Patrick Coffin and Andrew Clavin clash over sex, religion, and media bias in Sex, Lies and TV News, starting with KPFA’s cancellation of Richard Dawkins for Islam critiques while Trump’s transgender military ban sparks debates on unit cohesion vs. civil rights. Coffin ties modern gender fluidity to the 1930 Lambeth Conference’s contraception endorsement, warning it severed sex from procreation—linking it to porn’s rise post-Griswold v. Connecticut—while citing a RAND study on low transgender military prevalence. He champions Sex au Naturel (contraception-free sex) as morally sound, citing 1,400 couples with 0% divorce rates using natural family planning, but Clavin challenges its rigid teleology against individualism, leaving the clash unresolved amid abrupt theater tangents. [Automatically generated summary]
Berkeley radio station KPFA has canceled an interview with scientist Richard Dawkins because they say Dawkins has offended Muslims.
Dawkins, as you know, is an evolutionary biologist who became famous for being an atheist.
He claims that evolutionary theory proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that creation is a random process without purpose or meaning and that that's why he's so depressed and nasty all the time.
Dawkins has called faith, quote, one of the world's great evils, unquote, because it causes people to hate one another instead of loving one another as the Bible tells us to.
He says that if Jesus were alive today, he would not believe in himself, but would tell everyone that he did not exist.
Okay, I made that last part up, but it makes as much sense as the rest of what Dawkins believes.
Anyway, in his attacks on all religion, Dawkins has included attacks on Islam and has criticized the Quranic verses that command Muslims to slaughter everyone on earth so that God can ultimately have the planet to himself to use as a summer vacation spot.
In Berkeley, however, this is an atheist step too far.
It was OK for Dawkins to criticize Judaism and Christianity, which are offensive faiths because they created the values of freedom and equality that have oppressed minorities, gays and women by not giving them the freedom and equality created by Judaism and Christianity.
But to criticize Islam, which demands the destruction of minorities and gays and the virtual enslavement of women is a violation of the tolerance demanded by Judaism and Christianity, which are evil because, OK, wait, I've lost the train of this thought.
Let me try again.
You see, KPFA in Berkeley is tolerant, a uniquely Judeo-Christian value.
But they're not tolerant of Judeo-Christianity because it's intolerant, unlike Judeo-Christianity.
They are, however, tolerant of Islam, which is intolerant of those who don't believe in Islam, because what could be more tolerant than being tolerant of complete intolerance?
Put simply, it is now forbidden to speak your mind in Berkeley, California if you believe in something that offends those who believe in something else, who of course offend you because of their beliefs and are therefore forbidden to speak in Berkeley, California.
Thus, KPFA invited Dawkins to speak because he believes in nothing.
But then they found out that believing in nothing offends people who believe in something because they believe in something and not nothing.
So best to say nothing, which of course is saying something, which offends those who believe in nothing.
So say nothing, which offends those who say something.
Thus, anyone who is intolerant of anything is forbidden to speak in Berkeley because Berkeley is intolerant of everything.
And so Richard Dawkins had to be silenced.
Muslims responded to the news by issuing a statement saying everyone involved should be killed.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
Shipshi-tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-sing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
Shaving Secrets00:04:31
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah!
All right, here we are.
It's already, the Clavin this weekend is upon us.
This week went flying by.
And this show will go flying by because all we're going to do is talk about sex.
Sex, sex, sex.
I know.
First I'm going to sing Man, I feel like a woman, and then see if I get kicked out of the military.
We have Patrick Coffin.
You know, yesterday, I said Patrick Coffin was a priest.
He is not a priest.
He's kind of a Catholic answer man.
He is the host of the podcast, The Patrick Coffin Show, which features weekly interviews with A-list influencers and outliers in the effort to recover the Judeo-Christian roots of the culture.
I was on the show.
It can't be all A-list people, but most of them are A-list people.
But anyway, he has written this book, Sex au Naturale, What It Is and Why It's Good for Your Marriage.
So Patrick Coffin will join us later.
And, you know, we'll obviously be talking about the transsexual ban in the military.
My favorite story, actually, is Hillary Clinton book, Hillary Clinton's tell-all book about the election is coming out.
And it's called What Happened.
It's going to be like Knowles' book.
It's going to have two words in it.
I lost.
It's going to be stretched out.
I lost over 800 pages.
All right.
But first, let's talk about shaving.
Let's talk about something I know something about.
In fact, there is no man alive who knows more about shaving than I do because I have a lot of real estate that I have to shave.
