While the above selection from Chesterton is profound, he was wrong about the effectiveness of these revolutionaries. They have indeed wrought terrible damage since Chesterton's time.
From the same work by Chesterton:
I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself....Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.
I have long considered starting a thread about the traditional (or Christian?) view of sexuality, the body, nudity, modesty, etc. It seems it needed its own thread, because so many people misunderstand it in other threads, when it comes up as one of many issues.
The common misunderstanding is that the traditionalist wants sex to be hidden because it is shameful, or that Christians urge modest dress because the body is something dirty or sinful. In fact, we are protective of the body because we have a high view of it. It is the libertine and the secularist that say of the Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction, "It was
just a breast." Traditionalists do not know about "just a breast." We appreciate the beauty thereof too much to make such a dismissive comment.
