EVERY DERB IS SACRED: Sorry, couldn’t resist…. In a generally good column on priestly celibacy and American culture, John Derbyshire manages to press two of my buttons: He prettifies the sexual revolution and he thinks “Every Sperm Is Sacred” is pro-Protestant. No way, Josemaria.

First, while I can get behind all his criticisms of the Victorians (especially the fact that the burdens of sex fell disproportionately on women–and he doesn’t even mention the legality of marital rape, or restrictions on women’s ability to own property), Derbyshire acts as if the sexual revolution was something out of Chaucer or Shakespeare–a new frankness about sexual temptation and heartbreak. If only. I really don’t get how a putative trad-conservative can be so cavalier about a “revolution” that resulted in the death of over a million unborn children a year (16,600 at 20 weeks or more in 1997, by the way) and countless broken marriages and broken hearts. And once again, the burdens fall on women: the choice between childbearing and abortion; the frantic pregnancy scare during finals; the heavy emotional investment in a deeply unstable relationship; the pressure to have sex to prove you’re not a prude; the thwarting of (most) women’s desire to give themselves fully to another person. All these things cause men to suffer as well, but it’s just naive to think that the suffering is equal or that women are the beneficiaries. I have no desire to return to the Victorian age. But women deserve much better than what we got in the 1890s or the 1990s.

On a lighter note, it’s funny that Derb cites “Every Sperm Is Sacred” as an anti-Catholic sketch. I’ve always found it more crypto-Catholic than anything else. There’s the Protestant husband, pontificating about his Right As A Protestant to wear all kinds of exotic condoms, and there’s his frustrated, longing wife wondering why they never actually have sex; meanwhile, next door, the Catholic world teems with babies and the couple seems to be getting it on every other day. I mean, at least the Catholic couple seems to enjoy messin’ around with one another!

So to my mind, “Every Sperm Is Sacred” is an unintentional verification of the fact that the Catholic “theology of the body” is much more romantic and sexually fulfilling than a contracepted culture. (We should start a campaign to refer to Natural Family Planning as “the H&C; method,” for Honeymoon and Courtship, since that’s the real rhythm in the “rhythm method”…)