When I wrote that the homosexual community should take responsibility for its sexual behavior rather than blame the spread of AIDS on meth users who don't use condoms, I expected someone would ask me what right I had to address gays at all.
Instead, a former boyfriend has emerged who knows exactly what right I have to to address sexually compulsive drug users—and he accuses me of hypocrisy.
He's someone with whom I had what I considered a "mature" relationship back in late 1992, when I was 24, meaning that we weren't in love, but had sex—just like grown-ups. This was my year 7 B.C. (Before Christianity), during the dark period I described to The New York Observer's George Gurley, when I was on antidepressants that did little to solve my crisis of existence.
The letter-writer and I dated for less than three months, and I have not seen him since. The Observer piece brought me back into his sights and caused him to find The Dawn Patrol.
He writes :
You look great, you are off the pharmaceuticals, and, judging by your publicity, the sex dependency is gone, too. All of that is great!
If it's all Jesus's doing, that's great, too, though I personally feel that the kernel of truth in all religions remains a constant.
What does bother me a little is your lack of charity for those whose risky behaviors didn't change the same day that yours did....
[Gay men] will not give up the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake without an epiphany, and such epiphany will not derive from abstinence campaigns. Until every member of each at-risk group reaches whatever realization fate holds for them, it is only humane to work toward reduced risk.
After describing his own experience among meth users as a teen, he writes:
[I] learned that these people are in a helpless grip. They come in innocent, and are literally possessed by the drug....
I suggest that when you attempt to tell black, poor, addicted, gay people that abstinence is their sole salvation, you are not at one with the kernel of truth I mentioned earlier....
Fifteen years ago, when I met you, you were young, talented, white, comfortably situated, and living a life of chemical dependency and sexual desperation. If you were to go back in time and speak to your young self, I doubt if you could have found the right words to end the risks you were taking.
The cynicism here—masquerading as pragmatism—is so thick you could cut it with a knife.
I'm not even going to address the reference to blacks and poor people as having more difficulty with abstinence than the rest of us. That reeks of
Margaret Sanger's fearmongering rants about poor blacks being unable to control themselves, reproducing like "human weed."
"Until every member of each at-risk group reaches whatever realization fate holds for them, it is only humane to work toward reduced risk." This is libertarianism at its most soul-denying. The implication is that people are going to destroy themselves; therefore they should be given the least destructive means to do so. This is the rationale behind legalizing prostitution and hard drugs.
A healthy society treats certain behaviors as being more acceptable than others, so that those who are behaving in a way that harms themselves or others are forced to deal with the unpleasant consequences of their behavior. Changing the paradigm from one of correcting dangerous behavior to merely reducing risk writes off an entire class of people, leaving them to sink deeper into the pit of addiction and disease.
Does anyone think that sexually transmitted disease among teens has decreased since Planned Parenthood increased its efforts to give them sex-positive education?
Think again. Does anyone think that because more men and women are receiving contraception through Planned Parenthood, the organization is performing fewer abortions?
Think again.Lives are not saved by reducing risk. Lives are saved by
eliminating risk—even if it means hurting some people's feelings by telling them society will not condone their efforts to harm themselves and others.
Some people are kleptomaniacs, yet our society is not so sensitive to them that we teach kids in school, "If you can't avoid stealing something, just don't steal anything too big." We advocate abstinence from stealing, and we view kleptomania as a disorder. Likewise, society has a compelling interest to advocate that children abstain from sex outside marriage, and to treat premarital sex as disordered behavior.
I know exactly what I would say if I were to go back in time and speak to my younger self. I would say the same things that I would say to young women today who engage in premarital sex—what I said to myself at age 31 when I looked at what I had accomplished in my single life.
Do you want to get married?I have no answer for the single person who does not wish to marry. That's not my ministry. But I know that even when I was having sex with this man whom I did not love, I greedily, hungrily, ate up everything he gave me that even slightly hinted at what I really wanted: real affection.
I sought out sex because I believed I was not worthy of love, and I believed that I had to grab what I could. I stopped seeking sex when I realized that my hunger for the substitute had worn away my ability to recognize and accept the real thing.
The big lie of "Sex and the City" and all our culture's various glorifications of casual sex is that they tell people that the fake thing will lead to the real one. That's like saying that learning to detect the taste of Ripple will teach you how to discern a merlot. It doesn't work that way. You have to cleanse your palate.
Jesus said, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance."
The sin of our age is that, rather than admit that we are sick with moral blindness, we choose instead to change our definition of health.
"If you were blind, you would have no sin," Jesus said to the Pharisees, "but now you say, 'We see.' Therefore your sin remains."
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