Day 37: Making Love can turn Bloody

I was not around then, but during the Vietnam war I think there were people trying to protest bloodshed and violence with this slogan: Make Love Not War.

It is easy to assume that God is eager for an excuse to kill people because of the laws in the Old Testament that require the death penalty for various human behaviors, especially sexual intercourse that takes place outside of set relational boundaries. People who had extra-marital or incestuous sex were stoned to death. It seems kind of harsh! If sex is just making love, how could God be so mad when people are overdoing it a bit with who and when they love each other? When people make love instead of war, doesn't that count for an improvement, at least a little? Why do they have to get the same punishment as murderers? Is God just setting up an impossible situation where we get in trouble no matter what, whether we love death and violence, or if we love life and people so much that we get carried away with the "urge to merge" and "need to breed" as the singing Producer Leo Bloom likes to call it? What is so harmful about sleeping with that first sweetheart, or maintaining a friends with benefits relationship, getting some play on a trip to Europe, or skipping through the middle-age blahs with a hot young mistress?

I stumbled upon two different sexy Richard Gere movies in the last week while flipping channels, once during a midnight snack, and another while folding a load of clothes. In Unfaithful, Gere co-starred with Diane Lane as the cuckolded husband of a woman who decided to have a brief affair to add some passion and excitement in her nice but boring life. In An Officer and a Gentleman, Gere co-starred with Debra Winger in a movie about small town girls trying to catch an Air-Force officer for a husband to get a ticket out of factory life, and officers-in-training using the girls for some pleasure after a long intense day of training. In both movies, someone dies from what might be called crimes of passion. While these movies were probably popular for their steamy "intimate" scenes (I was watching the edited-for-tv versions), both were seriously if inconsistently passing on the message that sexual escapades can get somebody killed. A casual roll in the hay is not a celebration of life, it is a decision inviting bloodshed.

When God sets limits on our choices of sexual encounters it is not because he hates the pleasure of life, it is because he loves it so much. It sort of sounds like a cliche to just say that, but now that I'm a mom, I believe it even more. He loves safe, healthy and protective communities where any children that are made during sex are whole-heartedly wanted, women are protected physically and economically for their vulnerable role of hosting life in the womb and nurturing young children, and men are crystal clear about which woman and children they are committed to serve with the sweaty lifetime labor of provision and protection.

If baby Davey dies today because his great-grandma neglected to take him out of the car in the winter weather because she is tired and old and forgetful and Davey's mom isn't there because she is high on drugs because she has been self-medicating since age 12 because her grandpa started having sex with her at age 7, because he and grandma raised Davey's mom when she was little because her mom had not been around because she too had been drinking heavily and promiscuous with various men ever since that grandpa (her father) had sex with her, incest is bloodshed. It may take three or four generations before people start actually dying, but the blood will be shed.

God was not adding to the death toll with the laws and consequences about sex in Leviticus, he was trying to turn the people from the "urge to merge" onto a common fastlane to bloodshed and death.