The nature of sex itself, the act of copulating with another person to the pleasure of both, is good. Beautiful.

I agree with this, but -- we don't have sex in a vacuum. (Though it might be fun if we did.) It isn't just about the moment when the bodies connect. It's about the souls that inhabit those bodies, too, and something can be good for the body but bad for the soul.

The guys on Homicide say "Sex is like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's good."

I think that was said long before Homicide.

If you eat too much...

Oh, I have so had bad chocolate.

Me too, but that was all the stuff they used to cut the actual chocolate with.

There's bad in chocolate??!?

I dare you to come up with a single food conversation on this board wherein at least one person has not stepped up and said "Not me, I'm allergic /phobic /a freak with no taste buds /a chocolate bar once bit my sister."

Because not all sex *is* good, even among consenting adults.

Not all sex acts are good. But the very nature of sex is good; our bodies, hearts, and minds were meant to do it.

I dare you to come up with a single food conversation on this board wherein at least one person has not stepped up and said "Not me, I'm allergic /phobic /a freak with no taste buds /a chocolate bar once bit my sister."

This is very true.

Sad, but true.

There's bad in chocolate??!?

Nuts in chocolate isn't great. It's only so-so. But, I can suck the chocolate off of the nuts.

Back to Lyra Jane...

You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I think their views on sexual subjects are indefensible, but I have a tremendous amount of respect for some of the church's work on poverty, human rights and peace issues. They don't believe respecting life stops after the baby is born, as our president seems to, and I appreciate the consistency. Without John Pauk II's support for the Solidarity movement in Poland, we might still have a USSR.

My honest opinion, with a fair amount of knowledge of the history of the Catholic Church, is that it has done far more damage than good. Aside from its extremely problematic notions about sex (which I think contributed greatly to the pedophile priest scandal), it has consistently valued its own power and influence over doing good. That was true during the Holocaust. That has been true as it shuffled predatory priests around from parish to parish. That was true all through European history. Then you throw in things like...burning the Huegenots and such, or the vast corruption that inspired the reformation and it just hasn't been a good institution. And it doesn't learn much either. The Magdalene Sisters were still going into the late seventies?

(And then there's Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement -- I had a sort of mentor in college who was involved with a similar group, and I saw how much his faith backed his work for some very liberal causes -- he co-founded a punk activist group that's lasted almost 20 years, among other things.)

I've had this discussion many times with JZ, because her parish is that strain of Catholicism. In short, they are an extreme left wing part of the Catholic Church, not that numerous, an embarassment to Rome and forever skirting heresy or disobedience. Highly anomalous - not much of what constitutes the vast majority of Catholics. I'm always reminded of the French myth and romance of The Resistance. Which was a very tiny part of the population. For the most part, the French collaborated - that's not how they like to remember themselves. But it's truer.

I think sex is like food -- a lot of the time it is value-neutral.

Dude!

There's bad in chocolate??!?

Hershey's. Also the kind that's in cheap Easter bunnies.

"Not me, I'm allergic /phobic /a freak with no taste buds /a chocolate bar once bit my sister."

Oohhh!! Case in point, I lost my sense of taste for about 8 weeks after radiation. Chocolate is NAS-TEE when you can't taste it. It's like eating lard.