Freedom from Blog

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Friday, November 03, 2006

Why Do I Not Feel Reassured?

Paul, thanks for the correction. It's nice to know that your earlier remarks in celebration of man-on-sheep lovin' were merely a rhetorical flourish. However, after having placed them in a "rant" in which you decried any and every doctrine of sexual restraint as the result of anachronistic and silly religion, while citing in your defense an anachronistic and selective (if not so silly) classicism, you can surely understand why I missed your supposedly more enlightened point about "consenting adults."

Unfortunately, the line drawn at consenting adults will not do as a lodestone for sexual morality, since it offers nothing but laissez-faire bromides on issues such as adultery, incest, polygamy, prostitution, and even the prior example of #3 masturbating, Diogenes-style, in the street. After all, if you don't like it, just don't watch: "change the channel" as the self-righteous libertarians like to say. If sex is an activity like any other, then public masturbation is a form a symbolic speech that cannot be silenced by a "heckler's veto." My offense at #3's behavior offers no justifiable limitation upon it.

Given your earlier poo-pooing of the Foley scandal--which I'll agree does not make the top-10 list of GOP sins, even as it still merits justified derision--and your more recent anti-virginity jeremiad, I'm also not sure that the "adult" in your "consenting adults" is as significant as it purports to be. Do we really need the extended history lesson here? I understand full well that extreme "sex is evil" doctrines have derived from dubious arguments. For what it is worth, the doctrines you describe below bear little relationship to any Christianity I've ever known, except in anti-religious diatribe. Still, whatever their origin, the shrillness of the chastity-belt purists you have so carefully (and shrilly) exposed in no way diminishes the points that (a) sexuality is a morally-normed realm of human activity, and (b) an ethos of restraint has significant advantages over one of unlimited ejaculation.

Sex is a beautiful and complex human experience, one that should neither be commercialized via prostitution nor entered into lightly by those too young to properly prepare for it or deal with its many and varied consequences: pregnancy, STD, jealousy, betrayal, etc. Much of the power of sex comes precisely from its privacy and intimacy, coupled with its connection to emotions such as "love," which are no less real for being socially and historically conditioned. A doctrine of restraint, as opposed to license, recognizes this, seeking to constrain sexual activity in the name of its elevation (dare I say "sanctification") through "domestication." Of course, not all sexual experience can be so confined. Try as they might the Montagues and Capulets could not keep their young lovers apart. And no amount of social restraint will prevent phenomena like prostitution, porn, and adultery from arising on the margins of society. Sometimes dirty and illicit is fun--also, as a result, dangerous and antisocial. So let the margins remain the margins and the norms remain the norms, lest we discover that the boundaries we found it so easy to deconstruct leave us standing naked and exploited on the public square. If I recall, this is the point Aristophanes was trying to make in the Assembly of Women.

To return to the original issue, this debate began at SA when Sam expressed some curiosity over the public's ambivalence over gay marriage before launching into a "critique of heteronormativity." Since I'm the only one involved in this debate who seems to have experienced any of that ambivalence, I'll try to explain it. Like the public at large, I have a great amount of sympathy for "gay rights," at least in the abstract. I do not consider homosexuality sinful, and I believe in gays' rights to equal dignity as citizens and human beings. More specifically, I fully support gay partners' rights to inheritance, hospital visitation, and caretaker decision-making. I also believe that gay parents and their children will greatly benefit from the legitimacy that comes from either civil union or marriage. I've written on all this at FFB before.

BUT--and here comes the ambivalence--no matter how much I sympathize, I cannot eliminate a suspicion that gay marriage is the camel's nose under the tent for a more radical agenda, one that seeks a "transvaluation of values" with regard to bourgeois sexual norms. First you relax the norm, and then you dissolve it altogether. As long as the gay rights movement is acting for equal inclusion within a well-established and crucially important social norm like marriage, we're all on the same page. But that doesn't sound like it's enough, since everyone else who has commented in this debate has found that position not just insufficient but offensive. Sam wants to overthrow "heteronormativity" (to replace with "queernormativity"?), Frances wants to legalize prostitution, and Paul thinks teen sex, bisexuality, and even bestiality are within the "normal" range of human behaviors, not to be disparaged by us silly religionists, inspired as we are by magic beans, inferior texts, and sex-hating, power-craving priests.

This is where I get off the train. I'll sign on for equal dignity but not for sexual revolution. Especially not if that sexual revolution looks like it can't think beyond some false dichotomy between Puritanism and laissez-faire. Many middle-class, religious heterosexuals want to respond with human sympathy to the very reasonable pleas of gays for justice and equality in marriage. We just don't want to pull back the veil on our wedding day to find that, instead of a blushing bride, we've put the ring on Jerry Springer's finger and he's puckered up and waiting.

2 Comments:

At 9:57 PM, Blogger Paul said...

TMcD

1. My original post was aimed at the general climate of politics and sex in this country (which is what the entire SA thread touched upon), not anything you specifically wrote.

2. I never had “earlier remarks in celebration of man-on-sheep lovin.”

3. I never “decried any and every doctrine of sexual restraint.” I did decry Christian ideology being used to regulate sexual practice (and this was not aimed at you personally, since I don’t know you). The pre-Christian/classical examples I cited were and are relevant to any understanding and critique of current Christian sexual mores and traditions. I realize that I rambled on these topics in my posts, but I don’t have time to go back and edit.

