The Playboy Panel: Religion and the New Morality

Panelists

Dr. James Luther Adams, 65, professor of Christian Ethics at the Harvard Divinity School, is the most prominent Unitarian theologian in the world. Chairman of the National Advisory Committee of Social Rresponsibility of the Unitarian Universalist Association, he is the author of The Changing Reputation of Human Nature, Taking Time Seriously and Paul Tillich's Philosophy of Culture, science, and Religion. He is an officer of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Americans for Democratic Action and the Northern Student Movement, and was an official Protestant observer at the 1962 Vatican Council.

Dr. Harvey Cox, 38, is Associate Professor of Church and Society at the Harvard Divinity School. A native of Chester County, Pennsylvania, he received his A.B. with honors from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951, his B.D. from Yale Divinity School in 1955 and his Ph.D. in history and philosophy of religion from Harvard in 1963. Dr. Cox was ordained by the Baptist Church in 1956, is the author of the theological best seller The Secular city and has contributed articles to such magazines as Common-weal, Harper's, Redbook and Saturday Review. In April 1961, for Christianity and Crisis, he wrote a celebrated critique of Playboy that led to subsequent appearances on various public platforms and television panels on which he debated The Playboy Philosophy with Editor-Publisher Hugh M. Hefner, and to an article for Playboy (January 1967) on the Revolt in the Church.

Dr. Robert Wood Lynn, 42, dean of The Auburn Program at Union Theological Seminary in New York, received his A.B. magna cum laude from Princeton in 1948, his B.D. from Yale Divinity School in 1952 and his Doctor of Theology from Union Theological Seminary in 1962. After serving in the Army from 1943 to 1945, he was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in 1952, became an assistant professor at Union in 1959 and was appointed full professor in 1965. The author of Protestant Strategies in Education, he is also a member of the editorial board of Christianity and Crisis and a contributor to Spiritual Renewal Through Personal Croups and The Search for Identity.

Dr. Martine. Marty, 39, an ordained minister in the Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod), served in the parish ministry for a decade before joining the faculty of the University of chicago Divinity School, where he is Associate Professor of Modern Church History. An associate editor of The Christian Century and co-editor of an annual anthology titled New Theology, he is the most prolific and widely quoted of contemporary church historians. Among his many works are A Short History of Christianity, The New Shape of American Religion, The Hidden Discipline and Varieties of Unbelief.

The Reverend Howard Moody, 46, United Church of Christ, received his B.D. from Yale Divinity School. After serving in the U.S. Marines from 1941 to 1945 (and receiving the Air Medal in the Solomon Islands campaign), he assumed the pulpit of the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. Under his leadership, this progressive church has been the subject of numerous magazine articles and several television programs. One of Moody's church-sponsored projects, The Judson Poets' Theater, received five Obies (annual awards for off-Broad way plays) during the 1963-1964 theater season. The Reverend Moody has been active in the struggle for more humane treatment of drug addicts and was a delegate to the 1962 White House Conference on Narcotics Addiction. He has also been on the faculty of the New School for Social Research and is the author of The Fourth Man, an assessment of the clash between man's religious emotions and his scientifically conditioned intellect.

Dr. Allen J. Moore, 39, is Dean of Students and Associate Professor of Christian Education at the School of Theology at Claremont, California. He received his B.D. in 1953 from Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, was ordained into the Methodist ministry in 1953 and received his Ph.D. in 1963 from Boston University. For five years before assuming his present position, Dr. Moore was National Director of The Methodist Young Adult Work and Young Adult Research Project. He has also been active in studying the church's strategy for dealing with the problems of sex and marriage in a changing society, and is now deeply involved in research on the problems of ethics in an urban culture.

The Right Reverend James A. Pike, 54, formerly Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California, is now on the staff of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California. Bishop Pike received his doctor's degree in law from Yale, served in Naval Intelligence during World War Two and, before his ordination into the priesthood in 1946, was an attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D. C, and was admitted to practice before the U. S. Supreme Court. He later taught at Columbia Law School. The author of such lay texts as Doing the Truth, A Time for Christian Candor, What Is This Treasure, Teenagers and Sex and You and the New Morality, he wrote a widely publicized Playboy article (in April 1967) calling for taxation of church property and income. Possessed of a colorful personality and a penchant for controversy, Bishop Pike was one of the first major clerical crusaders for racial justice, and is one of the most outspoken and radical advocates of updating Christian doctrine and discarding "the church's unnecessary supernaturalism"— including the concept of the Holy Trinity. Recent accusations of heresy against him before the Episcopal House of Bishops—resulting in his censure for "irresponsibility" and vulgarization of the faith—caused him to invoke the church's judicial machinery. He put his miter on the line: "Exonerate my cause or unfrock me."

Father Herbert Rogers, S. J., 55, attended high school in his native New York City and seminary in Maryland. Since entering the Catholic Society of Jesus in 1930, Father Rogers has taught English literature, drama and philosophy at St. Peter's College in Jersey City and also theology at New York's Fordham University, where he is presently a member of the faculty. He has lectured and written on the theater, cinema, ecumenism, alcoholism, and the peace movement, and is on the Executive Committee of Clergy Concerned About Vietnam.

Rabbi Richard L.Rubenstein, 43, is the Director of the B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation and the Charles E. Merrill Lecturer in the Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh. His primary vocation, however, is that of a creative—and controversial—theologian. He is best known as one of the proponents of the "death-of- God" theology, about which he has written an eloquent opinion piece that will appear in next month's Playboy. He received his A.B. at the University of Cincinnati, was ordained a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and received his Master of Theology degree and Ph.D. from Harvard in 1960. He is one of the few rabbis to have a graduate degree in Protestant theology. Author of After Auschwitz—Radical Theology and contemporary judaism, Rabbi Rubenstein is a contributor to leading Jewish and Christian periodicals and a frequent lecturer on campuses in the United states, Canada and Europe.

[Q] Playboy: "The Christian church is being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 20th Century," Bishop Pike has written of the belated but deepening commitment of America's clerical establishment, led by its dissident young liberals, to the ideals of human rights and social reform. In the realm of human sexuality, however, traditional churchmen have for the most part staunchly resisted the changes in action and attitudes wrought by what has been called the Sexual Revolution. Christianity's internecine battle over the updating of sexual morality was touched off in early 1963, when Bishop John A. T. Robinson of Woolwich, England, wrote a widely read theological treatise entitled Honest to God. In a chapter on "The New Morality," Bishop Robinson opined that the supernatural underpinnings of traditional morality were being rejected by modern society, that the church's legalistic approach to morality is no longer valid and that both legalism and supernaturalism seriously distort the teachings of Jesus. "Nothing can of itself be labeled as wrong," he wrote. "One cannot, for instance, start from the position that divorce and sex relations before marriage are wrong or sinful in themselves. The only intrinsic evil is lack of love."

The traditional moralists were outraged—and scandalized. The relativistic new morality preached by Robinson, they insisted, is simply the old immorality condoned. Taking up Robinson's cry, zealous young reformists replied that they were simply revolting against the immorality of the old morality. And so the battle was joined, with philosophical positions ranging all the way from Norman Vincent Peale's insistence that sexual permissiveness threatens to precipitate the downfall of Western civilization to Dr. Alex Comfort's description of sex as "the healthiest and most important human sport." While the sexual conservatives trumpeted the destructive consequences of sexual indulgence, the liberals contended that sex can be a positive and rewarding force within or outside marriage, and is destructive only if used coercively or if distorted by such lingering influences as 18th and 19th Century puritanism.

The outcry about the Sexual Revolution, pro and con, soon escalated from obscure theological journals to the popular press, and readers of the Sunday supplements began to be told that "carnal anarchy is rampant on college campuses," that "the copulation explosion has reached seismic proportions." Most dispassionate and qualified observers, however, feel that the Sexual Revolution represents more of a change in attitudes than in actions. Many liberal churchmen feel that it is precisely this change in moral values, rather than any real or imagined change in overt sexual practices, that threatens traditional churchmen, because it signifies their loss of power over the minds and emotions of men. The Sexual Revolution, like any other revolution, Dominican theologian Bernard Suran has written, involves a transfer of power. The power to influence sexual behavior and attitudes, he feels, has been transferred from the church to such secular agencies as science, psychiatry and the mass media. "From the Fifth through the 18th Centuries," says Brother Suran, "the church's basic right to govern moral matters remained unchallenged. ... It has taken secular society a good many years to realize that its sexual etiquette has been created by a religious establishment to which it has denied allegiance. Only recently has secular man awakened to the incongruity of his looking to the religious establishment for his moral imperatives."

Challenges to traditional Christian attitudes toward sex are coming from within the church as well as from outside it. Theologian Joseph Fletcher wrote, in the Roman Catholic journal Commonweal, "The fact is that all along churchmen have relied on prudential arguments against sexual freedom—the triple terrors of conception, infection and detection—not upon Christian sanctions. But modern medicine and urban anonymity have made sex relatively safe. The danger-argument is almost old hat. It is true, of course, that coital adventures may bring on delayed emotional reactions, but the same is true of petting. And in any case, these feelings are largely guilt feelings which changing cultural norms are making archaic or even antediluvian. The guilt is going. If Christians honestly and seriously believe that there are matters of principle at stake, as distinct from situational factors, they had better make them clear." Thus, a radical re-evaluation of sexual morality is being forced upon the church. In the hope of assessing its significance and its scope, Playboy has assembled nine of the nation's leading liberal clergymen and theologians. Gentlemen, let's start with fundamentals. Do you believe that there is such a thing as a new sexual morality?

[A] Cox: Well, I think "the new morality" is about the phoniest phrase going. About every 20 years there is a flap about some "new" morality. There was one in the "Gay Nineties," another around 1922—the flapper era—and another just after World War Two. The new morality is about as new as the so-called "new theology." Morality is always new, always changing, because there are always new situations emerging to which existing moral principles have to be applied, and this requires new thinking. The trouble is, as Bishop Robinson pointed out, that for some people, new morality means no morality. But that's wrong. Morality is a living, changing organism; it has to be. We have to be constantly rethinking our moral principles, because there are always unanticipated and unprecedented situations—in the field of sex, for example, the fact that we now have an overpopulation problem, rather than the problem that the Israelites faced in the deserts, the problem of needing every person they could get. This influences the way we understand our sex life. No, I don't think there is really any "new morality" as such.

[A] Marty: Regardless of semantics, Harvey, we are undergoing profound and epochal changes. We are being forced to look at every aspect of environment in new ways, and a radical reappraisal of human relationships is inevitable. So far, no newly clarified formulation of morality has come during this change. We don't know enough about how the Christian message relates to these "new people" to give them clear guidance. This doesn't shock or surprise or shatter me. The Christian church has often had to bide time or tread water. Take the example of modern contraception. Here, as in so many other instances, there was no detailed, ready-to-go Christian ethic tucked away in our files, waiting to be put to use. Don't contraceptive devices and methods put sexual relationships into a different context than when intercourse always involved a direct risk of conception—when the threat of having unwanted children was very real? The morning after the pill was invented, the churches couldn't come up with a completely meaningful new ethic. When the world is too crowded instead of too sparsely populated, as you suggested, we have a new situation. The increase of mobility, the increase of leisure—these will force still more new definitions. But so far "the new morality" has been mere reportage, mere provocation, mere "playing it by ear." At least I have not yet seen any careful, systematic treatment. That will come later.

[A] Adams: A significant number of college students are already developing what I would call a new ethos. They want to find a heterosexual relationship that involves a maximum knowledge both of the other person and of themselves, in the context of authentic fellowship. They are making a serious effort to deepen the character of the boy-girl relationship and to broaden their range of perception and sensitivity. Some of these students stress only an intensity of interpersonal involvement, with little attention to consequence or durability. Others broaden the definition of involvement. They want to connect sex and love with concern for civil rights and other social-institutional issues. This second group doesn't confine itself to concern for merely interpersonal relationships; it is concerned with cultural criticism and with the institutional obligations of citizenship. This group represents a new trend in our youth culture, the trend away from an apolitical to a political orientation. But I don't know whether the seriousness of their political orientation is matched by an equivalent seriousness in regard to sex. It may be that something of a new ethos of fidelity and durability is latent here. We may have to wait a decade before we can know what this adds up to. It will be illuminating to observe not only what kind of poetry and novels come from these movements but what kind of marriage relationships. Certainly, there is a good deal of freewheeling premarital sexual intercourse, promiscuous and otherwise, among some of these young people, and also a marked quantity of thoughtless conformism. Here is a curious paradox of the youth culture: much talk about freedom and an equal amount of debilitating conformism. A friend in the Harvard Health Department tells me that he finds it necessary again and again to say to the undergraduate who hesitates to "go along," "You know, you don't have to conform to these misdemeanors." He adds that sometimes the student then looks as if he were being relieved of a burden.

[A] Moody: Right. Absolutely. I'm afraid the Sexual Revolution—and there is one going on—is leading us into a reverse Victorianism that may be more dangerous and damaging than the old Victorianism.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Moody: Well, look here: A girl used to feel guilty because she went to bed with a guy. Now she's often guilty if she doesn't. This comes from a new impersonalization and compartmentalization of sex, a separation of the body from the spirit. It's just as unhealthy as Victorianism, and the danger inherent in our emancipation from sexual suppression is that we are falling into a new kind of slavery in which we are no more free to make choices about sex than we used to be. If a girl feels guilty because she doesn't go to bed with a guy, God knows, that's no improvement; it's not getting her anywhere. She's just as apt as before to wind up on the analyst's couch.

[Q] Playboy: Couldn't it be said that sexual conformism and guilt can be destructive, no matter what value system they operate from?

[A] Moody: Sure, but it also means we shouldn't be so smug about fabricating a "new morality." If it's misinterpreted, it can cause as much havoc as the old rigid system of absolutes.

[A] Pike: Well, Canon Douglas Rhymes, in his book No New Morality, claims that the new morality is a restoration of basic ethical attitudes, in that it is concerned with persons as persons and not as tilings.

[A] Rogers: Like Adams and Marty, I think something new—and heartening—seems to be emerging. I notice it from talking to students a lot. They are more conscious of the fact that love and love alone should justify a sexual relationship. They have rejected the old justifications for sex, such as legal ties and procreation. For those who think in terms of morality, love is the most logical justification for sex. In the absence of social pressures and the threat of disease and all that kind of thing, there is a great insistence on the autonomy of the person. I think to this extent there is a new sex morality emerging. The emphasis is upon personal freedom. Freedom is the great key word, I think, that young people are insisting upon. It ties in with our great technological advances. Man is aware for the first time that he is capable of being free to an unprecedented degree, so he wants to make everything as free as possible. What is not so clearly appreciated is that, with the growth of freedom, there must be a corresponding insistence upon responsibility. For almost the first time, young people are really free, and therefore they have to be more fully responsible for the consequences of their acts, for the effects of their actions upon the well-being of both themselves and others. They don't have the old outside helps. They don't have the help of a society that condemns practices readily and is capable of enforcing its moral evaluations. Each person is very much on his own.

[A] Moore: I agree, Father, but the new sexual morality is more than just an individual and personal thing. The church is in a theological revolution in which there is more change taking place in our ethical, moral and theological understanding than probably at any time since the Reformation. This revolution is resulting in a genuinely new moral theology. We are being forced to rethink what we say and what we believe in the light of a great social and technical revolution that is taking place in the larger society. The basis for morality is shifting from prescriptions for behavior to methods for moral decisions, or how to arrive at situational answers. Theology and Christian ethics in the final reality must be relevant; they must be in touch with what is actually happening to people.

