\u201cComfort sex\u201d was our preferred title for this reflection but after connecting the dollar\u2019s downgrade to Dania in Columbia, we were accused of taking a cheap shot at Amerikana, not so much on the greenback as with our seeming ethical bent on presidential security checking body temperature with their dipsticks on commercial fuel tanks. It now appears that this was a second incident that followed a previous warm and wet camaraderie in El Salvador. <\/p>\n
No matter that both Columbia and El Salvador have legalized their commercial trade in flesh, and the security force frat guys were just observing an old boys\u2019 fun-filled carousing tradition, it is an election year and Obama is an open dartboard for the least infraction on the nation\u2019s manners. It reflects on the leadership, the GOP says.<\/p>\n
China has a saying that \u201cthe difference between politic and polite is etiquette,\u201d explaining the length the media goes into massaging their reports into the level of community standards. Not so our sleazy tabloid heritage, so it comes as no surprise that our Dania had hired a high-powered lawyer to look after her new celebrity status, and swiftly high-tailed it to Spain on the fear that the cowboy security boys will silence her now expected detailed account of their indiscretion!<\/p>\n
It is comfort sex, however, that caught our fancy, not from the pages of Playboy but from some of our self-conscious women who are not too keen on the demands and commitments of covenant but do not mind cultivating friendship toward casual comforting and comporting under covers. \u201cComfort sex\u201d has since been Googled into the same realm as \u201ccomfort food\u201d! Neither is recommended for one\u2019s health, but it is widely indulged in nevertheless.<\/p>\n
It was the early \u201960s when my Dad returned from almost six years of graduate work in a conservative school and geographical section of the United States, surprisingly carrying a 1958 brown-paper-wrapped book called Sex Without Guilt by Albert Ellis, an exposition of America\u2019s researched practices and attitudes toward love and human sexuality, along with the explosive work of the controversial and famed Alfred Kinsey of Indiana.<\/p>\n
We were too young to know what was dubbed the sexual revolution then, which confronted our tender moorings when it was our turn to walk the streets of San Francisco\u2019s North Beach in 1966, though we did not go far enough to wear a flower in our hair, hang beads down our neck, and flashed the V-sign to onlookers at Haight-Ashbury.<\/p>\n
What my Dad\u2019s book represented (I never read the book but his possession of it did us a huge paradigmatic number) was, however, a way of thinking far too removed from my upbringing and the religious orientation that nursed my \u201cfaith.\u201d That religious group, the United Methodist Church, was the reason I ventured back to Saipan\u2019s lagoon after Thanksgiving in \u201898 and helped redefine the institutional expression of my vocation.<\/p>\n
The same body held its quadrennial General Conference in Florida last week (I was around at the Dallas \u201860s and Denver \u201990s gathering) and in a legislative session discussing the Church\u2019s stance on LGTB, the most divisive issue in the guarded but non-operational psyche of Midwest United States, it was an African woman who cried her heart out in opposition to allowing homosexuality be regarded other than as a blatant \u201cabomination to the Lord,\u201d as denounced, she says, by Holy Writ and the missionaries of her upbringing. The UMC\u2019s fastest growing membership is from the Third World with a 19th century missionary mentality that has come to haunt and drive out the more progressive elements of this distinctively American institution that grew in the shadows of the U.S. Congress rather than the White House.<\/p>\n
In a confessional statement I made in my youth, I characterized my mother\u2019s Roman Catholic Church and my father\u2019s United Methodists as having, respectively, turned into a \u201cwhore\u201d and a \u201cpimp.\u201d Very politic but not too polite, my literal metaphors did not meet an appreciative audience.<\/p>\n
With Pope Benedict now going after Caritas International for not condemning homosexuality in its services, President Obama finally coming out in support of same-sex marriage, and Romney suddenly becoming adroit in avoiding any set position any given time but yet shamelessly revving up the hinterland\u2019s defensive homophobia, our preoccupation with whether the President\u2019s security were salacious in El Salvador, now scheduled for Senate hearing, makes the liberating U.S. land of the Alberts a rather sad-looking jaded juvenile.<\/p>\n
We took a few months not too long ago to understand the workings on Saipan of what we called the House of Horus (the Egyptian pagan god Horus, promiscuous and polytheistic, gave us the colorful English word \u201cwhore\u201d) wildly written up in these pages. It made us understand why our local male citizens get in trouble with new post-puberty virgin teens when we recall that the patriarchal Datus of Malayo-Oceania and the liege lords of Europe\u00a0had it as their honored prerogative to deflower the village\u2019s lassies.<\/p>\n
We thought Ellis and Kinsey had catapulted us beyond our ancient prejudices. We\u2019ve had some ardent holdovers to the past. Some even sit in legislatures.<\/p>\n
[I]Jaime R. Vergara (jrvergarajr2031@aol.com) is a former PSS teacher and is currently writing from the campus of Shenyang Aerospace University in China.[\/I]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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