The admonition “just say no” is an effective rhetorical device in that it is brief, clear and memorable. Since I oppose the abstinence-only sex-ed movement that “just say no” represents, my immediate reaction to their slogan is to say “just say no to abstinence.”

March 4, 2007

Rev. Paul Beckel

First Universalist Unitarian Church ~ www.uuwausau.org

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life,

 or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

INTRODUCTION

The admonition “just say no” is an effective rhetorical device in that it is brief, clear and memorable. Since I oppose the abstinence-only sex-ed movement that “just say no” represents, my immediate reaction to their slogan is to say “just say no to abstinence.”

But let’s go deeper than this today. Because abstinence and sexual restraint are certainly not bad things in themselves. On the contrary, one of my heroes, Mahatma Gandhi, refused the request of one of my other heroes, Margaret Sanger, when she asked him to endorse the use of contraceptives. He said “no.”

“Just say No to Abstinence” would make a catchy bumper sticker, but let’s go deeper than this today and talk about the dignity of each of us involved in these questions. What does it say about the dignity of the educator and of the student, when information is shared, or withheld? What does it say about the dignity of the lawmaker or those subject to the law, when the one in power is out of touch with the needs and the experience of those for whom the laws are made? So today we will consider Law, sexuality, and self-control, Gandhi, Sanger, and The Cider House Rules.

GATHERING HYMN                        With Heart and Mind               #300

GANDHI BIO[1]

Mahatma Gandhi was born in India in 1869, about the same time this church was first organized!  When he was only 13 years old Gandhi was married!  That was the custom – his parents and his wife’s parents made the decision about who and when they would marry.  He very much loved his wife, Kasturbai, but later in his life he said that the custom of child marriage was not a very good idea!  He was not afraid to learn and to change his mind.  In fact he said that he learned a great deal from his wife. 

For another custom in that time and place was that a wife had to do whatever her husband told her to do.  She would even have to ask his permission to visit friends or go to worship at her Hindu temple.  Well, Kasturbai did not think that this was right, and she often disagreed with him.  Gandhi said later that her firm but calm resistance helped him to understand that this was the best way to persuade people.

When he was 19, Gandhi sailed to England to become a lawyer.  There he also learned the fancy social manners and dress of the British.  He also read the Bhagavad Gita (the Hindu scriptures) as well as the Christian New Testament.

After he became a lawyer, he moved to South Africa. He was now a professional, and well-dressed, and he certainly thought he was as good as anyone.  But one of the first things to happen to him in South Africa is that he was thrown off a train for riding in the first class section.  The law, then, was that only whites could ride in first class.

Gandhi stayed in South Africa for 20 years working for fair treatment for Indians. For example, he fought against the law that stated that only Christian marriages were legal.

Then he moved back to India, to help to free his country from rule by the British.  He put every ounce of his energy into this goal.  He gave up all of life’s comforts.  He lived in a very simple house, ate no meat, and often fasted. He wore just a simple linen cloth, and he spun his own thread for his clothes.  He encouraged all of his followers to spin cloth so that India would not be dependent upon buying imported cloth from the British.

Even after becoming immensely influential among his people, he lived the life of a poor person ... and he tried hard to change the Hindu custom in which the lowest people in society were considered “untouchable.”  He practiced what he taught -- and even invited an “untouchable” family to live with him.

It was a hard struggle, with many setbacks, but he would not stop until he had achieved independence.  One of his most famous actions was when he was 60 years old.  He led a march of 200 miles to the sea -- in order to make salt from the sea water.  He did this in protest of the British law that said only the government could make salt.  But Gandhi openly defied the law and led 100,000 people into prison for breaking the law!

Even after this it was 18 more years before India gained independence from Britain.  All this time Gandhi tried to live as humble and productive a life as he could. This was not just a philosophical statement. He wanted to live in a way that would help him to control his passions, which could have erupted as intense anger at the oppressive practices of the British. He wanted to show that the frustration that the Indian people were feeling could be channeled effectively instead of turning to violence against those who so cavalierly made the laws for them.

Gandhi was 79 when he was assassinated during a period of intense violence between Indian Hindus and Indian Muslims.  But his teachings and inspiration are alive today. His methods were passed on to Martin Luther King, Jr., who used Gandhi’s strategy of nonviolent-resistance-to-unjust-laws. It seems that these direct but peaceful methods will always have relevance for us.