[A] Rogers: I agree entirely, and this is as true of the Catholic Church as it is of the Protestant. Let me indicate some of the changes in Catholic thinking. The first that comes to mind is a very new approach to reproduction and sex. Prior to Casti Connubi, an encyclical of Pius XI, there was almost no mention of the legitimacy of spacing births. One was told to trust in God's providence; the assumption seemed to be that there was a conflict between God's providence and man's sense of providence. Then, in the Forties, came a greater awareness of the actual limitations upon our freedom of choice; we learned a scientific basis for not judging others quite so readily. With the Fifties, we acquired a much greater awareness of the centrality of love—of the complete wholesomeness of the sexual act itself. I should venture the opinion that with the growth of the Sixties, there will be even greater acknowledgment of our ignorance concerning sex. Not an ignorance so great as to rule out making practical judgments for here and now, but an ignorance that will make us more cautious in not being too arbitrary and too detailed in our sexual codifications for the years ahead.

[A] Moody: Some people say that human beings have always acted the same; it's just that they are more honest and open now. But I do a lot of work on college campuses and I have often discussed these questions with college students, trying to find out from them what they're feeling and what they're doing. I think there is a new sexual morality emerging. And i think the most important single factor about this younger generation in regard to sexual conduct is that they don't feel guilt about going to bed with somebody—even though they may feel guilty about not going to bed with somebody. This is a very important factor. You may be able to conjure up guilt in young people today by setting up all sorts of rules and regulations for them and telling them they're disobeying God or dishonoring their fathers and mothers. You may succeed in making them feel guilty, but this guilt will be of your own making. Most young people will not, by the nature of their own feeling about how they relate to someone sexually, feel guilty about it. But it's too early at this point in time to decide whether I'm joyful about this lack of guilt or whether I deplore it.

[A] Lynn: All this talk about a new morality is one of the fetishes of our time. The newspapers have to have something fresh and novel for every issue, and so we tend to exaggerate discontinuities and to minimize the continuities of life that are underneath the surface. For a long time, change has been taking place in our sexual attitudes in this country, but talk of a swift and abrupt disintegration of standards is nonsense.

[A] Moore: Actually, as our moderator suggested, the moral revolution is primarily a revolution of attitudes rather than actions. I'm not convinced that there is a great increase in sexual immorality today, even by Christian standards. We shouldn't mistake more openness, more freedom of discussion, greater tolerance, for a change in practice. One of the more interesting studies that have been made in this area was reported by Dr. Mervin B. Freedman at Stanford University. He examined the sexual attitudes of college coeds and concluded that sexual practices among college girls have not changed very much since 1930. What has changed is their attitudes. It seems that college students today are more insistent that they be given the right to make their own decisions about sex, rather than having these decisions predetermined for them. And I must say I'm pretty much in sympathy with this. I have a good deal of contact with young adults in all walks of life, and I don't find many of them jumping into bed with someone—anyone—every chance they get. They're really quite mature. They have some understanding of their feelings and they're able to talk about and express these feelings. And they're much more tolerant. But I don't believe they're an immoral generation, as some politicians and theologians would have us think. In fact, the new generation isn't as preoccupied with sex as we are. They have actually settled the issue.

[A] Pike: I don't know the percentage of young people who now engage in either pre-or extramarital sex as compared with earlier and more conservative times, but I know that a profound change of attitude has occurred. There's a lot of difference between saying, "This is a sinful thing, but I'm going to do it anyway," and saying, "I'm going to do this, and it isn't sinful." Certainly there is a growing attitude that sexual relationships outside marriage are not in all circumstances necessarily wrong.

[A] Adams: It's too early to say whether a new morality of sexual behavior is actually in the making. Like Dr. Moore, I encounter among college youth a measurable proportion who are not taking a philandering attitude in sex matters, even though they don't accept the old conventions. These are the people who are truly in search of a new morality; but I don't believe they will adopt a laissez-faire attitude in sex matters any more than in economic philosophy. There are others, of course, who are exploring not a new morality but an old and familiar immorality. What will the responsibilities of parenthood do to them? Who knows? They might even turn up with a rigid new puritanism. That also would be no novelty. After all, the Restoration period was followed by a period of revulsion. A period of relaxation often gives rise to a period of neurotic reaffirmation or reformulation of norms. Something like this can happen in the life of the individual. The profligate youth later revolts against his younger self and adopts a rigid norm or joins an authoritarian church. There is nothing that a jellyfish wants so much as a rock.

[A] Marty: You may be right—but to return to Dr. Moore's point about the nature of the new morality, I think the revolution in sex mores involves more action than thought—or at least more action than organized and systematic thought. People have been improvising beliefs and behavior because they've had to. A 16-year-old, at the peak of his sexual concern, isn't really interested in the comment I made a moment ago about how we're undergoing epochal cultural changes and how in a hundred years we might know what to tell him. He won't wait: He'll act now. My personal observation is that he has often tended to act with more sanity than we give him credit for. He is thrown into implausible and absurd situations; he finds himself caught between an ethic propounded—but seldom lived up to—by adults from an inherited tradition on one hand and what seems to him to be empirical and logical and meaning ful on the other. I am more often than not impressed by the way young people retain their integrity, enter into profound relationships and eventually marry and establish good homes.

[A] Rubenstein: I agree. Although there is more sexual activity on campus than when I was in college, today's relationships are usually much more responsible than most of the more lurid journalistic accounts would suggest. As Dr. Adams has pointed out, these relationships also contain more affection and more genuine interchange between the persons involved than some of the more sensational accounts have suggested. Many people who have come out of fairly rigidly enclosed primary religious or ethnic groups have found themselves in the anonymity of a big city or a university campus. They tend to experience a new and unfamiliar freedom. As a result, they begin to question old norms and to assert some of their new freedom. The old idea that religion can supply a meaningful set of guidelines derived from divine sanction no longer carries much conviction with the average college student. I am in considerable sympathy with the death-of-God theologians; I feel that their significant insights point out that the thread has been broken between heaven and earth, and between God and man. I agree with Father Rogers that people are experiencing a new sense of personal freedom. We now ask, "Is this right for me?" We no longer ask, "How do I comply with a set of inherited commandments from my religious tradition?" We enjoy a degree of freedom today that people have never experienced before.

[A] Rogers: If you're going to judge the sinfulness of any sexual act today, I think you have to take careful account of the mentality and the attitudes of the person involved. For the most part, I do not think an attitude of mere condemnation is very helpful in evaluating such a situation. I feel it is more important to uphold the sacredness of sacramental marriage and yet to adopt a certain sensitivity in treating each situation of illicit sex as it presents itself. There is certainly a very significant difference between a relationship built upon love—in terms of respect, concern, tenderness—and one built upon lust or mere convenience. In other words, although I feel that as a Catholic I must maintain that marriage is the proper situation for a complete sexual relationship, I must also be prepared to respect the feelings and persuasions of those who do not find themselves quite up to this standard, and be prepared to evoke the best response that they are capable of. The function of the priest is more often exercised in staying with a difficult situation than it is in a blanket condemnation, or in washing one's hands of what one may consider to be an unclean situation.

[A] Pike: I can't buy the codifiers who say we've got a set of rules telling us when and when not to do something—who say how far to go in petting and what is right and wrong under every circumstance. That isn't the way decisions ought to be made. They ought to be made contextually, situationally, responsibly. If a person decides not to indulge in premarital sex in a given situation, it ought to be because sex is so good a thing, not because sex is so bad a thing. Mind you, we aren't simply saying sex should be avoided just because it's good. We're saying sex is such a good and important part of life that it shouldn't be treated casually.

[Q] Playboy: Would you consider all premarital sex casual?

[A] Cox: What Bishop Pike is saying, I think, is that sex should be handled responsibly. And that responsibility lies with the people involved. I think it's wrong to insist that in every instance and with every unmarried couple, intercourse is wrong. There are many times, however, when I would advise against it. It may unduly commit people to each other before they've really found out if they have enough common interests on a wide range of things. For many people it becomes a kind of excuse for not developing a commonality in other things; you can always go to bed. But, of course, there are instances in which it would be not only permissible but advisable for people to have intercourse before they're married. This might be the case, for example, during engagement periods that for one reason or another have to be unduly prolonged. I'm against any absolute proscription or prescription of sex before marriage. I think it varies from case to case.

[Q] Playboy: If sex prevents a couple from developing other mutual interests, isn't it possible that the failure is in the people involved rather than in sexual activity itself? Isn't it possible for a liaison that begins on a primarily sexual basis to develop into a far broader and more meaningful relationship?

[A] Cox: Of course, when it involves people who are emotionally prepared for a full and mature man-woman relationship. But an awful lot of kids aren't ready for that kind of thing, and getting involved in a sex relationship when they're not prepared to handle the emotional consequences can be pretty devastating.

[Q] Playboy: If two people aren't emotionally involved with each other to any degree, do you feel that devastating emotional consequences are likely? Wouldn't it be possible to sustain a primarily sexual relationship, as long as both parties know that's all it is, that's all they want out of it, and they both enjoy it?

[A] Adams: A sexual relationship without emotional involvement and without emotional consequences! That is quite a feat of specialization and spatialization. I'm reminded of Immanuel Kant's word about two individuals who enter into a mutual agreement to use each other's genitals. In modern parlance, such people are called "orgasm chasers." I suppose the least possible personal involvement requires the highest degree of transiency. If transiency and casualness disappear, emotional involvement develops. In any event, exploitation of another person, lack of respect for the other and for oneself—a violation of human dignity—will have emotional and other consequences, even in prostitution. Mature human beings prefer to relate the various aspects of living to the total personality, to culturally enriching values and to religious commitment, whether this aspect be eating, drinking, gregariousness, economic success or sex. Your question—inquiring about sex for the sake of sex—reminds me of the old notion that there is an Economic Man, the man for whom business is business and nothing else, for whom everything must be subordinated to the corporation—the organization man. The violation of human dignity and values attached to this view is widely recognized today. It is self-destructive. So also is a purely sexual relationship without emotional involvement and commitment. Psychosocial intimacy is a fundamental human need. This kind of intimacy requires emotional, indeed, full personal involvement. A sexual relationship without emotional involvement is something less than human. It can happen between animals but not between fully human beings.

[A] Moore: Yes, people, unlike animals, are not capable of a purely sexual relationship. This may be due to conditioning, to the psychological perceptions that they bring to their relationships, or to social influences. But in any case, there is more to the man-woman relationship than physical release and satisfaction. And I think it's this kind of transcendent meaning to the sexual relationship that the Biblical and theological tradition has tried to deal with in its emphasis on commitment in sex. Sexual relations seem to be more satisfying when the man and the woman have a continuum of relationships and meanings. It's not the body alone that "turns one on." It's all that the body represents. Imagery, especially for the woman, seems to require something more than bodily union. In fact, I don't believe there is such a thing as casual sex without gross depersonalization.

[A] Marty: Well, I can't say dogmatically that a person cannot divorce personality from sexuality, thereby making it purely mechanical. But it seems to me that the context in which this could occur would be either very artificial or pathological or—as in the case of prostitution—destructive of the dignity of the other person. In ordinary circumstances, I think that two healthy persons would find their sexuality an integral part of their whole personality, that such a divorce of emotion and sensation would be unrealistic and difficult to sustain. Most obviously, there is the risk that either or both of the partners would find themselves "escalating" emotionally, caring for the other in more ways than merely sexually. If only one partner accomplishes this, much unhappiness and hurt inevitably result. If both do. something good can indeed come of it, for human relationships have many different kinds of bases. But I'm not sure that compatible plumbing is the best basis on which to build a relationship.

[A] Rubenstein: I don't believe that a purely sexual relationship can exist longer than the first few encounters. A purely sexual relationship, with nothing else involved, would merely be mutual masturbation. I think we all have expectations that go beyond mutual masturbation, even in the most casual sex. I can imagine a situation where two people who are total strangers meet and are drawn to each other, having no further investment in each other than the sexual encounter, and then go their separate ways. The French have a phrase for it, étrangers passant, passing strangers. This can happen in an excursion boat or in a foreign city. But such encounters are isolated from the lives most of us actually lead. People who have never met each other before and will never see each other again can have casual sex and go on to something else. However, most of us are likely to have sexual encounters within our normal social circles. We are too involved with the people with whom we normally establish sexual contact. The likelihood of simply never seeing them or wanting never to see them again is so slight that really casual sex is not a realistic possibility. Furthermore, if casual sex is good, the people involved will want to repeat it. Casual sex doesn't remain casual very long with people who have any capacity for affection.

[A] Pike: The point is, we just can't look at it like a still picture. Human relationships grow and change, and we must look at them like we view a movie. We simply cannot assume that one partner will not become more involved than the other and that somebody may not get hurt. A second question that must be answered is: How much inner meaning must the relationship have for us in order to make the outward expression of sex appropriate?

[A] Moore: Well, I try to avoid giving categorical answers to questions about premarital sex. I don't think we can discuss it simply in terms of what is right or what is wrong. These are the kinds of questions college students like to ask, but if you answer them one way, they'll say, "Aha, that's what we'd expect of a clergyman," and if you answer them another way, they'll say, "Well, then, you're giving us the OK to do anything we want to." The first question for a theologian is, "What is the ultimate purpose of human sexuality?" And the second question is, "What is the meaning of this experience?"

[A] Marty: Well, this whole question of premarital sex covers more territory than most people realize. I don't think you can define handholding or dancing or necking by the unmarried as something other than premarital sex. I disagree with people who set aside copulation in an absolute way and say, "Here is the line." I've read many interviews with teenagers in which a sort of magic line is drawn. If you stay on one side of it, with technical virginity, you're a saint. If you happen to cross it, you go to hell. Such line drawing is a violation of the definition of sexuality in our tradition. True, sexual intercourse is, on the relative scale, the deepest, highest, most profound, most engaging and involving relationship. We conceive that relationship as one through which two people share a secret of personality and become "one flesh"—as in marriage. But two people certainly exchange a great deal of that secret of personality through sexual expressions just a little bit short of the "line." We all know very well that many, many young people in our churches take a wide range of these sexual expressions almost for granted.

[A] Pike: Obviously, sexual intercourse, like the foreplay that leads up to it, is good in itself—a very natural way of expressing love, rapport, recognition and some degree of commitment. Weighed against actual premarital intercourse, there have always been the three old terrors of "conception, infection and detection." But people are learning more and more how to handle these dangers, so that they are no longer absolute barriers. These three considerations have become a matter of ethical responsibility within a relationship. Two people may enter into a premarital sexual relationship with a view that "we have a strong affection for each other, but we're not committing ourselves." But one person can get much more deeply involved than the other, and someone can get seriously hurt. All of this has to be responsibly looked at, both in advance and during a relationship. But as for an absolute, unconditional injunction against premarital intercourse, I do not think so; I would say no.

[A] Moody: I suppose I, too, would have to say that premarital sex is possible without a person, in a theological sense, "falling from grace" or being outside the church. The christian community holds in itself all kinds of people of different backgrounds, different values and different mores. The Christian faith is large enough to accommodate all these different values, and I think it is wrong for us to judge whether or not some particular instance of personal conduct or social behavior is by its very nature apt to place a person "outside the pale." In my own religious persuasion, there are no beliefs that are set down in absolutes about premarital sex. The individual's conduct is left to his own judgment in the context of the situation. And for the Christian, this judgment must be based as much as possible on consideration of the ultimate welfare and happiness of both people.

Moore: There are many levels of human sexuality, and although premarital intercourse may not be the most appropriate, it offers the possibility of being meaningful. It might be entirely possible for two people who are very much in love, very much committed to each other, very much concerned with the relationship, and who are struggling to find a deeper way of communicating with each other, who out of this level of communication are trying to find some renewal, some hope for the future, to have sexual intercourse premaritally. But, as a social theologian, I think there are three things that must be involved in any sexual act—be it outside or within marriage. The first is that the people involved should have some shared history that is significant Sex is meaningless unless two people have some significant shared experiences other than sex. The second thing is that these two people should have a commitment to each other—a commitment they are willing to make public. By commitment I mean a promise to share life together. I don't necessarily mean "till death do us part," but there should be a willingness to make their commitment public; they needn't announce it in the local newspaper, but they shouldn't have to hide or lie about the nature of their relationship, either. Finally, I think that the two people should have some hope for the future. They should see that this act is not an end in itself; it is not just self-gratification, not just mutual masturbation, but points to something beyond them in both space and time. My point is that the state of marriage alone does not ensure "right," appropriate, meaningful sexual intercourse—although this, for me, is where it most appropriately belongs.

