Mark Baker, Melbourne University lecturer in Jewish history, says Judaism's "this world" view of sex contrasts sharply with Christianity's discomfort with earthly desires. "It (sex) was something that needed to be restrained and made holy through various types of behaviour. The body itself was never seen as tainted."

The latest fad to hit New York City's singles scene is "Dinner in the Dark."

Imagine a gourmet four-course meal with champagne and fine wine -- served and eaten entirely in darkness. Only the waiters, wearing night-vision goggles, can see what's going on.

Promoters promise the dinner is intimate and people lose their inhibitions in the pitch black, making it a great way to meet people.
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Whether anyone would want to meet these people, who acted more like high school students during a cafeteria power blackout than like urbane urbanites, is a whole different story.
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"It was great. You got to grope strangers, like that blond woman right there," a 36-year-old business manager named Jeff said gleefully. He also admitted to tossing pieces of bread at other diners under the protection of darkness.
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"We were just copping feels under the table. I felt like I was in kindergarten," said Sabreena, a 33-year-old attorney, standing amid broken glass in the littered dining room after the meal.

�it's not been easy - a lot of groups have shied away from helping us because we're not normal one-parent families with the usual problems.

Zhemgang dzongkhag has a problem. It has a small population of illegitimate children who cannot trace their fathers.

There were 249,227 marriages in England and Wales in 2001, the lowest since 1897, the Office for National Statistics said yesterday. With more couples choosing to live together without marrying, the trend has been downward since 1972, when the figure reached a peak of 426,241. The latest total would have been lower had it not included people marrying for the second time or more. About four in 10 marriages included at least one partner who had been married before. A fifth involved couples who had both been married. The average age of a man getting married was 34.8 years and 32.2 for a woman.

A pharmaceutical company will give employees returning from parental leave up to $6000 for child care in a policy that breaks new ground for Australian family-friendly workplaces. Aventis has introduced the deal in an attempt to retain its female staff, after it found that about half of the women who went on maternity leave did not return. The plan includes eight weeks' paid leave for primary caregivers and one week for secondary caregivers. The child-care payment of up to $1000 a month for six months after the primary caregiver returns to work sets Aventis apart from other companies with maternity leave schemes. Managing director Colin Hannah said Aventis did not want to lose talented women when they started their families.

A survey of recent courtship literature indicates a bias in this field toward studying young, hetereosexual, never-married persons.

I was a '70s teenage slut
In a remarkable memoir of her wild teen years, author Kathy Dobie reflects on the mysteries of adolescent sex and the female quest for freedom

Since you asked ... I want my husband to write a letter to my future lovers, telling them that the demise of our marriage was his fault.

While adoption is not an especially foreign concept in American life -- by some estimates there are nearly six million adopted people in the United States -- the advertising industry has done little to reflect the numbers. That is beginning to change. Images of adoptive families are becoming a familiar sight in print advertisements and television commercials for companies and brands as varied as Weight Watchers, Ikea, J. C. Penney, Tide, Merrill Lynch and John Hancock ... Generally, adoptive parents are white, upper middle class, well educated and prepared to spend on anything "remotely related to the child and the sense of family," said Dr. Judith Lee, executive director of Advocates for Adoption, an adoption agency in Manhattan. "They have waited so long to be parents, and they are so thrilled that they probably overbuy. They take more pictures; they buy more upscale baby furniture, more strollers."

Toothbrush? Check. Nightgown? Check. Disposable camera? Oh no! thought Katherine Williams when her 19-year-old daughter Shenna went into labor on June 22. With Shenna in tow, Katherine drove to a Wal-Mart in Albany, Ga., to buy last-minute supplies. But baby Michael Jerrod Moffitt Jr. (named after Shenna's ex-boyfriend) couldn't wait. "It probably wasn't even two minutes," says Shenna. "He just came out hollering."

There is something unique and miraculous about the connection between male-female sex and the creation of new life. Its connection to a marital structure in which that new life can be nurtured, protected, and elevated is also one that is obviously vital to defend. Catholic thinkers have developed the most elaborate modern doctrine on this subject. That doctrine affirms something life-giving and important: the nexus between sex, marriage, and family. As a symbol of what sexuality can be about, indeed what it is ultimately about, this linkage makes moral and theological sense. It also makes social sense. The data that children are better adjusted when they grow up in stable, nurturing, traditional homes is overwhelming. It makes all the sense in the world for a society to find a way to celebrate and protect this arrangement for, if nothing else, the benefit of the next generation.

Trans family values
HBO Films' "Normal" is supposedly a pro-tolerance paean about a marriage that survives a sex change. So why does it make us root for divorce?

Marriage can leave you happier, sadder or unchanged. But you'd better hope it's the first category, because it's likely to be permanent. A 15-year study by US researchers shows that marriage has the power to affect quality of life for years. This contrasts with the popular psychological theory of adaptation - that people's well-being is independent of circumstances, even drastic ones like spinal injury or a lottery win. According to an international team lead by Michigan State University's Richard Lucas, the married population, on average, is no happier in the years after marriage than in the years before marriage. But the "average" hides great changes up and down. "It is not the case that, after marriage, all people adapt back to their starting level of satisfaction," wrote Dr Lucas. "Instead many people end up happier than they were before the event, whereas a similar amount amount end up less happy than they started." By contrast, adaptation theory holds that everyone returns to their so-called "baseline" happiness soon after major life events.

"The big mistake these researchers have made is that they've only looked at marriage, and have forgotten to measure the effect other things such as children and mortgages," [Professor Bob]Cummins told ABC Science Online.

He agreed there was a dip in life satisfaction in people aged 30 to 50, irrespective of marriage, but argues that this is likely to be due to the increase in responsibilities at that time. He disagrees that adaptation is likely to be a key factor.

"Marriage is not an event like buying a new car," he said. "It's a dynamic ongoing process that provides social connectedness which is very important to humans."

So, if the Bush administration really wants to encourage marriage why not fix the marriage penalty -- especially given that in other contexts, the administration argues that taxes are a major influence on people's behavior? The conventional answer is that eliminating the penalty, especially without also eliminating the "marriage bonus" that single-income couples receive, would cost the government a lot of revenue. But this is an administration that appears undaunted by budget deficits. Its tax and revenue proposals for fiscal 2004 would cost the government nearly $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years ... Maybe the answer is that it doesn't really care all that much about marriage.