"When we are Christians, to the extent to any degree we are faithful to the gospel, we are bigger than ourselves. And that is why whether they are Arminian, Roman Catholic, or Calvinist, people who are truly serving the Lord are bigger than their own thinking, bigger than their own faith. We transcend ourselves. And that is the glory of the gospel. It enables us to do more than we can do. It is the grace of God working through us. It is not that we teach different gospels; we are trying to teach the same gospel even though at times our emphasis will be a warped one, a limited one, a partial one. All the same, God can use it". ^{R.J. Rushdoony}

Grandfather Bledsoe

Florence, Colorado was the home of two branches of our family. Uncle Gale and Aunt Arnola, along with Corinne and Sheryl lived there and they owned the local Penny's store. When I was still quite young, they left and moved to Fowler, Colorado to own and manage the Penny's store there. But I can still remember walking down the street in Florence as a youngster, feeling a bit conspiratorial and very important, and thinking to myself, "Little do they know (all the nearby pedestrians and merchants) that my aunt and uncle owned the Penny's store here."

The other branch of the family that resided there were the Bledsoe's. Grandmother Bledsoe lived at the family homestead of 205 Marble Street until her death in 1985 at the age of 103. She lived with Uncle Roy, who died at 84 in 1987.

Our Grandfather Bledsoe had died long before in 1947, which was about two years before my birth. He has long seemed to me to be the most interesting, and certainly one of the most complex, of our ancestors.

He was a man who stood on the very edge of the American frontier. He was poor, hardworking, and he was almost entirely self educated. My Father told me that he was the smartest man he ever knew, and he felt he could only stand on his shoulders and perhaps see a little father than he did. My mother was afraid of him. She said that he "talked a lot", (and apparently very loudly) "and had theories about everything." When I visited Mom this afternoon, since this was on my mind, I asked her again about him (it has been a number of years since we have talked about this). With her 97 year old memory, she said several things. She said, "He was very learned and profound, and I didn't understand most of what he talked about. He was tall and he was important." I was curious as to what she meant by being "important" (because he was a very poor man, and never occupied an outwardly significant position). She could not quite explain what she meant, but I took her to mean that his bearing gave one this sense. I asked her what he talked about, and she said, "Philosophers." I asked her which ones, and she said the only one she could remember was Socrates. She said when they saw him, he "gave a lecture on something for about an hour." My father told me that he taught himself mathematics all the way up through calculus (all of the Bledsoe's seem to have been very mathematical and they were all very proud of the mathematics that they could do "in their heads"). The book case in the Bledsoe's house had an entire set of the 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica published in 1910-11 (I now have it in its entirety on my book shelves). There were also a number of texts from ICS (International Correspondence School) which were still advertising their home correspondence courses in the back of comic books when I was a kid. In the last year, I have seen some of these texts in the restored library of the old school house in Ward where Aunt Dody taught school in the 1930s that still stands right in front of the old Kelly cabin. I think a lot of these courses would today be graduate level courses (there were texts in Ward on Metallurgy, and Mechanical Engineering). The level of these text books tells you a lot about the abilities of the American working man and frontiersman.

Our father's first name was Marx, and that was not accidental. There can be no doubt that our grandfather had read Karl Marx. Our father was born in 1913, four years before the Russian Revolution. He had certainly read the Communist Manifesto and perhaps he had read at least portions of Das Capital. I doubt he was a systematic Marxist. Like a number of people in those days, I suspect he found a wild, romantic hope for justice in the theories of Marx. But it would have been extremely unusual for an American frontiersman to have a working knowledge of the esoteric German at that time.

But there is a whole other side to our grandfather as well. My father told me several stories about him. I wish I had heard more and knew more.

He said our grandfather was an expert with a team of horses and with a handgun. He won third prize for using a handgun in the 1906 Texas State Fair. My father added when he told me that, "and there were a lot of gun slingers in Texas at that time." He was good, real good with a gun.

