“Who am I to stop them?” Parents, teenagers, and sex

[Xantippe]

In that case you are committing a double sin by both taking the marital act out of context and also mutilating it for your own pleasure.

I’d argue that outside of marriage, it is not a marital act.

On a somewhat different tack, compare rape to rape plus contraception. Do we really wish to argue that adding contraception makes rape substantially worse? I don’t think almost anybody is going to want to make the argument that rape without contraception is substantially better than rape without contraception.

 

[Xantippe]

It’s the fact that it’s enabling sin by giving a false sense of no negative repercussions. It acts as a balm to an already darkened intellect.

That doesn’t really sound like what you were talking about earlier, when you said (speaking of fornication) that “Whether condoms are 100, 80, or 20% effective at biological protection they are still 100% deadly to the soul.”

I think you need to clarify whether contraception accompanying fornication is a stand-alone serious sin (“100% deadly to the soul”) or whether it’s just conditionally so (“enabling sin”/“balm to an already darkened intellect”). Those two views are actually quite different.

(Apologies for not having a firm handle on the terminology! I believe that there are some terms for what I’m trying to say.)

 

[Xantippe]

Not really. The idea of bodily autonomy is very crucial to this conversation. It’s funny, though because you are on the side of “I can tell Timmy he MUST hug creepy Uncle Melvin” but at the same time say “I can tell my child they will not have sex”

Going back to this, one of the things we want to avoid is a situation where the child thinks that the governing rule is, “do whatever adult authority figure says.”

 

[Constantin]

If premarital sex and condoms are really that deadly to the soul, how come civilization didn’t break down long ago? Ok, not everything’s alright, there are a lot of families ripped apart and marriages failing. But still, there are many couples who had premarital sex and used condoms and seem to be living happily and without larger problems. Strange, isn’t it?

 

[Xanthippe_Voorhees]

If premarital sex and condoms are really that deadly to the soul, how come civilization didn’t break down long ago? Ok, not everything’s alright, there are a lot of families ripped apart and marriages failing. But still, there are many couples who had premarital sex and used condoms and seem to be living happily and without larger problems. Strange, isn’t it?

Not really. Being ignorant of the disease doesn’t make it any less real. In time, it all comes back.

 

[Constantin]

I don’t know. A disease without any symptoms is health. It’s easy to say that in time it all comes back when this is hard to verify. I know a lot of couples who did not live according to Catholic teaching and nevertheless are happy - for all I can tell.

 

[Bruised_Reed]

A disease without any symptoms is health.

I can’t think of a worse analogy. Some of the most dangerous diseases are often asymptomatic, and some of those are contagious.

 

[Xanthippe_Voorhees]

I don’t know. A disease without any symptoms is health. It’s easy to say that in time it all comes back when this is hard to verify. I know a lot of couples who did not live according to Catholic teaching and nevertheless are happy - for all I can tell.

Really? We know many things now that we didn’t know in the past. Smoking used to be considered healthy. As late as the 60s–and even 70’s–doctors encouraged women to smoke when pregnant to keep babies small.

The social implications of contraception are way, way too recent to justify participation or declare victory.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

I know a lot of couples who did not live according to Catholic teaching and nevertheless are happy - for all I can tell.

One of the big lessons I had to learn in this life about sin was that God doesn’t always make you miserable or make you pay the piper for it at the time. That’s movie-plot stuff. You can sin right and left for years and nothing bad will necessarily happen to you. So whether a couple ends up happy or not is not the litmus test for perfection. We’ve had happy couples in our family who lived together for years before marriage or conceived kids out of wedlock. It’s good that these stories had happy endings, but it doesn’t mean it was a wonderful thing to be doing at the time.

I may very well think the Church needs to rethink some of its positions on sexual matters. This might even happen someday. But I can’t stand here and say something is not a sin because I think it should be okay, or that it’s not a sin because it worked out happy for me when maybe it worked out awful for Couple B.

 

[kinghenry17]

No sex allowed and if need be, end the relationship for them. Parents today have lost their minds and are actually gencouraging their young kids to be LGBT. You are not a parent and are harming your kid

 

[ATraveller]

deadly to the soul, how come civilization didn’t break down long ago?

Those are two separate things.
If knowing it’s a sin and a person is unrepentant, it’s hell. Not hell on earth but hell hell.
The wide availability of contraceptives and it’s non-medical use have made sexual immorality more prevalent. The false security of them has resulted many unintended pregnancies and more STDs and drug resistant forms of them. Premarital sex is generally associated with poorer relationship quality too.
But even if pre-marital sex wasn’t associated with such things, as Christians, by giving in, it’s a rejection of God and His ways. It’s an abuse of sexuality and a mockery of marriage.

The social implications of contraception are way, way too recent to justify participation or declare victory.

The biggest mistake Protestants made was our endorsement of artificial birth control. Some of us are waking up to this serious error.

 

[UbiCaritas]

This.

In my extended family, there was a case where several siblings were sexually molested by a very close friend of their family. The kids had been taught that if a Grownup said “you must do X,” then they MUST do X, or they were disobedient and would be spanked. Period. “Never ask why” was literally a rule in their house. And since Uncle Steve (name changed) was practically family, they HAD to hug/kiss him. And if he wanted to touch them, he got to, because he was an adult and he said so. It didn’t matter that they didn’t want him to touch them–they Had To Be Polite. Throw in a strong family culture of “any mention of your private areas or anything remotely relating to sex is immodest, sinful and shameful,” and…well, while even their parents would have said that of course sexual abuse of a child was wrong, when Uncle Steve started taking them into his bedroom and doing other kinds of touching that they weren’t okay with, how were they supposed to go to their parents and say, “These things are happening and I’m not okay with them” when it had been made clear from day one that a) the kid didn’t have a right to not be okay with being touched by Uncle Steve, and b) so much as saying “bottom” would get them in trouble anyway because mentioning such things is immodest and disgusting, and in any case, they shouldn’t know anything about That Kind of Thing?

Learning to follow social norms is, indeed, important, but they don’t always have to involve close physical touch. I would never require a child to hug someone, while I would require a child, given sufficient intellectual development, to say, “How do you do?”, shake hands, and so on.

 

[TheAmazingGrace]

“…and kids took those expectations seriously.” Except for the ones that didn’t.

 

[Constantin]

Sorry, but if there are no symptoms ever, a disease cannot be dangerous. If it doesn’t do any harm, you cannot even call it a disease.

 

[Constantin]

The church declared contraception an evil, therefore it must be harmful. If reality shows that it may not be so harmful after all - at least to some people - well, that’s a problem because it could severely impact general credibility of church teaching, with a lot of possible implications. That’s why stout Catholics dig in their heels that much when it comes to contraception.