[A] Rubenstein: I would rather deal with the problem primarily on psychological rather than on purely religious terms. The real problem of premarital sex is whether the people who engage in it are emotionally able to handle it. Speaking from my experience as a college chaplain, I must agree with Harvey Cox that most of the people who indulge in premarital sex aren't emotionally capable of handling what they get themselves into. I think there is much sexual immaturity in our society.

[Q] Playboy: Some psychologists have suggested that this may be at least partly because many young people make the mistake of equating sex with love.

[A] LYNN: Yes. It's very easy for people to deceive themselves about what constitutes a serious relationship. In this area, we have to be fairly realistic about ourselves and our enormous capacity for self-deception. In our society, many people feel that it's necessary, once they've experienced the full sexual relationship with each other, to make a commitment, so they're driven into making a premature commitment. This is as much of a problem as the absence of a commitment.

[A] ADAMS: I agree. A premature commitment issuing from premarital intercourse can be motivated by a sense of responsibility—by a strong subjective sense of conscience—but the objective consequence of the commitment may in the end be destructive. It is often easy to overlook the fact that one is responsible for consequences as well as for authentic motives. A widely held view in our youth culture today places much more emphasis upon inner authenticity, the euphoria of spontaneity, immediate response, than upon continuity and durability. In this sort of ethos, a consideration of future implications tends to be neglected. Physical intimacy can be exhilarating, but it can also be deceptive when it gives an illusion of personal intimacy that doesn't really exist. Physical intimacy shouldn't be identified with depth of personal relationship. It's possible for the person who indulges in premarital or extramarital inlercourse to be misled by this deception. My main point is that opposite values always have to be taken into account, as is true when we consider both conscience and consequence, freedom and order, spontaneity and reflection. But these considerations don't provide a pat answer to your question about premarital intercourse. I don't have a slot machine into which I can insert a coin and get an answer in an automatic fashion. For one thing, it's difficult to define intercourse; as Reverend Marty points out, it's not confined to coitus, after all. In view of the fact, however, that narcissism and exploitation can all too readily find rationalization in the name of spontaneity, I prefer to appeal to what I believe is an authentic conception of love, an abiding affection that carries with it responsibility and respect for the other person in the context of a community. But one should not understand responsibility merely in terms of a compact; responsibility means response to broadly human needs. This is what is meant in part by Gibson Winter's term "a covenant of intimacy." Out of this complex of values emerge guidelines, not neatly formulated rules. One thing is clear: Sexual experience cannot be properly separated from the rest of experience. One may not relegate sexual intercourse to the status of "an aside" or of something segregatable. Sexual behavior is an integral part of human behavior. It must be viewed as an expression of the total personality and not as something comparable to the simple act of drinking a cup of water.

[Q] Playboy: In this connection, Hefner has written that "Sex is, at its best, an expression of love and adoration. But this is not to say that sex is, or should be, limited to love alone. Love and sex are certainly not synonymous, and while they may often be closely interrelated, the one is not necessarily dependent upon the other. Sex can be one of the most profound and rewarding elements in the adventure of living; if we recognize it as not necessarily limited to procreation, then we should also acknowledge openly that i( is not necessarily limited to love, either. Sex exists—with and without love—and in botli forms it does far more good than harm. ... This is not an endorsement of promiscuity or an argument favoring loveless sex—being a rather romantic fellow, ourself, we favor our sex mixed with emotion. But we recognize that sex without love exists; that it is not, in itself, evil; and that it may sometimes serve a definitely worthwhile end." How do you gentlemen feel about that?

[A] Adams: Mr. Hefner seems to be saying that when fully human and responsible participation in intercourse is not possible, then dehumanization is better than nothing at all.

[Q] Playboy: Is sex without love necessarily dehumanizing?

[A] Adams: Sexual intercourse should involve the total personality. If it does not do so, it brings about a disjunction between spirit and nature, and I don't see how you can say a disjunction between spirit and nature is better than nothing at all.

[A] Lynn: I think Mr. Hefner tends to be an absolutist when he implies that sex without love is better than no sex at all. A great many people, I am sure, would prefer no sex at all to sex without love.

[A] Rubenstein: Well, I would agree with Mr. Hefner that sex without love is better for an adult than no sex at all, but I would go on to say that if it continues indefinitely to be sex without love, I'd have to wonder what's wrong with the person and why he or she remains incapable of having a really deep and lasting relationship. Married, fulfilling, emotionally gratifying sex is the best kind of sex. Sex without love is at best a poor substitute lor sex with love, and must always be seen as such.

[A] Moody: I wouldn't want to make such a categorical statement as Hefner's. I mean, that's getting down to the level of hiring a prostitute or getting a shack-up job. If you really need nothing but sexual release, and that's all there is to it, then that's sad. I don't want to be dogmatic, but I don't want to reach that place where I say that sex without love—that is, sex without caring—is better than no sex at all. I'd hate to have to get to that point.

[A] Cox: Maybe our disagreement here stems from the fact that we're using the slippery word "love" in very different ways. If Hefner means romantic love, the kind of love we often think of when we talk about mixing sex with love, then I would say that Hefner's wanting to mix sex and love is a kind of romantic prejudice on his part, albeit a nice prejudice. But the fact is that most of the sex of history and of the modern world has very little to do with romantic love. And I would agree with him that there is clearly a difference between sex and love, and that sex without love exists. However, if by "love" we mean caring or being concerned for the other person's welfare or health or worth, then I think we must be against sex without love just as we're against any other activity that isn't concerned for the welfare of the other person. In fact, using my definition of the word "love," sex without love is pretty much the same as irresponsible sex, and I hope Hefner is against that.

[A] Lynn: To say that sex without love is not necessarily evil and that it may sometimes serve a definitely worthwhile end is rather like saying the same thing about a "just war." Sure, there may be cases where that holds true, but I'm very suspicious about the odds. I think those cases are rare.

[A] Marty: Well, I don't know, Bob. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't generalize about it. I know sexually repressed people who hold themselves in, who are emotional basket cases, who are crabby and judgmental, who are good for nothing in the world and who probably would be better off if they could have a means of expressing their sexuality.

[Q] Playboy: You mean they'd be better off if they did have sex without love rather than no sex at all?

[A] Marty: Well, let's take a hypothetical case. Think of a man, say, 40 years old. Maybe his wife is dead, or he's divorced, or maybe he never married. In any case, there's nobody in his life right now. He works at a lonely desk, seldom sees people, and he goes home and eals a TV dinner. He's holed up in his apartment; this is his whole world. He's never been involved in a good social or ethical cause, never done anything for anybody else. And then he climbs into bed with somebody. What happens? If we hear about it, for the first time in his life we start caring about him. Suddenly he has joined society; he did something wrong. He might have hated people right along; he might have been a slum landlord, but we never bothered about him. We weren't concerned about his spiritual welfare when he was just a slum landlord victimizing his tenants, and we didn't care whether or not he had a potential to care for other people. But now he climbs into bed with somebody and we say he's using her, that he's going to destroy his and her potential to be human. All of a sudden we're concerned with his morality and his potential for antisocial behavior.

But now just suppose this guy tangles with somebody who really uncorks him, who gets him over some of this emotional isolation—gets him to join the human race. You know, he may actually become a better human being for it. We can hypothesize cases like this because we've all observed them—instances in which such a person joins the human race because he did something that we would have ordinarily considered illicit and immoral. This plot has often been played out; I know Christian ministers who have really hoped that a certain older unmarried woman in their congregation would get seduced, that some man would give her a thrill and start caring about her, because perhaps then she would stop being so judgmental toward others, and that she might thereby start being somebody. Now, a preacher can't proclaim that secret hope from the pulpit, but he can, as a human, support her in her need and in her interpretation of the event when and if it happens. So I certainly agree that there can be circumstances in which somebody who has been good for nothing can start being good for something through experiences and relationships that are, by my own view, less than the norm for Christians, but which by any human view are much higher than the norm for selfish humanity. I hope that makes some sense.

[A] Pike: It certainly does make sense. I've known a number of cases in my pastoral experience very much like the one you describe.

[A] Moore: So have I. One of my concerns as an educator is to teacli people the process by which they can make good decisions, rather than predetermining the decision in advance. I'm a situationist. I mean by this that the answers are induced out of the situation in which a person finds himself. The problem is that there has to be a basis for making moral decisions in a given situation, and this is what some of us are searching for today. It's possible for sexual intercourse between two responsible single people who are very much committed to each other to be a more meaningful expression of sex than that which sometimes exists within marriage. We forget, I think, that many wives prostitute themselves in order to get what they want from their husbands. They use sex as a weapon to manipulate the husband. And husbands can depersonalize their wives in attempts to prove their maleness.

[Q] Playboy: Dr. Moore, you seem to feel that situation ethics is the answer to the need for a viable sex ethic for single people. Hefner has often pointed out that the Christian church has traditionally offered no kind of sex ethic for single people except "Don't." Yet we live in a society where many people find it impossible or impractical, for educational or financial reasons, to get married until their late 20s, although the sex drive reaches its peak in the late teens. Gentlemen, can the church expect young people to abstain completely from sexual activity for the 10 or 15 years of their lives when the sex drive is strongest, and then suddenly enter into a sexually mature and well-adjusted marriage?

[A] Lynn: Your analysis of the situation is quite acceptable, and you're talking about an area where the church has been guilty of selective inattention. We not only haven't developed a sex ethic that makes sense for the single person; we haven't even thought much about it. Even the most supposedly enlightened theologians scarcely deal with this problem at all. Mostly, they deal with questions of premarital sex for college students, but they ignore the problem of what happens to the single woman who doesn't marry until she's 30 or 35, or maybe never marries. What about her? We've said very little—because we have very little to say.

[A] Moody: I'm a little bit leery about the church's being able to promulgate any kind of ethic that would prescribe behavior patterns for all people. I lend to agree with Dr. Moore that most ethical decision making is done—and should be done—by human beings within a context of some kind of world view and in the particular situation in which they find themselves. Now, I admit that the church has not done its homework in regard to any kind of word for the youth of today. I think that's sad. The church always talks as though there's no such thing, for example, as premarital sex. In this area, it seems to me that the church is terribly irrelevant today. Young people are trying to decide in what context they're going to have premarital sex, and I feel that the church has some responsibility to help them with their decision making, and not forever to look the other way, pretending that there's no reason for them to think deeper and to ask questions. I used to think you could give general lectures on sex to tell people how to behave. I really don't believe that anymore. All we can do is teach them to think—to think about themselves and the world and their relationship to it; in other words, to develop attitudinal postures out of which come the decisions they must make; to think about who they are and to know the world of other human beings, and out of that context of caring and concern for another person, to make decisions about their sexual life and all other areas of their life.

[A] Pike: Many churchmen, through their writings and sermons, are recognizing this problem, and as a result there has recently been a very rapid shift to situation ethics in contrast to the old code. This shift, I think, will continue to increase and will eventually result in most of the various church denominations' making official declarations supporting a situational approach to sexual morality much like the recent committee report on sex morals received by the British Council of Churches as having "much to contribute of value to the contemporary discussion of moral questions."

[A] Lynn: I think the only beginning of an answer the church has to this dilemma is the current emphasis—which is so apparent in this panel discussion—on individual responsibility and a refusal to exploit the other person. But actually, I don't think that's very much of an answer. The church has to give some guidance as to what responsibility means. As I said earlier, I'm quite wary of the human capacity for self-deception and rationalization in any area of human life, including sex. Therefore, I don't think the ethic of responsibility, of care and concern for the other person, takes us very far. It's become largely a slogan, a cliché. Beyond praising "concern," "openness," "responsibility" and all that, what more does the church have to say? Very little.

[Q] Playboy: Does the church need to say anything beyond that?

[A] Lynn: Yes, but that's a problem we're just barely beginning to think about. We're in the same place on this issue as we were on the question of economic ethics in the early part of the 19th Century, before we began to think about the problems of industrialization. If you go back and read the thought of the American Protestants of the early 1800s, you'll find they were as ill equipped to deal with questions of economic ethics as we are ill equipped today to deal with the problems of sexual morals in a world where human situations are vastly different from anything we've ever known before.

[A] Adams: There are within Christendom, of course, certain cultures in which premarital sexual intercourse on the part of people who subsequently become married is rather generally recognized. In Holland, for example, not merely in the anonymous culture of urbanism but even in the rural districts, it is fairly common for people to be married after the bride-to-be is already three or four months pregnant. And there seems to be little sense of guilt or community reproach attached to it. I understand that something similar can be said about Sweden. We must recognize that even before the advent of urbanism and mobile culture, some church people in established traditions—that is, church people with a national culture of continuity —had already made an adjustment. So when we speak about what the church is going to do in the future about establishing a viable sex ethic for single people, we can say only that certain segments of Christendom have already made changes in that direction. The task of the church in a changing society is always the task of reformulating standards, by taking into account aspects of the situation that previously were ignored or that previously were interpreted in a different way. So the future of the church here with regard to sex behavior is not in principle different from its future with regard to other fundamental questions. The problem of achieving a standard itself requires reflection and responsibility, taking into account the whole complex of values that make human life meaningful. But let me point out that there's a difference between trying to find a decent standard for today and simply saying "Well, the world is changing. Look at what human behavior actually is. We might as well adjust ourselves to it. This is the way people are, so we might as well accept it." In other words, what people do cannot be a basis for an ethical standard.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that's the basis on which many churchmen have become more tolerant of premarital sex—because everybody's doing it?

[A] ADAMS: Yes, perhaps some of them. But I agree with Margaret Mead in her comment on the Kinsey Report. She said, "Let no one suppose that these data that describe what people are doing can be taken as the basis of what is right." What is right may, of course, be different from what they're doing. If the church of the future is worth its salt, it must rethink these things, and if the sex ethic is changed, it must be changed toward the end of finding a standard that has a theological base. That is, we must arrive at a new understanding—a reinterpretation—of sexual relationships between people under God.

[A] Marty: I agree that this has been an overlooked question, in that our sex ethic until now has been devoted to either of two goals in life: one, how to remain celibate all your life, thus attaining a higher degree of "spirituality," or, two, how to prepare yourself for monogamous marriage, which is the only other ideal. I don't think it would be truthful to claim that the church has done anything except devote itself to these alternatives. In recent decades, the church has bent and stretched within those boundaries; but I don't think anything really new has emerged yet. I couldn't honestly say that the church has developed a new ethic. And this means that there's really a kind of unrealistic thing going on: The church is affirming one set of values while it's allowing or winking at another. I think any pastoral counselor knows that what he's talking about from the pulpit or in his classes isn't really being grasped or lived up to by the people who hear him. I can't say where this is going to go. By this I don't mean that Christians should merely take a poll and then adjust or try to be relevant to its findings. No, if something runs counter to the central impetus of Christian ethics, believers must condemn it, even if this greatly embarrasses and inconveniences them, setting them apart from others in the world. The Christian may live under norms and mandates he would not impose on the world at large, because these norms were designed to equip him for the discipleship of Jesus Christ. They were not designed to license him to be a snoop or a legislative busybody or a thrill-seeking gossip. As things are now, I see more erosion in popular Christianity; but looking ahead, I don't think the church will ever endorse every kind of extramarital relationship. I do, however, picture the church trying to find meaning in forms of sexual expression that it has not yet recognized and not yet related to the Christian ethic.

