Go Organic: The Scientific Case for Catholic Sexual Ethics by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse (2006)

Go Organic: The Scientific Case for Catholic Sexual Ethics by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, who taught economics at Yale and George Mason Universities. She is the Senior Research Fellow in Economics at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, and is founder of Your Coach for the Culture Wars.

The Catholic Church has taken more heat over its teachings about sex than any other topic. You may be surprised then to learn that modern science is on the Church’s side. That’s right. The Church’s traditional teachings can now claim the authority of both social, evolutionary and biological sciences. I learned this while doing the research for my book Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World.

Married people have more frequent and more satisfying sexual relations than the unmarried.2 As for sexual violence, marriage is by far the safest kind of sexual relationship, both for women and their children. Rates of domestic violence for cohabiting and for dating couples are higher than for married couples. Children are more likely to be abused by their mothers’ boyfriends than by their mothers’ husbands, even when the boyfriend is their own biological father.

I call the alternative vision “Organic Sex.” This view of sex, which happens to be the Catholic view, is that sex is an organic reality, with two natural purposes written into the human body. The first purpose is procreation. The second is to build up and solidify the couples’ relationship. Building a long-term relationship has survival value for a species whose young have a long period of dependency. The offspring of parents who work with each other to stay together are more likely to survive than the offspring of parents who can’t or won’t cooperate with each other. The fact that sex is “fun” is along for the evolutionary ride. The fun is nature’s way of getting us to keep the species, and the most basic unit of the community, going.

Go-Organic-The-Scientific-Case-for-Catholic-Sexual-Ethics.pdf