SANGER[2]

Our next reading is from a speech by Margaret Sanger, founder of the Birth Control Federation of America, which later to become Planned Parenthood. Sanger, who gave this speech around the country in the 1920’s, was, like Gandhi, jailed for her activities.

“The sex instinct in the human race is too strong to be bound by the dictates of any church. ...The teachings of the Church have driven sex underground into secret channels, strengthened the conspiracy of silence, concentrated men’s thoughts upon the “lusts of the body,” have sown, cultivated, and reaped a crop of bodily and mental diseases, and developed a society congenitally and almost hopelessly unbalanced.  How is any progress to be made, how is any human expression or education possible when women and men are taught to combat and resist their natural impulses and to despise their bodily functions?

More than ever in history, women need to realize that nothing can ever come to us from another.  Everything we attain we must owe to ourselves.  Our own spirit must vitalize it.   Our own heart must feel it.  For we are not passive machines. We are not to be lectured, guided, and molded this way or that.  We are alive and intelligent, we women, no less than men, and we must awaken to the essential realization that we are living beings, endowed with will, choice, comprehension, and that every step in life must be our own initiative.

GANDHI

Margaret Sanger sought an interview with Gandhi in 1936 because she was concerned about the explosive population growth in India, along with that country’s dire poverty.  She knew that support from Gandhi on birth control would have an enormous influence on the citizens of India. 

Gandhi shared Sanger’s concerns.  But, having taken a personal vow of celibacy 30 years earlier, he could not agree with her proposed methods.  While extending his very gracious hospitality and warmth to Sanger, he firmly stated his position on abstinence:

“I know from my own experience that as long as I looked upon my wife carnally, we had no real understanding.  Our love did not reach a high plane.  There was affection between us always, but we came closer and closer the more we (or rather I) became restrained.  There never was want of restraint on the part of my wife. 

Very often she would show restraint, but she rarely resisted me although she showed disinclination very often.  All the time I wanted carnal pleasure I could not serve her.  The moment I bade goodbye to a life of carnal pleasure our whole relationship became spiritual.  Lust died and love reigned instead....”

SANGER

Having served for years as a nurse, Margaret Sanger met a patient – a young immigrant named Sadie Sachs – who asked her doctor for contraception and was told to have her husband sleep on the roof.  Three months later, Sanger left Sadie’s side, unable to watch as her patient lay dying from a self-induced abortion. She described what she called her “Great Awakening:”

“I looked out my window and down upon the dimly lighted city.  Its pains and griefs crowded in upon me...women writhing in travail to bring forth little babies; the babies themselves naked and hungry, wrapped in newspapers to keep them from the cold; six-year-old children with pinched, pale wrinkled faces, old in concentrated wretchedness, pushed into gray and fetid cellars, crouching on stone floors, their small scrawny hands scuttling through rags... I could bear it no longer....

“As I stood there the darkness faded.  The sun came up and threw its reflection over the house tops.  It was the dawn of a new day in my life....

“I was resolved to seek out the root of the evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were as vast as the sky.”

OFFERTORY

REFLECTIONS

Last month New Jersey joined Vermont, California, and Massachusetts to offer marriage or a nearly-equivalent legal status to same-sex couples.

Clearly the legal battles over privacy and equality on matters of sexuality will always be with us. From the highly visible and inflammatory debates over abortion to the still smoldering controversy between the Unitarian Universalist Association and the Boy Scouts, who have successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that, as a private organization, they have the right to exclude gays and atheists from their ranks.

Who should make the rules regarding private behavior?  It was only 42 years ago that the U.S. Supreme Court decisively ruled that states could not prohibit the use of contraceptives!

The rubber condom – the first reliable, affordable form of birth control -- was developed by Charles Goodyear in 1837. Margaret Sanger opened the first public birth control clinic in the U.S. in 1916.  After 9 days it was shut down and Sanger was jailed.  When she was released she opened the clinic again, only to have it shut down again within a few weeks.

Sanger also published a newspaper called the Woman Rebel, which ran afoul of postal regulations against obscene literature.  In another paper, her column, “What every girl should know,” talked frankly about sexuality and reproduction.  When the Post Office censor banned her column, the space was left blank, but the Headline remained: “What every girl should know – nothing, by order of the U.S. Post Office.”