[A] Rubenstein: To the best of my knowledge, Judaism has not had this difficulty with premarital sex. We have a principle that says that if an unbetrothed man goes into an unbetrothed woman, their act is not considered an act of sexual degradation. The early Jews made a distinction between the act of an unbetrothed man or woman and the act of a married man or woman. But, more important, it's beside the point for me to say that a particular relationship is desirable or undesirable. People are going to enter into a relationship when they feel it's appropriate to their needs, no matter what clergymen say. Very often, all we can do is try to pick up the pieces and help people mend things. I would be most reluctant to pass judgment on sexual matters. In a sense, it would be passing judgment on somebody else's freedom.

[Q] Playboy: Until now, we've been talking about premarital sex. Would you also hesitate to pass judgment on extramarital sex?

[A] Rubenstein: I'm completely in accord with the Biblical strictures against adultery.

[A] Adams: Any conclusions about sex outside of marriage depend on what you mean by marriage. For the Christian, marriage is more than a civil act; it's a religious covenant. The idea of a covenant presupposes that the individual becomes a person by entering into meaningful and enduring relations with other persons, by making a commitment. The texture of his commitments constitutes the character of his personhood. This is also true of a community. One could say that the kind of commitment made by a person or a society gives that person or society its style. Marriage for the Christian is a commitment not only between husband and wife but also between them and the religious community, and all are bound together in fidelity, sexual and otherwise. But one should not make this fidelity sound like a business contract, signed and sealed and duly notarized. Nor should one identify it with neatly formulated rules. Fundamentally, marriage is a covenant of intimacy, rooted in affection. And affection rules out casualness; it rules out not only coercion but also manipulation and exploitation. But the covenant is not absolute. The responsible person, in the modern view, may in good conscience believe that a particular covenant should come to an end. The maintenance of a covenant can have very destructive consequences. Divorce may be a means of mitigating this destructiveness. But extramarital intercourse is something else. It may be nothing more than plain adultery. Generally, it is not the proper remedy for maladjustment in marriage. Yet there may be rare, special circumstances under which extramarital sexual intercourse may be condoned.

[Q] Playboy: What sort of circumstances?

[A] Cox: Jesus made it uncomfortably clear that in this area the church has no business condoning or condemning. He also insisted it is the attitude that counts as much as the act. Certainly where it entails deceit and the deception of the spouse, it's always damaging. On the other hand, I can envision extreme instances in which it might be the lesser evil. Take the famous instance in Tea and Sympathy, where the wife of a teacher in a boy's school helps a boy who fears he has homosexual tendencies achieve a kind of confidence in his own manhood by having an affair with him. I wouldn't want to put my unequivocal stamp of approval on her action, however, because we can't know what other factors might be involved in such a situation; but it does raise the point of the lesser evil. Also, think of those people who are separated from their spouses for years by war, prison or sickness. What we have to learn today is not to inflict on others our own particular understanding of the marital bond or the sexual act. Adultery really means violating the marriage vow, but that vow is understood differently by different couples, so a wide pluralism is really necessary, and we should not condemn other people for not living up to our standards.

[A] Rogers: Well, I can't see where adultery would ever be permissible for a fully responsible Christian. It violates the essential commitment of two people in marriage. But again, when you're dealing with a concrete situation, you have to juxtapose it with relevant alternatives. Sometimes it is a better thing just to let an affair work itself out than forthrightly to condemn it. A considerable change is taking place in pastoral counseling. For one thing, there is a renewed awareness of personal evaluation and personal responsibility. In this setting, the priest frequently functions as advisor, but the actual decision must be that of the individual concerned. Playboy: Father, you say that adultery, at least for the Christian, violates the essential commitment of two people in marriage. But only a minority of people in our society are committed Christians. How do you feel about mutually agreeable marital infidelity for those who aren't?

[A] Rogers: Well, I suppose such situations do exist, but I really can't personally understand how they can, how a couple can really continue to love and respect each other under such circumstances. I would think the emotional strain would be terrific. But maybe the facts are against me; I just don't know that much about what people actually do in their private lives. I don't feel qualified to pronounce judgment upon the situation of those who do not accept Christian principles. Since people do vary in their capacity for emotional adjustments and accommodations, I should think we must await further evidence before coming to any hard-and-fast conclusions.

[A] Lynn: I agree, Father. But I would be very suspicious of the likelihood of love between such people remaining unimpaired. Isn't it naïve to think that passion and temporary involvement can be so easily managed?

[A] Pike: My experience in counseling indicates that more often than not damage does occur to the primary relationship. I have run into only about two couples who, rightly or wrongly, have a mutual agreement along this line, where there apparently isn't any flak or tear-up about it. In most cases, it involves the necessity of deceit on the part of the party who goes outside the camp. And deceit, more often than not, is unsuccessful, and this brings hurt to the other person. Even if the deceit is successful, I've seen many instances where it has taken some of the savor out of the primary relationship.

[A] Rubensteion: I'm not prepared to say that mutually agreeable marital infidelity is wrong or immoral. But it would seem to me that marriage means the sharing of the total personal and psychological resources of two people, and I can't conceive of a couple who are really enjoying their marriage wanting to do that. On the other hand, I know that it exists in our culture. My guess is that these marriages are less than adequate, but it's difficult for me to sit in judgment as to how other people live their lives. All I can say is that I personally don't see how I could possibly live that way. Moore: With few exceptions, extramarital sexual relations, even when mutually agreeable, lead to serious problems for a marriage. I can remember working in a marriage-counseling center where we had seven very sophisticated couples playing the trading game. They were coming one by one for help without one another's knowing it. It was becoming a problem for them. One of the things that often makes such a marriage deteriorate, even in the most sophisticated society, is that you begin unconsciously comparing one sexual partner with another, and the one you're accustomed to, the one you're living with all the time, cannot stand this comparison. And most affairs are not this open. Most involve deceit and secrecy, which places terrific strain on both the primary and the outside relationship. The sin here is not the sex act but the disruption of fidelity and trust.

[Q] Plaboy: What about a situation in which one of the spouses is institutionalized or incapacitated? Would you consider extramarital sex permissible under such circumstances?

[A] Rogers: I would certainly be inclined to be extremely sympathetic in a case like that, but positively approving such a thing as a kind of moral commitment would, I think, be wrong.

[A] Lynn: This would be one of the most painful and poignant human situations I could imagine: a man with his wife permanently, say, in a mental institution, or vice versa. It is at this point that my sense of marriage as a covenant is tested. I worry about the pressure that human beings are under when the possibility of a sexual relationship is not permitted.

[A] Cox: I think this is the type of situation in which extramarital sex would be acceptable. I would say that in every possible instance, however, some kind of understanding with the spouse is essential. I think that doing things that the spouse doesn't know about, or lying to the spouse, sows seeds of personal destruction.

[A] Marty: It wouldn't take a good pastor ten seconds to understand such a situation, and he would try to handle it compassionately. But I can't envision a pastor recommending adultery as a solution, because I have great difficulty imagining that the crippled mate could ever really, in his or her heart, want it. For this reason, I suppose I would pull rank in such a circumstance and urge that the spouse may be called to an extraordinary kind of sacrifice or suffering. If a man gets polio and is paralyzed, he will look upon his wife with more dependence than ever. I cannot imagine that he would feel that the necessary relationship on which his very life depends would not be threatened by her having sexual relations with someone else. Here, let me accent something that plays a big part in the Lutheran tradition: While marriage is not a sacrament—though I regard it virtually sacramentally—it is based on the concept of the vow or the pledge. This implies more than mere legalisms couched in terms of civil marriage and its requirements. We accent very strongly the way human relationships are based on language, word, pledge. Thus, when I commit myself, as with an oath, it almost seems as though the whole structure of the universe depends upon my following through. God speaks to a man and a woman through a word; and they, before Him. speak to each other, promising to be together in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. Life is risk. If they violate pledges, the agreed-upon base of human relationships is violated. We make a good deal of this approach.

[A] Adams I don't see how the Christian communily itself could actually sanction extramarital relationships. The unusual hardship case—an invalid or a separation by war, etc.—calls for a thin line of distinction. I would insist, along with Dr. Marty, however, that entering the married relationship entails "for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse." On the other hand, no Christian point of view is authentic that is based on a set of inviolable rules. There are situations in which human values can be actually preserved by violation of neatly formulated principles.

[A] Moody: Although premarital sex is a shadowy region in Biblical ethics, this is not so true when we come to the question of adultery. But I have a feeling that we are in for some overhauling and re-examination of this whole area of our sexual life, mostly because it has been such a sham. It has been phony in so many ways—in terms of what we talk about as norms and what is actually going on. The church needs to provide new guidelines for extramarital sex as well as for premarital sex. I think the church is afraid to do this; but eventually it must. The trouble is that the first time you talk about extramarital relationships, people always block their minds. They say there are absolutely no justifiable reasons. I have discussed this with a number of my colleagues. How do we proceed in our counseling when these questions are raised? What do we have to say to a man or a woman in a situation where sex with the marriage partner is impossible? Can it be that once again all we have to say is, "Total abstinence is your lot. Live with it"? Well, it seems to me that we had better take a good look at that, out of respect for the realities of this life. It's amazing the kind of realism we can condone when we look at the ethics of foreign policy. We can't condone equivalent realism, however, in personal ethics. We insist we are being merely realistic when we say that killing is ordinarily wrong, but in self-defense or in war it is justified. When it comes to realism about a human being, with all his sexual needs, though, we become highly idealistic and moralistic. Are we able to say with dogmatic assurance that all extramarital sex is bad and destructive to the marriage relationship? As Reverend Adams indicates, most men engaged in counseling know there are situations in which extramarital affairs have saved marriages rather than destroyed them.

[A] Moore: In my own counseling experience, I have known some such cases.

One example was a wife who was living with, but estranged from, her spouse, who became involved outside marriage, and in the experience found a new understanding and confirmation of herself. She learned from the affair, and her marital relationship found new health because of the experience. The problem is that we look upon sex as the great sin that must end everything. A man can wreck his car. or he can lose his job or injure his child physically, and his wife is able to bridge these experiences. But let him get involved with the flesh and this becomes the great unforgivable sin. There are many kinds of estrangements and wrongdoings within marriage; sex does not necessarily have to be the experience that will end all other experiences. I think the objection to sex outside of marriage is that within the Christian tradition of marital union, sex is more than just the physical act; it is symbolic of the commitment and merger of two personalities who are attempting to share a whole life together. The problem in our world today is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for two people to share a whole life together. There are so many forces pressing upon each individual that contribute to estrangement. Some experts are pessimistic enough to say that in another 20 years, marriage will no longer lie for life, but on five-year contracts. I'm inclined to think that when extramarital sexual relations occur, it is only symbolic of a breakdown that has occurred in the union between two personalities; and to attack this breakdown just as being a sexual sin misses the point altogether.

[A] Adams: Extramarital intercourse by married persons is viewed as abnormal not only because it's a violation of a norm but because it often indicates some sort of personality maladjustment. In most cases, extramarital intercourse is a symptom radthr than a cause of marital unhappiness. And so the more fundamental problem is not that of extramarital intercourse, but rather the problem of maladjustment.

[A] Moore: Yes. We ought to recognize the fact that sexual expression is a much bigger question than the sexual act itself. To reduce sex just to intercourse is abstracting it from the whole person and his total sexuality. But on the other hand, I would go so far as to say that marriage itself may not be the only determining factor in the lightness or wrongness of sexual expression. When we get into this trap, we tend to make the institution of marriage more important than the welfare of man. There are many people who are married and who have very invalid sexual expressions within that marriage.

[A] Cox: I agree. The sexual expression of love is a broader expression than just sexual intercourse. It involves the whole range of sexual contacts, and it would be not only unwise but impossible to restrict all sexual expression to marriage. I would think that the sexual expression of relationships between men and women would at least be a part of the wide range of relationships, in and outside of marriage.

[A] Lynn: Well, I think that a sexual relationship is at the very base of the marriage covenant and, therefore, is to be taken most seriously. This doesn't mean that a husband or a wife cannot appreciate another person as a sexual being. Thank God for beauty, wherever it exists. But because the marriage covenant between man and wife has, in a sense, its beginning and its end in the sexual relationship. I would argue for a firm commitment to the sexual bond.

[A] Marty: So much normal human relationship is sustained through noninvolved and legitimate kinds of flirtation—and flirtation has a sexual base—that if you said all sexual expression had to be limited to marriage, you would rule out much human relationship. I agree that sexual intercourse, which we conceive to be the full and ultimate expression of sexual involvement, ordinarily should be limited to marriage. But it is somewhat more complex than merely enforcing a code based on such a viewpoint. I can picture what might be called the "tea-and-sympathy" context, which Harvey mentioned a while ago, in which I could conceive, from the pastoral point of view, the legitimacy of something like adultery in extreme situations.

[A] Moody: It all boils down to the fact that we can't set up absolute ethical norms to determine behavior before we actually enter into the situation in which those answers are called for. We should also recognize, as Dr. Moore pointed out a moment ago, that sexual love within marriage can be just as damaging and degrading to the human personality as sexual love expressed outside of marriage. The most valid guidelines concerning the sexual expression of love— and this has nothing to do with rules and regulations—are related to human beings and their worth, their preciousness as people. The respect for this, and the concern for it, and some tenderness and feeling for that worth, it seems to me, are the basic guidelines for all treatment of human beings in a personal relationship.

[A] Rogers: And this means that, regardless of the context in which people express themselves sexually, the Christian must never lose sight of the more serious implications and the essentially sacred nature of the sexual union.

[Q] Playboy: Must sex always be so solemn and sacred in order to be moral and responsible, Father? How do you feel about sex for pleasure?

[A] Rogers: I wasn't suggesting that people should douse themselves in holy water before going to bed. Of course, sexual pleasure is good and legitimate. Of course, sex should be fun. We are getting away from our traditional overconcern with the procreative purpose of sex. Procreation is still a very important point of reference, but the inner, immediate meaning of marriage is being sought in love—a common shared life—and this includes the fun and pleasure in sex.

[A] Cox: Of course, sex should be fun. Man is, among other things, homo ludens— the playing creature; this is one of the things man can do that machines cannot. Machines may take over a lot of other things, but they do not play. Man does, and I think his sexuality is one area in which man expresses this playfulness. It is good that some correctives have been introduced, some criticisms of the standard Christian understandings of sex. The criticisms that have emphasized playfulness and the erotic element are useful and welcome. And they act as a corrective to what I think is an oversolemnizing of the theological understanding of sex. But I would like to say immediately that when sex is viewed only as play, then the other person becomes merely the plaything, and sex is restricted to the leisure side of life. Men who view sex only as a source of pleasure fail to see the woman as a companion, as a co-worker, as one with whom the male struggles in the social, professional and political arena. She is seen almost entirely as an object of diversionary interest. Sex is fun, but when it becomes nothing but fun, then pretty soon it is not even fun anymore. Some eminent psychiatrists have lately been reporting a neurosis that is beginning to emerge in America today. Young people come to psychiatrists not with complaints of guilt feelings arising out of a repressive Victorian background but from the fact that they have all the freedom they want now, but they aren't having fun. It's not pleasurable for them. They report that fun in sex just doesn't seem to be there, and they ask, "What's wrong?" It's a reverse guilt syndrome. We feel bad because we're not having the fun we're supposed to be having.] don't believe we can pull off a total identification of sex with play. It's fun, but it's more than that.

[A] Rubenstein: I think that sex can be play only when everything else is going right. To see sex only as play is to forget what sex is. It is a way of relating to another human being at a particular moment in the timetable of life as we go from birth to death. The insights of both literature and religion speak of the relation between love and death. When we are involved in sex, we are involved in that activity out of which the human origins arise. We are also reminded of where we are going. There is a certain tragic sense connected with the sexual act. What is involved is not purely personal and voluntary. When we engage in sexual intercourse, we are serving forces beyond our own nature. Even what we desire is beyond our own nature. In sex we give our bodies to each other. I believe our bodies are all we have. When I give my body, I give my total self. I can have good sex only when I am at home in my body. But to accept my body is to accept my mortality. Paradoxically, to accept sex is to accept death. To accept sex is to accept the fact that our bodies are limited in time and ultimately brings with it the price we pay for entering time—namely, death. This solemn element in sex has been underestimated in our country, which tends always to underplay the elements that are tragic in the human condition. I am reminded of Albert Camus' essay Summer in Algiers. In it he talks with reverent joy about the way his compatriots used to enjoy their bodies. They used to swim naked on the beaches of Algiers. At the same time, there was a sadness to all this, because the very same bodies, which they knew to be all they had, would within a very short period decay and die. I do believe in celebrating the joys of the body. But I also believe the body is all that I have. Therefore, the joys I celebrate have a terminus to them, so sex has a significance that is more than just play.

