It Goeth The Way of Chivalry

Aclose friend of mine has been living with his high school sweetheart out of wedlock for nearly three years now. Not long ago I asked him if he and his girlfriend had plans to marry in the near future. I was taken aback by his matter- of-fact response: "No," he said simply, "we don't feel there's any need to rush into something that important."

My friend's reply was a subtle comment on the degree to which American attitudes toward sex and the institution of marriage have changed. At one point in the not-too-distant past, sex was seen as an outcome of marriage and not as its precondition. For many, the traditional chronology has become inverted. I am not so naive as to think that pre-marital sex never existed before the advent of the "sexual revolution," but if we are to believe the statistics, the incidence of pre-marital relations in earlier times was at least the exception and not the general rule.

On television and on college campuses across the nation, liberal sexual mores typified by casual, non-committal and ephemeral relationships, have had the effect of diminishing the sanctity of sex. The 20-something actors on prime time television sitcoms now unabashedly discuss their sexual relationships before their young audiences in the way that the children on "The Cosby Show" once took pleasure in speaking of simpler, more innocent relationships. Along with so much else that has fallen prey to "progressivism," there are indications that chastity, not unlike its cousin chivalry, is passe.

The incidence of infanticide reminds us of the grisly consequences that may result when teens engage in sexual intercourse and are not mature enough to handle the responsibility which comes with being a parent.

This October, 15-year old Judith Martinez of Queens, N.Y. admitted to giving birth to a child as she sat on the toilet. When the baby had stopped moving in the toilet water, Martinez allegedly wrapped the baby in a plastic bag and put it in an alley outside.

This June, Melissa Drexler of Ocean County, N.J. was charged with murder when, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, an autopsy found that her six-pound baby boy had "died from asphyxia due to manual strangulation or obstruction of the mouth or nose." In the proceeding investigation it was revealed that Drexler had given birth to the baby at her high school prom and then disposed of him in the trash.

In November of 1996, college first-years Amy Grossberg and Brian C. Peterson Jr. were charged with murder after allegedly consigning their newborn son to a dumpster outside the room they had occupied at a Comfort Inn in Delaware.

These cases attest to the fact that while teenagers are certainly endowed with a natural biological ability to produce children, this comes with no guarantee that they will be emotionally or physically capable of rearing them.

What is striking about the arguments of those who seek to justify premarital sex is the manner in which they have framed their discourse. The terms invoked by defenders of progressive sexual liberties give teenagers an excuse to have sex before marriage as long as it is an intellectual pursuit. Pre-marital sex, like illicit drug use, is sometimes defended by an appeal to the value of "experimentation." Experimentation gives these activities the guise of objectivity and rationality so that in opposing them, we appear to be taking issue with nothing less than the quest for knowledge itself.

The high risks of seemingly safe "sexual activity" were exhibited in the wake of the recent fiasco at Stanford University in which five different brands of faulty condoms were recalled after being distributed freely to the student body by the campus Student Health Peer Resource Center. The fact that even married couples could theoretically have been affected by the faulty condoms misses the point of the argument for pre-marital sexual abstinence: While accidental and unintended pregnancies occur in marriages all the time, those children are usually brought into the world with significant advantages (such as a stable environment in which they can be physically and emotionally nourished and protected) over their less fortunate counter-parts born to parents out-of-wedlock.

The distribution of condoms to high school and, in some cases, even middle school student populations, seems even harder to justify than condom distribution on college campuses. We should be making the case to high school students that the test of true love lies in the desire to get married. If two people truly love each other, they will be committed to marrying each other and abstaining from sex until that time when each can guarantee the commitment of fidelity and monogamy to the other.

In my sister's public high school, one organization gave students "chastity cards" the size of business cards which conveniently fit into wallets in the places that condoms ordinarily might. Inscribed on the back, above a line on which the bearer was asked to symbolically attest to his or her commitment, were written the following words:

"Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to myself, my family, my friends, those I date, my future spouse and children, that I will live a chaste life while a single person and will enter into marriage committed and faithful to my spouse for life."

Some will call me an antediluvian sentimentalist, but I cannot help thinking, especially in light of the Stanford incident, that giving 15-year-olds cards is an immeasurably more moral project, and in many ways a much safer one, than giving them condoms and sending the messagethat sexual promiscuity is fine when practiced "safely."

In "Duties Toward the Body in Respect of Sexual Impulse," a portion of his Lectures on Ethics, Immanuel Kant made a powerful argument against sexual relations out-of-wedlock. The argument is all the more hard-hitting when one reflects that Kant is considered to be a father of modern liberalism. Suggesting that the rights of sexual partners to each other could only be secured by marital commitment, Kant argued that "there must be a basis for restraining our freedom in the use we make of our inclinations so that they conform to the principles of morality." This is at odds with the credo of our generation which seems to be driven by the search for immediate gratification with no limits upon sexual freedoms or base inclinations.

Changes in our sexual mores have not all been for the worse. The fact that we are more able to discuss sexually transmitted diseases and other aspects of human sexuality openly, for example, is beneficial even if the new spirit of openness is the result of some regrettable changes in sexual practices. In the good old days, we may have spoken more eliptically about the birds and the bees, but children were experimenting with sex less than they are now and divorce and teen-age pregnancy rates were similarly lower.

In all the talk about democracy's discontents, the end of civic virtue, and the dissolution of the American family unit, chastity has largely been left out of the mainstream solutions which have been suggested for ending our national civic malaise. To the extent that pre-marital sexual promiscuity is correlated with high teen-age pregnancy and divorce rates, a greater emphasis upon the merits of chastity may help to alleviate some of the most pressing social ills resulting from our national loss of innocence.

Justin C. Danilewitz '99 is a Crimson editor living in Adams House.