Philosopher Simon Blackburn argues that lust “gets a bad press.” His project, based on a lecture sponsored by the New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, is to rescue lust from misunderstandings and historical abuse. In his book, Lust, Blackburn presents an updated vision of lust as sexual desire for its own sake. If lust now has a bad press, Blackburn wants to be its public relations agent.

In his seminal 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntingdon argued that a clash between civilizations is the primary cause of conflict on the global scene today. However, in a fascinating article published in the journal Foreign Policy, researchers Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris argue that the real clash between civilizations is not about democracy–but sex.

MTV Networks unveils its new gay channel, Logo, on Thursday. According to The New York Times, “While movies will be the digital cable channel’s mainstay, Logo will offer a variety of regular series, featuring travel programs, documentaries, concerts, performances by stand-up comics, sports, reality shows, awards ceremonies and original sitcoms. There will be regular news spots, co-produced with CBS, also owned by Logo’s parent, Viacom.”
The most amazing part of this story is the claim made by Brian Graden, president of Logo and MTV Networks Entertainment: “When you tell a story about gay rodeo or gay surfers it’s not a story about sex nor does it need to be,” he told the paper. “So much connects us beyond sexuality.” That’s a statement most will find hard to take. Sexuality stands at the center of the homosexual culture. Just take a quick look at press coverage from this past Sunday’s Gay Pride celebrations in major American cities. Who does he think he is kidding?
The real fact is that the new network, though programmed for a homosexual audience, will be required to keep explicit sexual content to a minimum, since the channel will be available on regular cable systems. Instead, viewers can look forward to a new series called “First Comes Love,” described by the newspaper as “a comedy makeover show in which the comedian Scott Thompson and a wedding planner help about-to-be-married gay and lesbian couples plan their nuptials in two weeks. Documentaries will feature a variety of gay lives: rugby players, surfers, rural dwellers, Cubans and Republicans.” Don’t accuse them of ducking diversity.
The Logo Web site offers news about coming attractions. Consider “Surfer Girls,” described by this statement: “By weekday these lesbians are doctors, lawyers and realtors, but their weekends are all about the waves.” That is just too much information.
Logo joins Here!, a pay service gay channel started in 2003. Advertisers are lining up for the Logo launch. “There hasn’t been a very efficient way to deliver a sustained message to gays and lesbians,” says Howard Buford, founder of Prime Access, an ad agency specializing in gay and ethnic marketing. He told USA Today, “If there’s a channel dedicated only to redecorating a house or only to preparing food, it seems a channel for gays and lesbians should have preceded that.” Advertisers include Motorola, Miller Lite, and Subaru.
LINKS THAT SUPPOSEDLY DON’T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH SEX: Julie Salamon, Logo, A New Gay Channel, Looks ‘Beyond Sexuality’, The New York Times, Tuesday, June 28, 2005; Gary Levin, ‘Underserved’ Viewers Get New Gay Channel, USA Today, Tuesday, June 28, 2005.

In a world increasingly given to unrestrained sexual activity and a cornucopia of sensuality, voluntary sexual abstinence appears radical, suspicious, and downright odd. This certainly seems to be the case as Rolling Stone magazine reported on what it called “The New Virgin Army” in its June 30-July 14, 2005 issue. The article, written by reporter Jeff Sharlet, identifies this new “army” of sexually abstinent Christian young people as, “the young and the sexless.”

When a civilization gives itself over to moral confusion, sex and love are the most obvious laboratories of experimentation–and thus, of controversy. Consider the following:
ITEM ONE: Transgenderism Considered on “Larry King Live” Larry King interviewed Jennifer Finney Boylan on the May 25, 2005 edition of ‘Larry King Live.” Jennifer Boylan–formerly known as James Boylan–went through a male-to-female sex change after 43 years of living as a man. Also appearing was Dierdre Boylan, to whom Jennifer Boylan is still married, although Dierdre had married James, not Jennifer. Still following?
Jennifer Boylan is a professor of English at Colby College in Maine, and is the author of She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders. Larry King began by asking about the difference between “transgender and transsexual.” As Jennifer explained, “I understand how people would get confused, because where would people learn about this. Transgender is like an umbrella term, that includes a lot of different people. A transsexual is a person like me, someone born in one body with a lifelong conviction that they are the other sex. And so that’s one kind of transgendered person. “
The show included an extraordinary amount of autobiography [complete with surgical details]. Boylan admitted that, as a teenage boy and young man, he had a strange relationship with girls. “Because I would kind of get together with girls and I’d ask them questions like, well, how do you get your hair to do that? Or what’s it like to have breasts? And my dates would kind of look at me like, well, what do you want to know that for?” Jennifer continued: “My world always revolved around women, but certainly my sexuality was different from — certainly from that of other men. I think women were like, you know, a warm fire in a cold room to me. I was drawn to them.” At one point Boylan simply remarked, “I think as a guy, as a teenager, I was certainly kind of an odd date.” Something of an understatement, no doubt.
The strangest part of the interview had to do with how Jennifer Boylan still lives with Dierdre Boylan, who had married James. They have two sons, now 9 and 11, who call Jennifer “Maddy,” a conflation of Mommy and Daddy. “It’s true that my children don’t have a father or a father figure. And that’s not a small thing,” Jennifer acknowledged. “But on the other hand, they do have me. And I think I’m a very good parent. They certainly see a lot more of me than I saw of my own father. And we do most of the things that families do together. I think a lot of time we forget that there’s anything different about us.”
For her part, Dierdre Boylan commented that she is a “straight” woman who has no desire to have sexual relations with Jennifer, through they are still legally married. “I do miss having a husband, and being a husband and wife,” she admitted. “I miss our physical relationship. In many ways, particularly now, sort of five years down the road, most of the things that I loved about Jim are still present in Jenny. The things that aren’t there are the most male things.” That comment has multiple meanings, to be sure. In any event, this case represents the convoluted complications that ensure when the Creator’s gift of gender becomes an experiment in self-expression rather than a focus of objective identity. Read the transcript for the full story.
ITEM TWO: A New Job Description: Surrogate Mothers for Gay Couples. The New York Times reported May 27 [see story] that some women are gladly serving as surrogate mothers in order to allow gay male couples to “have” children. The paper described several women who have given birth for gay couples, or are in the process of doing so. Lura Stiller, for example, gave birth to a baby girl on behalf of Cary Friedman and Rick Wellisch, gay partners who are both physicians.
According to the paper, “Within the close-knit world of professional childbearers, many of whom share their joys and disillusionments online and in support groups, gay couples have developed a reputation as especially grateful clients, willing to meet a surrogate’s often intense demands for emotional connection, though the relationships can give rise to other complications within the surrogate’s family and community.” In addition, “Many surrogates who choose to work for gay couples say they feel ill equipped or reluctant to deal with the sense of hopelessness and failure expressed by married women and men who have struggled unsuccessfully for years to bear children. Still others are drawn to men as clients because they fear the possible resentments and jealousies in working so closely with other women.”
Shannon Klein, identified as a mother of three and a home-schooler, suggested a very different motivation: “In all honesty, there’s a bit of a rebellious nature in me,” she said. “I know that there are people who wouldn’t approve of being a surrogate for gay parents, and that has made it more intriguing.”
The procedure most often involves a donor egg and the sperm of one of the male partners. Analogously, lesbian couples often use commercial sperm banks in order to inseminate one of the partners. The artificiality of all this is a powerful reminder that heterosexual marriage is the Creator’s intended context for human reproduction.
Ms. Klein is on to something important when she admits that her foray into surrogacy for homosexual couples can be traced to “a bit of the rebellious nature in me.” It’s the rebellious nature of humanity that explains the emergence of such a phenomenon in the first place.