As of 1929, laws in 29 states banned the distribution of contraceptives.  But Connecticut’s law, which also banned the use of contraceptives, was among the most severe. Sanger was at the center of the first of many campaigns in the Connecticut legislature to get the law changed.  During one debate in the legislature the Catholic Bishop argued against contraception not only “to preserve the natural law” – that sex was made only for procreation – but also “to preserve the race.”  He argued that unless they had four children per family, “...the races from Northern Europe...the finest type of people, are doomed to extinction.”[3]

By the 1930’s enforcement of these laws was lax.  You could even get “preventives” through the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Clinics were opening in many American cities...but they were still careful to follow such rules as only serving married women, living with their husbands.  In their most defensive posture, clinics would emphasize their service to women who already had children, or whose lives would be threatened by a pregnancy. 

Periodically clinics would be shut down, but when an attempt to overturn the law finally made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court simply ruled that there was no danger that the law would ever be enforced.  Not till 1965 was a decisive statement made by the Supreme Court that bans on contraceptives violated a couple’s right to privacy.

This crucial language was refined in a 1972 ruling.  When a man was arrested for distributing contraceptive foam to non-married people (even though the same product was freely available on drugstore shelves)... the court affirmed the right of the individual to be free from government intrusion in the decision of whether or not to bear a child. The Roe v. Wade case, affirming a woman’s right to abortion, came the following year.

But how far would the courts take this right to privacy?  Certainly not so far as to protect gay citizens.  A 1986 U.S. Supreme Court ruling stated that Georgia’s anti-sodomy laws are constitutional.  To which Justice Harry Blackmun wrote, in a scathing dissent: “Depriving individuals of the right to choose for themselves how to conduct their intimate relationships poses a far greater threat to the values most deeply rooted in our Nation’s history than tolerance of nonconformity could ever do.”

--

I don’t know if Gandhi would have understood. Would he look at us today and ask, “Why all the fuss over sexuality?”? But the values that Gandhi was espousing were not simply, “Just say No.”  He was not advocating self-depravation just for the sake of self-depravation.  Gandhi’s doctrine had a distinctly political motive – and it was not to make everyone celibate.  Gandhi’s underlying motivation was teaching self-control and conquering of the passions so that his followers would have the discipline to withstand the frustration of a decades-long struggle ...without resorting to violence against their oppressors.  His goal was to ensure that they would have the satyagraha, or soul-force, which could endure the brutality of the oppressor without flaming into counterproductive passionate physical response.

Both he and Sanger devoted their lives to overturning cultural standards that kept women and the poor disempowered.  Where they differed most profoundly, perhaps, was that Gandhi believed that people could be taught by his example.  Sanger took a more pragmatic approach.

--

Sometimes we can get useful insights on such painful conundrums through history; sometimes through fiction, which brings us to John Irving’s great novel, The Cider House Rules. Dr. Wilbur Larch devoted his life to relieving suffering and enhancing freedom – just like Gandhi and Sanger. But his life was more private. Dr. Larch was the head of an orphanage in a remote corner of Maine in the first half of the 20th century, and he practiced “the Lord’s work” well into his 90’s.  The Lord’s work was his phrase for what he offered to desperate women who came to St. Clouds orphanage.  He gave them what they wanted – an orphan or an abortion. 

It was his calling, he said, “to be of use.”  And he pressed that ideal into his most prized orphan, Homer Wells, who never made it into an adoptive home. Homer stayed at St. Clouds long enough to learn all of the obstetrical procedure he would need to take over when Dr. Larch died. But to Homer it was very clear that a fetus had a soul, and abortion was wrong. Moreover, Homer grew into a young man who needed to discover himself through his own adventures, which took him only as far as another small town in Maine, where he worked in an apple orchard for 15 years.

“The Cider House Rules,” which serve as the title to Homer’s story, exist on many levels.  The Cider House Rules are, first of all, a list of petty rules posted in the Cider House, where the Black apple pickers stay during their summers in Maine.  It’s a list of well-meaning, but inane rules about not sitting on roof of the cider house – especially when drunk.

