Bruce
Wainwright
Olden wonder
ABSTINENCE FAILS TO MAKE THE HEART
GROW FONDER
Abstinence? Don’t talk to me about abstinence. I did all
that back in the 1960s, that’s the ‘Swinging Sixties’, just
in case you’d forgotten. It’s what you did in those days if you
happened to be gay (long before the term had even been invented) and you could
get 18 months banged up in chokey for your troubles.
Abstinence was what you did when you were so confused about your sexuality
you didn’t know if you were Arthur or Martha, and the students’
union could hold earnest debates about ‘sex before marriage’.
Then the Pill arrived and everything changed for ever: the dawning of the
Age of Aquarius, or some such nonsense, and as a matter of principle, we were
in favour of free love. Of course, that didn’t mean we were getting
any, but that wasn’t the point. We hoped to get some in due course,
and when we did we wanted it to be free. Not knowing what it was you wanted
in the first place, of course, didn’t make it any easier, and in any
event, you could always rely on St Paul and the God Squad to try and ruin
the fun.
Now
I shan’t trouble to quote chapter and verse on the subject, but you
can take it from me, and the most cursory inspection of the New Testament
will confirm, that St Paul did not go a bundle on fornication. Since then,
as we know, the Church has tended to endorse his approach to the subject;
give or take the odd Rasputin who took the alternative, and some would suggest,
more realistic view that before you could be forgiven your sins, you needed
to commit a few in the first place. In the main, however, what we do with
our wobbly bits has been a matter of consuming interest to clergymen for centuries.
Unfortunately they have too often been closely associated with the movers
and shakers who lay down the criminal law.
A growing secularisation of our society, however, has certainly weakened their
hold on the public’s attention and God has increasingly been seen as
little more than the polyfiller, used to plug the gaps where science hasn’t
yet got the answer. So what, literally, a godsend the arrival of HIV/Aids
was. If pregnancy, clap and the Great Pox can’t stop unregulated fornication,
perhaps Aids will. Praise the Lord and pass the condoms. Not on your life.
What’s the point of having the Scourge of God if you can defeat his
divine purpose with a little rubber johnny? Fornication is sin and you’d
better get a firm handle on that one. The solution is not to fornicate; be
abstinent. OK, so you’ll be miserable and, like St Anthony,
probably end up seeing visions and demons sitting on the end of the bed, but
who said life was going to be easy? As I’m sure they say down in Texas,
“Get with the program”.
The misery and frustration are pretty well guaranteed; the success of abstinence
is rather more problematical. Because total abstinence is so much against
the grain of human nature, it will, almost inevitably, fail, and those who
have placed their trust in it as their sole protection from HIV/Aids will
be left so much the more vulnerable in the end. Speaking from experience,
I can say ignorance and polyfiller panaceas are no substitute for real information
and genuine choices. Beginning with the children, and very young children
at that, people need to know the facts. Then, those facts need to be repeated,
again and again.