Syndicated columnist William Murchison argues that procreation lies at the heart of the best case against same-sex marriage. The society must put a premium on procreation to survive, so Murchison reasons that this should be sufficient to privilege and protect marriage as a heterosexual institution. Here’s how he made his case in The Cult of Non-Procreation, first published back in January 2004:  “As it happens, a man and a woman go together in a way — blush, blush — that same-sex couples find utterly impossible and always will. There must be a reason, right? Right. No heterosexual relationship, no procreation. No procreation, no human future. That is where the state’s interest in this thing comes in. It comes in also in consideration of the massive evidence supporting the heterosexual family as the most successful setting for training up the products of conception, namely, children. Yes, we know all about the child-beating morons who disgrace marriage. They aren’t even a patch on the loving and hard-working parents who far outnumber them. I can’t imagine anyone who grew up with such parents favoring the undermining of traditional marriage.”

Do evangelicals care only about issues of sexuality, marriage, and personal behavior? That’s what Michelle Cottle thinks, and that’s what she argues in “Prayer Center,” her article in the May 23 edition of The New Republic. Cottle offers a sympathetic portrait of Sojourners founder Jim Wallis, reporting that, since his student days, Wallis “has been struggling to mobilize Christians against social problems traditionally identified as concerns of the political left, such as poverty and racism.” Nevertheless, Wallis and his agenda have been frustrated by the fact that, “in U.S. religious circles, such issues have long taken a backseat–especially in the political arena–to matters of personal morality like abortion and gay rights.”

The bookstores love the summer season and tables are filled with books targeted for summer vacation. For women, the big development in publishing has been the development of a new form of pornography disguised as a “romance novel.” These ripping romantic tales feature detailed sex scenes in the text and airbrushed eroticism on the cover. Now, publishers have developed pornography for the younger generation of women, targeting teen girls with tales of romance, sexual exploration, and empowerment. The sex is front and center, with some books offering what amounts to advice on sexual technique for teens. Most parents know that teenage boys are tempted by visual pornography. How many parents are paying attention to what their daughters are reading? Consider two books by author Hailey Abbott. In Summer Boys and Next Summer, Abbott introduces a cast of beautiful, wealthy, fashionable, and over-sexed teenagers. The sex scenes are far too explicit to be quoted here, but just consider this run-up to the real steam, taken from Summer Boys: “Ella walked into the dunes, not knowing what else to do. She climbed the first mound of loose sand, her feet sinking with each step. She descended to a small valley, then climbed again. She reached top and froze. Down the hill in front of her, Peter was lying on his back, his body propped up against the next rise. He’d taken his shirt off and tucked it behind his head. He looked incredible, sprawled against the sand, his bronze skin glinting in the moonlight. Ella looked at his flat stomach and noticed that the top button of his shorts was undone.” The boy’s greeting was rather direct. “No one is allowed to talk until they’ve taken their shirt off.” Very little is left to the imagination.  Next Summer is even more explicit, with scenes and story lines that will send parents into cardiac arrest. The girls are presented as sexually-driven, while the boys are described in terms of physical attractiveness–something of a role reversal. The characters, especially the girls, wear the latest fashions from Abercrombie and Anthropologie (items carefully chosen for maximum erotic effect in order to attract boys) and carry Kate Spade purses. Popularity, attractiveness, consumerism, and sexual adventures are packaged as the avenues to an idealized adolescent adventure. And note this–the books are published by Scholastic, Inc. through its Alloy Entertainment division. Many parents will remember Scholastic from school book fairs. As they say, times have changed. Parents–look in those book bags.