Latex Solutions and the Pope

List the litany of problems:

Young girls reaching puberty earlier these days.

Sexually-active teens.

AIDS in Africa, let alone here at home, or, in my own hometown of metropolitan Detroit, MI.

Family planning.

Population control.

Solutions seem to start with latex.

Not within the context of human sexuality in what is called the natural law.

So, one gets fixated on the condom as the solution to the AIDS epidemic on the other continent, by the Pope's own admission in his comments to the German author, Peter Seewald, in a conversation where Benedict XVI spends over six hours in interviews in a very human discussion last July.

His thought is now in a book, I bet few will read, and, many will comment on. Go figure this lazy culture and ready to defend its selfish ways.

All of the dialog is written in, Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Time (Ignatius Press), 219 pages.

Everywhere is heard the glory of the rubber these days.

And, woe to you who challenges simple solutions and rubber!

"Banalization of sexuality" is how Benedict describes our culture.

Forget self-restraint in the post sexual revolution era.

Forget the whole context of sacred sexuality to be celebrated in marriage, not as random commodity where sex sells in Thailand and Cambodia, for example, on the backs of trafficking of youngsters as sex objects and toys for gratification.

Forget the common good.

And, yes, forget latex for awhile.

Bring on the open debate about the dignity of the human person.

Bring it on beyond sound bites and fixations of the time that only cheapen the dignity of the human person and the sacredness of sexuality.