traditional understandings of sex and marriage. Sex seldom remains a purely private affair, especially in the era of social media. Among other things, sex can lead to love, marriage, hate, murder, children, disease, happy homes, broken homes, social cohesion and social disintegration.
As Pope Paul described it:
"Married love is also faithful and exclusive of all other, and this until death. This is how husband and wife understood it on the day on which, fully aware of what they were doing, they freely vowed themselves to one another in marriage. Though this fidelity of husband and wife sometimes presents difficulties, no one has the right to assert that it is impossible; it is, on the contrary, always honorable and meritorious. The example of countless married couples proves not only that fidelity is in accord with the nature of marriage, but also that it is the source of profound and enduring happiness."
In other words, marriage was once considered a more public institution than it is today, not through legislation but through social convention. Young men were incentivized to make themselves good husband material if they wanted sex and children. Young women were encouraged to remain chaste and marry young. Divorce was unthinkable for our great-grandparents. Then, as now, women were much more ruthless about slut shaming than men.
Above all, marriage was ordered toward children:
"Finally, this love is fecund. It is not confined wholly to the loving interchange of husband and wife; it also contrives to go beyond this to bring new life into being. “Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents’ welfare."
Marriage Now
In paragraph 17, Pope Paul predicts the consequences of the contraceptive mentality:
"Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law [emphasis mine – AL], and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection."
Players and sluts ye shall always have with you, but the world now incentivizes us to be this way. Men must constantly perform or else their unhaaaappy wives will blow up the marriage for cash and prizes. That is, if men choose to marry at all. Fewer do, and in all honesty, I can hardly blame them. Why should they? If they want sex, they can find plenty of willing ladies provided they have even a modicum of game, and they won’t have to risk losing their homes, their jobs, their children, and their sanity in the divorce grinder.
Women too have grown to devalue men. Would the carousel exist to the extent that it does if it weren’t for the pill? If they can have consequence-free sex, then they will pursue the apex alphas and ditch the frustrated betas who were the good husbands and providers of yesteryear. Women are more exquisitely sensitive to social pressure than men, and the social cues that existed in our great-grandparents day aren’t there anymore.
The key here is that artificial contraception radically separated marriage and sex from child rearing. Marriage used to be a recognized public institution that carried with it certain legal and social obligations to which the couple was expected to conform. If children are removed from the occasion, then marriage becomes all about romantic feelings.
Fuzzy Feels Are Optional
If marriage is nothing but a public declaration of romantic feelings, then two consequences follow: if the feelings go away, that’s a legitimate reason to end the marriage; and if sodomites have romantic feelings for each other, then what reason do we have to exclude them from marriage?
Traditionally, Christianity has taught that if you burn with lust, you should marry. The specific woman you married was a question of prudence like choosing a career or a new house. Nowhere did the Church say that God had created “the one” or your soulmate. Unfortunately, this thinking has infiltrated all Christian churches today with disastrous consequences.
Jesus Christ famously prohibited divorce in the Gospels but many Christian churches have creative methods for getting around that. In theory, the Catholic Church has stood strong alone among all Christians. Strictly speaking, she does not recognize divorce but she makes “declarations of nullity,” which means a couple never formed a sacramental marriage at the time of their wedding vows. The American Catholic Church in particular has been handing out annulments like candy for fifty years, so it’s understandable why outsiders think of them as Catholic divorces.
The Basis Of Civilization
The building block of civilized society is not the individual but the family. The great evil of our time is that our progressive overlords actively undermine the family at every turn. My tradcon friends vacillate between believing game is either a placebo or a set of irresistible Jedi mind tricks cads use to deflower innocent virgins. The media wonders why young men refuse to grow up, man up, and marry those sluts. I say the men of today are responding rationally to the incentives of a world gone mad.
Be honest gentlemen: if Marriage 1.0 were still the rule instead of the exception, how many of you would happily marry? The contraceptive regime radically disrupted the natural formation of families. Sex became an end in itself. From that conviction came the scourge of pornography. The logical conclusion is the development of sex bots. And an elderly, celibate Italian bishop saw it all coming more clearly than all of the experts.
Andrew Levinson,
Return of Kings 12 Comments [8/17/2015 10:33:25 AM]
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