It has come to this.  I’m in church, waiting for mass to begin.   I’m 88.  And what am I thinking of?   Sex!!

This might seem less odd if you consider how distressed I am that my very own state, Connecticut, has recently passed a law making same-sex “marriage” legal.   I can’t write “marriage” without quotation marks because I can’t comprehend how anyone can think gays can marry when they can’t even mate.  From the beginning of humanity, marriage has meant the commitment of a man and a woman to each other with the intent of having sexual intercourse and caring for offspring that might result from that union.   Even heterosexual marriage was not valid unless it was consummated.   That meant mating.  And gays can’t mate.  Or have offspring.

For several years I have been watching a couple at mass who sit a few pews in front of me.  I would guess they are about fifty-ish.  I suspect they may have grown children but, of course, I don’t know.  I don’t even know their names.  They sit close enough to each other to touch.  They kiss at the sign of peace. They wear wedding rings.  They have a nice rapport.

Then, right there in church, I imagine them in the marital embrace.  The first word I think of is “comfortable.”  Then “enjoyable.”  Two-in-one-flesh comes to mind.  There is a rightness to it.  Like a key in a lock.  A coming together of things designed for each other.

Long ago there was a line in my missal that read: “It is meet and fitting and availing unto salvation…”  I remember this line because even back then “meet” and “fitting” were seldom used  that way in ordinary conversation.    To me there is a “meetness” and a “fittingness” about this couple coming together sexually.

Try as I may, I cannot visualize two men or two women having “meet and fitting” sex.  It is good for men to love each other, and women to love each other.  Indeed, they are commanded to love one another.  But whatever they might do sexually, it is not mating.  It is not the way sex was designed to work.  It might better be considered some variant of  mutual masturbation.  Or that old-fashioned word,  sodomy.

If I may be permitted a bit of anthromorphism, you have to feel for the poor sperm that had hopes of meeting up with an egg and finds that it is not even in the right ball park and doesn’t have a fighting chance.  Also, there are bioactive chemicals in the seminal fluid (“there’s good in that goo”) (see seminal thoughts) that are going to waste.  What a perversion of purpose!

Did you know that humans are the only animals that mate face to face?  Could it be that human sex is supposed to be a person-to-person encounter and not just a instinctive animal activity?  Human sex can be – and should be –  a holy thing.

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Definition of sodomy:  Anal or oral copulation with a member of the same or opposite sex.  Also copulation with an animal.   — Merriam-Webster

For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication: That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour;  Not in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God:  That no man go beyond and defraud his brother in any matter: because that the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also have forewarned you and testified.  For God hath not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness.  — 1 Thessalonians 4:7-8