I mean, I go over my entire head every day.
It's like a 15-minute job.
And I want it, you know, I just want it to be a good experience.
Long, long before I had this show, maybe, I don't know, even a year before I had this show, and certainly before they were a sponsor, I was part of the Dollar Shave Club and have been for the last three or four years.
It's only been around for five years.
I heard about it on the radio myself, and I just thought, you know, I'm so tired.
First of all, I'm tired of shelling out for these disposable razors.
They're so expensive.
And you go to the drugstore and they lock them up because they're afraid people are going to steal them.
So you have to call somebody to get a razor out.
And then, you know, when they run out, you start to slice your head off, you know, because they're too expensive to replace all the time.
And if you're doing what I'm doing, well, you got to shave all these nooks and crannies and all this stuff, you know, they start to cut you up.
So this is a smarter choice.
The Dollar Shave Club, which is dollarshaveclub.com, is a smarter choice because what they do is they send you the razors by the month and you can choose whether you get just a double razor or a triple.
I have two.
I actually have two.
They give you different stems, handles for them.
And I actually have two different handles because the higher up razors, the ones with more blades, give you a closer shave.
But I get a little bit more agility with the smaller ones and they get me into all those strange places that you've got to shave if you shave your head.
So it's like, this is really, and they have all this other stuff.
They got shaved butter.
I love the shaved butter.
They also have hair stuff.
I know nothing about this, but trust is as good as everything else.
It's just not something I know about.
But it really is easy.
You sign on.
They just come every month.
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It's really a good service.
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Like I said, I've been using it long, long before they became sponsors.
And for a limited time, new members get their first month of the executive razor with a tube of Dr. Carver's shaved butter, which really is cool.
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That's a $15 value for only $5 if you sign up now.
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It really, it's just, it's the easiest way to do this.
And it's not just that it's cheaper.
It's a lot cheaper than buying throwaway razors.
But it's not just that it's a lot cheaper.
There's also better razors and you can change them once a week.
You can afford to change them once a week so you always have a good one.
You can only get this offer exclusively at dollarshaveclub.com slash clavin.
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Try it out.
Like I said, I've been using it for years and years.
Manipulating The Transgender Debate00:14:40
So, this is an incredible story, this transgender story.
And there's obviously a lot of different angles about it because Trump is like the master of chaos.
He just does everything in this way that creates the maximum amount of chaos.
So he tweets out, you know, Mattis has said that he wanted to take a look at this idea of letting transgenders into the military.
And he said he was going to look at it for six months.
They were going to ban it, or they didn't know they were going to ban it.
And suddenly, without informing the Pentagon, apparently, Trump just tweets out, the commander-in-chief just tweets out, after consultation with my generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States government will not accept or allow.
That was the first tweet.
Just a boss.
Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military.
Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.
Thank you.
The first thing I thought of about was Corporal Klinger.
Does anybody remember Corporal Klinger?
You remember the TV show MASH?
It was about the MASH unit in Korean War, and Corporal Klinger wanted to get out of the military so badly that he would always wear a dress because that would be a sign that he was a psychological problem.
This is what Donald Trump scenes like this that Donald Trump is trying to prevent.
What are you doing?
Can't a guy have a washing set without somebody biting him on the neck?
Biting who?
I was biting you.
No, you weren't.
You were biting me.
Klinger, what are you doing in here?
Just bowing a little your shampoo, Major.
It's wartime.
We all got to help each other.
No, we don't.
You get out of here, you pervert.
Pervert?
Who been who, Major?
This has got to stop.
This has got to stop.
So anyway, I mean, Trump just, this was like the rollout of that anti-immigration thing, you know, the, remember the travel ban?
Remember the chaos that he caused with this?
And it's really funny because with Trump at this point, there is so much chaos.
Just to deal with the chaos part of it first, there's so much chaos that people have begun to think that it's kind of like a strategy, you know?
I mean, here's Sheldon Whitehouse, senator, very, very liberal senator, and he just says this is a distraction.
Doesn't have the aura of seriousness.
It looks like he's trying to throw yet another shiny object out there to distract people from what's going on with Russia.
And as usual, when he throws a shiny object, he figures out a group that he thinks is vulnerable and just tries to be mean to them.
So he's trying to distract from the Russia investigation, but that is actually continuing.
Here it is.
You are all hereby found guilty of the crime of witchcraft.
I sentence you, hags, to be burned at the stake until you are deemed fit to re-enter society.
