Mister Scratch wrote:Coggins7 wrote:I
think the fact that the "other way exits" provides much wiggle room. It is much easier to have sexual gratification by having many sexual partners/girlfriends/mistresses than to be plurally married. Obviously sexual gratification, which seems to be the primary antiMormon logic, is not the reason for plural marriage.
This is an excellent point, and one that has always intrigued me re the more liberal anti-Mormon critics. Since, in essence, the crux of the sexual revolution was the ennoblement and glorification of serial monogamy over monogamy and traditional concepts of chastity, I've always found it a bit odd that liberal critics of plural marriage would be so exercised about the practice, given that polygamy, is, from a purely behavioral perspective, cutting to the chase.
This isn't correct. The "crux of the sexual revolution" was to free up choices about sex from the rigid template laid out by the religious right. The religious right describes a sexual world that consists entirely of married men and women having sex in the missionary position. The real "crux of the sexual revolution" was to point out that there is a whole marvelous, beautiful, exotic, diverse, exciting world out there beyond the Church-prescribed method of sex. The neat little trick performed by religion (as anyone who has read Foucault will know) is to not only regulate sex, but to regulate
discussion of it. This becomes transparently obvious when one
reads the recent fittingly named MADposts by juliann & et. al. Orwell was prescient indeed.
Actually, the crux of the sexual revolution was an antinomian revolt against the general Judeo/Christian moral template per se. It was an attempt to legitimate a pansexual hedonism (combined with neo-primitivist, neo-Pantheist attitudes and beliefs about nature) that recalled practices and attitudes common in certain Pagan cultures of the past but that had been dormant or submerged in western Christian culture for centuries. What we really had, beginning in the late Sixties, was a eclectic revival of the decadent popular Pagan fertility cults of the ancient world, complete both with the worship of sexual pleasure and human sacrifice (convenience abortion) to ensure the continuation of the material life and circumstances that allow such worship (and to circumvent the consequences of some of the practices attendant to such worship of the self).
The sexual revolution was as much an upsurge of an antinomian, anti-western, Dionysian animus toward Judeo/Christian norms of behavior as it was an "anti-industrial revolution", as Ayn Rand termed it.
It was the beginning of the end of western civilization, and the prelude to the Second Coming of Christ, the only thing that will preempt the full devolution into chaos of the entire planet and all of its peoples as these ideologies continue to metastasize throughout the various nations and peoples of the earth. There are other Satanic philosophies connected with the Great and Abominable Church of course, all of them destructive and malignant, but the "sexual revolution", really just a cyclic rebirth of certain older Pagan sexual attitudes, is one of the most profound and imposing in its effects upon the culture.