Ah, that explains the Southern Baptists!

[elfs]

Hot on the heels of assuring the American people that he got the message, George Bush has nominated Erik Keroack to direct Title X, the federal program that distributes funding to family planning and pregnancy crisis clinics. His instructions are "to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them with priority given to low-income persons." The budget for Title X last year was some $280 million dollars.

Except Keroack is a freaking lunatic who directed a "pregnancy crisis center" that sought to mislead women seeking an abortion to come in, at which point they would bombard her with "Jesus luuuvs you and your baby messages." Keroack has said that contraception is "demeaning to women," apparently because it interferes with their god-directed duty to be a quiver producing arrows for God's army, to "present their bodies as living sacrifices to the Lord."

But Keroack has finally explained why Southern Baptists have the highest rates of divorce of any creed in this country. People have only so much love, and some people use it up too fast. His argument is that oxytocin reception, the brain's chemical reward marker for doing pleasurable things such as hugs, massage, social interactions, and sex, can be burned out if one has sex too much. He said, "People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual."

As Majikthise pointed out, this guy believes that if you do it once too often, you'll never love again. This begs the question: what about wanking?

Comments

[caprine.livejournal.com]

It also raises the question: what about children? If your oxytocin production capacity "wears out" from use, you can only love your firstborn properly; subsequent children, you just won't give a shit about. Yet aren't women supposed to be loving mothers for those arrows for God's army?

Actually, how can we love our children at all if we love our spouses? There just isn't enough oxytocin to go around!

"Dr. Keroack? Pull over; biology police. Whoa--he's resisting! Hit him with the textbook!"

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Actually, you're not really supposed to love any of them very much. If you love anyone more than God, it idolatry, and he'll punish you by taking that person away.

This is absolutely terrifying to a first time mother who is overwhelmed with love for her newborn and kinda wishy-washy on God.

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

I'm not finding anything linking him to quiverfull... did I miss a link?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

He's not linked. I was just pointing out that his rhetoric and quiverfull's goals are eerily familiar.

'Using up' love

[(Anonymous)]

I've been convinced for a long time that people do indeed have a capacity love. Or rather, people have a capacity for social bonds in general.

It's something like 'encumberance' from various role-playing games, but for social bonds. 'Love' is heavier than 'friend', which is heavier than 'my pet dog', which is heavier than 'my pet fish'. This is why people neglect their friends when they get a new significant other, because they've used up their social bonding capacity.

It also handily explains why some people can handle having fourty or fifty friends, while others struggle with a couple of fish and a dog. They just have a higher social encumberance.

Re: 'Using up' love

[(Anonymous)]

Ack. s/capacity love/capacity for love/

Re: 'Using up' love

[elfs.livejournal.com]

But there's a morally vast gulf between saying that someone has a certain amount of social bandwidth-- the amount of attention one can successfully arouse to attend to one's self-imposed social obligations-- and saying that one has a "limited lifetime supply" of social capacity and that once you've used it up you'll never again have deep or meaningful relationships with people. The, uh, doctor is proposing the latter, and I think it's fundamentally immoral to lie to people about their own feelings and abilities like that.

Re: 'Using up' love

[(Anonymous)]

I'd have to agree with you about that. I didn't mean to imply that I was defending him at all.

It's almost sounding like he's gearing up for some sort of witch-hunt. After all, if someone has 'used up' their lifetime supply of love, then doesn't that make them less than human in some way?

Re: 'Using up' love

[(Anonymous)]

As a further thought, if it WERE true, then would it be more moral to die after having used up your love potential, or to die with some of it still unused? I'd argue that not using it up would have to be less moral, according to the standard Christian viewpoint.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Sounds like stuff I've heard from some anti-sex men:
"We only have a limited lifetime amount of sperm. Every time we have sex, we come one step closer to dying."