Nookie for spiritual progressives

As dumb as they are, I don't think Lerner's comments about sexuality are any sillier or more un-realistic than the sort of tripe the Vatican has to say on the matter - like how birth control is "intrinsically evil" or some such nonsense.

Look, Spitzer made *a lot* of enemies in New York and they were just waiting for a pretext to bring him down. He broke the law and faces indictment. That's sufficient pretext, I would think.

This really has nothing to do with "right-wing sexual moralizing". We're talking about *New York* of all places!

I invite you to read what the "Vatican" has to say about birth control. Agree or disagree, it isn't tripe

To anyone who hasn't already swallowed the notion that the church speaks infallibly on such issues, the idea that using a condom is in and of itself an intrisically evil act, yes, that is a load of tripe.

Lerner's comments are inane, because they imply that social/political changes can eliminate problems such as prostitution, objectification of persons in sex, and what he considers a general shortage of "sexual satisfaction" in society.

How is this any more inane than supposing that religious or "spiritual" changes can eliminate problems such as prostitution, or objectification of persons in sex?

Lerner's out of control language is worth savoring throughout the email, e.g., "It's not uncommon for men (and now increasingly women as well) who have achieved great power in our society by adopting an outer show of ruthless pursuit of power and influence (even, as in Spitzer's case, if the power is aimed at pursuing laudable ends) to feel a deep emptiness and loneliness that is not addressed by friends or spouse, and hence to seek some kind of outside connection no matter how superficial that is not bound by previous rules and roles." Poor Eliot, so lonely under that outer show of ruthless power.

And then there's the assumption hidden behind the millenarian hope that sexual satisfaction be "broadly available" -- as if it were something like health insurance or a social program or a consumer good like universal broad band access that the government or market should provide. Where's decadent late capitalism when you really need it?

What's hilarious, at least to me, are a couple of things: 1) that Lerner believes Spitzer did what he did because he wasn't getting enough sex at home; and 2) the deeply naive belief that we can eliminate this kind of behavior by making sure men get enough nookie, and that in so doing they hold a certain view of women in their minds.

I do believe that moral reform of men and women can and will reduce the incidence of prostitution, and lead to a more healthy attitude toward sex (mind you, what I consider "healthy" in this regard is probably not what Rabbi Lerner considerds "healthy.") What I find naive to the point of hilarity is the idea that Spitzer wandered because he isn't being sufficiently serviced on the homefront, and that what would cure that is more and better and more politically correct sex. Myrna Minkoff, you're moment has arrived!

How is this any more inane than supposing that religious or "spiritual" changes can eliminate problems such as prostitution, or objectification of persons in sex?

Does anyone suppose this?

What I find naive to the point of hilarity is the idea that Spitzer wandered because he isn't being sufficiently serviced on the homefront, and that what would cure that is more and better and more politically correct sex. Myrna Minkoff, you're moment has arrived!

I don't know about the "politically correct sex" part, but Dr. Laura is on the same page as Lerner in speculating that Sildy wasn't putting out enough...

http://kevinmccullough.townhall.com/blog/g/c4682ca4-c337-422c-b896-6f3e1d1c123b

jaybird, I am not catholic and do not hold to the catholic teaching on birth control, but I would respectfully suggest that you examine what the catholic church teaches about sex and why, particularly pope john paul ii's writings on the theology of the human body before continuing to comment on the subject. It is astoundingly well thought-out, well supported and beautiful stuff. It may not always get taught and played out that well in the real world, but it is truly a worthy ideal to hold up. Again, I'm no apologist for the catholic church or the no birth control idea, but your comments scream to me that you aren't actually familiar with the church's ideas. Which means they won't be taken seriously by anyone who is.

Rod: What I find naive to the point of hilarity is the idea that Spitzer wandered because he isn't being sufficiently serviced on the homefront

I agree with this, since the operative word seems to be "because". Though I may cultivate my own greenhouse, I do not spurn the lilies of the field. This is simply la nature.

What is interesting about this is that political officials quite OFTEN are involved in extra-marital sex and yet we, Joe Public, are acting like this is shocking, astonishing and news worthy. This man ought to be doing some serious repenting, no doubt; and since he was involved in illegal activity he needs to resign from his post as governer. Why are we surprised, though?

I'll admit that I found the above hilarious. All I could think was an imaginary poltitian exciting the crowds "Satisfying sex for ALL!" "Orgasms for the masses!" "Everybody's gettin' some, baby!" He or she would totally get voted into office.

As for me, I'm enjoy fidelity in marriage quite a bit, thank you very much.

This all does raise the issue, though, of what someone should do if his/her spouse makes an absolute and long-term refusal to have sex?

Adopt the spiritual practices of a monk or a nun, something we are in a sense called to do anyway. ;^)

All I could think was an imaginary poltitian exciting the crowds "Satisfying sex for ALL!" "Orgasms for the masses!" "Everybody's gettin' some, baby!"

That's exactly what it sounded like.

Vote for Lerner: A _______ in every ________!