He was a dirt farmer in what would now be Fort Worth, Texas. Two lawyers used legal shenanigans to steal his land. Our grandfather had a response that probably tells you a lot about his character. He took his handgun, and paid a visit to the lawyers, and he shot off their knee caps. He apparently had no Hamlet like indecisiveness about him.

After that, it was necessary that he flee. He fled in a covered wagon with our Uncle Roy, who was then ten years old. He left our grandmother behind with the new baby, who was to become our father. He left with a cover story behind him that protected our grandmother. He left the story behind that the two lawyers had tried to rape our grandmother. The story apparently had enough credibility that he was not pursued very vigorously, if at all. It took him nine months to reach Littleton, Colorado, because he had to stop and work. He at some point sent for my Grandmother and our father, who no doubt arrived by train. I do not know how long they were in Littleton, or why they left. But they left there and moved south to Florence, Colorado where they settled for the rest of their lives.

Again, I do not know, but I think it possible that they moved to Florence, because the first oil well west of the Mississippi was drilled there, and Sinclair Oil Company (I believe) planned to open a refinery there, and that would mean work. My father told me that the refinery never opened because the city of Florence "got greedy" and decided to levy a great tax on it. This is a lesson in the folly of high taxation. Sinclair Oil decided they could relocate and they did not need Florence. Florence seemed to have needed them however, but the goose of the golden egg was killed by city counsel, and the town simply stagnated and never amounted to anything.

Our grandfather at some point mastered a certain amount of chemistry, and he worked for a paint company. My father told me that in the little white brick house that was on the property, was a chemistry lab that he had set up there. He worked on lead based paints.

The Ku Klux Klan was immensely powerful in Colorado for a number of years and certainly was in the 1920s. My friend Betsy Hoffman, when she was the president of CU, told me a story (which I heard her repeat at a graduation ceremony several years ago) about George Norlin who was president of CU (after whom Norlin Library is named). The governor was in the pocket of the Klan, and he ordered Norlin to fire all of the Jews at the University. If he did not, all state funding would be cut off. Norlin refused to do so, and for several years in fact, the university received no funding. But Norlin did not fire a single person for religious or ethnic reasons. Today, he is remembered as a hero.

My Grandfather's leftist orientation might be remembered today in the light of the horrors of tens of millions of the dead who were destroyed by Marxism. But a part of the leftist heritage of that era that can be remembered as "righteous" was its hatred of bigotry. He later became a devotee of Roosevelt, and revered him so much that he thought "he should have been made king." My father told me two stories that are priceless and are now a source of very great pride.

Our grandfather hated the Klan and everything that it stood for. He was not a man to be bullied or who could be frightened. His antipathy for the Klan was apparently well known. They attempted intimidation. He was told that the Klan were going to come to his house and burn a Cross in his yard. It was officially suppose to be a secret who the members and leadership were, but in fact, many of them were well known. It was common knowledge that the Grand Wizard was the owner of the hardware store. Our grandfather went down to the store and bought a Colt 45 from him. He asked him what it was for. Grandfather Bledsoe told him that if the Klan ever came to his house to burn a Cross in his yard, they would find out. They never came.

As he grew older, his view of guns apparently changed. My father said he came to hate guns. After the crisis with the Klan was over, he disposed of the gun somehow. He said they never knew where, or how he disposed of it. He thought he maybe dismantled it and threw it in the well, or a mine shaft, but he did not know, and they could never find it or the remains of it.

Some years later, there was a city election in Florence. The Klan were not going to allow any Mexicans or Catholics to vote. Our grandfather went down to City Hall and simply stood next to the ballet box all day long, and then sent my Uncle Roy and my Father all over town in his Ford (I don't know if it was a Model T or Model A) and had them pick up all the Mexicans (we would say Hispanics now, because these were American citizens) and Catholics, and brought them to City Hall to vote. Nobody interfered. I take it from stories like this that his presence was commanding.

