The Privacy Paradox

I have been musing on the fact that the adoption of the notion that 'what goes on in the bedroom is private, and solely the concern of those involved' leads inexorably to the widespread availability of pornography, public displays of sexuality, and the drive for enforced approval of aberrant sexual behaviour and a general collapse of sexual morality.

That is, perhaps, only an apparent paradox. 

It seems to me that society has a choice. We can either have agreed public rules about sexual behaviour, providing a framework within which personal privacy is maintained; or we can privatise morality, leading to a free-for-all in a public sexual market place.

The former system is one which honours marriage, recognising that society has a legitimate interest in supporting stable families and in discouraging behaviour that militates against them; the latter is the one we now have, where sex is for sale (in all manner of ways), deviant minorities both recruit and clamour for public approval, and our children, rather than being protected and prepared for their difficult task of raising stable families, are sexualised in the interests of other peoples' commercial and political desires. 

In some cases, this sexualisation is done with the best of intentions (eg those misguided people who pursue 'sex education' in the schools), but the results are catastrophic. To take just the most recent example that has hit the headlines, if the problems described in this article are only a tenth as grave as presented, this still represents a terrible human tragedy.

Sex is naturally private: it is not something that should be viewed, or shared around, or bought or sold, or paraded through the streets or the media.

Sex education should be an education in chastity, and the other moral virtues, as those are what our children need to raise stable families - and indeed to have the best chance of happy and fulfilling lives.

But to guarantee that, we need a public morality that recognises both virtue and the true nature and ends of sex: the procreative and the unitive aspects of which the Church is, and always will be, the champion.