At the risk of tipping the cap toward the selective raillery of early-90s cigar-smoking right-wing chic, Lerner is exactly the sort of purveyor of pious piffle making it all too easy for a Chicken McMencken (Hendrik Hertzberg's tag) like Bob Tyrrell to run, with regular updates, P.J. O'Rourke's old "Enemies List" in The American Spectator...

I usually like what Lerner says, but I do think this was a bit much. OTOH, so is most of what everybody else is saying, on both sides. I think it's a lot simpler than most of us are willing to admit. The American people, like most other people, want our politicians to be alpha males. Most alpha males mess around with women to whom they are not married. Note that most of the Democrats who have lost elections in recent history are models of marital fidelity. Deep down, a lot of voters think that makes them wimpish and therefore unsuited to higher office.

Anytime a religious leader (including the pontiff) pontificates about sex, it's hard not to laugh. In fact, it's often hard for adults to talk about sex without sounding vaguely silly.

At the risk of sounding equally silly, and thinking about the "Bratz" thread below, one of the best treatments sexual responsibility I've encountered recently was in an episode of "Everwood" in the mature adult nurse, Edna Harper (Debra Mooney) spoke with an adolescent male, Ephram (Gregory Smith) who was thinking of becoming sexually active.

She talked about how complicated sex actually is. Sex is complicated, because human beings are complicated. Sometimes (often) sex isn't good (in the sense of being enjoyable). In addition to the possible consequences of contracting STDs or becoming pregnant, there are also the emotional consequences that arise from human relationships, even when sex isn't involved.

I think one of the problems with much treatment of sex in this culture is that it is treated in a reductionist fashion, as if it were merely a mechanical act, or "no big deal," or, from the Right, as if "just say no" was enough. It's not.

My favorite line is "Going to a prostitute is legal in some states and some countries around the world, and is often the very arrangement that saves families from splitting up whose sexual energies have diminished but whose love is intact." Ah yes, whoredom recast as pro-family. Can't believe this guy pretends to be within the Judeo-Christian consensus. Reminds me of the women's group in a local mainline church that defended one of their members who (after her husband was put in an assisted living center) went out and got some action from a "toy boy." The women's group said that we must have compassion for our sisters who have been deprived of the fundamental right to regular sexual satisfaction. Sounds a lot like the song that was popular a few years back, y'know the one with the refrain that goes something like: "C'mon baby, we're just mammals. Let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel." Sheesh.

In other news, researchers have recently concluded that theft is likely to continue until the streets are paved with gold and money grows on trees. They're apparently moving next to the question of whether murder would take a hit if people were to become indestructible immortals and unicorns populated suburban America.

America is just silly. Sarkozy, the new "conservative" French president, divorces his wife within months of being elected, after the two of them openly engaged in various extramarital contacts for years. (This in no way prevented him from being elected, I might add.) He then promptly takes up with an Italian supermodel, flying hither and yon with her, even having "overnight visitations" in their equivalent of our White House. He then manages a quickie wedding with her. In interviews, she proclaims monogamy is "boring", and much prefers polygamy or polyandry, boasting of her past sexual conquests.

And Sarkozy is still see as the get-tough, hardline choice for president. No one thinks twice about it.

Here, we cry like babies when we discover that power-hungry, uber-rich, alpha-males want sexual variety, and are willing to pay to get it. The American terror of sexuality, the Augustinian loathing of the body, the Puritan hatred and fear of the flesh all crop up here, where grown and otherwise intelligent men scream like stuck pigs over these archetypal antics, while swallowing gross dishonesty, incompetence, and malfeasance of their more "sexual pure" elected officials whole.

Other countries laughed at the nonsense involving Clinton, and they'll laugh just as hard about this.

He wasn't even spending taxpayer dollars, as far as I've seen...only his own wealth. Outside of violating some obscure law concerning the transfer of large sums of money, which was created to prevent money laundering, and not to prevent hiding your illicit expenditures from the spouse, he's hardly committed a crime.

None of this is to say he didn't screw over his wife. He did, and clearly she has the right to be pissed, and take whatever actions she deems appropriate concerning the situation. And, given his prosecution of others for the same sorts of shenanigans, he's a huge hypocrite, and deserves a swift kick on that account.

As for the rest, Lerner is right. If we weren't trapped by archaic value systems that equate marriage and sex with property rights and purity issues, Spitzer would have handled things in the eminently practical way that Sarkozy did, and we'd care about as much.

None of it has a damn thing to do with his ability to run a state, with the small exception that anyone who spends $31,000 a day for sex doesn't know the value of money.

France led the way when it comes to Western Enlightenment values. We could learn a lot about sex, and government, from them as well.

"France led the way when it comes to Western Enlightenment values. We could learn a lot about sex, and government, from them as well."
- J('accuse pour la)P(revention de)L('Infame), above

Not to mention a lot about L'Éducation Sexirentale:

France's sordid housing crisis

By Jonny Dymond
Europe correspondent, BBC News

It took six months for Liberation journalist Ondine Millot to get to the truth about the most sordid side of France's housing crisis.

Look through some property websites and you can see the advertisements: the phrase you are looking for is contre services - when a room in an apartment is offered, sometimes "free", in exchange for services.

