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.