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Pew Research
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“Pew found that 57 percent of U.S. adults who identify as Christians believe that sex in a committed relationship is sometimes or always acceptable, while 49 percent think that casual sex (two consenting adults not in a committed relationship) is sometimes or always acceptable.” - C.Leaders

Discussion

Wed, 09/02/20

If it’s truly a committed relationship, why isn’t a ring on it? Except for the reality of child support (really one of our arguments for marriage!), precisely what commitment do unmarried couples possess? Mores change, yes, but I think we need to challenge the notion that unmarried couples can be routinely described as “committed”, because that falsehood seems to be a huge part of defending the lie that premarital sex can be acceptable.

Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.

Thu, 09/03/20

My favorite quotation on that term:

“But I do suggest that the facts are otherwise. “It is in the nature of love to bind itself”; vows are love’s native language. Love that is mute in the language of promises, though it may be called love, is not love but something else. Even the medieval courtly lovers, who glamorized the love of women not their wives, paid backhanded homage to the fact, for they delighted in extravagant vows. Those few of them who really understood what they were doing made a vow almost as extravagant as the marriage vow itself: to love their lovers chastely. Compared with these great fools, we moderns are pikers. Our foolishness is of the more clownish variety that says, “I have a committed relationship,” even though the whole point of the relationship is avoiding commitment.”

See https://isi.org/intercollegiate-review/what-everybody-ought-to-know-abo….

I may be remembering a similar quotation from his book The Meaning of Sex. But I found it in the above online excerpt, too.

Michael Osborne
Philadelphia, PA