Word: sexuality
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...held, is permissible for both family planning and reasons of health. But the Anglican Communion's five-week Lambeth conference of bishops just concluded went a liberal's step further: it positively recommended contraception as a valuable liberating force in the family and in the enjoyment of sexual relations...
...procreation of children is not the only purpose of marriage." Husbands and wives have the duty of practising sexual intercourse as an expression of their love. Though intercourse is not "the only language of earthly love." it is certainly the most intimate; "it has the depth of communication signified by the Biblical word so often used for it, 'knowledge' . . ." Therefore it is wrong to shackle sex to the conception of children...
...thwart this purpose is. according to Roman Catholic doctrine, a sinful contravention of God's will. Birth control by mechanical or medicinal means is absolutely forbidden by the church, and women for whom childbearing is a health risk are enjoined to practice abstinence, either total or periodic, from sexual intercourse. It follows that Catholic doctors and nurses may not prescribe contraceptive devices, even for non-Catholic patients. But should Catholics, when they are in a position to do so, stop non-Catholic doctors from prescribing contraceptives for non-Catholic patients...
Again the novel's narrator is Darley, a seedy, itinerant Irish schoolteacher. Again the plot concerns his sexual and soulful involvements with Justine, a feline Egyptian Jewess; Nessim, her millionaire husband; Melissa, a tubercular Greek dancer. There is also an assortment of other exotics, who seem to have crawled from beneath a blistered and immemorial stone of Alexandria-Scobie, the transvestite policeman; Toto de Brunei, who dies with a hatpin rammed through his brain; Capodistria, the goatish sybarite; hare-lipped Narouz, who carries a severed head in his saddlebag; Pursewarden, who has discovered "the uselessness of having opinions...
Pursewarden, who might thereby escape Nessim's slow-burning revenge. Darley would willingly have died at Justine's command, but Pursewarden, her real love, considers Justine merely "a tiresome old sexual turnstile through which presumably we must all pass...