Uncle Roy died in the late 1980s and I inherited the house. It was really little more than a shack with a little one room white brick house (where the chemistry lab was located) across the driveway, a garage, and some out buildings in the back. It must have been about a third acre of land. I had to go down on a number of occasions to prepare the property for sale. One day, I had been in the cellar doing some cleaning work, and as I was coming up, an old man who I had never seen before, and never saw again, was walking down Marble Street, and was near the old mulberry tree which was near the street. He saw me, and I suppose knew that Uncle Roy had recently passed away. He came over to me and he said, "This was Bates Bledsoe's house, wasn't it?" He had by that time been dead about forty years. I acknowledged that it had been. He then said, "There are two basements down there in that cellar aren't there." (It was a statement, not a question) Indeed there were. We always knew from childhood that there was a cellar below the first cellar. "Do you know why?" he asked. Why yes, I thought. It had always been explained that the stove down there was used to heat the house in the winter and that that heat was so nice coming up through the floor. "He had a still down there. Bledsoe made bootleg whiskey down there." Of course! It was one of those explanations that was as obvious as the nose on your face. During Prohibition, he had dug that space with a spoon, and heaven only knows how long it had taken him. My father told me he dug it with a spoon. After my Grandmother's and Uncle's deaths when I inherited the property, I found a diary that he kept on an old Indian Chief tablet. He wrote in it everyday with pencil. It was dated and entry after entry was very pedestrian and common. Many of the entries described how he had dug for so many hours with the spoon. I have lost the tablet. It is the one thing that I now value amongst a lot of legal and insurance and medical papers that I still have. But that is the one document I wish I had, and I do not know where it is. But it tells in a prosaic way part of that story.

Our Grandfather was also an "expert with a team of horses". My father used exactly those words. But, he also didn't learn to drive an automobile until after he was forty. He never mastered the automobile and it finally overmatched him. He was a beekeeper, and one day he had been out tending his hives. When he came to drive back, his auto turned over on him. The car caught on fire and he was burned to death in the accident. That was in 1947, He lived long enough to learn that his first grandchild was on the way. He did not live to greet Elaine into the world, but he had heard. My dad said that it was a "miracle he didn't kill himself long before..." with the clumsy way he drove a car. The man who could do "anything with a team of horses" was like my generation are with computers. What you learn after forty is never second nature to you, and the auto was not to him.

Yessiree!! Here they are! My darling daughter, and my darling grand-daughter!!

Welcome to the world of blogging, Jadyn...

Love,

Grandpa

Sex and the City

Sometimes a man has been heard to declare that he wishes both to enjoy the advantage of high culture and to abolish compulsory continence. The inherent desire of the human organism, however, seems to be such that these desires are incompatible, or even contradictory. Any human society is free to choose either to display great energy or to enjoy sexual freedom: the evidence is that it cannot do both for more than one generation. J. D. Unwin[i]

We believe that civilization has been built up by sacrifices in the gratification of the primitive impulses, and that to a great extent it is being perpetually recreated as each individual repeats the sacrifice of his instinctive pleasures for the common good. The sexual are amongst the most important of the instinctive forces thus utilized; they are in this way sublimated--that is to say the energy is turned aside from its sexual goal and diverted towards other ends, no longer sexual and socially more valuable.

Sigmund Freud[ii]

I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning, consequently assumed that it had none and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially a matter of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously a liberation from a certain kind of political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. Aldous Huxley[iii]

Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and talked with me, saying to me, "Come, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth were made drunk with the wine of her fornication...Then he said to me, "The waters which you saw, where the harlot sits, are peoples, multitudes, nations and tongues. And the ten horns which you saw on the beast, these will hate the harlot, make her desolate and naked, eat her flesh, and burn her with fire...” Revelation 17:1-2, 15-16.

Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. Revelation 21:2

I.

The Bible ends with two cosmic cities in the book of Revelation (chapters 17-22). The New Jerusalem, which represents "the New Heaven and the New Earth" is the outcome of the New Covenant in Jesus Christ. At the very end of the Bible, it "comes down from Heaven" and appears to hover over the earth, and is very near. The book of Hebrews assures us that we have now come "to the city of the living God, the New Jerusalem." (Hebrews 12:22) It is a present reality. It is something like "corporate headquarters" of the Kingdom of God.

