True Blueprint

by Janice Graham
I remember my first crush. I was 12 ½. It was summer, 1967, and I was going to a new sort of activity, a church youth picnic at a beautiful park in the Bay Area, California. I even remember what I wore: a sky-blue shorts outfit with buttoned pockets on the shirt and epaulets on the shoulders. The event promised to be magical for one reason. Amazingly, I had been told that a boy liked me, the boy with the brown eyes who smiled shyly and stared at me in Sunday School, and chances were he was going to be at the picnic. When I saw him my heart leaped; the picnic was suddenly very interesting. An older boy had the brand new hit song, Light My Fire by the Doors, blasting from his truck. We ran relay races. I suppose we ate something. I don’t think the boy with the brown eyes actually spoke to me the entire day, but it was enough that he was always nearby, within sight, snatching glances, smiling his shy smile. 

Today people would call this being opposite-sex attracted or heterosexual. But those terms didn't exist in those days. They weren’t needed. Everyone took for granted the orderly way of things. In a society that does things right, when a young person first begins noticing someone of the opposite sex, it doesn't seem to be sexual at all. Innocent young people who have been protected and influenced properly and who are just beginning to awaken to how they fit in the one appropriately idealized male-female pattern of life certainly aren’t thinking about an entire group of people they are attracted to or about ultimate mating, the act of sex. They are only thinking about the person they are attracted to, how cute they are, how they smile, if they are nice, what they think.

Yes, on that day, at that picnic, I wasn’t thinking about the entire male group. I was thinking about one boy. All the other boys weren’t particularly interesting to me; I wasn’t attracted to them. Rather than labeling me opposite-sex attracted, it would be much more accurate to say I was specially attracted to one opposite-sex person. In my youth, this singling out of one special opposite-sex person perfectly imitated the male-female coupling pattern being depicted all around me, by my parents and all others, and by such things as art, stories, scriptures, stories, books, TV shows, and movies. I feel blessed that this was the single blueprint that was drawn for me in my early years on which I built my life.

Today young people are abundantly provided with a variety of blueprints labeled gay, straight, LGBT, LGBTQI, S&M, SSA, SGA, homosexual, heterosexual, transexual, transgender, fluid, man-boy love, pansexual, etc., etc., etc.! Mainstream society didn’t need this alphabet soup until recently. Why do we need all these terms now? Because we have ever-multiplying new patterns being modeled and dignified and idealized in mainstream society as equally valuable or even preferable alternatives to natural biological moral human sexuality. These proliferating terms are constructed to advertise and legitimize new patterns. Is it any wonder that in today's oversexed culture, young people, often bored, self-centered, experimental, rebellious in nature, objectified, pornographied, and sexually abused, are drawn to this or that trendy and fashionable blueprint? What a shame that innocence and proper sexual development are now being circumvented on a culture-wide scale.

It is easy to see how human sexuality is now being expanded to preposterous excess. But there is also something very narrow about these new patterns. Traditionally, the one right blueprint for male and female coupling did not begin and end with sex. It was about so much more, about the future, about cherished shared interests and values in connection with God, marriage, children, a secure family life, about generation after generation of posterity. Contrarily, these new labels and patterns seem to be based first and foremost on individual sexual pleasure, on what sort of sexual activities are available. The sexual revolution is about big groups of strangers seen as purely sexual beings instead of about finding one certain proper person with whom one can build a full and multi-faceted life in order to contribute to the security and prosperity of the human race. 

Who can deny that this narrow, depraved new world is obsessed with sex and that people often treat each other more like erotic eye candy and sex toys than human beings? We have come so low that many outwardly pious church-goers actually think it is perfectly chaste to indulge in adulterous, pornographic, or homosexual mental activities.  (We wonder if they think incestuous and pedophillic fantasies are chaste as well. Why not?) 

Today we are being fed the false notions that sexuality is all-encompassing and that alternative sexual desires are harmless, innate, and unalterable. But of course they are the opposite: harmful, learned, and alterable. To paraphrase George Orwell, for its own safety and survival society should promote fairly strict rules and stigmas for human sexuality--- including only one legitimatized blueprint for the two human sexes: two opposite-sex adults singling each other out for life. They decide to be faithful and therefore decide not to think sexually about anybody but each other, and that properly. (It is natural for faithful spouses to notice the beauty,charm, or attractiveness of others of either sex, but they do not sexualize them or fantasize about them.)

In my lifetime, the true blueprint for human sexuality has gone from being the only one around to actually being prohibited. For instance, in California, a movement is in motion to legally ban reorientation therapy for unwanted homosexuality. In other words, many damaged, confused, and miserable young people will not be able to find a professional to help them root out their unwanted, unhealthy sexual thought patterns and behaviors so they can reorient them in the one proper and healthy direction. They will only be able to find professionals who will encourage sexual deviancy. Indeed, this has already happened. In fact, harmful   blueprints for human sexuality are now being forced on the public through every conceivable social institution. 


There's a great science fiction book called A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller, 1960, in which the whole world has long ago been blown up. The initial survivors in charge immediately destroyed all vestiges of art and learning, blaming the accumulation of knowledge for the devastating apocalypse. Thousands of years later, some monks in a primitive secret monastery in the desert are still trying to collect and protect what cultural relics they can. One monk finds what he thinks is a transcendent work of beauty and spends his life copying it in gold leaf. He doesn't know it's only a blueprint of a common thermostat. The same sort of thing is happening today when it comes to the truth about human sexuality and purpose. Phony, sterile, worthless, even harmful templates for human sexuality are being emphasized and encouraged and celebrated today. Do we really want such gross ignorance, depravity, and degradation mistaken for progress and enlightenment by future generations, that is if there are any?

Of course there is only one true blueprint for human sexuality, and it's a terrible shame young people today are being confused and taken in by worthless counterfeits.