The rules are completely ignored by the pickers, who cannot read anyway, and the orchard owners make no attempt to enforce them.  The white owners do not want to cross the Black crew boss, Mr. Rose, who manages the picking and pressing operations with perfect efficiency year after year. Still, every summer, Homer (a white guy) posts the rules. And over time he discovers some deeper Cider House Rules: unstated, internal rules of the tightly-knit community of the Black pickers. “Who lives in this Cider House anyway?” Mr. Rose would say, with a penetrating look.

These were the real Cider House Rules: Protect the community by doing what Mr. Rose tells you to do.  Don’t draw attention.  We can fight amongst ourselves (to negotiate the rules) as long as it doesn’t draw attention. This unstated rule gets pretty specific: fighting can even go so far as to knifing each other – but not so badly that it will draw the police. And so, year after year, under the watch of Mr. Rose... who exerts total control over the picking and pressing, and is very fast with a knife...the picking crew is totally reliable.

Homer, meanwhile, the boy doctor who did not want to do abortions at St. Clouds, who argued with Dr. Larch that his clients should have practiced better self control...Homer becomes the father of a child of a woman engaged to the orchard owner’s son.  (You didn’t have to follow all of that – just know that he must have broken some of the rules.)  He in fact carries on a 15 year sexual relationship with the owner’s wife. The three of them are best friends as a matter of fact.  And the owner, being paralyzed from the waist down in the war – is led to believe that the child they all share is an orphan that Homer has brought from St. Clouds. (Again, you don’t have to follow all that – just know that – at least by conventional standards of Maine in the 1950’s they are breaking a number of unstated rules).

Through it all Homer maintains this odd but believable sense of orphan innocence ... until his obstetrical skills are called upon to save Mr. Rose’s daughter, who is pregnant with her own father’s child. Homer is caught in a dilemma of whether to play god, and finds that regardless of what he chooses to do, he will inevitably be playing god.  He discovers that we all make our own rules. We all break somebody’s rules. And we always encounter consequences – whatever choice we make.  He discovers that heroism is not to shy from making the choices.

==[4]

An eighty-three year old man comes into the confessional.  "Father,” he says, “I must speak to you.  I am a widower, and very lonely.  Last week, though, I met a beautiful twenty-six-year-old girl.  She really liked me.  I took her to a hotel, and in the last five days, I’ve made love to her fourteen times.”

“You should say ten Hail Marys,” the priest tells him.

“Why should I do that?  I’m Jewish, Father.”

“Jewish?  Then why are you telling me this?”

“Telling you? I’m telling everybody!”

Unlike Catholicism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, Judaism has never romanticized celibacy or viewed it as an ideal for its adherents. The Torah’s ideal is that “a man shall leave his mother and his father and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

The Hebrew scriptures are filled with graphic sexuality from the Song of Solomon’s references to young lovers, to Jacob’s deal with his uncle Laban -- that after seven years of labor, he would have his cousin Rachel as his wife.  When the seven years are up he says, “Give me my wife, for my days are fulfilled, that I may go unto her.”  Hardly the most delicate language with which to address one’s future father-in-law.

Despite ancient Judaism’s patriarchal worldview, the rabbis regarded sexual release as no less important to women than to men....  Because the rabbis feared that women would be too inhibited to initiate sexual relations, the Talmud legislated minimum conjugal obligations for husbands, based upon their professions: “every day for men of leisure who do not need to work, twice a week for laborers, once a week for ass-drivers, once every thirty days for camel drivers, and once every six months for sailors.”  A man was forbidden to change his job without his wife’s consent if doing so would affect her conjugal rights.

Sexual fulfillment was assumed to be so basic to a person’s mental well-being that the High Priest at the Temple at Jerusalem (a position in some ways comparable to the pope) was required to be married...for according to Talmudic belief, great men have greater sexual appetites than their less accomplished brothers.

Jewish law encourages Jews of both sexes, and at all stages of life, to continue having sexual relations.  Even elderly men are encouraged to marry and, if their wives are young enough, to have children.  That is probably one reason for the surprisingly large number of jokes about older men and younger women:

A wealthy eighty year old man stuns his children by telling them he is marrying a twenty-five-year-old woman.  The children raise strenuous objections, but the man assures them that they are all provided for, and he will do what he wants.  Meanwhile, a jaded, oversophisticated friend of his has a heart-to-heart talk with him.  “You know, your wife might get a little bored, seeing as how much older you are.  She probably needs some company her own age.  Take in a boarder, and when you get too tired, they can entertain each other.”

