The following piece is a little graphic. Written for a mainline Catholic publication, it was understandably rejected on grounds that the subject matter is too sexual and the tone a bit too strident. It's not the type of thing we like to present regularly on TWE, either, but the piece raises an interesting angle.
Busting the Blood Lusting
The news out of the West Coast was kind of wacky last week.
A man in Portland, Oregon used an Internet chat room to set up a mass suicide on Valentine's Day. Authorities stopped the plot before anyone died, but in the process, discovered that the perpetrator, Gerald Krein, had been enticing women for years to have sex with him and then commit suicide. At this point, police don't know if he ever succeeded.
About the same time, the FBI busted seven members of the North American Man/Boy Love Association in a sting. The men had allegedly traveled from their homes in California to board a boat to Mexico, where they expected to have sex with boys as young as eight years old at a bed-and-breakfast.
Now, in fairness, it should be noted that many of the women interested in Krein's plot weren't from the Coast, and NAMBLA has members in other parts of the United States. Moreover, all that sex and gore has classical roots that pre-date Hollywood, Berkeley, and other beacons of perversion. It goes back at least to Rome during its decline, when blood sport and sex were key ingredients of the Roman entertainment diet. Many of the Church's early martyrs lost their lives in gladiatorial shows that included elaborate, live sex orgies.
It also can't be denied that sex and gore is part of the popular scene today. Consider: (1) The movie Deep Throat came out in 1973 and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1975. Both were low-budget long shots that brought its producers millions of dollars. (2) Blood Feast, a movie that signaled the official birth of the gore film, came out in 1965, just as America was beginning its full-scale tumble into the sexual revolution. (3) Promiscuous girls are usually the victims in horror movies (David Hogan noticed it in his book, Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film, noting that horror films work "from a surprisingly Puritan morality" that punishes fornication).
Contraception leads to more sex. It also leads to abortion. Pope Paul VI's argument in Humanae Vitae made immediate sense to me when I first read it about fifteen years ago: If sex is legitimate on grounds of recreation alone, it's more legitimate to discard the "non-recreational" results. The couple intended to have fun, not a child, so the child can be dismembered and flushed. That such a shift in the culture's mental landscape would occur is understandable and, as Paul VI proved, predictable.
But lately I've begun to wonder if there's more to the rise of sex and the killing of the unborn. Is there something about sex that increases the lust for blood? The murderous gladiatorial shows were combined with sex shows. The horror film rose as the sexual revolution rose. In an era when sex has nearly reached Brave New World levels, Halloween has become the number two U.S. holiday, with sales over $7 billion a year.
It seems arguable that illegitimate sex increases the desire for blood, especially innocent blood.
For the folks in NAMBLA, homosexual sex isn't enough. They want sex with young boys. Without going into the details, suffice it to say that such "sex" is nothing less than a disgusting form of violence. Authorities learned of the Valentine's Day plot from a Canadian woman who had planned to participate, but then discovered that one of the woman planned to kill her children as part of it. The Canadian woman then went to the police. As part of the investigation, the authorities learned that Krein was inviting the women to bring their children with them. Four children would have been involved.
We know sin proliferates. If a person commits one type of sin, he's more likely to commit another. It's no coincidence that municipal districts with adult bookstores attract drug dealers, money laundering, prostitution, and other crime. We know most hardened criminals thoroughly enjoy pornography.
There's little doubt that ubiquitous sex and passion for violence are related. We're seeing more and more instances of it, and it appears to be reaching perhaps its most gruesome and rotten form.
Attacks against children. At first the unborn, and now the born.