Likewise, Babylon the Great is also an on-going present reality, and it represents all of fallen humanity's attempts to find sufficiency and life apart from God. For a time, it is a very rich, and in many ways, successful city. It is a city of merchandise and the merchandise named indicates the economic conquests of that city. It has merchandise of "gold, silver, precious stones and pearls, fine linen and purple, silk and scarlet, every kind of citron wood, every kind of object of most precious wood, bronze, iron, and marble..." and much more (Rev. 18:12). But it is also a city of corruption, decadence, and violence. Ultimately, the mark of its commerce is that it trades in the "bodies and souls of men." (vs. 13). It is the "dwelling place of demons, a prison for every foul spirit, and a cage for every unclean and hated bird..." (Rev. 18:2). It is finally a city that is "drunk with blood".

These images are especially relevant for us because we are living in a time when the entire planet is "metropolozing". Everywhere, human beings are leaving their rural roots and are moving into the city. In China, every year, 30,000,000 people are leaving farms and rural life and are moving into cities. That, as one of my professors reminded us, is the entire population of Canada moving annually into the city in that great nation. This phenomena is global on every continent, and in virtually every nation. So it behooves us to study the city, and to find a theology of the city.

But it is also true that typology and symbolism cut to the truth faster and with more clarity than a hundred sophisticated sociological studies ever could. I am currently interested in sexual mores and their effect on civilization, and the Biblical images cut to the chase almost instantly on this theme.

Most languages have masculine and feminine nouns, and I am not sure these are entirely arbitrary. The gender of nouns may convey very deep truths that need to be unearthed. The city, in all languages that I am aware of, is of the feminine gender. Both of the cities at the Bible's end are feminine, and both are symbolized by women.

Biblical imagery is fluid and traverses the depths of meaning by what it immediately transforms into. If one looks the first time, one sees a city. But, if one blinks, what is seen with the second look is not a city, but a woman. In both cases they are beautiful women, and both are possessed of glory. But one is corrupt and is the woman of death, and the second is faithful and true, and is filled with life, infinite life. The first city is Babylon the Great who becomes the Whore of Babylon. The second is the New Jerusalem who becomes the Bride of Christ.

Now here we find an intertwining of two things that in some mystical and final sense belong together. It is also the fascinating case that empirically in the modern world, they belong together. The power of sexual relationship, and the fact of a metropolis belong together. The city is the great trysting place, the place of renewal or destruction of relationship, the place where souls and bodies are bought and sold, or where truth and fidelity create new life. They do so in the text, and they do so in reality.

Socrates was very willing to pay the price exacted upon him by his city because he owed his existence and being to it. And the "it" was not an "it", but a "she", and "she" was a mother to him. Our respective cities ought to function as mothers giving us life, and nourishing and protecting us after our birth. But our cities are not without husband and mate or pimp and master, and all belong to God, or gods who father through them and lend their character and name. In the ancient world, every city had some titular god or gods that she was beholden to. Prostitution was more often than not, sacred prostitution. The prostitute was a gateway to the god whom he or she served. To have intercourse with a sacred prostitute was to consort with the gods, and this sexualized relationship defined the underlying "energy" of the city. The temple was the center of the city and the center of the temple was the sexual commerce of the temple.

The ancient world was, with qualified exceptions, (exceptions that gave rise to both expansive and cultural energy) overwhelmingly given to polymorphous sexuality. The issue was not one of gender. I.e., the issue was not one of male and female, but one of penetrator, and penetratee, and it did not much matter what was penetrated by the aggressive party. It might be boys, girls, men, women, or animals. And while romantic love did exist within marriage (as the story of Helen of Troy, or Penelope and Odysseus remind us) it was a rare aristocratic luxury and did not in principle exclude other forms of sexual expression, especially for the man. And when chastity was imposed, it was universally imposed on the woman and not on the man. The sexualization and exclusiveness of marriage was the gift of the Torah and of Judaism.[iv] The Torah restricted sexual intercourse to the heterosexual union that was bound in covenant, and in the law of the Old Testament, we see the gradual move away from polygamy to a monogamous standard. The model for both parenting and for marriage as found in the Old Testament is found in Jehovah's relationship to Israel and Jerusalem as Father and finally as Husband. All peoples model themselves on their gods, and Israel likewise modeled herself on the God she belonged to.

