4. It makes a mockery of chastity.  Every faculty of man has its proper use. If I walk every day, I will develop strong legs for standing and walking and bracing myself. That is what legs are for. Chastity is the virtue of using one’s sexual desires properly. Since the act that is biologically designed to produce babies has the predictable propensity to, in fact, produce babies, and since the desire to perform that act is one of man’s strongest drives, all cultures have attempted to curb that desire or direct it towards healthy ends.

Before the advent of the modern welfare state, most peoples laid heavy blame on those who brought children into the world when they were unfit to care for them. Traditions vary from culture to culture, but one thing at least is constant: If you produce a baby out of wedlock, you are in trouble.

Chastity has all kinds of practical considerations going for it. If you are chaste, you stand a much lower chance of being beaten or murdered by someone driven witless by jealousy; you will probably not contract certain debilitating, even deadly, diseases, and if your spouse is chaste, you certainly will not contract them; your marriage begins in better shape, as you will not be spoiled or confused by memories of previous affairs, many of them painful; you will not help destroy a family with your looseness, your own family or someone else’s.

The psychological considerations are greater still. What insanity, that we encourage boys and girls to set forth on a series of sexual train wrecks, with all their misunderstandings, abuses, and treacheries, as preparation for lifelong marriage! It is a miracle almost if they do not reach their twenties as thoroughly cynical about themselves and the opposite sex as is the most embittered divorcee. How can love survive the acid bath?

But how can we recommend chastity to the young, when we enshrine the principle that what they do with their genitals is their own business, and that such activity is all for personal fulfillment? What value can sexual restraint possibly have, except as some calculating means towards keeping one’s resume clean along the road to wealth and power?

How can we even talk about chastity when we accept homosexuality? For a homosexual defines himself by the action. A teenager calls himself homosexual because he has performed homosexual acts. It is incoherent to suppose that we can recommend to “straight” teenagers a chastity that must be violated by the self-defining homosexual. What homosexual could or would “wait until marriage,” even if pseudogamy were made legal? If homosexual acts are accepted, there remains no reason at all to condemn or even frown upon premarital sex. What you condone in one case will cause you also to condone other things, necessarily. We are not islands unto ourselves.