Sex, Lies, and Red Tape

I don't think that any religion or ideology has ever wanted to abolish sex entirely, they just wanted to keep it under some kind of reasonable control. Of course, what's reasonable to some people may be considered unreasonable by other people, which is why we had the Sexual Revolution. The Catholic Church forbids its priests to have sex, but those same priests admonish their married parishioners to have lots of children, or at least they used to. I remember an old British comedy on PBS called "Bless Me Father", which was set in the 1950s. In one scene the priest is counseling a newly married couple and encouraging them to do what married people are suppose to do. The couple was having difficulty getting used to the idea, since sex had been forbidden to them until recently. The priest told them, "That's how it is with us Catholics, everything is forbidden until it's mandatory." Now that I think of it, there was a sect called the Shakers that didn't believe in any kind of sex, and they subsequently became extinct because of it. Too bad, I understand that they made some really good furniture in their day.

The thing about sex is that people lie about it a lot. They lie about other things too, but I think they lie about sex more than all the other things put together. I'm not sure why that is, maybe because sex is such a powerful instinct that it scares some people. Maybe they feel more comfortable fantasizing about it than actually doing it. After awhile they may confuse their fantasies with their realities so that they themselves don't know the difference anymore. Somebody should do a study about that.

I heard that Trump was trying to levy some import tariffs lately. Funny, that used to be a Democratic agenda item and the Republicans were opposed to it. I'm generally in favor of free trade myself, but what we've got now is not really free trade. When NAFTA was first passed I remember reading somewhere that it involved 1200 pages of regulations. How can anything with 1200 pages of regulations be called "free"?