But the more radical difference made by the Torah in relationship to marriage had to do with the underlying metaphysics. In the Roman Empire, for example, (and the rest of the ancient world), there were hundreds of cults and religions. They all however, had underlying characteristics that were similar. All of them were dependent on an underlying monism or pantheism. This was not always the bald monism that became the defining characteristic of the Vedas or of what we would now describe as "Eastern religion", but underneath the differentiation of being that existed at the surface level, at a much deeper level, there was a shared unity and power. Sexual energy was one of the shared powers or energies that defined the unity, and also the divinity of being. The religious, monistic, and divine nature of sexual energy is most explict in a text like The Kama Sutra, and in the discipline of tantric sex. But, it is implicit in all of paganism. To penetrate would be the sign of power and dominion, but to be penetrated meant to overwhelm, engulf,and swallow the other in a great ocean of being. In all of this, there was participation in the underlying divinity of the cosmos.

The one religion in the ancient world that denied the identity of sexual energy and divinity was Judaism. The Torah, alone in the ancient world, confined sexual expression to marriage, and denied the polymorphous sexualization of all being. Christianity followed Judaism and carried the theme of complete fidelity within monogamous marriage forward in the great image of Christ and His Bride as the Church. That now began to redefine the city. The city was not to be an expression of ancient polymorphous sexuality, but an expression of His unique and faithful relationship in monogamy with His Bride. Hence, something relatively new appeared on the scene. There were precursors to this in the inter-testamental period with the Jews while they were still under the rule of Persia, Greece, and Rome, but those precursors were now greatly magnified and expanded. From that point on, the ancient city, which rested upon the foundations of sexualized monism, was to be challenged by another city which was defined by Christ's faithful marriage. The challenge was and is complete and total. Both cannot be the foundation of the world. One or the other will ultimately predominate. From that point on, pagan polymorphous sexualized monism was to be challenged by Christian monogamy. Hence, just as a wounded animal will lash back with fatal defensiveness, now, polymorphous sexuality will also lash back at its challenger, and it has been radicalized. It has always been defined by domination and submission, but as with everything else in the ancient world (all of the principalities and powers) it was far more benign in the ancient world than now. In the ancient world, apart from the challenge of Israel (which was comparatively small and localized) the challenge spread and threatened to become universal and to completely displace what was previously normative. Hence, polymorphous sexuality now takes on the character of "anti-Christ". What was implicit but often hidden then is now explicit and radicalized. Polymorphous sexuality would now evolve to become sado-masochistic, violent, and blood thirsty (as became evident in the in the Games and Colosseum of the late collapsing Roman Empire). Hence domination and submission are radicalized, and become means of seeking perverse "salvation", and ultimately becomes the worship of death. So, we see in a figure like the Marquis de Sade, torture and murder become means of achieving orgasm and satisfaction. Modern serial murder is almost always tied to pulsating orgasmic pleasure, and pornography as it descends from "softcore" to "hardcore" is defined by how much it relies upon inflicting and receiving pain.

Hence, the beast, the kings, and the woman are all now ultimately defined by what they hate and are against. The woman is "drunk with the blood of the saints", the beast is “filled with names of blasphemy" and the kings "make war with the Lamb". They are all defined by being against the Kingdom of God that has now been established and has come into competition with them. The sexual relations of the woman, the kings, and the beast are entirely made up of what we would now term "sado-masochism". The kings that she gives herself to are themselves beholden to a power that is superior to them, and this power is termed the "beast". The woman also has direct relations with the beast and the language and imagery indicates bestiality. She has intercourse not only with the kings, but also the beast upon whom she is "seated". It is lust fueled by pain, domination, slavish submission, hatred, and rebellion. The danger of any woman giving herself to more than one man is that the men involved will either not value her, or if they do, they will be afflicted with great jealousy. These relationships eventually become violent and destructive. The text finally tells us that the ten kings, in the end, "hate the harlot, make her desolate and naked, eat her flesh and burn her with fire." (Revelation 17:16).

