Vulgarity warning: if you’re offended by the F-word (which is used no less than 29 times in this article), do not click the link!
But despite the vulgarity, a point is being made with this satire, as is always the case with The Onion.
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| “Local Lutheran Minister” – from The Onion |
The article is Local Lutheran Minister Love to [have sex with] his Wife. It’s not a real story, and it’s really rather funny, but above all it makes a point that challenges Catholics for a response.
The satire behind the article is based on a simple assumption, a very understandable assumption, and an assumption that the whole world is making, even most Christians.
And that assumption is this: sex is for pleasure only.
Therefore there is no difference between any sexual act – it’s all motivated by an odd biological drive and its object can be the same sex, a different sex, any number of orifices, a person who’s married or single or not even a person at all. It’s just “getting off” – it’s just an orgasm, and why do we burden people with all kinds of religious nonsense and guilt? It’s just a fun thing to do. A kind of messy and intensely interesting pastime.
There is, of course, one answer and one answer only to this false assumption. It’s an answer the world does not want to give, and it’s an answer even the Westians in the Catholic Church don’t want to give.
The answer is this.
Sex makes babies. Sex makes families. Sex makes much more than sex.
As G. K. Chesterton said ….
Sex is an instinct that produces an institution; and it is positive and not negative, noble and not base, creative and not destructive, because it produces this institution. That institution is the family; a small state or commonwealth which has hundreds of aspects, when it is once started, that are not sexual at all. It includes worship, justice, festivity, decoration, instruction, comradeship, repose. Sex is the gate of that house; and romantic and imaginative people naturally like looking through a gateway. But the house is very much larger than the gate. There are indeed a certain number of people who like to hang about the gate and never get any further.
Take that, Sigmund Freud!
If Chesterton is wrong, and if Jesus Christ and His Church are wrong about sex, then The Onion article is spot on. Don’t forget that. This kind of satire makes a good deal of sense, when once you buy into the false assumption.
We are not to forget what sex is for. If we do, we can never answer our secularist friends and we will always be vulnerable – and legitimately so – to such parody.
Kevin,
I must admit the article is very funny, and that it nonetheless makes a serious point.
The point is really made not by the picture conveyed of the sexual enthusiasm and gymnastics of the fictional minister and his wife. Rather, the point is made by two anomalies, which together are both hilarious and subtly, seriously instructive.
The first anomaly is the fictional fact that the minister speaks as if sex for him and his wife, and for everyone else they know, is just an ordinary recreation, like playing ten-pin bowls – with the un-selfconscious use of the “f–“ word accentuating this. (If he used “copulate” instead the point would be almost as effectively made, since that is almost as base and functional a term.) The second anomaly is that he is a clergyman, and so of all people should be attuned to a fact which even the most dessicated secularists instinctively recognises, namely, that sex between a “loving, committed couple” is so intimate and private to themselves that its experienced meaning for them, which is inextricably intertwined with their experienced meaning of each other for each other, is misrepresented and violated if it is not treated as sacred but is made a subject of everyday social chatter. (Ironically, the minister speaks of marriage as a “sacred union” but shows he has no sense of its sanctity.) The point would be lost if it was a “Hell’s Angel” talking about sex with his wife or girlfriend, since such insensitivity and obtuseness in such a person would not seem anomalous.