the pill

All this prudity in the Abrahamic religions comes from the Jews.  The Romans, when they weren't  in the mood of conquering and putting down rebellion, were an easy going lot.  They loved their orgies, and if the current Caesar was gay it was no big deal.  And as far as religion goes you could keep your old one, and as a matter of fact, some of the Romans would probably take it up because they loved religion so much that one was never enough, but you did have to pay lip service to the Roman gods.

But all that went into the crapper with the Jews who had that pesky First Commandment.  Much mayhem ensued, because they wouldn't put the Roman gods before that jealous Yahweh, not even lip service, so they had to be conquered several times.  And just when the Romans thought they had put the lid on this shit, up pop the Christians, who were pretty nice guys with the poor and all, but awfully puritanical.

But here is the deal, why were the Jews, and the Romans too, though they were looser, and pretty much everybody, so down on sex?  Well it has to be the babies, right?  It's just disruptive.  A guy wants to be sure that all his wive's babies are his (though why is that?  What's the difference?  I have to think the selfish gene comes in here), and that his daughter's kids are whoever's he chooses her to marry.  If babies came from picking each other's noses, I don't think anybody would care who anybody had sex with, but they damn well better keep their noses to themselves.

I don't know if you are a reader of Vonnegut, seems like you would be, seems like he would be a writer you would like, but there is one of his books where the phrase "I once read a science fiction story where...' occurs over and over again, so I like the fact that you have brought up a science fiction story.  But I am a little puzzled about what is meant by puberty.  Normally puberty embraces a whole range of changes in behavior, but I think what we are mainly talking about is the sex drive.

And here again isn't the problem here that people have babies, that all those kids are not getting past high school, and that there are all those babies with no means of support?  If they were having sex with no babies, wouldn't that be perfectly fine?  It would by me.

Ten years old?  That sounds awfully precocious Beagles.  But then it sounds like you took the problem in hand. And still you had time for hunting and fishing and putting on that uniform and marching up and down the field.  People are always ruing what looks like wasted time, but the fact is that if they don't waste it one way they will waste it another, it's not like we would all be finding a cure for cancer.

You speak about our technology giving us a way to postpone puberty (the sex drive), in the sense of if we can put a man on the moon why can't we invent a toothpaste that goes back in the tube, but really we don't want to delay puberty because you can never become an adult unless you go through it.  But yet again, sex is not the problem, babies are.

And here's the thing, I think most people believe that everybody has the right to have as many kids as they can pump out, and I say that is just not true if everybody else has to end up supporting them.  Does everybody have a right to eat steak every day?  But of course this is a little dicey for a good liberal like me, because isn't it like saying, rich people have a right to as many children as they want, but poor people only as many as the rich people decide that they can have.  And of course there is a racial component to this.

I believe the Chinese enforced their program with abortions and the Chinese society is generally much more compliant than us Americans, and of course we could never do those abortions.

We could do a pill thing, something like everybody has to be on the pill (maybe we could invent a male one too, so as not to be sexist) until high school or GED or something like that, but I don't know how we would enforce it, and I know it would be the end of the career of whatever politician broached the subject, but I do think we would be better off.