It's obviously Teddy Kennedy came back to life to do the, it's the witch hunt to get it, to get it, it's the witch hunt.
So anyway, let me, here's the thing about this.
This is many things, but it is not a civil rights issue.
It has nothing to do with civil rights.
It has nothing to do with transgenderism, right or wrong.
None of this.
Mattis said when he was in his hearing, he didn't care who slept with whom.
It has absolutely nothing to do with it.
You know, one of the problems we have in America really is a problem.
It's like one of those uptown, what they call an uptown problem, or actually what they call now a white girl problem.
It's a problem.
It's an easy problem.
It's because we are so far away from questions of survival, of questions of necessity.
We are so rich, so well protected, that we have these conversations in a bubble of protected fantasy where we're not even talking about what we're talking about.
So people are saying, oh, it's a civil rights, the poor transgender person.
I mean, it has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with this.
You know, it really is amazing.
What they always do, they always do this on television, especially.
But actually, this is the news media, the left-wing news media.
It's all it is.
They bring on individuals.
Individuals who, let's say, in this case, they brought on a transgender seal, the Canadian broadcasting company.
I just use this because I know it's Canada, but it's typical.
They bring in Rachel Clark, a transgender Marine, okay?
And here's the anchor woman introducing this.
Just listen to this few seconds.
Rachel Clark is a transgender activist who served in the U.S. Marine Corps.
She joins me now in studio.
Thanks so much for coming in today.
Thanks for having me.
First of all, I want to get your impressions of this policy.
How does this policy make you feel?
Who cares?
Who cares how this policy makes anybody feel, okay?
We are talking about this in this protected bubble that our military has created, our wealth has created, our food and abundance has created, where we forget what it is we're doing.
The military is there to kill people and break things.
It is there to keep us alive.
It is there so you can go to the opera.
It's there so you can go to your protest march against the military and say how bad the military is.
They are there to protect you while you're doing that, because if they're not there, we know for a fact, if they're not there, it's like removing all the pawns in a game of chess.
They will just come down and take you away.
You will be gone the next day.
I've always thought whenever they say, whenever a college says, you know, we're not going to have ROTC, or whenever a state says, you know, we're not going to support the military, I always think, okay, let's withdraw military protection from that state.
Let's not, California, how about UC Berkeley doesn't have military protection anymore.
There would be UC Berkeley for one minute.
So we're talking about survival, even though we're so safe, it doesn't seem like a question of survival.
There are a million things that will keep you out of the military.
An eating disorder.
If you have ADHD, that can keep you out of the military.
If you have mood disorder, any kind of depression.
And the thing, first of all, we don't know anything about, we don't know enough about transgenderism.
Is it in and of itself a mental disorder?
There's plenty of reason to say that, but we know it is attended by lots and lots of mental disorders, much higher rate of depression, much higher rate of suicides.
I think the suicide attempt rate is up around 40% for transgenders, much greater rate of substance abuse.
The only question here is whether it makes it tougher for the military to do its job of killing people.
That is their job.
Their job is to go out, find our enemies, meet them, say hello, and then kill them.
That's their job.
And anything that gets in the way, I am against women in combat.
I am definitely against women in combat situations.
They get hurt more.
They're not as good at shooting.
They haven't got the endurance that men have.
They destroy.
They weaken the unit cohesion, what they call unit cohesion, the togetherness of the people.
You know, I don't care if it's unfair.
I don't care if it's unfair.
The idea of the military is not to be fair.
There are no civil rights issues in the military.
The only issue in the military is can they kill enough people to keep the rest of us alive?
Can they kill enough bad guys to keep the good guys alive?
Can they be scary and mean and big and tough and ugly and formidable and keep it alive?
And you know, everything about the way these debates are formed is meant to keep you from thinking about the truth.
Here's George Stephanopoulos' introduction to his report on this.
Just watch the way this is reported.
Now to the backlash over President Trump's ban on transgender service in the U.S. military, take a look at these images right here, protests breaking out across the country after the president tweeted his decision to ban transgender individuals from serving in, quote, any capacity.
The policy President Trump is reversing was just announced last year by President Obama's administration, and now the future of those currently serving our country is in question.
This wasn't an abrupt move by President Trump.
He promised during the campaign that he would be stronger on LGBT rights than Hillary Clinton.
How many lies and deceptions and distractions can you pack in to a 15-second opening?
I mean, that's really what it is.
All right, I got to stop and say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, which means, can we stay on for Facebook and YouTube?
