Sex and gender

Should I get married? Most of us don’t ask the question. We just assume we’ll get married and spend time thinking about whom we will marry.

Martin Luther, however, did ask that question. When he became a monk, he had taken a vow of celibacy and the Bible has stern things to say about those who break their vows. He also thought there was a good chance he would be martyred, soon. There were many people who wanted him dead. Should he marry when his wife could end up a widow before their first anniversary? Too, his Roman Catholic critics believed the new Protestant movement was just a cover for sexual licentiousness. If he got married and others followed his example, this would help silence the critics.

Luther struggled with the question and asked his parents about it. His father urged him to marry and have children, just like fathers everywhere, always, and at all times.

In Roman Catholicism, marriage was a sacrament and regulated by canon law that told you...

The work of Alfred Charles Kinsey at Indiana University, and the affiliated Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, has had a dramatic impact on our age.

In that I grew up in Bloomington, the home of IU and the Kinsey Institute, and have lived here for a portion of my adult life, I can claim some expertise in knowing the reputation of the Institute in our small, midwestern city. In that I’m a Christian, I’ll be writing from a specifically Christian worldview in making these series of posts. The impact of the man and the Institute that bears his name has been evil. 

The author of my major source has made an attempt to be objective and at least some reviewers think he has been successful. It is the biography by James H. Jones entitled, Alfred C. Kinsey: a public/private life (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997). Jones is a historian who teaches at the University of Houston. He did his Ph.D. at IU and has written, Bad Blood: the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. He began his work on Kinsey while he was in Bloomington...