4. The anti-Christian diatribes I wrote were justified in the context of current American discussions of sex and politics, because it’s Christian ideology driving the public discussion and public policy. I might remind you that a president was impeached and almost had to resign because he had some sort of sexual contact with another consenting adult that involved a cigar and this played no small role in Al Gore’s defeat. How silly. And the Foley matter is not worthy of national public attention either, other than to show Republican hypocrisy.

5. For hundreds of thousands of years the human species survived and flourished with “young people” in their teens having sex and even procreating. This is a fact. For various sociological reasons it doesn’t make sense for them to procreate at such a young age anymore, but we can’t just turn off the biology. So, we have solutions to obviate the dangers of unwanted pregnancies and STDs now, and Christian ideology (which is full of ideas that are simply untrue) is impeding their use. Since Christian ideology is the major culprit in our country, a historical critique of that ideology is warranted and necessary to combat it. Not that Christianity is the only religion worth skewering on this, but it is the dominant and influential voice of insanity in our politics.

6. On a practical level, outlawing prostitution is precisely what makes it an attractive, forbidden fruit, it keeps it from being properly regulated for health concerns, its illegal status costs tax-payers dollars on enforcement and jails, it leads to the failure to collect taxes that would otherwise be collected, and I doubt it even limits its popularity in any substantial way. Societies like Denmark that make it legal are not overrun with its commercialization in the media nor are the native populations more inclined to use such services. In countries/cities where it is legalized, it gets limited/zoned to a particular area of a city (red-light district in Amsterdam, for instance). In that sense it is no different than in the US where it is illegal. So, even if legal it remains on the margin, but the difference is that it actually gets responsibly regulated (which is what we both agree is what society is all about).

7. You apparently belong to the minority position among Christians on the issue of gay rights and gay marriage. Traditional Christian ideology abhors it (OT, NT and most Christian churches), and most Christians are sticking with these texts and traditions, which is precisely what is preventing gays from receiving the same rights and protections as heterosexuals in our country.

8. Giving gays equal rights, legalizing prostitution, and acknowledging the fact that it is normal for teens to have sex (most youngsters in the entire world in every culture actually do lose their virginity by the time they are 17-18 and about 90% of Christians lose it before marriage too), and then responding to these facts in a realistic, pragmatic, and humane way rather than outlawing or condemning them on merely religious grounds is just sensible public policy (as for bestiality, it does not involve two consenting mature humans, so I’ll just point out again that your repeated charge that I endorsed it, when I didn’t, is false). Legalizing gay marriage and prostitution and addressing teen sex in a real way won’t lead to some radical transvaluation – tradition and biology are too strong. On the other hand, repression, denial and injustice are more likely to lead to the revolution you fear. They are also the very reason why sex is now being bandied about in this election and in the media in ways far more lurid than legalizing any of these practices would cause.

9. I’ve got no problem with people being religious. I do have a problem with people trying to run our country based on their own religious faith/texts or politicians who pander to a religious faith for political power, which is exactly what is happening. There are lots of data in history about what happens when religion is used in politics in this way, and the data aren’t pretty; religion, especially book-religion, is a far more dangerous force in politics than any imagined danger in what I am advocating. Only the David McCullough types in the world would ignore this history and not draw conclusions. And if I simply point out that some religious texts contain stories or traditions that cannot be literally true and aren’t very helpful, be it the Iliad or the Bible, and then so be it.

At any rate, why don’t we just Move On? You appear to be on the Blue team, and in this political season that’s good enough for me.

 
At 11:42 AM, Blogger tenaciousmcd said...

To paraphrase Eddie Murphy, "once you go black (sheep), you never go back." Hard not to use a rhetorical bombshell when it gets handed to you on a silver platter, something we Dems have been slow to learn.

I'll make that my last cheap sheep joke, accepting (as I do) that you didn't really MEAN to celebrate bestiality while documenting the range of sexual fetishes to which humans have shown themselves prone. I would suggest that Aristotle's dictum to "look for 'nature' in those things that are well-ordered" (again, I paraphrase) might have cautioned some prudence in drawing overly hasty conclusions from such a listing.

We could also dance around the religion & Christianity issues here a bit longer, with me pointing out, for example, that 1) the Xianity about which you complain is not Xianity per se but a very specific (and very recent) blend of evangelicalisms that has more to do with GOP electoral aims than anything else, and 2) the larger Xian tradition is a practical, adaptive, and resilient one, one built upon the Greek and Roman rather than simply replacing them. Xian notions of sexuality owe some debt not just to Jewish tradition and Xian text but also to Stoicism, Aristotelianism, and other classical systems (indeed, some of what you complain about derives from a particularly unfortunate interpretation of Aristotelian teleology with regard to sexual matters). Still, Xianity certainly contributes much to the equation, giving added weight to notions like equality, free will, charity, and forgiveness. Although I'm quite happy to embrace that tradition myself--with all its human flaws--I wouldn't presume to impose it on you.

And, like you, I've grown a bit tired of this debate. Let's move on.

 

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