Let's stay on because I want you to listen to Patrick Coffin.
Really interesting because he wrote this book, Sex au Naturale, a book, by the way, I mean, I'm very liberal about sexual issues for a number of reasons that we'll discuss.
But when I bring on guests, I want to hear what they have to say.
And this is a very, very intense Catholic take on sex and marriage and what it should be like.
Really interesting, well-written, good read, Sex au Naturelle by What It Is and Why It's Good for Your Marriage by Patrick Coffin.
So we will be talking to him and we'll stay on.
But just because we're staying on, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't subscribe.
You should subscribe to thedailywire.com.
It's a lousy 10 bucks a month.
For $100, you get a year's subscription plus the leftist tears mug.
Come on, come on, a leftist tears mug.
Plus, you can be in the mailbag.
We had the mailbag yesterday.
You know, my wife said she didn't understand my discussion of basically a platonic forms and why.
Yeah, did I lose people there?
I don't know.
I followed it.
Yeah.
Well, if you followed it, my God.
All right.
But I tried.
I tried.
You have to, you know, you have to, it is tough philosophy.
But I did, what I was saying was right.
I may not have described it as well as I could have.
All right.
So the thing about all of this that is really interesting is that because we can't, this is why we can't have nice things in this country.
We have, you know, if you watch the show business reaction to the transgender thing, it was all the same.
It was F you.
You know, Stephen Colbert comes out and says, F you.
And then the audience, like trained monkeys, they really are at this point like trained monkeys.
When I say F you, you all cheer and yell because now we know what this is what we, you know, it is like if they didn't have the F word, these guys, their entire senses of humor would disappear.
I think Samantha B T, we did the same thing.
Oh, yeah, Trump will F you.
You know, I mean, it's like an entire industry, an entire industry geared toward keeping us away from discussing the issues like adults, turning it into a personal matter, bringing on people who might shed a little tear, you know, like, oh, I'm so sad that the transgender people can't be in the military, and not discussing it.
Hey, I would listen to a discussion.
You know, there was a RAND study.
The RAND is a big corporation that studies all these military things.
And they said, you know, there just aren't that many transgenders in the military.
And most of them don't want reassignment surgery, as they call it.
So it's not a big deal.
You know, I would have that debate, sit and have two people have that debate.
And the other side said it doesn't matter.
It's bad for unit cohesion.
Transgenders, of course, can still serve in the military.
What they can't do is they can't come out and say, I'm transgender and I want to have surgery and you should pay for it.
So that's the only difference.
I am actually in favor of the military doing whatever it has to do to be as lethal and terrifying and murderous as it can possibly be.
That is what I want.
And to use it as the front line of social justice warrior experimenting seems to me inherently stupid.
But let's have that debate.
Let's have that debate.
Instead of these guys just bringing on individuals, it's all about distraction.
And you talk about Donald Trump distracting people and using issues to throw people off.
And maybe he is.
There was an exchange on the Brett Baer show on Special Report.
Really got to me, you know, because I've been talking a lot about the fact that obviously they're debating in the Senate the health care bill and they voted down straight repeal, which really was shameful, especially from the lady from Murkowski from Alaska.
She's been parading her anti-Obamacare credentials for years and just putting out press releases about it.
And then she voted down a repeal bill, a straight repeal bill.
But there it is.
They got to go through their debate.
They got to go through their whole show.
They're going to vote on all the amendments.
And I was saying that Trump has a chance to have a real victory here, but he's distracting everybody with this Jeff Sessions thing that he's always attacking Jeff Sessions and now distracting people with the transgender thing.
And Brett Baer had the panel on at the end of the Brett Baer show.
They have that panel.
And Charles Krauthammer, this brilliant guy, is there.
And Baer says to him, Is it possible that all of this is three-dimensional chess, essentially?
He says to him, You know, before the Democrats were attacking Jeff Sessions, and now that Trump is attacking them, they are defending him, you know.
And he asks Charles Krauthammer, and he played this clip of Dick Durbin, Senator Dick Durbin, Senator Angus King, and you'll hear them first attacking when he was up from Sessions was up for confirmation, they were attacking him, and then praising him and defending him from mean Mr. Trump.
The wrong person for this job.
We need someone with unquestioned strength, values, and integrity.
Jeff Sessions stuck his neck out for this president, the only, the first senator to endorse him.
And now look what the president's doing to him, chopping his head off.
Because of his relationship with Mr. Trump and his history, I'm just not sure he would give the kind of independent advice that this president desperately needs.
