Thomas Seay:
> Anthony, you are absolutely right!!!! Puritanism just
> takes a much more convoluted style among CERTAIN
> leftists. You have stirred up a hornet's nest because
> they dont like to think that they are puritans,
> because they associate puritanism with Southern
> Baptists.
>
> Good job!
If we're just talking about this list, what I see is a variety of people who want to talk about the issues raised in various ways. Naturally, they provisionally want to repress other aspects of the issue for the benefit of their mode of discussion, e.g. I wanted to repress giggling in order to contemplate the ways in which one's social relations and culture might affect certain kinds of sexual performance, and I suppose the gigglers didn't like this because they wanted to explore the humorous aspects of the kind of sober, earnest approach I was pushing. And so on -- _de_gustibus_. Obviously, unless we're going to have a surrealist free-association orgy, there's going to be a certain amount of repression going on -- including that advocated by you two, which I'll be glad to point out, analyse, and explain if you desire, as soon as I have a few hours to spare.
However, I don't see anything like the broad, totalitarian repression described above, and I think you need to give examples of it. Who is promoting the dominant Puritan belief that sex should only be legitimized in the most narrow of circumstances in this discussion? May we have a cite or two?
-- Gordon