The Abstinence Clearinghouse Blog

Many of the most recent news headlines have been rife with reports of sex and scandal. Not that this should really shock anyone, as it is obvious that there is nothing the media will fixate its attention on longer or harder than the tawdry; however, despite how often the weekly wires are inundated with talk of such things, the stories coming out of New York should have caused even the most desensitized to stop and reflect, even for a moment, on the nation’s pitiful moral state.

Only several days after the news broke on former New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s involvement with prostitutes and his resignation from office, the newly sworn governor, David Patterson, and his wife, in what was probably an unprecendented display of honesty and forthrightness in the political arena, discussed their extramarital affairs with the press.

Events such as these cause some to question the faith they place in those with leadership positions and the sanctity of the marriage relationship while others simply see these situations as propagating a natural cycle of betrayal and an innate failure to remain faithful in monogamous relationships.

One such response comes from Natalie Angier in her New York Times article, “In Most Species, Faithfulness is a Fantasy.” She writes that Spitzer’s adulterous acts are wholly unoriginal due to the fact that “sexual promiscuity is rampant throughout nature, and true faithfulness is a fond fantasy,” and continues by citing numerous examples of failure to remain monogamous from within the animal kingdom. While she observes that adultery is not approved of in the natural jungle, just as it is not looked on favorably in its concrete counterpart, she discusses the subject in such a way as to make these nefarious acts seem both natural and predictable.

I read Angier’s article and I hear the details surrounding both Spitzer and Patterson and I see how majority of people will only barely shake their heads at these situations anymore because they seem to have become so commonplace and I become frustrated. Not only does the idea of teaching abstinence prior to marriage seem archaic to this post-modern society but, apparently, the idea of abstinence within marriage seems to have become anachronistic as well. To abstain is to restrain or refrain one’s self from participating or indulging in something, in this case, sex, but it needs to be more than what happens prior to the “I do”s–it also has to be personal restraint within relationships in order to maintain the health and integrity of the relationship and in order to break this increasingly devastating cycle of betrayal and adultery that only leads to the downfall of leaders, the destruction of marriages, and the unraveling of what is left of America’s moral fabric.