Both of these cities are now active historical powers. Both are now at work and active on the human scene. Real cities in the real world partake of the reality of both of these cities right now. No city in the world is one city or the other. But for every city, especially now as the Gospel is taken to all the world, both of these realities are at work.

While these are symbolic types, what is clear from the Bible is that the Gnostic dualism between symbol and fact, does not exist. The question is never a choice between whether something belongs to the realm of fact, or to the realm of symbol and value. There is no dualism of this sort. The symbolism of the two women and the kind of covenants (or anti-covenants) that they live in extends to the real sexual and marital relationships that real men and women live in, in the real cities of the world. A city that worships like Babylon the Great, will be a city that models its sexual relationships after the harlot and the beast and the kings. A city that worships as a part of the New Jerusalem will model its marital covenants after the Bride and her Husband.

The question is which city will dominate in any given city in the world in which we live. One city is corrupt, and lives ultimately by trading in "the souls of men..." (Rev 17:13) and is under judgment. It is a city given to destruction. The other city is the city of the glory of God and the glorified humanity. It is the place where ultimately all human potentialities are fulfilled, and it is finally blessed with no curse. What is most important for our purposes in this short paper is that the first city is marked by sexual debauchery and what could be termed relations that are sado-masochistic. The second is marked by fidelity and love in the bonds of marriage.

II

The first quotation at the heading is from J. D. Unwin's Sex and Culture, a 676 page volume published in 1934. The second quotation is from a lecture given by Freud at the University of Vienna, and it parallels the theme of his book, Civilization and Its Discontents.[v] A primary motivation for the researching of Unwin's book was to find material to confirm or refute Freud's book, which came first. The third quotation is from Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means, and was written in response to Unwin's body of work.[vi] Huxley was one of that generation's luminaries (best remembered as the author of Brave New World), and he had the honesty to state what made both he and so many of that generation of British intellectuals tick. He later wrote the Introduction to Unwin’s final book, Hopousia.[vii]

Unwin was a sociologist from Oxford University in England. He had some desire to prove Freud wrong in his book Civilization and its Discontents. Briefly, Freud’s thesis was that civilization is dependent upon sexual discipline and sublimation. Unwin’s life work led him to study 80 primitive societies, and 16 historical civilizations. The above quotation is the summary of his findings. Unwin's life work led him to study the "qualified exceptions" that I refered to in the above section. Even with an underlying monistic metaphysic, the ancient world still on notable occasions found its way near to monogomamous marriage (chastity was ultimately only severely imposed on the woman, and when imposed on the man, it was not for the sake of fidelity to the woman, but in order for the man to give himself fully to a higher cause, like the advancement or protection of the Empire). And when it did, the outworking appears to have been quite marked. Societies with the ideal, fortressed with customary and legal consequences and rewards (and ideals are never entirely achieved) of restricting sexual intercourse to a monogamous marital state, and of maintaining sexual continence before, after, and outside of that union, are the cultures that display the highest degree of cultural energy and creativity. Unwin found only a single and qualified exception to this rule.[viii]

In the ancient world, it was recognized in the higher civilizations that being sparing and parsimonious with ones sexual powers created other energies. Plato was the supreme teacher of sublimation in the ancient world with his teaching that sexual hunger is ultimately a hunger for beauty and wisdom. Hence, there were periods in the ancient world when the parsimonious expenditure of sexual energy was encouraged, or even demanded. This was apparently true in the expansive phase of every ancient empire on the part of the ruling class, or what became the ruling class. In these periods, sexual powers were contained, and generally found outlet in conquest and expansion over other peoples, and in release of cultural energy.[ix] Later in all of these peoples, sexual energies were again released to be gratified immediately. The result was that those people themselves fell prey to other more disciplined peoples. In the modern world, totalitarian states have often tried to discipline sexual energies and to re-channel them into service to the state in order to replicate ancient militaristic powers of conquest.[x]