When you take the oath in this country, your oath is to the Constitution.
You don't say, I promise to be loyal and support the president of the United States.
So Bayer plays these two cuts, and he says to Krauthammer, is Trump just playing this game to get the Democrats to suddenly support Jeff Sessions?
It's the three-dimensional chess theory of Donald Trump, that everything he does has these incredibly clever motives.
And Krauthammer, I won't play the Krauthammer cut, but he basically just couldn't, he didn't even hear the question.
I mean, he's a brilliant guy, and he said, yes, the Democrats are hypocrites.
They don't believe in anything.
They will say anything, but that's a different issue.
But what Baer was asking him about was: was Trump using that to his advantage?
And the question with the transgender thing is the same thing.
There's some theory that Republicans came to him and said they wouldn't pass his spending bill that includes spending to build the border wall if he didn't do something about this.
And so maybe he did it for that reason.
But there's so much chaos in Washington.
But the only thing I want to point out, the only thing I want to point out is if Trump is a disinformationist, the media is too.
The media are too.
The news media has been doing this for years.
When you bring on, oh, here's a transgender SEAL, here's a transgender Marine, and when you don't bring on people to discuss the actual issues, it is all geared toward manipulating you through your emotions.
And then you watch the news and then you stay up late and you watch Stephen Colbert and he says, F you, President Trump.
Union of Man and Woman00:15:44
And everybody, yeah, F you.
It is all geared to manipulation.
It is all geared to not having the discussion that we are supposed to have.
But let us have the discussion with Patrick Coffin.
He is the author of Sex Eau Naturel.
I got to get this subtitle, What It Is and Why It's Good for Your Marriage.
He was on the, for years, for eight years, he was on the top-rated Catholic Answers Live apologetics radio program.
You can find him now at patrickcoffin.net.
There's a podcast there, and on YouTube, it's patrickcoffin.media.
Patrick, there you are.
How are you doing?
Hey, I'm doing great, Andrew.
I was just filling out a few platonic forms.
I really, I have to apologize for a point for promoting you to priest yesterday.
That happens all the time.
It's my natural grace.
And, you know, Pope Francis just this morning told me that name-dropping is totally inappropriate.
He called me.
He said, He wanted me to make you a priest.
I'm the only one he hasn't called.
So to start out with, I am fairly liberal, live and let live.
Don't scare the horses about sexual issues.
At the same time, I do look at some of this transgender stuff.
And when I see people in mainstream venues recommending that you butcher your children, you know, if little Timmy plays with a doll, cut him to pieces and inject him with hormones.
You know, I see this.
And I do have this sense that the left at least, or a strong, a large portion of the left, has gone insane on sexual matters.
And there is this feeling of that people have lost their minds on this question of sex.
And I would like to know, before we start talking about the book, which we will, but I would like to know, where do you think this starts?
Why do you think this has spun so far out of control?
That's the question to be asked and framed.
And I appreciate your time here on your show, Andrew.
I was delighted to have you on mine.
So this is a lot of fun.
So thank you.
I think we need to take a look from 50,000 feet above the tarmac and go back to the summer of 1930.
In 1930, in August, the Anglican bishops met.
And as Anglican bishops do, they produced a document that not a lot of people paid attention to, but it did include one reference to contraception.
And at that Lambeth conference in 1930, for the very first time in all of Christian history, their excellencies made an exception.
Only within marriage and only in extreme, you know, extraordinary circumstances could a man and a woman prevent the coming to be of a new human being.
Well, within 10 years, all of mainline old line Protestantism had collapsed and this deep fissure within the Christian world began.
So where is this going?
Well, with the acceptance of the divorce between love and life, which is represented by contraception, the logic there is inexorable.
It's going to catch up with you.
If it's okay to thwart the act by which new human life is created, then all bets are off.
In fact, Sigmund Freud noted this in 1920, gave a lecture in Vienna that you can look up.
It's in a collection of his talks.
And he said, it's the mark of sexual perversion that it sets aside reproduction as an aim.
So Freud last time.
I saw this in the book, in Sexo Naturelle.
I saw it in the book, and I was stunned that Freud said that.
Yeah, and so did Mahatma Gandhi in the 20s was saying the same thing, that contraception was going to reap a whirlwind of abuse toward women.
It would increase lust in the world.
It would see women as instruments for men's pleasure, and they would begin to be used.
And so once you take apart that most fundamental aspect of what a human person is, you know, we're built to be with others.
