Connecting the Dots
I think I have been underestimating the power of sex. Let’s consider the holy trinity of love, sex and marriage. Because I’m gay until recently I only focused on putting love & marriage together. Anybody familiar with the way gay men act, knows that in the gay community frequently sex has nothing to do with emotions or commitment. Sex between men is a simple act of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. That’s where conservatives get their panties in a knot. Sex between a man and a woman takes negotiation, give a little to get a little. There’s the rub. Gays get lots of free and easy sex while for straight men it comes at a price.
The other day at work in the lunchroom I saw an older coworker holding hands with her husband. From past observations I know the woman is very religious. Then it hit me. She gets to have church and sex together. As an excommunicated gay man I had never connected religion and erotic that way before. The thought of sex with a woman doesn’t do anything for me, but the message I get from larger society is that sex with a woman feels very good. Now if you combined the emotional high of religious ecstasy with sexual ecstasy, you just couldn’t get any higher than that. Marriage frequently is a religious rite. Which puts sex under the church umbrella. Then after marriage, all societal messages and blessings are saying go for the gusto. In my life never having connected church and sex, I think I’ve been cheated.
Now let’s expand the religion-sex connection a bit. The way I understand it, suicide bombers make the sacrifice on the promise of sex in the afterlife. After all, what’s the point of having 72 virgins if you don’t get to deflower them? In Mormon theology, people are eventually resurrected with fully functioning bodies. And the faithful ones benefiting from Heavenly Father’s presence go on to become like Him, as gods themselves peopling other worlds with their own spirit children. Now just how do you suppose those spirit children come about? Could it be sex? In other words, obedient Mormons get to have sex forever; and not all with the same wife.
Maybe the way I connected love and marriage without sex can be twisted to an analogy of why straight men oppose gay marriage. Straight men, the power brokers in today’s world, having connected marriage and sex, are repulsed by the thought of marriage being represented by two men having sex. And don’t mention polyamory. They aren’t even going there. Maybe polygamy, but not polyamory.
Yes, I think I’ve been underestimating the power of sex. Life experience leads me to conclude that decisions are made emotionally then rationalized logically. Because some people can’t conceive of themselves in a same-gender marriage or polyamorous arrangement, they seek to deny those relationships to all others.