Love & Passion Quote by George Weinberg

Weinberg is taking a swing at a culture that treats sex less like a human capacity and more like a recurring misdemeanor. The image of the confession box is doing heavy lifting: it’s not just “religion” in the abstract, but a ritual technology for producing guilt on schedule. If your erotic life is automatically routed through repentance, you aren’t learning ethics or care; you’re rehearsing self-disgust.

The intent is clinical and political at once. As a psychologist who helped coin and popularize “homophobia,” Weinberg spent his career naming how institutions turn feelings into pathology. Here, he flips the lens: the problem isn’t the sex act; it’s the compulsory framing of sex as moral failure. Confession becomes a feedback loop. It teaches you that desire is something you survive and then apologize for, rather than something you integrate, negotiate, and take responsibility for in real time.

The subtext is less “stop being religious” than “notice the script you’ve internalized.” You can be consenting, considerate, even loving, and still experience yourself as contaminated if the only sanctioned aftercare is absolution. That’s why the line hits: it links shame to identity formation. Constant contrition doesn’t merely follow sexuality; it shapes it, narrowing what you think you’re allowed to want and what you think you deserve.

Context matters: Weinberg is writing out of a mid-to-late 20th-century moment when mainstream psychology was slowly disentangling sex from sin and sickness. The quote is a warning about how moral surveillance becomes self-surveillance, and how that internal cop can be harder to outgrow than any doctrine.