Sometimes the service is perfectly innocent - cleaning the apartment or washing clothes, to defray some of the high cost of renting property.

But sometimes it is not: instead the requests are sexual, demeaning, bordering on the perverse. "Sex twice a month," is one blunt demand. Another asks for someone "open in spirit and elsewhere".

"Flat in exchange for libertine services," goes another...

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/7290139.stm

"Until sexual satisfaction is so broadly available in our society that no one has to pay for it and so deeply tied to love that no one is objectified in the process..."

Does it occur to anybody else how contradictory those two statements are? Love is not something easy; it is something that takes a long time and a lot of hard work to create. This, it seems to me, is a problem with liberal idea of sex, and probably a few other things: they want it to be meaningful, but also very common. Diamonds wouldn't be valuable if they were as common as coal.

God bless.

Stefanie,

Yep, as far as I can find, all the money was his own. There is a law in the U.S. called "structuring", which basically says you can't transfer large sums on money in such as way as to hide the fact that you are doing so. Banks have an obligation to report transactions over $10,000. So, if you make a $12,000 purchase, and deliberately make two $6,000 payments to try to hide the fact, you may be guilty of structuring, which is one of the charges they are looking at in his case. There are some other possibilities, like summoning a prostitute across state lines, which are almost never prosecuted, and yet here are being considered. As Simon accurately points out, the man was an unpleasant martinet who made a lot of enemies in high places, and I can see them pushing these points that usually go unpushed. But the structuring laws were meant to deal with issues like money laundering. Here, they are being used for another reason entirely. You can see the potential problems.

As for the rest of Simon's post, it's just unimpressive. Anybody can make a list of any country's sins, with little effort. Let's see. American as an example of great government: slaughter and dislocation of the Native Americans, slavery, lynching, hidden medical testing on African-Americans, Richard Nixon, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, the internment of the Japanese-Americans during WWII, gunboat diplomacy, lobbyists and Big Business running government, etc. etc. See, easy!

The historical reality, available to anyone with a basic education, is that Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite was the forerunner of our own revolution, and great thinkers such as Voltaire, Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal etc. helped usher in the Enlightenment that inspired Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, etc. The French have contributed enormously to world civilization, as have we, and many other nations. Obviously, every aspect of their government doesn't bear emulation. The same is true of ours, Great Britain's, or anyone else's that you care to name.

However, some elements of their social and governmental structures would serve us well. In this case, their laissez-faire attitude to sexual relations, and their insistance that both religion, and people's private lives, stay OUT of government. What the French President does behind closed doors with women is his own damn business. Would that the same were true here.

Nor does some odd tale that people are trying to extort sexual favors for apartment rental have much to do with it. People have been using sex as a weapon and a negotiating tool since before Lysistrata. Thank God the French are silly enough to go "Oh look! Some people are misusing their sexual license to act poorly towards others. Quick...take sexual freedom away from the masses...they can't be trusted with it."

They recognize it's an old story, and move on. There are people who feel that undesired sex twice a month is a fair price for a decent apartment. Considering my mortgage, I'd think about joining them, frankly. If I need a ride, and my next-door neighbor says they'll give me one if I put out, I can either put our or walk. It makes them a crappy person. But it has nothing to do with social policy.

One would have hoped you'd understand that I didn't mean the PHRASE predated our revolution...the ideals it represented did. The quick Wikipedia look-up shows the depth of your knowledge of history.

It's just not worth more of my time to try to convince someone of the obvious ties between our revolution and the French Revolution, which is taught in every high school history book in the country. And apparently they didn't detest the French so much that they didn't send Franklin to Marseilles to beg for weapons, money, and support. Or forming an Alliance with them in 1778? Or owing them $11 million dollars at war's end for the supplies. I guess their detestation didn't run too deeply.

And of course our own revolution was thuggery free, as we all know. What's a little tarring and feathering between friends, after all?

Have a blissful evening. Ignorance should at least provide that.

It's just not worth more of my time to try to convince someone of the obvious ties between our revolution and the French Revolution, which is taught in every high school history book in the country. And apparently they didn't detest the French so much that they didn't send Franklin to Marseilles to beg for weapons, money, and support. Or forming an Alliance with them in 1778? Or owing them $11 million dollars at war's end for the supplies. I guess their detestation didn't run too deeply.

JPL, Perhaps you aren't aware that the French government which nobly aided the United States in our War of Independence was that of His Most Christian Majesty, Louis XVI. No wikipedia necessary to recall that fact, thank you.

You're the one who, for no apparent reason, interjected France into the discussion. I have nothing against French culture, nor do I hold the United States up as the exemplar to the world in all matters of governance or sexual mores.

But neither is France the standard by which other nations ought to be judged. And that's especially so when we are being lectured by historically challenged Francophiles who think the French Revolution somehow inspired the American War of Independence that preceded it.

Fair enough, rombald. But note also that the "Enlightenment" is a broad term for 18th century intellectual trends in general. The reality included many different, sharply divergent philosophical and political ideas. Joseph II and the Marquis de Pombal were figures of the Enlightenment, as were such diverse thinkers as Voltaire, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, and Hume.

Personally, I'll take Dr. Johnson over the lot of them.