OKAY, I DON’T AGREE WITH THIS:

Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide. He or she is ripping the veil from all that is private and delicate in oneself, and pulverizing it in an assembly line of selfish sensations.

Actually, I had quite a few years like that before I was married, and I consider it a good thing, though I’m quite happy to be married now and wouldn’t have wanted to live that way forever. (But I think that one reason that I’m happily married now is that I did live that way for quite a while first). But I agree with David Brooks that gay marriage is a good thing, and actually strengthens traditional values rather than harming them.

UPDATE: Got a few emails like this one:

So you are saying promiscuity is OK? That indiscriminate sex is OK? That degrading your self for sexual gratification is OK? Is this what you teach your children? I don’t agree with you at all! Gay sex is not natural nor normal and cannot strengthen our decaying traditional moral values!

Hmm. I didn’t say anything about “indiscriminate sex,” now did I? Funny that some people can’t conceive of anything else. Nor was my pre-marital love life “Hefneresque,” as another reader puts it. These strike me as rather revealing reactions — much like those who, on another topic, assume that all war is equivalent to “carpet bombing” or that owning a gun guarantees mass slaughter. Moderation, apparently, is inconceivable to some people.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bruce Bridges emails:

As a single man that has not found the right girl even at this late date, I am one of those that has been pulverising all that is private and delicate blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blaaaaaaaaah.

The problem with those that need to point out my failings is of course that they can’t stop themselves. First it was gays, then single sinners and of course eventually, married people that are corrupt enough to venture beyond the missionary position.

The republicans would do well to recognize that this way of thinking is what most of us think of as “fringe”.

Given a choice, I’ll hang with the sodomites thank you.

Yeah. But my point was that to arrive at what is, in fact, the kind of marriage that Brooks describes (except perhaps for the “I am you” angle, which seems a bit creepy to me), I had to pass through the kind of conduct he deplores. Only I think that I couldn’t have the one without the other. I’m deeply suspicious, frankly, of people who assume that all sex outside marriage is somehow depraved or corrupt or instrumental. Perhaps they are projecting, or perhaps they are just ignorant. It certainly seems to me — as I indicate above — that sex is to some on the right what violence is to some on the left: something seen as so dangerous, and so powerful, that if it is not kept entirely in check, it is sure to go completely out of control. I regard both kinds of thinking as misguided.

And, at any rate, the one kind of lust that appears to be incapable of satiety is the lust to control others’ lives. . . .

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Stephen Green isn’t ashamed to admit that he likes sex.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Beth Mauldin isn’t either.