And the ultimate inbuilt union is between a man and a woman through sexual union.
This is why our genitals are called genitals.
They generate new life.
So we say kind of casually, oh, human life is sacred.
If that's true, then the means of transmitting that life is in also some sense sacred.
So once you disassemble such a basic building block of human life, then of course you're going to challenge other basics like, what's my sex?
What's my gender?
Can I go from one to the other?
What would be wrong with any kind of sexual union?
And so now you have 500,000 or so polyamorous couples.
They want the definition of marriage to extend to polyamorous couples.
There's groups in Canada and in the Netherlands that want to remove the taboos toward bestiality.
I'm not making this up.
The headlines now used to be called onion parody headlines.
So I think the trans confusion, which by the way, afflicts about a third of a percent of the population.
So when the celebrities have this collective paroxysm of nausea at President Trump's very sensible policy, the numbers don't bear the emoting.
It's a very, very small sliver.
Now, let me ask you this, because you must know that in the world today, you actually sound, what you're saying is radical.
I mean, most people would look at you, especially people who are younger, and who grew up with birth control as just a natural thing that was there.
They're going to look at you and you say you're radical.
So let's, for the sake of argument, let's eliminate the extremes for a minute.
Let's eliminate the crazies and just say, well, what's wrong with gay people being free?
What's wrong with people having a few sexual encounters that don't produce children before they get married?
What is wrong with the freedom that birth control provides and that the new sexual freedom provides?
Well, the freedom mantra is the main slogan by which birth control was sold in the 60s.
It was going to usher in a new era of freedom that women would be able to pursue whatever they wanted and marriages would become happy and people would be quote-unquote free.
No one ever defines freedom anymore.
And not only do they not define the thing they think it's going to make them happy, things nowadays don't have any meanings.
You know, sex doesn't have a meaning anymore.
Even the fact that we're having this conversation is probably looked at as odd by some.
Bizarre.
Yeah, no, some of the stuff you're saying, I know, sounds bizarre to younger people.
Right.
But let's look at a different body part.
Let's take it out of the sexual realm altogether.
The eyes are made for something.
An atheist has to admit that there's an inbuilt purpose to the human eye.
It's to see things, especially beautiful things.
The ears have a purpose.
It's to hear things, especially words like, I love you.
The lungs have a purpose.
It's to oxygenate blood.
The heart has a purpose to pump blood through the body.
So if you damage your eyes, that's wrong because your eyes have an inbuilt purpose.
You are undermining the purpose for which the thing is made.
The great Thomas Aquinas said that you can't know what a thing is until you know what it's for.
So if you want to remove nails, you reach for a hammer because that's what the hammer's for.
So obviously you can see where the spear is going to land.
Translating this line of thinking into the sexual sphere means that sex has a purpose.
And any educated 12-year-old knows what that purpose is.
It's twofold.
As Dr. Janet Smith says, sex is for babies and for bonding.
Babies and bonding.
Now, it can have other purposes.
For instance, a couple can get married at the age of 89.
And so the procreative aspect is not going to be in play there.
But they're not undermining it.
They're not thwarting it.
And that's the heart of contraception.
Contraception, actually, Andrew, has nothing to do with sex, per se.
If I'm an evil mayor and I want to control the population of my town, I could add an additive into the water that would sterilize the men.
I would be the contraceptor in that town because I would be undermining sexual acts.
In this case, it wouldn't be mine.
It would be the citizens.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, no, I see what you're saying.
I have a couple of questions that immediately spring to mind.
I want to put them put them before you so that people don't feel that they weren't addressed.
What about you said that some somebody could have, you know, an older marriage could have.
What about the fact that there that even though things have uses, sometimes creative people find other uses for them?
My feet are for standing and walking, but gymnasts hang by them when they are doing that when they're doing their routines.
We find medicines that were created for one thing but can be used for another.
Obviously, people get a lot of fun out of sex.
And in the context of marriage, especially where you're not spreading disease and you're not destroying people's lives, what is wrong with doing things that having sexual acts that turn you on but don't have the possibility of creating life?
Well, that is, it's a box with the word Pandora on the side because where does it end?
Where does that line of thinking get you?
It gets you unable to oppose any kind of sexual union.
For instance, what would be wrong with sex with a goat?
Now, by saying that, people are going to, oh, he's insane.
He just brought the word goat in here.
But if reproduction is set aside as an aim, then all bets are off.
Why couldn't anybody at any time for any reason just masturbate all day?
