I’m unabashed in my fondness for Ronald Reagan. He was way smarter than most people give him credit for; and subtler too. It doesn’t surprise me that he wrote letters as eloquent and funny and wise as the newly released ones can be. But I was struck by his candor about how damaging sexual shame and guilt can be. This passage is particularly embarrassing to the scolds who have come to monopolize much of the discussion of sex in conservative circles:
I have learned painfully that some “idealism” is in effect a flight from reality… To show you how “over idealistic” my training was – I awoke to the realization (almost too late) that even in marriage I had a little guilty feeling about sex, as though the whole thing was tinged with evil.
A very fine old gentleman started me out on the right track by interesting me in the practices of, or I should say, moral standards of, the primitive peoples never exposed to our civilization – such as the Polynesians. These peoples who are truly children of nature and thus of God, accept physical desire as a natural, normal appetite to be satisfied honestly and fearlessly with no surrounding aura of sin and sly whispers in the darkness . . .
I guess what I am trying to say is that I oppose the dogmas of some organized religions who accept marital relationship only as a “tolerated” sin for the purpose of conceiving children and who believe all children to be born in sin. My personal belief is that God couldn’t create evil so the desires he planted in us are good and the physical relationship between a man and woman is the highest form of companionship …
Notice how he embraces sex and pleasure within a semi-traditional framework of a second marriage. He’s a Californian Republican, not a Southern one. He is specifically challenging the doctrines of Saint Paul, daring to challenge the Bible itself. And he’s an antidote to the cramped, fearful and narrow notions of someone like Senator Santorum who has said that love has nothing to do with marriage. He reminds me of what I once found so attractive about a certain kind of open-hearted Republicanism, something that has gotten so lost among the paranoids and puritans that now sadly dominate the party. In the words of Neil Tennant: happiness is an option.
WHO IS ARAFAT?: A useful reminder.
The Dish 