Strange though it seems to have to point this out, shouldn’t someone notice that there is something more profound than irony in the following juxtaposition?

Under the law, a student who has been accused of sexual assault can’t defend himself by saying he thought the accuser was a willing partner. There has to have been “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.” Consent, so defined, must be “ongoing throughout sexual activity.”

(source: California Sends in the Sex Police – Bloomberg View)

Conjugal love involves a totality, in which all the elements of the person enter – appeal of the body and instinct, power of feeling and affectivity, aspiration of the spirit and of will. It aims at a deeply personal unity, a unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul; it demands indissolubility and faithfulness in definitive mutual giving; and it is open to fertility. In a word it is a question of the normal characteristics of all natural conjugal love, but with a new significance which not only purifies and strengthens them, but raises them to the extent of making them the expression of specifically Christian values.

(source: Catechism of the Catholic Church – The sacrament of Matrimony)

Specifically, shouldn’t someone notice that the desired “liberation” of sexuality has–quite unsurprisingly to those who heed the experts in human nature–resulted in ever-more-detailed, ever-more-intrusive regulation of sexuality?  That it has not resulted in greater capacity to enjoy the goods of conjugal union, but in raising the stakes in rationing those goods, so that practically every facet of our commercial and cultural life is dominated by efforts to consume as many “others” as possible?  Continue reading »