So perhaps the real conversation that we need to have is not about sex or divorce or any other secondary issue. Maybe these are simply conscious or unconscious diversionary tactics and there's a deeper, more difficult matter we need to be discussing. If anyone is able to figure that out they'd be doing us all a great service.

Seems like there is a middle ground of real sex education and use of contraceptives along with better education and hope for girls - that is the proven difference - if girls have hope for a different future they delay getting pregnant.

I wonder if one piece of this is our cultural invention of adolescence as a life stage in the twentieth century. We now romanticize adolescence, delaying the full responsibilities and awards of adulthood often until people are well into their twenties and beyond, yet people generally mature faster physically because of better nutrition. Add to that the fact that relational communities and families are not as stable as they once were in many places to help us attain adulthood, it's little wonder so many of our young people are in crisis.

Maybe its all the anti-gay, anti-sex preaching in those red states that really turns folks on. Sex talk from the pulpit leads to sex in bed and behind the shed.

So perhaps the real conversation that we need to have is not about sex or divorce or any other secondary issue. Maybe these are simply conscious or unconscious diversionary tactics and there's a deeper, more difficult matter we need to be discussing. If anyone is able to figure that out they'd be doing us all a great service.

I know what you're getting at, Peter P.

The Issue, is Unmarried Sex.

With the rarest of exceptions, gay or straight, we're all doing it---or did it.

Yet we can't talk about it.

If we're conservatives, we desperately try to hold on to sexual ethics "as they have been" (as if ANYONE is following them, even the most devout).

If we're progressive, we pretend "Oh, if ONLY we could open MARRIAGE to all, gay or straight, then there would be no problem!" . . . when of course that's BS.

Deep down, I think a LOT of us are thinking "fidelity in marriage, chastity (i.e. NO SEX) in singleness . . . for you. I was/am different!"

Esp. for progressives, we have NO way of talking about "why I am different" (and can/could have unmarried sex), without seeming to confirm the worst slurs against progressives, as sexual libertines (nevermind that unmarried conservatives are DOING IT just as much if not more, than progressives are!)

I wish I had an answer.

JC Fisher

Well actually, I think I DO have some answers---it's just that it would involve me "speaking from personal experience"...and that's embarrassing (not to mention "TMI"). In the USA, I think we're still all Puritans, when it comes to This Subject.

I agree with JC again...we're puritans; that's our problem. Even the most "liberal" among us are puritans.

-Grant Charles Chaput

During my time in Mississippi, I struck up a conversation with a university employee who was researching poverty in the Mississippi Delta. One phrase kept coming up again and again: "If only we could delay first pregnancy by another year or two . . ."

In 2007, the Guttmacher Institute released a study which found that:

Almost all individuals of both sexes have intercourse before marrying, and the proportion has been roughly similar for the past 40 years.

As historian Stephanie Coontz noted in her book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and The Nostalgia Trap, virginity at marriage may have been rhetorically/religiously prized, but premarital sex was more common than not. She quotes a 1938 study which found that two-thirds of female respondents born after 1910 admitted having premarital sex. So much for the notion of some "golden age" in America when everyone was chaste until marriage!

It's time for the church to address the issue of human sexuality--for people of ALL orientations--honestly and openly. Rather than saying "Don't do it until marriage," we need to be talking about the critical importance of consent and mutuality. The church also needs to take on the "rape culture" in which we live.

Paige Baker