“Good idea,” the man says.

A year later, the friend calls up to ask how things are.  “Wonderful,” the old man says.  “My wife is six months pregnant.”

“Congratulations,” the friend answers.  And smiling to himself, he adds, “So I guess you took my advice about bringing in a boarder.”

“You bet,” the old man says.  “And she’s pregnant too.”

==[5]

A recent study has shown that the vast majority of Americans have been having sex before marriage -- for decades. This is not a recent phenomenon. Youth, then, receive severely mixed messages from our culture: “just do it” and “just say no.” Guilt and anxiety are bad enough, but guilt and anxiety have not sufficed. We still have 800,000 teen pregnancies per year, and 25% of sexually active teens contract a sexually transmitted disease.

Posting some ”Cider House Rules” that the kids will simply ignore because they have no relation to their real lives is not a solution. Adolescents need, and have a right to, full and accurate information about sexuality. Instead we have created for them an atmosphere of silence and shame.

This is not helpful for a generation who reach puberty earlier and marry later than any other generation in history. Rather than chastising them and burying their legitimate questions and concerns, we need to help them to make responsible and informed choices.

There are only two comprehensive sexuality curricula in use by religious groups in the United States: “Our Whole Lives,” developed by the Unitarian Universalist Association with the UCC, and “Sacred Choices,” developed by Union for Reform Judaism. Your support for this work is so important. It is so important for teens to have a place where they can freely ask questions without fear of condemnation.

What are the results of “Just say No?” Teens who make abstinence pledges have higher rates of oral and anal sex than those who do not. And 88% break their pledges anyway, and when they do so, they have a much lower rate of contraceptive use than those who did not pledge abstinence.

The U.S. Government has provided more than a billion dollars for abstinence-only education in the past decade, but no funding for comprehensive sexuality education. This is a sad farce. We are not providing our children with the medically accurate information that they need to protect themselves and protect others.

The ethics of fear and shame, based in rules and prohibited acts, does not work and it ignores our responsibility to help youth understand, affirm, and embrace their sexuality, which is a basic developmental task for adolescents.

Each of us will come to our own conclusions on the myriad and complex political issues surrounding privacy and sexuality. The issues are so personal and difficult to express that we will be tempted to think that they are beyond the realm of public discussion.

But even our desires to be left alone must ultimately be protected by the mutual consent of our community.

As we continue to negotiate these boundaries, may each of us, in our own way, and with integrity, may each of us be of use.

SENDING SONG                   

–        Creative love our thanks we give / that this, our world is incomplete / that struggle greets our will to live / that work awaits our hands and feet.

–        That we are not yet fully wise / that we are in the making still / as friends who share one enterprise / and strive to blend with nature’s will.

–        Since what we choose is what we are / and what we love we yet shall be / the goal may ever shine afar / the will to reach it makes us free.

BENEDICTION        

Know the rules / break those you must / and be prepared for the consequences. March 4th.

[1] Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948).  The reading below is from The Gandhi Reader, edited by (UU minister) Homer Jack. The bio is from Jack and multiple sources.

[2] Margaret Sanger (1883-1966) The first Sanger reading is from a speech in the 1920’s recorded in In Our Own Words: Extraordinary Speeches of the American Century, edited by Senator Robert Torricelli.  The later Sanger reading is from Griswold v. Connecticut, by Susan Wawrose.

[3] Religious liberals can’t let themselves off the hook too easily here. Still another hero of mine, Rev. John Dietrich, a founding voice of religious humanism, preached on birth control in 1930 also arguing that it was a matter of preserving genetic strength – an issue that saw a lot of strange bedfellows in the early 20th century. Interestingly, Dietrich argued FOR birth control on a similar basis that this bishop was arguing AGAINST birth control.

[4] This section is based on Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say about the Jews.

[5] This section contains material adapted from the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing. www.religiousinstitute.org Their message, endorsed by a wide range of religious leaders (yes, even Catholics) is that sexuality is a blessing. “It has the promise to enhance human wholeness and fulfillment [as well as] the potential for misuse, exploitation, and abuse.” Religious institutions can help or hinder a healthy sexual development. “Research demonstrates that participation in a religious setting prepares young people to resist risk-taking behaviors.”