Or why couldn't they lust after someone else who's not their spouse?
See, it's not that there's only one purpose.
In fact, there's comfort.
Obviously, there's pleasure.
There's union.
There's relief.
There are all those things.
But the thing that makes it what it is, its inbuilt purpose.
I haven't even brought God into it.
The thing that makes it what it is is the possibility of new human life and the union of a man and a woman.
Because otherwise, without contraception, you have no pornography industry.
If you look at the mainstreamization of porn, it began post-1965.
Before 1965, it was illegal to sell or advertise contraceptives in the United States.
And the Griswold versus Connecticut decision produced this penumbra, as the justices of Roe v. Wade said, known as the right to privacy.
So when the right to privacy was introduced into American life, well, obviously, if sex is shorn from conception, why can't you masturbate?
Why do we have to have a porn industry stuck in one part of the town?
And so you have the introduction of pubic hair in 1969 in Playboy.
And within years, a couple of years anyway, you've got a whole industry of glossy magazines that did not exist 10 years prior.
And now, I mean, the whole world's pornified.
And that was given jet fuel by the contraceptive mentality, that sex is for whatever I want it to be for.
There's no question that the world is pornified.
I have to say that even I, who don't pay attention to this, I walk down the streets of New York and I start to think like, God, there's something buzzing in my head.
What is it?
It's that every poster has a naked woman on it as you're walking along.
And it gets you.
It gets into your mind.
But there does seem to be, I mean, you put a couple of things together there, like having sex with a goat, which seems to me wrong because the goat has no say.
You know, the goat has no will in the act.
So it's kind of you're raping an animal.
But then you talk about masturbation.
I think, well, you know, what business is that of mine?
Now you talk about, even when it comes to a loving relationship between two gay people, you say, well, what are they doing wrong?
I mean, who are they harming?
And I guess that's where that is the question in a free society that keeps coming up and that keeps, you know, the way the news media keeps from discussing this is appealing to that sense of freedom that Americans love so much so that we don't discuss the kind of issues that you're discussing right now.
So what is wrong with an act that doesn't hurt anybody and is done with consent?
That's a very good question.
And I think sometimes some forms of harm are hard to prove.
Actually, they're even hard to admit.
I've learned a lot from a guy named Joseph Shambra.
Joseph Shambra is an ex-gay porn star.
Really dark, satanic activity, the full Castro San Francisco life.
And he left it.
And he writes about the harm that that whole scene wrought in the lives of not just him, but the many friends that he had had in the past because they passed away from AIDS.
So I think it depends on who you're paying attention to about what harm sexual misbehavior can bring to someone.
And let's face it, God is a genius.
Sex feels really, really good.
You know, he hasn't put redundant things in there.
In fact, the very first commandment, I say this in the book, Sexo Naturale, the first commandment was not, I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods beside me.
The first commandment is in Genesis chapter 1, verse 27.
Do it.
Be fruitful and multiply.
Not partially.
Fill the earth and multiply.
And then he says it again to Noah and in Genesis 9.
He says it again in Genesis chapter 35.
So God's pro-sex, definitely.
And so we're prone to auto-kiddery.
We all do this because we want what its pleasures bring us.
We don't want anything that's going to impede what I want from myself right now.
And I admit that some of the harms here are difficult to discern because we have a vested interest in not wanting to look at it because it's so pleasurable and so immediate.
Well, then let's put it in the positive side.
And again, the book is Sex Eau Naturel, What It Is and Why It's Good for Your Marriage.
Sex au Naturel is basically, well, I should let you define it.
Sure.
What does that mean exactly?
I stole it without shame, but I admitted it in the intro.
It's a line from Federica Matthews Green, who's an Orthodox writer and NPR commentator.
And the French term au naturel is a kind of a poetic way of saying nude.
You're naked.
They swam au naturel meant they skinny dipped.
So sex au naturel is sex without the intrusion of any chemical, of any barrier, of any withdrawal, of any truncation of what it means.
And that's the heart of the biblical ancient Christian insight into sexual intercourse.
Because sexual intercourse is what it is, whether or not it produces children.
You know, if I'm playing baseball and I see the pitch coming in from the pitcher and I swing, just because I didn't connect and hit a home run doesn't mean I wasn't doing the baseball thing.
So there's a meaning in itself to sexual intercourse.
And sex au naturel is my witty way of summarizing that sexual union should be truly romantic and without the fear-based language of protection, which is the heart of contraception.