[A] Marty: Well, I don't think that every time I eat a lobster I have to moralize about the vitamins and minerals to be drawn from it. If someone taps me on the shoulder and wants to theologize upon the experience, I will politely invite him to do so with somebody else. Pleasure is a legitimate element in humanity. But what is a person for in the world? Is he just for eating lobster or having sex? If he is, then he is in trouble before we ever get near the question of legitimacy in something pleasurable. But if he has a warm, responsible, healthy relationship to others and to the world, then pleasure will fit in as a part of his sustenance.

[A] Moore: I hope that within Protestantism we can get over the attitude that sex has to be some sort of superspiritual experience. I am afraid that so many Christians have so mystified sex that they can't enjoy it. I'm sure many people aren't willing to become real physical beings because they're trying to make sex into some sort of spiritualized prayer experience. This is probably because they feel so guilty about sexual intercourse and physical pleasure that the only way they can do it is to turn it into an other-than-body experience. I wish we could get away from this. I wish we could accept the idea that man is made to enjoy the pleasures of life, that sex is one of these pleasures and that to be truly sexual is to be earthy and physical and to let the body be one of the channels out of which we can express our deeper existence. Sex, for me, is one of the ways husbands and wives can celebrate the joys of life together. Moody: There is an undeniable animality about man, and we shouldn't try to pretend it isn't so. If that animality, that physical, biological urge and its consummation, is a part of the pleasure of life, then it should not be denied.

[A] Rogers: I agree that there is a very real sense in which sex should be play. Play is highly contemplative. By this I mean that it is not out to win or to achieve something outside of the scope of its immediate concern. Love is contemplative and it is fitting that it expresses itself in play. But I suspect that is not exactly the sense in which the question is being asked. If by sex-as-play you mean a sort of deliberate rejection of the complex structure of sexual expression, if you mean pleasure utterly detached from responsibility, then such play may well appear self-defeating. The very concentration upon sexual pleasure as an end in itself tends to put it beyond the capacity of the average man's habitual achievement.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Rogers: Because if he makes personal pleasure the ultimate achievement, the sole standard for judging his sexual accomplishment, failure to achieve this standard may produce greater guilt than the old puritanism. And here let me say that if one thinks of sexual puritanism as the separation of the biological from the emotional, then one must speak of two opposing sorts of puritanism: One sort would have sex only for the purpose of duty, and fails for this reason to see sex as good in itself. The other sort of puritanism would limit the sexual to the merely pleasurable—excluding its emotional involvement and its social responsibility. Both forms of puritanism oversimplify the complex phenomenon of sexuality and rob it of its specific and true inner meaning. Furthermore—and this is very important—the danger in mere pursuit of pleasure is that it often results in one person's using another person. A person is always a person and can never be exploited as if he or she were a thing—an object. A person—for the Christian—must always be an end, never a means.

[Q] Playboy: That is a view with which virtually everyone, from the most conservative to the most liberal, including Hefner, agrees in principle. What Hefner objects to is the idea that all sexual relations unblessed by deep spiritual love and irrevocable vows are by definition exploitative and inhuman. Some churchmen have felt that noncoital sex—inside or outside marriage—is immoral because it is not only "unnatural" but is exploitative, because it is sex purely for pleasure rather than procreation. How do you gentlemen feel about the morality of noncoital sex; that is, sexual activity that leads to orgasm without intercourse?

[A] Adams: I would assume that such behavior could contribute to the maintenance of, and even the deepening of, love between two people.

[A] Cox: Any action that expresses affection between consenting adults in private is something that lies outside the range of my moral condemnation.

[A] Rubenstein: The trouble with noncoital sex is that when practiced exclusively to the neglect of coital sex, it represents an immature relationship. In noncoital sex, one often expresses some neurotic fear of the full genital relationship. I believe in a kind of incarnational theory of sex. The mind and the body must be at one with each other and they must will their total function, which means genital sex. On the other hand, I don't see anything immoral about noncoital sex. I simply feel that when practiced exclusively, it is immature and incomplete. It represents a kind of fixation at an infantile level of sexual development.

[A] Marty: I see no problem at all. I look at this in the category of play. Holding hands is not coital sex, yet I could picture the right man with the right woman getting a bigger—and healthier—charge out of that than the wrong man with the wrong woman could get out of "normal" intercourse. All these things, including all forms of fondling each other's bodies, if mutally agreeable, would belong to play. And if such activity reinforces a good relationship, I have difficulty seeing why the state should have laws about it. In fact, such laws seem absurd. So, as a pastor, if it is mutually supportive, I would have difficulty seeing anything even to discuss.

[A] Rogers: Well, it seems to me that there should always be a reference, wherever possible, to procreation. I don't think procreation is central, but I think completely noncoital sex is too much of a deviation from it. I'm not now speaking of foreplay. I'm talking about deliberately producing an orgasm without intercourse. I think this is immoral for the Catholic.

[A] Pike: Well, I see no moral difference between petting to climax and actual intercourse. I don't see any significant distinction between intercourse and noncoital stimulation to orgasm. If one is going to be this involved—leaving out whether or not one should be this involved—it might as well be as fulfilling as possible to both people. There is no point to "technical virginity."

[A] Moody: We have this great hang-up on genital intercourse, and we call a girl a virgin if she hasn't reached that stage. It is possible for noncoital intercourse to be immoral, but it is also possible for it to be morally responsible. Again, it would depend upon the situation and the circumstances that exist between two people.

[A] Rubenstein: Well, you know, many couples have resorted to noncoital sex because of fear of pregnancy. But, needless to say, we now have better forms of contraception.

[Q] Playboy: Since we're on the subject, what are your views on the morality of birth control?

[A] Rubenstein: I understand what the Catholic Church means by its prohibition; the sex act cannot be taken out of context of the fact that this is the way children come into the world. From this point of view, I would say that the desire for a child is unconsciously involved in all good sex. However, given the terrors of overpopulation and the hideous problems that will arise unless this problem is solved, we cannot afford the luxury of unplanned parenthood. For this reason, I'm unequivocally in favor of birth-control measures. I have no moral judgment against childless marriages, because I realize that there can be circumstances in which the birth of a child might introduce a severe problem. Nevertheless, if a healthy young married couple didn't want a child, I would wonder if they were well. But I would certainly not think they were bad or evil.

[A] Marty: I'm almost tempted to ask: Is there any moral problem about birth control? In the Lutheran Church, as in almost all Protestant churches, we reacted negatively at first to the development of modern contraception. The literature on the subject just a generation ago was generally negative; now it's almost universally positive about family planning. Change has come about chiefly because of the rereading of the Bible, which is where Lutherans always have to start to measure their norms for reclarification and revision. Concerning birth control, they can find no clear prohibitive texts; if they could, they would probably go against the whole world, no matter what the cultural situation was. Biblical passages such as the one about Onan are seen as no problem; they were misapplied in the first place. The words "Be fruitful and multiply" are seen more as a blessing than as a command. Natural law isn't a big thing with us. In our reappraisal of the human situation today in a crowded world, we tend to stress doctrines and teachings about stewardship, responsibility, planning, provision, shared love, all of that. A Lutheran counselor would insist that marriage involve children whenever possible. But no stigma is attached to childless couples. In fact, there is strong pastoral support for them.

[A] Cox: Not only do I feel that birth control isn't wrong, I think it is of question able morality not to use birth control today, when population growth is such a serious problem. Christians have a positive responsibility to restrict the size of their families.

[A] Pike: I believe in family planning, in responsible decision making about having children. A child should be wanted. In some circumstances, it is a positive effort toward responsibility to use the best birth-control methods available. The church has no infallibility as to what, in a given decade, is the best means under the circumstances to prevent birth and still maintain the sex relationship, which has another, independent primary purpose—that is, a unitive function.

[A] Moore: Frankly, I feel that we still need to do a great deal of research into the whole matter of birth control. For example, sterilization is one of the more perfect ways of preventing conception, but some recent studies indicate that sterilization of the male contributes to a great feeling of inadequacy and impotence. The birth-control pill is limited in that there is presently some question about how long it can be safely used.

[A] Adams: An elaborate research on these matters is under way at the Center for Population Studies at Harvard. Two members of the Department of Ethics at Harvard Divinity School are associated with this Center and the project. They are finding that the issue of developing efficient and safe birth-control techniques, important though it is, will not by itself bring about the necessary reduction in the birth rates unless the motivation to limit and control births is present. The existence of such motivation is often assumed, but this assumption is not warranted. Certain coeds in our own culture, for example, despite their knowledge of birth-control techniques, play a kind of "Russian roulette," declining to use contraceptives and taking their chances as to whether or not they will become pregnant.

In other cultures, as in our own, one finds special religious objections to birth control. In India, surviving sons are needed for social security and for the burial of the father, a religious observance viewed as absolutely essential. Among Islamic peasant women, controlling or limiting family size is held to be in God's hands, and God might take the children of those who presume to stop having children. Islamic peasant women do visit birth-control clinics, but primarily to seek assistance in spacing the births of their children for the sake of health. Such a temporary health measure is sanctioned by the Koran. Responsible parenthood is today a moral issue even when birth-control techniques as such are viewed as morally acceptable. But for some cultures and subcultures, planning per se is an alien concept.

[A] Moody: Since the whole world population explosion is moving toward S. R. O., I believe in some kind of family planning, in not bringing into the world children who are unwanted. The children that do come, God knows, need lots of love and care and tenderness, which parents sometimes cannot give to a great many children. Prospective parents ought to determine what they have to give in supporting and helping kids grow up, and practice birth control accordingly.

[A] Lynn: I agree. Properly understood, it is a way of spacing your children, to preserve the sanity of the father and mother and the economic health and well-being of the family. That's great, but when birth control is used by people who kid themselves that they're merely postponing children until some unspecified future date, only to get caught up in the consumer syndrome and finally wake up in their middle years with a sense of wistful emptiness, then this is a very sad and unfortunate misuse of birth control.

[A] Rogers: With respect to the various birth-control techniques, the evidence is that there is considerable hesitation, even in the highest Catholic circles, as to what exactly the force of law is, and even the nature of the law. Under these circumstances, I think I would have to take a very tolerant view. Thus, if for physical reasons a child would be extremely hazardous to the life of the mother, and if the rhythm method is not safe, under those circumstances I feel that the pill, or something like it, should be allowed or tolerated.

[Q] Playboy: But what if, as Rabbi Rubenstein suggested, a couple simply doesn't want children?

[A] Rogers: This is what I call the contraceptive mentality, and it should be condemned. It is an attempt to completely dissociate sex from procreation. It is the mentality that refuses to see parenthood as the natural result and complement of a sexual relationship. Notice I speak of a sexual relationship—not each and every sexual activity. Certainly rhythm is morally acceptable, and there is considerable probability that the pill will be acceptable. The actual decision should be left up to the individual couple, after appropriate consultation with doctor, psychiatrist and spiritual advisor.

[A] Adams: But I question the necessity for the risk, the uncertainty, the worry involved in the rhythm method. With respect to the theological defense of the rhythm method, I agree with the Roman Catholic mother in England who gained wide approbation a few years ago when she said, "You may be fooling yourself by using rhythm. But certainly you are not fooling God. He knows what you're up to." In short, contraception is inevitably "artificial," but like a pulley or a wheel or any other product of intelligence, it is an instrument of human freedom. This means that it can be abused. On the other hand, it can contribute to responsible parenthood.

[A] Moore: The rhythm method—for my money, at least—is the most imperfect method. I'm perfectly happy for Catholics to use it, but I hope they will soon change their minds and be willing to accept mechanical means of birth control. You see, for me at least, sex is a natural expression of a healthy marital relationship between man and woman, and this expression, this means of communication, this act is essential to that relationship and should not be tied to conception. If I had to rate this, I would say that sex is first for the purpose of communication and second for the purpose of creating new life. The very fact that I set up this hierarchy of values means that birth control is very essential to my understanding of sex. Also, I believe that every man should have the power to determine the outcome of his acts, and thus should have the power, as far as is possible, to determine the outcome of every sexual expression.

[A] Pike: I agree completely. As to methods, I would make distinctions between artificial contraception, sterilization and rhythm only in terms of the effectiveness and the appropriateness in the given context. Obviously, for a young person to be sterilized—there would be no later opportunity to have a family and raise children—I would, generally speaking, say that this is wrong. Now, if we know that because of blood factors or other physical reasons, a particular person should never have a child, then, yes, sterilization might be the answer. However, my moral objection to rhythm—sometimes called "Vatican roulette"—is that in most cases it isn't as dependable as other available methods and therefore is a violation of responsibility.

[A] Rubenstein: As far as I'm concerned, any birth-control measure is all right if it's effective, aesthetically appropriate and doesn't interfere with the full enjoyment of the sexual act.

[Q] Playboy: How would you feel about a couple who practiced birth control from the very beginning of their marriage because they didn't ever want to have any children?

[A] Adams: The human being should be a free creature; and a married couple should be free to choose not to have children. They thus choose, however, to forgo a fulfillment that belongs to the human being. It's conceivable that a couple might agree that they aren't sufficiently mature emotionally to undertake the responsibility of rearing children; or the deliberate childlessness of a married couple might conceivably be related to a "higher" vocation. In making the decision not to have children, of course, a couple runs the risk of bitterly lamenting the fact later on, as Bob Lynn suggested a few moments ago. But this possibility holds true for all roads, taken or not taken.

[A] Cox: I think they can make that free choice if they want to. But I wouldn't advise it. I think children are something that round out and strengthen a marriage, make it a more meaningful thing. However, maybe they want to adopt children rather than procreate them. There are so many children without families in our world and so many people who want children and who do not have them that I could envision a family, for example, using birth control all of the time and not having any of their own children, but adopting children as a way of having them.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about abortion as a method of birth control, gentlemen? Do you think it would be justified to save the physical or mental health of the mother or if there were a danger of a malformed infant, or if the prospective parents happened not to want a baby for personal and emotional reasons?

[A] Adams: It is gratifying that therapeutic abortion—for the saving of the life of a pregnant woman—is permitted in most states. Often therapeutic abortion favors not only the health of the mother but also the good of the husband and the children in the family. I cannot for one moment accept the spurious "religious" notion that the Christian should adopt a special kind of vocation for the care of a malformed infant when the malformation was recognized even before the birth. Certainly, we need a liberalization of the law with regard to abortion. Five progressive states allow therapeutic abortion for the prevention of serious injury, emotional as well as physical. But I am amazed at the slowness with which the public faces the situation. It is said that 2500 illegal abortions are performed daily in America. As many as 5000 women a year die because of improper abortion and improper care. Apparently this number is a conservative estimate. And contrary to popular belief, most abortions are not for unwed mothers. Nine out of ten are procured by married women over 30 who have three or four children. Well-organized abortion rings operate in the large cities, making enormous profits because of the backwardness of our legislation. This situation deserves a high place on the agenda of public issues. Both the Planned Parenthood Conference and the American Law Institute have called for model abortion codes to stimulate responsible discussion. Some experts argue for "abortion on demand" and for more extensive, informed use of contraceptives. But I doubt that abortion will or should be exempt from all laws of regulation. On the other hand, I can see no ethical or religious justification for the attempt of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to prevent the liberalization of laws surrounding abortion. This liberalization aims to relax some of the restrictions, and it does not coerce anyone to practice abortion. Those who do not wish to avail themselves of the relief provided by proposed legislation are free to maintain their own standards. It would seem to me appropriate for the Roman Catholic Church to attempt to persuade their own constituency to adhere to Church rules, but it is not appropriate for the Church to impose these standards by law upon other citizens. Almost everyone on this panel has expressed himself in favor of freedom and against coercion in religion. I have expressed the same sentiment, and now I say I reject the Catholic Church's attempt to coerce the rest of us by maintaining the old laws.

[A] Rogers: Moral principles are one thing; civil law is quite another. Law is not simply concerned with enforcing morality. When we think in terms of law, there are other considerations besides the morality of abortion that must be reckoned with. Whether we should have definite laws against all forms of abortion is a matter that calls for further study and considerable discussion between all those who have an interest in the matter. There may be reason to believe that abortion laws should be liberalized to prevent greater evils. From the moral standpoint, however, I could not support such legislation, because abortion seems to me to be direct killing of human life, and for this reason it is immoral. I am very reluctant to admit compromise in this area of direct taking of human life, because the implications are too vast and terrifying—including the destruction of the human race by nuclear armament. The emphasis must be upon the value of human life—any human life—that of the baby, that of the Viet Cong, that of the criminal. I am prepared to admit the possibility of exceptions to this general principle of the sanctity of life—but I would mitigate this general principle only under powerful persuasion. Obviously, however, I am not speaking of a situation in which there is some pathologic condition of the womb where an operation is necessary that would involve the death of the child. This is not a case of direct killing. There is a difference in attitude between a direct and an indirect killing. And attitudes are all-important.

[A] Moody: Well, Father Rogers, I can appreciate the argument your Church uses to develop a theological position on the question of control of birth, and I would not for a moment denigrate it. Given your theological and biological presuppositions about when life begins, then your conclusions are absolutely correct. I do not happen to share those presumptions, however. In fact, I don't know where I draw the time line on abortion, but I feel that even up to the birth of the child, especially in cases where the mother's health or life is in danger, abortion may be both moral and sensible. Like you, I don't share theological presuppositions that deny the life of the mother for the sake of the unborn child

[A] Pike: Again, there are no absolutes. As far as the sanctity of human life is concerned, we are killing people right now in Vietnam. We kill people as an act of self-defense either as a nation or as an individual. My objection to capital punishment, for example, is not that the people are killed but that, as sound statistics show, capital punishment doesn't deter crime. If capital punishment were shown to deter crime noticeably, then I think that would outweigh the other factors. My approach is the same in regard to abortion. If all the factors are weighed, and the lesser of the two evils is abortion, then it should be carried out. Certainly our laws should be liberalized to permit abortion in cases such as rape and incest and the verified danger of the birth of a child who will be permanently incapable of living life adequately, physically or mentally. The law should also take into account seriously debilitating mental and physical effects on the mother. The fact is that we have no verification, medically or theologically, that the fetus in the very early months is a human being. In fact, Thomas Aquinas and others in the Roman Catholic Church said that until there is a quickening—for him, after 40 days for males and 80 days for females —there is no life. To those for whom Aquinas is the normative theologian, abortion, therefore, is not really killing a person . So for them, talk about murdering the child, as some put it, doesn't really count until a later period—after safe abortion is no longer possible—when life really seems to begin. These are technical questions, but even if abortion is the taking of the life of the child, this is a question of weighing that consideration against the other factors. But we have not yet achieved reform allowing for the grounds outlined. So I haven't even forced myself to think of the question of whether abortion would be a legitimate method of regular birth control. We are so far from getting our laws amended to take into account these urgent and obvious reasons for abortion that I simply have to "pass" on this broader question.

[A] Moore: Well, I approve of abortion. If two people are not willing and ready emotionally, psychologically or economically to enter into parenthood, they should have the right to terminate a pregnancy. I don't think we're dealing with real life, anyway, until the child is born and his personality begins to take shape; so the old argument against abortion, I think, is completely out of date.

[A] Rubenstein: I can't accept abortion as easily as you do, Dr. Moore. Normally I am utterly opposed to it. Our Jewish tradition has a horror of it. At the same time, there may be medical reasons why a woman cannot give birth. But there would have to be pretty good evidence that the child would be born malformed before I could approve abortion on those grounds. In the case of the Thalidomide drug that resulted in so many malformed births, for example, my feeling is that those births should have been aborted. But just not wanting a baby— which you give as an acceptable cause —would for me be the worst possible reason for an abortion, and one that I would find the greatest difficulty in accepting.

[A] Cox: I'm a little old-fashioned about abortion, too. I think it's too often used in our society to avoid social stigma among the married. You know, the middle-class girl who gets pregnant and instead of having the baby and putting it out for adoption, or raising it, has a quiet abortion somewhere because she doesn't want to bring any social disrepute on her family. The lower-class girl n our society who gets pregnant, especially the Negro girl, tends to go ahead and have the baby. And then we publicize the statistics about the high illegitimacy rate among Negroes, when there have been no records of how many suburban white girls have had abortions. I am in favor of legalizing abortion, mainly because so many people, black and white, are killed and maimed by illegal ones. Still, though I would defend a woman's right to have an abortion, I am personally strongly against her doing so. I approve in those cases where abortion safeguards the physical health of the mother; I think it would be perfectly acceptable—but not when it's just a matter of getting rid of the child. I would rather see a wider acceptance of birth control, which is vastly preferable to abortion. For one thing, when a woman becomes pregnant, a kind of psychosomatic process begins in her body, and if it's interrupted, it can inflict a kind of damage that we don't yet know much about. There's a close connection between the mental and physical state of people in various aspects of sexuality, and I think we have to be careful not to intrude until we know a little more about what we're doing.

[A] Marty: If I were a pastor in a Thalidomide case, and the prospective parents came to see me in a crucial stage of early pregnancy and said it was quite likely that they were going to give birth to an abnormal baby, I would no doubt be middleman for them, working with a medical doctor where it is legal—or smuggling them to where it is permissible, or working for liberalization of laws where it isn't—to take care of the matter. I would assess human values and probably vote more for an actual mother than for a potential monster.

[A] Moody: I think our present abortion laws are the most barbaric on the books in this country. Once again, it's a matter of the American people, particularly religious people—and I'm not now talking about Catholics, but about Protestants, whom I know best in terms of how they treat this whole question and the kind of hypocrisy that is involved in it—not being willing to open their eyes to what exists. We don't realize how many people in this country are getting abortions every year, how many of our daughters and (continued on page 148)Playboy Panel(continued from page 78) sisters are involved in this practice. We don't realize the kind of criminality a person is forced into by the abortion laws that are now on the books. I think this is terrible. I really believe we need to do something decisive about this situation.

[A] Rubenstein: I feel very strongly on the whole subject of sexual freedom—not just on abortion—that these are essentially private matters and that the state has no right to interfere.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel the same way about homosexuality?

[A] Rubenstein: Up to a point. I would say that homosexuality is basically a psychological sickness; the homosexual is fixated at a rather low level of sexual expression. He is deeply involved in what the psychoanalysts call "castration anxiety." I wouldn't consider homosexuality either fulfilling or an adult kind of sexual relationship. On the other hand, I don't regard homosexuality as immoral and I don't think there should be any laws on the books prohibiting it. It ought to be a matter of individual choice. However, it is one thing to say that this is a matter of individual choice and quite another to endow homosexuality with the respectability of mature sexuality, which it definitely is not. Only in a complete heterosexual relationship do people have a fully mature sexual relationship.

[A] Lynn: I'm afraid I can't quite go along with your pat psychological analysis, Rabbi. Frankly, I don't think we really know whether homosexuality is a psychological condition or just another kind of normality, and any dogmatism here is decidedly premature. We should listen far more seriously to homosexuals than we have before. When I say "we," I mean those of us who are heterosexuals and are happy in that relationship.

[A] Rogers: We have often been less than kind, and at best often merely condescending, in our treatment of the homosexual. This is a severe problem, and we don't help matters by using terms such as "unnatural." We must remember that such words are understood by people in terms of their own experience, and they intensify guilt needlessly and thereby augment rather than clarify or alleviate this psychologic disturbance.

[Q] Playboy: Do you consider homosexuality immoral, Father?

[A] Rogers: I guess I would have to say that acted-out homosexuality is in itself immoral, but this is not answering the question concretely, because we must deal with people in terms of their knowledge, in terms of their value judgments and in terms of their degree of freedom. Bear in mind that I distinguish between the terms "immoral" and "sinful." "Immoral" is in the abstract, and when we say "sinful" we are talking about real people. So I don't know how I could speak always and necessarily of homosexuality as "sinful." This is all-important.

[A] Pike: Right! It may not be a question of judging a person in terms of sin; we must take into account compulsions and other psychological factors. The question may be what is wrong with the person, not what is wrong with the conduct. I mean, let's see why he's this way. Maybe he doesn't have any choice. Homosexuality may be a choice for some people, but I have real doubts about whether it's a sound choice. I think in almost all cases homosexuality represents unfortunate factors in the development of the individual, and we should not be judgmental about him. Rather, we should try to help him free himself from whatever blocks he has about relations with the opposite sex. But in any case, freely consenting adult homosexuality should not be a criminal offense. Even if it is to be conceived of as a sin, it should not be a crime. Not all sins are crimes—nor should they be when they don't affect outside persons.

[A] Adams: Bishop Pike brings up the question of the relation between law and morality. The Wolfenden Committee in England has recommended that homosexual practices between consenting adults in private should not be considered criminal offenses. The assumption is that there must be a realm of private morality that is not the law's business. But society is entitled to protect people in this area. A completely permissive attitude on the part of society would be unjustifiable. Although I realize we have been speaking here about sexual relations between consenting adults, we recognize that we cannot approve of the homosexual who in the seduction of youth brings out latent elements of homosexuality that might not otherwise be activated.

[A] Cox: I agree with Rabbi Rubenstein that homosexuality is a psychological condition, but so is heterosexuality. Many factors—physical, environmental and psychogenetic—influence a person's sexuality. So it's more than just a matter of taste, although that's part of it. But if a person is homosexual, society should permit him to exercise it. with no restrictions whatever, as long as it is done between consenting adults, in private. But this doesn't mean that I think homosexuality is as desirable a way of life as heterosexuality. I would want to try to convince homosexuals that they're missing something, that theirs is a partial and fragmentary expression of sexuality, which I think grows out of a kind of fear of encountering a truly different kind of person. The heterosexual encounter is an encounter with a person irreducibly different from yourself. It includes a kind of terror, but also a kind of maturation that is introduced by this confrontation with the wholly other. I think that in part there is a timidity in homosexual behavior that is afraid to take that step. But that step is essential to the development of real personhood.

[A] Marty: Although I agree with Harvey that the tendencies toward both heterosexuality and homosexuality are psychologically based, I'd like to point out that we can choose to express the tendency or not. We can choose to be celibate or not. I may choose to restrict my sexual expressions or to be a libertine. In my view, then, although homosexuality has a psychological base, the moral questions concern the voluntary acts of the homosexual.

[A] Adams: As I said a moment ago in mentioning the Wolfenden Report, this is a question that relates to the bearing of law upon morality. Society has the right to protect itself against destructive, antisocial behavior, but is it appropriate for the community to assume that all aspects of morality are subject to investigation and rule, subject to coercion at the hands of the law? The recent Supreme Court decision with regard to the birth-control law in Connecticut held that the use of contraceptives by married couples is in the realm of privacy. Shouldn't this principle be extended, in restricted ways, to the homosexual behavior of consenting adults?

[A] Cox: I would be in favor of a society in which there were no legal restrictions whatever on the private behavior of consenting adults.

[A] Rogers: I don't think we should discriminate against the homosexual; we should treat him the way we treat the heterosexual. In both cases, the seduction of the young, violence and public indecency should be forbidden. Of course, there's a practical consideration, too. These antihomosexual laws encourage a much worse evil: blackmail and police entrapment. As I remember, that was one of the major considerations in the Wolfenden Report.

[A] Moore: It's very interesting how in some cities where the police work to entrap homosexuals, they often catch the man with overtly feminine characteristics rather than the hard-core homosexual prostitute, who has learned how to avoid the police. Thus, the innocent bystander with homosexual tendencies or who occasionally slips into homosexual behavior is the one who is persecuted. We are going to have to realize that there are many different ways to express our sexuality. Some people choose not to marry, to remain celibate, but we don't call them queer. All of us are the products of our psychological backgrounds. I'm ready to say that homosexuality is a style of sexual expression, and like other styles of sexual expression, it has its imperfections. My quarrel with the homosexual community and its outspoken advocates is not in the realm of civil liberties; it is with irresponsible behavior. I would be opposed to promiscuity among homosexuals, just as I'm opposed to promiscuity among heterosexuals. But I'm ready to adopt liberal new laws in regard to homosexuality, and to get rid of this police brutality against homosexuals that exists in most of our states today.

[A] Rubenstein: One of the reasons why a homosexual finds such tremendous hostility directed against him is that practically every human being alive has some latent homosexual feelings. Most people do not want to recognize it in themselves. Instead, they turn against the homosexual with a great deal of anger that is really a defense against their own temptations. Just as all of us have secondary sexual characteristics, all of us to some extent are latently homosexual. The minute a person realizes this about himself, he is much less likely to be hostile to the homosexual, who has not mastered his problem.

[A] Moody: Right! One reason for our uneasiness with homosexuality is that it touches many people too closely. When I was in the Marine Corps, for example, the guys who were really hardest on homosexuals, who beat them physically, were the guys whose own sexuality was in question. A strong heterosexual will have no fear of the homosexual; it is the ambivalent man who seems afraid.

[A] Moore: I think this Sexual Revolution will be a very helpful thing for the homosexual. My only fear about the Sexual Revolution is that it won't go far enough. There are forces in our society already that are trying to develop anti-obscenity laws, so-called morality laws, to stop the tide of sexual revolution. I hope that we can go far enough to get over this preoccupation with sex and begin to deal with persons as human beings.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned anti-obscenity laws, Dr. Moore. Do you believe in any kind of censorship?

[A] Moore: Well, there is always the problem of helping people, especially the immature, evaluate literature, films and magazines; but I don't favor legal censorship. I fear it. We're in an age in which we are going to have to find some alternative to the censorship laws of the past. Ideally, in a sexually mature society, we can handle the problem of the immature by rating films and books, grading those things that are for family, for children, for adults. I think the movie industry, for example, is beginning to do this in a very responsible way. There is no reason why sex cannot be dealt with in literature and the performing arts as one of the aspects of human life. To censor material just on the basis of sexual content reveals the immaturity of our society. But we should recognize the difference between erotic realism and hardcore pornography. We can deal with the question of pornography only when we are able to help society openly discuss what is good sex, and to begin to build into society the process of evaluation. The whole problem with censorship is that it concentrates on sex and doesn't say anything about sadism and violence. It doesn't say anything about themes of war and militarism—which, by the way, is increasingly a subtle way to disguise sick sex in books and films.

[A] Cox: I don't think any useful purpose is served by prepublication censorship of anything—films, books or anything else. After publication, children should be protected from pornography by parents, churches and schools, but not by some kind of censorship that enforces somebody's tastes on the rest of us.

[A] Rubenstein: I don't like censorship, and I don't like the kind of people who are usually censors. But I don't believe that some activities—for example, the literal depiction of sexual intercourse—should be shown on the screen.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Rubenstein: Well, it tends to make the act of being a spectator more important than the act of participating in the relationship. Although it's impossible to make any general statements about human sexuality that apply to everyone, it seems obvious to me that voyeurism can become a masturbatory substitute for real sex, and as such, undesirable. It can become a substitute for the reality of a real woman. When a man is afraid of a real, sexually active woman, he turns to pictures. We know that voyeurism is basically an affliction of people who are afraid of sex. They want to be reassured that the real thing isn't dangerous. As long as people stay at the voyeur's level, they aren't going to get to the next level—which is simply being involved in healthy sex. Now, I don't see anything immoral per se in watching the sex act on the screen. I object because it's a substitute and an unnecessary detour. Voyeurism ultimately represents the desire to watch one's parents in the sexual act, and this is infantile.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't you speaking of compulsive voyeurism, which precludes one's own active participation? But what about people who can both watch and participate, and enjoy both activities? Dr. Albert Ellis, the well-known psychologist who is head of the Institute for Rational Living in New York, has written, "The reason any sexual activity becomes deviant is because it becomes compulsive or exclusive or obsessive. There is never anything inherently wrong with an act per se. Not only is viewing pornography perfectly normal under most circumstances, since practically all healthy human beings enjoy doing so at times, but in many cases it is distinctly helpful to husbands and wives in their regular marital relations. In my marriage manual, The Art and Science of Love, I stated this fact emphatically, and since the book was published I have received a great many letters from married couples who tell me that they got a much greater satisfaction from sex after viewing a stag film."

[A] Rubenstein: I doubt that. A person who has watched a blue film might be stimulated, but not by his real sexual partner. In good sex, there is no need for extra stimulation. I don't think normal, healthy people need stag films as a crutch. I don't have any moral objections to it, but I certainly think it would be out of place in a public theater, and I think most people rightly find it offensive. I recently visited Denmark, where I attended a public movie in which something very close to the act of sexual intercourse was depicted on the screen. Denmark is much more liberal in these matters than we are, and yet I noticed the acute embarrassment of the audience.

[Q] Playboy: Are you sure you weren't projecting your own embarrassment to the rest of the audience?

[A] Rubenstein: Absolutely not. The embarrassment was vocal. It was very disturbing for all of us. Sex simply is not a spectator sport. I think that people for whom sex is a spectator sport are people who aren't getting their kicks out of the real thing. They're afraid of the real thing. They are content to identify with someone else. Nevertheless, if I had to choose between showing the act of love or the act of killing, I think I would show the act of love. One of the horrible things about the motion-picture medium in our country is that we don't see that there is a pornography of violence as well as a pornography of sex. If I had to choose between the two, I would prefer sexual pornography. But I would rather have neither. I see nothing objectionable in the literary presentation of the sexual act, however. I am opposed to literary censorship. It may be an inconsistency on my part, but instinct tells me that the realistic representation of the actual sexual act on the screen is somewhat different in quality from the depiction of a sexual scene in literature.

[A] Lynn: I suppose some form of censorship is inevitable in any society, but I refuse thereby to give a blank check to self-appointed censors—of films or books.

[A] Moody: As I see it, there should be no censorship except the censorship that every individual imposes upon himself and that parents impose upon their children. Some movies and books include sexual subjects that I think children are not prepared for; but when we begin to apply censorship to these things, we're in danger. That's why I'm always so careful about not wanting somebody else to tell me what my child may read. I want to decide myself what my child may read.

[A] Adams: I agree. I would like to keep the Government out of censorship as much as possible, because in matters of censorship, the Government is usually the tool of pressure groups. Often the pressure group is a church that is not willing to rely upon its power of persuasion with its own members and wishes to impose its standards by coercion upon the rest of the community. All of us can recall instances of this. The process of maturation requires that people shall be permitted to read or see what they wish. I don't want the Government to tell me what I or my children may see. I am entitled to make this sort of decision for myself. I grant that the community has the responsibility to maintain some standards with respect to public decency. But that is a difficult, delicate issue for which we need to clarify the criteria. I think we should recognize that pornographic books and pictures are sold to youth in the back alleys, at exorbitant, exploitative prices. This is a racket, a very lucrative racket, and it preys upon the young. This evil of exploitation depends largely upon the clandestine character of the market, and perhaps it could be mitigated by requiring that sales be made in public places. In any event, not all of the problems in the area of censorship would be solved by leaving matters to the individual and to voluntary associations.

[A] Pike: My attitude toward censorship is very much like the early American Colonial flag with the snake and the words don't tread on me. My general feeling is that people should do as they want; in other words, "Get off my back!" I realize that there is a good deal of hard-core pornography in circulation—for example, a "novel" that is just a series of erotic episodes with sequences connecting them like little bits of Scotch tape, having no plot, no meaning, simply meant to be sheer titillation. I can see how that could be barred, particularly since the censor really has no way of separating young readers from adult readers. To say "for adults only" doesn't do much good; if it's around, it's available. I suspect that there are some things that should be barred; but on the whole, I would rather take the risks of obscenity—since I'm not so sure how damaging it is to people—than the risk of suppression of ideas and expression. I'm sure that some of this horror stuff that is tolerated, showing hatred and murder and war—as when we report with glee not that we have gained so much ground in Vietnam but that we've killed a thousand Viet Cong and lost only ten of ours—could also be damaging to young people. And I can't understand why a four-letter Anglo-Saxon word is supposed to be more sinful or wrong than a Latin derivative, let us say, of 11 letters meaning the same thing. This is purely semantics; it isn't a moral question. The church should spend less time encouraging censorship and more time cultivating a taste for a "whole" view of life and for those things which are mature. If hard-core pornography must be censored, however, I know the state has to do it. Much as I'm biased against censorship, I have to recognize that.

[A] Lynn: The trouble with that is that people who exercise censorship are often nothing more than self-interest groups who want to protect their own immediate interests and not the rights of others. Since I don't want the state to handle censorship, this leaves me in a very real quandary. I don't see anyone around who is wise enough to be a public censor.

[A] Moody: Neither do I. Look where "clean-literature" citizens groups have led us. Have you ever known such groups to operate with any kind of literary discrimination? They will forbid Black Boy or Catcher in the Rye or some other great classics and say, "These are dirty." But one man's meat is another man's poison. That's why censorship never quite works. Let's consider the mores of a community—for example, Greenwich Village. The tolerance level is a lot higher there than in most places. Probably things can be seen and done there that in another neighborhood would be absolutely prohibited. The mores of communities differ. That's why the Supreme Court of this land has had such a terribly difficult time deciding what obscenity really is. And I don't think it's such a terrible thing that they haven't been able to decide. There's good reason for this indecision. I don't want the state to censor my reading material any more than I want the state to underwrite the religious training of my children. That's the parents' job.

[A] Lynn: The only way censorship works is through a family's or a society's health and vitality, which develops a sense of understanding and a kind of maturity, as Bishop Pike suggests, that can take anything. But I don't think it would be prudent to say that no one has the right of censorship, because this would take away from a society the right to preserve and defend the integrity of the social order. To absolutely rule out censorship would be as dogmatic as it would be to insist that there must be a severe censorship.

[A] Adams: Well, ill Chicago many years ago, I was involved in a great controversy over a movie called The Fight for Life, a picture produced by the Federal Government in order to expose slum conditions in Chicago. It was banned by the mayor. But we couldn't even find out why. We did see one possible reason, though: There was one place in the movie where a class was receiving some kind of instruction at a hospital, and we wondered if the police censor thought that it was instruction in birth control. At any rate, we finally called on Mayor Kelly after attending a private showing of the picture under the auspices of the Civil Liberties Union. The mayor said, "You're wasting your breath. Don't talk to me about it. Go and talk to the cardinal. If the cardinal says this movie should be shown in Chicago, it will be shown in Chicago." So we said, "But Mr. Mayor, we didn't elect the cardinal to tell us what movies could be shown." So he said, "Don't talk to me about who you elected. The cardinal told me that it should not be shown, and it's not going to be shown. But if you persuade the cardinal, then it's OK with me." So in my experience, the official authorities who exercise the power of censorship have shown themselves to be erratic, ignorant and incompetent. What's needed is a review board consisting of responsible, sensitive citizens who enjoy the confidence of people of taste and judgment.

[Q] Playboy: That view seems inconsistent with the First Amendment to the Constitution, which says, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

[A] Rogers: It seems to me that any attempt at legal censorship—however intelligent, tasteful and well intentioned—is ineffective. Also, in practice, it can militate against freedom of opinion. It is ineffective partly because it is difficult to define or identify sheer obscenity—that which has no redeeming social significance or any literary value. So principally for that reason, it seems to me that we should not concern ourselves too much with censorship of books for adults. I think our emphasis should be upon educating rather than coercing the public. The only effective censorship, as Reverend Moody has pointed out, is really self-censorship. The greater question in my mind concerns censorship of books, as the other panelists have pointed out, which readily fall into the hands of children. But again, I'm not sure if there's any effective way of censoring books in order to keep them even out of the hands of children. If there were, I would be willing to consider it—provided it were scientifically established that smut has a proportionately deleterious effect upon the young.

[A] Marty: That's one of the rationalizations the sexual censors have given to justify their crusades over the years: "We must protect our children!" But we should remember that this ploy is fairly recent. A reading of the history of censorship suggests that just a few decades ago nobody thought of the kids; the cry was, "We must protect our womenfolk!" This was a function of the double standard, which was almost universally accepted until very recently. The assumption was that women were psychologically and mentally fragile, and an exposure to any kind of erotica would not only contaminate them morally but it could cause them to have a nervous breakdown or something of that sort.

[Q] Playboy: But most observers agree that the double standard hasn't completely disappeared. Do you gentlemen think that inherent psychosexual differences between men. and women, as some have suggested, give any validity to the double standard?

[A] Lynn: Perhaps that was the case in previous times, but I don't think it's as true now as it once was. Women have been liberated by birth-control devices, so that they are freer to reject the double standard. But you know, we don't yet really understand the psychosexual differences between men and women. I'm not willing, like some social scientists, to say that they are absolutely alike. A woman is so much more involved emotionally in sex, she's so much more closely identified with the birth process. She's the one who bears the child, and in this sense her awareness, her sobriety, her involvement is far deeper than that of the man. We've looked at these differences almost entirely from the point of view of the man, and this discussion of sex we're having today is suffused with the male's sense of his freedom—with no understanding of the woman's sense of responsibility, or her own deep emotional involvement in sex.

[A] Moody: It's strange. I've remarked to a lot of women about what a terrible thing the double standard is and how much sham and hypocrisy there is about it, only to have them tell me, "Leave it alone; I like the double standard; I want it." You understand, these remarks don't come from strong, aggressive women who are fighting for their place in the sun with men. That sort of woman abhors the double standard as much as I do. There does seem to be a certain polygamous bent in men as opposed to a monogamous bent in women, but I don't think we can draw any sweeping conclusions from that about inherent psychosexual differences between men and women. Women, obviously, engage in premarital relations today as much as men do, and they aren't being seduced or coerced or hoodwinked into it. They're engaging freely in it. There are certain built-in strictures, like fear of pregnancy, loss of reputation, that used to have a restraining effect on women, but I don't think they have much effect anymore.

[A] Pike: Happily, we're getting away from the situation in which a young man feels free to be promiscuous but still cherishes the notion that the girl he marries automatically has to be a virgin or she's no good. In matters of both freedom and responsibility, there seems to be less and less differentiation between men and women, boys and girls. It's about time, I'd say.

[A] Rogers: Although I certainly don't believe in judging women very differently from men in matters of sexual activity, I think it only fair to mention that the double standard does have a kind of basis in reality—culturally conditioned reality, perhaps, but reality nonetheless. As Dr. Lynn pointed out, a woman's attitude toward sex is, by necessity, more serious. She cannot be—or at least isn't—as casual about it as a man, because it involves more of her emotionally and to some degree physiologically. Rightly or wrongly, there are greater risks for her. The risks are considerably less than they were 50 years ago, but they still obtain. In Kiss Me Kale, there's a song called I Hate Men, and one of the lines is, "It's he who'll have the fun and thee the baby." Perhaps I should best put it this way: Woman's attitude toward sex is still sufficiently different from man's to be taken into account, but not so great as to warrant greater condemnation.

[A] Moore: But, Father, that basis for the double standard has been rendered somewhat obsolete by birth control. The woman is no longer the one who "gets caught." We're living in a heterosexual world in which the woman has achieved her freedom and must learn to take responsibility for her sexuality, along with the man.

[A] Pike: Yes. In the past, women were more psychologically oriented toward marriage than men, but I see a change in this. In my counseling experience, I've seen more and more women who consider marriage and children not as big a thing, relatively speaking, as it seems to have been in the past. I'm not saying that this is either good or bad, but I do think that the abiding relationship in the family and the home is the desideratum; it is good when women emphasize this.

[A] Adams: Claims regarding the unique psychological nature of woman, I think, represent for the most part unexamined folklore, for they tend to overlook cultural influences. In our culture today, the roles of the male and the female are in a state of flux. This situation is partly the consequence of a spurious theory of egalitarianism. Equality in dignity must, of course, be insisted upon; but the differences between male and female can become so neutralized that polarity between the sexes is jeopardized; thus, the erotic ingredient of love is weakened. Intimacy between the sexes, a fulfilling intimacy, requires difference and firmness of identity.

[Q] Playboy: Hefner has written in The Playboy Philosophy that this "breakdown in the cultural patterns that distinguish the sexes—especially here in America—has caused us to drift toward an asexual society, in which it becomes increasingly difficult for either sex to find true satisfaction or fulfillment in its interpersonal relationships with the other." He feels that this is one of the two primary causes—the other being the increasing automation and anonymity of our civilization—of the erosion of individual identity. Do you agree?

[A] Adams: Well, the sartorial and tonsorial embellishments of a good many men and women—not only of the beatniks—certainly aid and abet frustration and confusion. Ten years ago, the clothes and hairdos of many young people today would have been taken as signs of homosexuality. These practices bespeak a loss of clarity with regard to the polarity of the sexes. Achievement of sexual identity thereby becomes difficult. This weakening of sexual identity—or differentiation—also creates confusion about respective responsibilities within the family. If the father and the mother don't exhibit some clarity about their respective roles, then relations between the parents become ambiguous and frustrating, and the child of either sex encounters difficulty achieving personal and sexual identity.

[A] Cox: Well, that doesn't really worry me, because I think all this stuff about woman's psychosexual "nature" is nonsense. As Dr. Adams pointed out, it's almost entirely cultural conditioning. But the biggest adjustment we men have to make now is to recognize that women are just as free as we are. Men like to have women in a dependent role, needing security, because that's part of the art of seduction. In the past, if the woman needed permanence, the man could use that need, if he wanted to, in the seduction process. Now this is no longer the case, and many men don't like it, because one of their weapons is lost. Women are as free to be predatory as men are; and we have to adjust to that.

[A] Moore: Yes. One of the things we're discovering is that the woman is not sexually passive. As she becomes free and loses the inhibitions that were characteristic of an earlier age, she emerges a very sexual individual who has needs and desires entirely her own. This is still hard for some men to take. But we must now recognize that woman's sexual needs must be taken seriously. In the past, we have talked almost entirely about the sexual needs of men. The identity crisis you gentlemen were discussing a moment ago is much more characteristic of the woman today, who is caught up in the feminine mystique and who is quite unclear as to what it means to be a female in the contemporary world. She has achieved the freedoms she worked for, but she still isn't quite sure how to express herself. So we have the stereotyped definitions of femaleness, which are largely physiological definitions in terms of breasts and hips. I think the reason men are so breast-conscious today is that the woman is breast-conscious; her breasts are the one symbol she can display to prove her femininity. Many women walk around as if they were wearing their bodies outside their clothes. So to deal with the topless craze as being a moral problem is to miss the real social and psychological significance of toplessness. It is only a symbol of the problem of sexual identity in our time. The woman who is out to display her sex bvit who has no intentions of following through is a person who, in my estimation, is being irresponsible. I'm not saying that the body of a woman should ever be depreciated; it has always been a thing of beauty, appreciated both by the artist and by the common man. But the exaggeration of the body, a phenomenon so characteristic of our society, emits sexual signals that the owner of the body usually has no intention of acting upon. I think this is one reason so many people are confused and disturbed. They see these signals, yet they know there is an opposing set of standards behind the signals that negates them.

[A] Cox: Well, I think much of our so-called sexual liberation has been man-centered rather than woman-centered. Woman has not been taken into consideration. As Reverend Moore suggested, women have a serious problem in working out their identities. If they aren't simply going to be a second kind of man, what are they going to be? I don't think we men can force our ideas of womanhood on them. This is one of the most serious weaknesses in much of the so-called sexual-freedom talk today.

[A] Rubenstein: You cannot disadvantage one sex without some unconscious retaliation. Women have much to protest against, especially the cult of youth that our culture suffers from. Personally, I don't honestly think a woman gets to be interesting until she's at least 30 years old. There is a profound difference between women and girls. A woman is usually far more compassionate, far more giving, far more responsive and far more sexually adequate than a girl. One of the things I find wrong with playboy's emphasis is that it exhibits young women as Playmates when they're hardly capable of full sexual response, when they have hardly begun to experience the ironies of life, when they cannot be mature and compassionate partners. It is part of our American immaturity that we look to adolescence as the great time of life. Why doesn't playboy have a 45- or 50-year-old Playmate?

[Q] Playboy: Why should we?

[A] Rubenstein: Well, it would seem to me that she would be far more interesting as a woman, and far more interesting in bed, if I might say so. The fact that she might not be visually attractive doesn't mean a thing.

[Q] Playboy: In a photograph it means a great deal.

[A] Rubenstein: But I object to the fact that we don't look beneath the surface at what things really mean.

[Q] Playboy: How do you look beneath the surface of a photo?

[A] Cox: Well, I agree with Dick. A Simone Signoret or a Lauren Bacall is much more attractive to me than an 18-year-old girl barely bordering on full womanhood.

[A] Rubenstein: And I agree with Harvey's marvelous insight into the whole playboy attitude toward women, insofar as it doesn't give women their due.

[Q] Playboy: Hefner has written repeatedly that women are the equals of men in their rights, their dignity, their integrity and their value as human beings.

[A] Rubenstein: Well, I'm not talking about what Mr. Hefner says. I'm talking about the whole impression I get from playboy's presentation of women. The girls in playboy are presented primarily as sexual beings. If a woman is just something you go to bed with, rather than a partner in a very important and decisive relationship, then woman is an object rather than a person. I like Martin Buber's conception of the I/Thou relationship, which is a spontaneous relationship between free persons who give of themselves. There is no constraint. There is no sense of one as an object. There is no sense of being manipulated. Both are fully real persons in the I/Thou relationship.

[Q] Playboy: That is exactly the kind of man-woman relationship Hefner has said he feels is the most rewarding.

[A] Marty: Well, when I first saw that article Harvey wrote criticizing playboy for depersonalizing women, however much I agreed with the positive side of the article, it occurred to me how incongruous it is for a churchman to make such an accusation. The Christian church has in practice been guilty of depersonalizing women for centuries.

[Q] Playboy: Hefner made that point during his Trialogue discussion with three clergymen published in The Playboy Philosophy. He said, "Though we are sometimes accused of having a dehumanized view of women, our concept actually offers the female a far more human identity than she has had historically in the Western world. It is our religious tradition that has tended to look upon woman as a depersonalized object, or possession, by continually associating her with its antagonism toward sex. Sometimes the emphasis has been placed upon the temptation to sin in womankind, and sometimes the emphasis has been placed upon feminine purity and chastity; but whether they were considered creatures of the Devil, or placed upon a pedestal, their status in our antisexual society has always been that of an object rather than a human being."

[A] Lynn:Touché! He's right. Women have historically had second-rank status in every area of life, including that of the church. And it's still true today. In the church we are very slow to make decisions in response to our presumed ideals. We make them finally and perhaps only because of the pressure of necessity, and I think this pressure of necessity is going to drive us toward the further recognition of women.

[A] Pike: I think women have a far better break in professions and in other realms of public and secular life than they have in the church. Before the church can hope to give leadership in terms of equal status for women, it's going to have to catch up with secular society. Martin Luther King said, "The church is more often than not a taillight rather than a headlight." And this is a perfect example of it.

[A] Lynn: The difficulty of the church today is that it's ideologically pretentious. It pretends to live up to its idealism, but that's actually a mask to disguise the status quo.

[A] Marty: Any attempt to make the Christian faith sound as if it's always had a positive and almost ribald attitude toward sex and human pleasure, as some recent thinkers have tried to do, doesn't do justice to the facts of Christian history. In actual practice, churchmen have traditionally been antisex and antipleasure in almost every context; and they have carried this over to women themselves. Churchmen have always asserted the theological principle that before God women are equal to men. But I don't think you can conclude from any of the church's practices that it has through most of its 20 centuries really regarded the woman as a parallel crown of creation. She is described in almost all cases as inferior.

[A] Moody: It isn't just the church. Most men in our society have had this attitude toward women. But the church in the past has been guilty of fostering this attitude. Let's face it: The Reformation was a masculine thing. How many feminine theologians have we had in the Christian church? Hardly any. What feminine viewpoints ever get incorporated into our way of thinking? Virtually none. That's why I agree with what Hefner has said about the church's negative attitude toward women. I mean, there was a whole mystique about feminine evil that developed in earlier centuries. The church supported that school of thought theologically. In fact, from around 1500 until Puritan New England, over a million women were put to death as sorceresses and witches. This will give you some idea about the hatred of women in the church. I think the church is in large part responsible for our traditional distorted view of women as either vessels of sin or holy paragons of virtue. There's no question that rejection of femininity has been a great loss to the whole Christian church and to our whole culture. The fact that women haven't had their way for all these centuries has been a tremendous loss to us—and still is. We're going to suffer a great deal if we don't learn to take the feminine element of human life into account and give credit to it and allow it to operate in our lives—without denigrating it, without interpreting it as a sign of weakness or forcing our boys into homosexuality because they've got feminine traits. We Americans have been atrocious in our denial of the feminine aspects of life, and our whole culture has suffered a great loss as a result.

[A] Rubenstein: Well, these attitudes have been with us a long time. In traditional Jewish communities, they considered it a greater sin for a married woman to have extramarital sex than for a married man to do so. I don't think it was because women were considered property. The reason for it—aend this is something that both Judaism and Christianity share—is that this was essentially a patriarchal religion with a very strong masculine orientation. A religion with a masculine orientation tends to disadvantage women and to regard men as having superior privileges.

[A] Marty: When I hear Christians criticizing modern urbanites for making a "thing" out of a woman, I'm reminded that the cultural context in which the Bible was recorded, and in which the church was formed, gave the double standard some of its base, almost accidentally, and certainly in violation of the Bible's central affirmations about womanhood. Early Christian spokesmen, influenced by their cultural environment, often pictured woman as a mere receptacle for the male. She was never seen for her sexual status, her sexual rights, her sexual desire. Modernity did both woman and the church a favor, which the church has not acknowledged, by putting into practice the democracy that is inherent in Christian doctrine. One can say that Christianity bore the seeds of liberating practice, but if liberation came only with modernity, I think we churchmen had better send some cards of thanks to the moderns.

[A] Pike: It's about time we admitted that the church's sex norms have been, even within marriage, totally wrong in most of its history. Take Saint Augustine, who said that intercourse always involves sin because it involves bestial movements. Saint Jerome bigheartedly granted a limited value to the sexual act; he said that from it can be produced more virgins. Churchmen have simply had a bad attitude all along, until modern times, when we have at last begun to recognize that there is only one claim on life, and that is: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole soul, whole mind, whole strength, which means total responsibility for making decisions under God with the whole of one's being. This means that the decision in a given situation about the sexual act between two persons is a contextual decision, with responsibility for weighing all the factors.

[A] Adams: I agree that Christian tradition on the whole has a poor record with respect to its attitude toward sex, an attitude of devaluation, an attitude of prurience, an attitude of secrecy in talking about it. But two things should be taken into account here. First, the extreme asceticism that appears in the Christian tradition is theologically unsound insofar as it makes sexual intercourse as such sinful. It belittles an authentic aspect of human existence. At one period in the Middle Ages, for example, complete abstinence from intercourse was admonished for no fewer than five days of the week: on Thursday in memory of the arrest of Jesus, on Friday in commemoration of his death, on Saturday in honor of the Blessed Virgin, on Sunday in honor of the Resurrection and on Monday in honor of the faithful departed. The present demand that priests should be permitted to marry presupposes a more sound Biblical view of sex than the extremely ascetic view. On the other hand, the ascetic view was in part an extreme reaction against a merely sensual conception of sex. Here I would point to an analogy. One cannot understand the ancient monastic "cult of filth"—the unwillingness of certain ancient monks to take a bath—if one does not recognize the lascivious connotations of the Roman bath. So also the devaluation of sexual behavior historically was in part a reaction against sexual practice that was merely the indulgence of lust. Yet the correction of lust is not properly effected by simply adopting extreme asceticism.

[A] Rogers: Well, it's true that we Catholics have allowed ourselves to get into a bind of overemphasizing chastity, often to the neglect of the other virtues, such as honesty and social justice. So thoroughly have we done this that for many Catholics, the word sin immediately suggests sex. I have for long felt that many Catholic moralists were wonderfully adept in explaining away the statements of Jesus concerning almsgiving, or nonresistance to evil; but what little Jesus did have to say about chastity was always taken with the utmost gravity. I am far from suggesting that what Jesus said should not be taken seriously, but I simply note the selective retention of texts that deal with sex to the comfortable exclusion of other texts that figured in Christ's thinking upon human dignity. Another point that has puzzled me is the fact that sins against chastity are always treated as, per se, mortal sins in sharp distinction to other sins, such as sins against justice or honesty or the dignity due to man, which sins are usually, per se, venial. There is certainly something here that is wildly disproportionate. We have always been very definite in condemning sexual sin, but wonderfully vague and accommodating when it came to racial justice or war. This discrepancy bugs me.

[A] Lynn: This discrepancy is true of nearly all Christians, Father, not just of Catholics. One of my old teachers used to say that Christians always had their exceptions on morality. One Christian would be an absolutist in the area of war, another in the matter of divorce. I'd never thought about it until just now, but there is a consistent place where we have been absolutists, and that's on the question of sex. And I think for the most part that is due to our traditional fear of the body. It can only be explained by the false dualism between body and soul, which no longer makes any sense at all—if it ever did. The attitude of traditional Christian thinking that the mind and the spirit of man is holy, but that the body is evil, has no basis in Christ's teachings. It's a perversion of later centuries. Of course, I suppose future centuries will look back upon us and see our corruptions and distortions. I don't want to criticize the past, though, and beat the medievalists and the Puritans. I'm not really interested in that. Puritans are used these days as a favorite whipping boy, but they were really far more lively than we give them credit for.

[A] Adams: Indeed they were. The term puritanism, from a historical point of view, has been egregiously distorted. Puritanism initially was a social philosophy that broke through all sorts of inhibitions that were associated with earlier authoritarianism and also with feudalism. Puritanism was the greatest revolutionary force for 200 years in the history of Western civilization.

[A] Marty: All vital schools of thought in Christian ethics come into being at a time and in a social situation when these ethical systems are practical and make eminent sense. And the Puritan sex ethic, the real Puritan sex ethic, not our caricature of it, made much sense at the time it was promulgated. But like other ethical systems within the Christian tradition, by the time it actually became codified and formally assimilated into church doctrine, it was out of date.

[A] Lynn: That's a wonderful insight. But the problem is how to keep reforming and reformulating that ethic so it never becomes frozen into the rigidities of a code.

[A] Pike: No religious morals are necessarily fixed and permanent when viewed in terms of historical development. At one time it was sinful to lend money at interest, but when I was the bishop of a diocese, we lent money to churches. The only sin in this transaction was when they didn't pay it back. There was also a time when slavery was accepted by the church; but there were rules within the game on how to be a good slave, a nice master, and so on. In 1920, at the Lambeth Conference—our modest Anglican version of the Vatican Council—it was held that any form of contraception was sinful; in 1958, family planning was declared a moral obligation. A Roman Catholic theologian working on their problem asked me, "How can you do that as a church?" I replied, "That's the advantage of not being infallible."

[A] Moore: We're moving to an era of uncertainty in which all aspects of life will be much more open-ended. In such a situation, the church will have to give up its authoritarianism and its emphasis upon the "givings." Most of my generation are hung up on sex, but I believe the issues are much larger than that one topic. The real issue is the nature of our humanity in these times and how it can most appropriately be expressed. I believe that any new morality that emerges in our time will focus more upon the issues which will establish man as a person within a community of persons.

[A] Cox: Morality must always be a living, organic thing. We must constantly be rethinking our morals, not on the basis of rigid law but on the basis of human needs.

[A] Lynn: And morality, as Bishop Pike points out, is a constantly changing tiling. The breakthrough will come not when Christians can conceive of morality just as an evocation of what ought to be but rather when they can look upon what they're actually doing and come to grips with it. When I was in the parish ministry, I did a study on the parishioner's perception of a minister. A minister has a five-letter word written right across his chest: ought. It's no wonder he can't help his flock. He can't help them understand what they're up against, because they don't want him to look at what they're really doing, and he has no way of achieving an understanding of what he can do to help them. Many young ministers are inhibited because of this image with their parishioners. This accounts in part for the dropouts among young clergymen. When you can begin to look at what morality actually is, then you can begin to get change and correction and self-criticism. In this respect, what playboy has done has been very helpful, because it has forced us to look at our actual morality. None of us ever look at our own morality by ourselves. We have to be forced to do it. One of playboy's contributions has been to awaken us to the invasion of privacy in the mails, playboy has called our attention to the outlandish sexual laws that are still on the books, and it has prodded us to re-examine what it is that happens to the person who's considered a deviate by society. We just haven't looked at these things before. There've been few, if any, Christian leaders who've seriously attended to these problems. Certainly no other national publication has. I have my quarrels with playboy, but the important thing here is that playboy has spotted several areas of selective inattention that we churchmen have persistently overlooked or ignored. And none of us would have looked at these things without the force of good criticism that arouses us and says: "Now look, here's what's really going on here." I have no faith in the reform of an institution from within that institution. The reform of an institution, even the church, comes about by the pressure of the people on the outside.

[Q] Playboy: You gentlemen seem to agree more often than you disagree about what's wrong with our sexual codes and what to do about it. As a Catholic, Father Rogers, are you in general accord with the other panelists?

[A] Rogers: Well, it's always difficult to discern a consensus in the midst of a variety of theological backgrounds, but I think there is evidence of a very considerable agreement among all of us, despite our differences. In general, we agree upon the need to view human sexuality in terms of personal fulfillment as well as in view of our social responsibilities. There is quite general agreement also that sex is good in itself, which is not to say that it shouldn't be accompanied with restraint or with regard for other values. We seem in fair agreement that there is a significant change in attitude toward sex among young people nowadays, enough to warrant speaking of a "new morality"—not totally new, of course, but new in that it gives a more wholehearted endorsement to what we in Western culture had been saying somewhat halfheartedly for some time; namely, that sex should be related to the other phases of human conduct and especially that it should be considered in the context of love rather than of the observance of some abstract law. There is some difference of opinion among us as to exactly when and how the expression of sexual love is appropriate or moral, but the central emphasis is clear enough: All of us are against sex without love, without some sort of bond or sense of responsibility, because we feel that sex is not a casual matter. It has been difficult for us to fully evaluate this new morality, because it is clearly in a stage of great transition. But I should venture the opinion that as it comes more and more to center upon love, and as the church comes more and more to see the persistent relevance of love, a sexuality that is at once expressive of love and tender of its restraints will come to the fore. Young people want restraints, but they want restraints within their capacities and which are related to their other emotional needs. Sexual morality must be correlated to other aspects of life. It must not become a highly specialized, departmentalized sector of human behavior. In short, the chastity we must preach must be a chastity at once expressive of and restraining of sexual love. Love has about it a need of expansiveness, of great freedom—and of great personal restraint. But the restraint must always be seen as related to love and not as something of a taboo left over from an earlier era.

[Q] Playboy: Thank you, gentlemen.