Budziszewski on "Designed for Sex"

Last summer I went with my son to a middle-school class on relationships at our church. One of the young ladies there reacted to the teacher's advice against kissing too soon: "Well, I didn't think kissing was any big deal!"

I had to speak up.

"No big deal? Do you really think kissing is no big deal? How sad! I'm so sorry for you. Every kiss I've ever shared with my wife has been a big deal! Why would you want to take something so terrific, so meaningful, and make it into no big deal?"

J. Budziszewski recently wrote "Designed For Sex" for Touchstone Magazine. That's right--a Christian writing on the value of sex! (It's not really that unusual, but people still seem to think it is.) He quotes two authors with sentiments similar to what I said that night:

"Naomi Wolf, in her book Promiscuities, reports that when she lost her own virginity at age 15, there was 'something important missing.' Apparently, the thing missing was the very sense that anything could be important. In her book Last Night in Paradise, Katie Roiphe poignantly wonders what could be wrong with [sexual] freedom: 'It’s not the absence of rules exactly, the dizzying sense that we can do whatever we want, but the sudden realization that nothing we do matters.'"

This is on a different level than the middle school class, but there's a common message: we give away lightly what means little to us; yet is it really so meaningless? No, sex matters, and for that very reason it is to be reserved for when it can be the most meaningful: a committed, permanent relationship called marriage.

Now, I wish he had given the article a different name: we're not designed for sex, and he doesn't actually say that we are. He does focus on the sexual aspects of the way God designed us, which is not quite the same thing. With that caveat, I highly recommend the article; it has the one of the best practical explanations I've seen of how God's instructions really do serve our best interests.

More great quotes:

"My generation may have ordered the sexual revolution; theirs is paying the price."

"The fact is that we aren’t designed for hooking up. Our hearts and bodies are designed to work together. Don’t we already know that?"

"Sex is like applying adhesive tape; promiscuity is like ripping the tape off again."

"The problem with twenty-first-century Western sexuality is that it flouts the basic principles of the human sexual design."

Posted: Mon - July 18, 2005 at 09:50 PM |

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Budziszewski on "Designed for Sex"

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson