Greetings! Yes, I still breathe. Just taking a blog break. I wanted to update the entry below, originally published on April 7, 2008. Steve at Hog on Ice wrote a response to my post called Abstinence and the Suburbs. While I don’t agree with everything he writes, his point of view is worth noting.

He mentions my “self-imposed celibacy.” To clarify, I am not celibate, which, although defined as abstention, is vowing not to marry. I have not vowed such a thing. I wish to marry, but I will remain abstinent until I do. The distinction is important for people struggling with this issue. Giving up premarital sex is not synonymous with giving up on or avoiding marriage.

Anyway, I’m en route to the left coast. See you next week, and rest easy!
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I’m sure there are lots of chaste women living in cities all across America, but “Chastity in the City” doesn’t sell in Hollywood.

By chaste, I mean voluntarily abstaining from sex until marriage and from extramarital sex while married. Journalist, blogger, and author Dawn Eden says chastity is much more than being sexually abstinent or faithful. Check out her interview with John Hawkins of Right Wing News.

Buy a copy of Dawn’s book, The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On.

Is it worth buying? Read my review.

I’m considering writing a similar book about my road to sexual abstinence, among other things. I became abstinent shortly before becoming a Christian (I was going through a “Look at me. Aren’t I a good person?” phase), but it took on a spiritual meaning once I surrendered to Christ.

There is a crisis, to understate the matter, in the black community. About 75 percent (more in some cities) of black babies in the U.S. are born out-of-wedlock. That women should keep their legs closed until marriage is considered a naïve notion at best and a sexist/oppressive one at worst. Subversive is what it is.

Some people are offended by the expression “keep your legs closed.” Is it vulgar? Perhaps, but so is having babies with several different men without being married to any of them. What about the man’s responsibility? He shares it, for sure, but the book I have in mind will be geared toward young women, black women in particular, who either don’t know what God requires of them and those who know and don’t care, and somewhere along the way lost respect for themselves and forgot who they are in Christ.

I’ve written reams on illegitimacy and its impact on children. No point reinventing the microchip. Look up terms like “out-of-wedlock” and “fatherless.”