Swiss sociologist, Phillip Mottu in a speech in which he quotes Unwin, said this:

Societies that once displayed very great energy subside and decline when sexual discipline is relaxed. For example, in relation to the early Roman Republic, Unwin says, “It is difficult to imagine a more complete reduction of sexual opportunity or a more rigid cancellation of personal impulses. These men gave Rome her gravitas. Their honorable dealings became proverbial as the 'faith of the Romans,' which towards the end of the Republic disappeared." By the end of the first century of our era we are told that "the Romans satisfied their sexual desires in a direct manner". Consequently, they had no energy for anything else. The old traditions were still preserved in some parts of the Empire, such as Illyria and Spain. Many of the provincials went to Rome and succeeded to high office, and it was these provincials who gave the Roman Empire strength. "Then in their turn the provincials reversed the habits of their fathers by extending their sexual opportunity. The lack of energy displayed by their sons and grandsons, is apparent in the records of the third century."[xi]

Now what is clear is that America, and even more, Western Europe, are marked by exactly the kind of sexual lassitude that Unwin found as a universal marker of cultural decline.[xii] Our universities are struck dumb in the presence of what is almost a polymorphous sexuality that is being actively practiced at, and even promoted by, our state universities.^[xiii] And it is predictable, given Unwin's data, and even now observable, that our universities and our cities will come to be dominated by people, many from the outside, who do practice chastity. And in fact in some places, our universities are now using, or seeking to use "affirmative action" to limit the number of Asians who can come into our universities for very fear of this domination. Asians have the lowest illegitimacy rate of all groups in America, being somewhere between 2-3%. The largest import to America from India are intellectuals and PhD candidates, and this group is also marked by chastity. One can quibble that other factors may be at work here, but I have yet to find one critic who denies that the strong traditional family life in these groups is very central to their success. In the mean time, our universities are struck dumb, and are absolutely incapable of even addressing the issue of sexual morality, except on the laughable level of ensuring that plenty of rubbers are available. They are incapable of rising above hygiene and health in any public or official statement. This in itself is an index of the impotence that has overtaken the Western world as it has de-Christianized.^[xiv]

There is a certain fascination when the 80+ year old Hugh Hefner shows up on television these days. He always appears with a bevy of young "Hefner girls", "girls next door", young things who only too gladly populate his bed and pleasure him, to whatever degree a man his age is capable of being pleasured. Hefner is always treated with enormous deference and respect. He is never challenged, never asked a difficult question. He is treated like an icon and a great cultural shaper who has earned complete respect as a kind of "elder" to be venerated. This is a kind of index of our sexual debauchery. It would be fascinating to know just how much cultural destruction and how much human misery and degradation that man is responsible for. He, more than anyone, has made promiscuity respectable. [xv] But what is the outcome of the triumph of the vision of which he is the great public icon?

The most immediate index of his triumph is the rate of children being born out of wedlock. Almost thirty years ago, Daniel Patrick Monahan, then Senator from New York State, sounded an alarm in regard to the state of the black family in our cities. The illegitimacy rate was then about 25% and Monahan declared this a crisis of immense proportion. It was one that was of civilization destroying proportions. It is now the case that the illegitimacy rate in the white community is about what it was in the black community then, and the illegitimacy rate amongst blacks has more than doubled. The national illegitimacy rate is now approximately 36%. This is a sign of one of two things. Either it is a sign of how poorly we are giving sex education to our children, or it is a sign of the decline of marriage. But just how much more our children need to know about condoms and how to use them is an interesting question. To paraphrase Malcom Muggeridge, one can foresee a future when the entire educational time in our public schools is taken up with “sex education” and the illegitimacy rate will have risen to 100%. In a post-Cartesian age, marriage, which rests on a social and theological covenant, is left defenseless. What is consistent with our time is the constant clamoring for more rubbers and more education as to how to use them. It is all a technical question of plumbing and plumbing maintenance. A civilized order cannot bear this.[xvi]