Okay, I have two last questions.
One is that I meant to ask, one of them I meant to ask you before and it slipped my mind.
What about the objection that you look in so many places where people don't have a lot of money and they, you know, sex is one of their main forms of condolence and entertainment and they have too many kids and they can't afford the kids.
It becomes a Jew, the obscure situation.
You know, we are too many.
What do you say to them?
I mean, what does the Catholic Church or you personally have to say to them?
Well, the church does not condemn spacing your births.
Every month, the woman is fertile for one day, the day of ovulation.
And if you have a grave reason or a serious or just reason to delay pregnancy, even indefinitely, if it's in the case of a medical condition that might make pregnancy dangerous, you can avoid intercourse on those days.
Natural Family Planning00:03:41
It's called natural family planning.
And it's 98% plus effective in preventing pregnancy.
But what you're never doing is you're never interrupting the meaning of sex itself.
You're simply expressing your love in a non-genital way.
So for that, okay, I mean, no, I get the answer.
I'm running out of time.
And the last thing I want to ask you is why is this good for your marriage?
Oh, it's good for your marriage because couples who contracept can much more easily hide behind sex.
They can throw sex at a problem.
If you're not using contraception, so you have no birth and no control, which is what really the hidden meaning of the phrase birth control, which by the way, that phrase came from Margaret Sanger, by the way, a brilliant polemicist and propagandist.
So with no birth and no control, it's just the adventure of true love.
And every month you have this conversation with your spouse.
Are we ready for a new baby?
What would a new baby look like in this house?
We already have too much chaos.
We got three kids.
Forget it.
Let's just go for four.
Couples who use natural family planning have a very close to zero divorce rate.
This was verified by Robert Lerner of the University of Chicago.
Dr. Yosef Roetzer tracked 1,400 couples over 20 years who all had one thing in common.
They used natural family planning to space their births.
Over 20 years, 1,400 couples had a zero divorce rate.
Cool stuff.
It has a data-driven success for marital longevity and happiness.
Patrick, thank you very much for coming on.
This is really interesting.
People can find you at patrickcoffin.net and patrickcoffin.media, anywhere else they can find you.
Correct.net is where they can get a signed copy.
This week is the anniversary of Humane Vitae, which is the 1968 encyclical on this whole matter.
Very short document.
So if you go to the .NET site, patrickcoffin.net, and when you get to the checkout, the coupon HV for Humane Vitae, HV20 gets you 20% off.
And I'll even sign it.
And for an extra fee, I'll sign it, Andrew Clavin.
Patrick, it's great talking to you.
I hope you'll come back.
Sexual Naturelle, really interesting book and a good read.
Thanks for coming on.
All right.
Thanks a lot, man.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Really interesting.
And, you know, I mean, I just have this thing that I've been wrestling with about this, the issue, because, you know, when Patrick talks about, he was talking about some of the stuff that we talk about here, which is teleology, the purpose of things, the reason for things.
And this is where the natural law of the Catholic Church comes from and the natural law of thinkers throughout the Western tradition.
I have some problems with it.
I have some problems with it.
It seems to me a gay guy in a straight marriage is being untrue to something in himself, even though he is also deviating from what he's talking about, the purpose of sexuality.
And it seems to me that a couple, a married couple who enjoy doing things that don't lead to procreation or just cementing a bond between two people, which I think is a pleasure and a delight and shouldn't be haunted by guilt.
I mean, these are things that seem to me to have a new way of addressing natural law that takes into account individualism.
That is kind of what I'm looking for.
Stuff I like.
I got to talk about stuff I like.
You know, I have given two standing ovations in my life.
You know, one of the things in the theater now is like people give a standing ovation to anything.
You know, they just stand up for every single.
And you think, like, dude, you know, it's like giving an A-plus to every single, it's like a trophy for trying.
You know, I have given two, I love the theater.
I'm in the theater a lot.
I go to the theater a lot.
I've given two standing ovations in my life.
Two Standing Ovations00:02:07
One of them was to Sweeney Todd when I first saw Sweeney Todd with Angela Lansbury.
And who was it, Len Carriot, who's now the grandfather on Blue Bloods.
Len Cario and Angela Lansbury, the first cast on Broadway.
I saw Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Stephen Sondy, with a book by Hugh Wheeler.
Just a brilliant, brilliant musical and grim and dark and evil as it can possibly be.
The movie doesn't do it justice.
But here is my favorite song and possibly one of my favorite songs ever: Pretty Women.