Coffin Opens Conference On Church and Morality

"It's easy to marry the girl you love, but hard to love the girl you marry," William S. Coffin, Chaplain of Yale University, told a Divinity School conference on "The Church and the New Morality" yesterday.

Calling for a return to more meaningful married relation, Coffin emphasized that "more than ever we need to be involved with each other as persons, to enhance rather than bypass each other's personalities."

"More than ever we need not organic relations between male and female, but personal relations between man and woman," he told a Lowell Lecture Hall audience of 200.

Coffin said that he condoned premarital sexual intercourse for an engaged couple who are deeply involved with and committed to one another. "The Bible certainly finds a lot of other things worse," he quipped.

Many people marry to find sexual satisfaction, Coffin claimed. "They enter marriage not because they are prepared to give, but because they desperately need to take. Good marriages are therefore between those who can get along without each other," he stated.

Coffin also noted that some college students use sex to find a meaningful relationship and a sense of intimacy. Not only do they not find this, he said, but they become even more lonely than before.

But meaningless sex lives are only symptoms of a sick culture, Coffin added. We try to lose our loneliness and boredom in sex because our superficial culture "distracts and pulls us apart more than it gives us meaning," he explained.

Coffin also criticized the academic world as "sterile and routinized"--one where "we talk of problem but don't live with them."

During the second part of the one-day conference, Robert W. White, professor of Clinical Psychology, examined the role of today's youth in bringing about the present revolution in sexual mores

Children Criticize

The young no longer regard their elders as competent authorities concerning sex, he stated. "Children used to be a captive audience of their parents," White said, "but now they are a thinking, criticizing audience."

White characterized today's youth as highly intolerant or hypocrisy and dishonesty in human relations and feelings. These attitudes are perfectly expressed by the vehemence with which they have attacked civil rights problems, he said

Tracing the changing role of parents during this century, White explained that Freudian psychology came into vogue in the '30's. Young parents then became extremely conscious that any mistakes in child-rearing would make their children neurotic, he said.

He added that Freud's idea that too much sexual repression was bad, spurred parents to give children more freedom