To get at the heart of the matter . . .

To distill a solution down to its essence . . .

These phrases describe an inherent human proclivity. We are built to look for patterns and because we are so good at it, planes fly, cars go vroom, and computers work. Patterns and causation and correlation are much appreciated in the physical sciences and in everyday science . . . we can readily appreciate that if we water and fertilize our gardens, they are much more likely to produce a bumper crop.

Unfortunately, our talent for pattern recognition in the physical arena does not well transfer to the metaphysical. This no doubt has much to do with a dearth of education in critical thinking, philosophy, and ethics. Why, after all, waste time with that stuff when educators can better spend precious school hours instructing high school students on the nuances of putting condoms on bananas?

Take, for example, the following series of events/movements/attitudes.  What is the commonality among them?

1. David Letterman’s child rape “joke”
2. Playboy Magazine Online’s recent “hate f**k” list of conservative women
3. The “tea bagging” comment on CNN
4. Defense of abortion/the abortion industry
5. Voracious opposition to any sex ed based on abstinence
6. A high divorce rate
7. Calvin Klein’s New York threesome advertisement
8. Reality Television

At first blush, the common thread among the above events/movements/attitudes would seem obvious. However, I suspect many would initially answer incorrectly . . . if you answered ‘sex’, then I say you answered in error. The commonality, in my opinion, is not sex. Rather, it is the abuse and corruption of sex. Underlying even the abuse/corruption of sex is the ancient past time of man, hedonism. In my opinion, these are the underlying, metaphysical common denominators.

The late Pope John Paul II spent a great deal of his pontificate thinking and writing about the Theology of the Body. His writings are a sublime and beautiful exploration of human nature and what it actually means to be created in the image and likeness of God. In short, sex does indeed have a pleasurable, jolly good time component to it, but that is only a single aspect of it and, in and of itself, the jolly-aspect isn’t its purpose.

Hedonism is the underlying culprit behind why so many focus all their attention and energies on the jolly-aspect while ignoring every other facet of sex. In effect, hedonism leads to single-mindedness on one tree at the expense of the whole forest. When one and only one element is hyper-accentuated, abuse and corruption are sure to follow. By way of analogy, think for a few moments about a normal diet. A balanced diet becomes corrupted if it were to feature only dessert. If you ate only cookies, candy, cake, and ice cream, you’d end up fat, anemic, and malnourished . . . the effects of hyper-accentuating a single aspect (i.e. dessert) of a normal diet. But, hey! Cookies taste good, right? The hedonist answers, “Yes! So by all means, indulge!”

Sex has a grandiosity that is quite difficult to adequately do justice to in a single blog. Although God is pure spirit, human sex is a physical representation and expression of God’s divine nature. Sex is a material expression of the love of God. It is meant to humanly reflect Agape, the perfect, selfless love of the Trinity, which is the very atmosphere of the Kingdom of Heaven. Sex also signifies, in the human flesh, the oneness of God (He is 3 persons . . .  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit . . . in one divine nature). And, sex humanly expresses a prolific divine trait . . . life, for without sex, there can be no procreation. All of these other aspects . . . unconditional love, oneness, and life . . . are a part of sex precisely because we are created with the Imago Dei (i.e. created in the image and likeness of God).

When hedonism runs rampant and the pleasure aspects of sex are allowed to both trump and drown out every other aspect, corruption ensues, abuses follow, and the culture becomes coarsened in no time at all.  How else can an adolescent in an old man’s carcass such as David Letterman not be summarily run out of show biz for “joking” about the rape of a 14 year old child, or an 18 year old young woman for that matter? It is because sex has been made so thoroughly frivolous and in doing so, everything has been sexualized in a deformed manner from political discourse (i.e. “Tea Bagging”), to entertainment, to advertisement, to education, to children (witness Bratz Dolls for pre-teen girls . . . each one looks like it belongs in some red light district dancing on a pole).

Finally, in my opinion, liberals are the great proponents of hedonism. It is they who joke about tea bagging and raping. It is they who view traditional marriage as an enemy of “equal rights.” It is the liberals who balk at abstinence education and mock religious people as sexually repressed prudes. They are the ones that push for their version of sex ed at ever younger and younger ages. The liberals and progressives have taken a beautiful element of humanity and thoroughly corrupted it. Instead of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, they’ve done just the opposite. They’ve made a sow’s ear out of the beautiful and then jumped headlong into the sty . . . it should be no surprise then when the David Letterman’s of the world make light of child rape.