… [E]ach faith encourages monogamy, complementary, and permanence in sexual relationships. Each faith independently developed these marital norms because they recognized that it was good not just for men, women and children, but for society at large….
A Buddhist teen, a Hindu sixth-grader, a Sunni boy, a Jewish girl and a Lutheran adolescent may have little in common when it comes to their religious life. But I guarantee that if those kids are being raised by a single mother, they all have laid awake at night wondering “Where is my father?” and “Does he love me?”….
All the “sex-positive” cultural messaging is powerless in the face of a child who has had to pay for their parents’ belief that they had a “right” to sexual expression, freedom, and pleasure…. Without the society-wide expectation that men commit prior to sex, there is little protection for women from whom biology demands so much. And there is no provision, protection and involvement from the men for whom children so desperately long.
~ Katy Faust, Them Before Us, June 12
