Odds and ends: religious and sexual liberty, prostitution, casual sex
Here’s where I pull together not all that closely related remarks about discussions happening on other blogs.
In Needed: straight talk on gay marriage, Rod Dreher raises the question about trade offs between sexual and religious liberty. As I’ve said, I think all the discussion of stuff like “oh no, our kids will get gay friendly lessons in the public schools” was a huge red herring in the Proposition 8 debate – you can have same-sex marriage and teach nothing at all about marriage in the schools, have same-sex marriage and allow parents to opt their children out of any classes covering sex education (as was the case in my own school system when I was young – the part about opting out, of course, not the part about same-sex marriage), or have no same-sex marriage and still have gay friendly tolerance curriculums in the schools. And, since I have several other same-sex marriage threads available, I’d ask that same-sex marriage not get discussed in this particular thread. But the question of trade offs between sexual and religious liberty can get interesting in other ways. Rod quotes Maggie Gallagher, who is quoting yet another person.
“It seemed to me the height of disingenuousness, absurdity, and indeed disrespect to tell someone it is okay to ‘be’ gay, but not necessarily okay to engage in gay sex. What do they think being gay means?” she writes in her Becket paper. “I have the same reaction to courts and legislatures that blithely assume a religious person can easily disengage her religious belief and self-identity from her religious practice and religious behavior. What do they think being religious means?”
To Feldblum the emerging conflicts between free exercise of religion and sexual liberty are real: “When we pass a law that says you may not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, we are burdening those who have an alternative moral assessment of gay men and lesbians.” Most of the time, the need to protect the dignity of gay people will justify burdening religious belief, she argues. But that does not make it right to pretend these burdens do not exist in the first place, or that the religious people the law is burdening don’t matter.
“You have to stop, think, and justify the burden each time,” says Feldblum. She pauses. “Respect doesn’t mean that the religious person should prevail in the right to discriminate–it just means demonstrating a respectful awareness of the religious position.”
Feldblum believes this sincerely and with passion, and clearly (as she reminds me) against the vast majority of opinion of her own community. And yet when push comes to shove, when religious liberty and sexual liberty conflict, she admits, “I’m having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.” …
I’m a little puzzled as to the conclusion, because to me it seems that there are obvious cases where each should win.
- If sexual orientation’s a legally protected category, and I have an ordinary management job at a regular old company, I shouldn’t be able to claim religious liberty as a basis to discriminate in hiring.
- If, on the other hand, I’m at a church, and we’re hiring a minister, religious liberty obviously trumps, and legally protected categories should be irrelevant.
Other cases could get more complicated. For instance, I think that there should not be any general parental right to opt kids out of public school classes, on religious grounds or any other (if you find the classes your kids would need to go to unacceptable, you can home school). But I think that one should, as a matter of policy, always allow parents to opt their kids out of classes dealing with sex education, lessons about marriage, or the like – whether it’s parents opting kids out of “abstinence” classes because they don’t approve of those classes’ take on sex roles, or parents opting their kids out of comprehensive sex education because they think the class gives tacit approval to teenagers having sex. To do otherwise seems, to me, too intrusive on family relationships. And, if you’re bothered by the kids that may be missing out on sex education if their parents opt them out, support Scarleteen – most teenagers do have Internet access either at home or at a friend’s house, after all.
Parents should not, on the other hand, be able to opt their children out of, say, classes on evolution, based on religious beliefs. If homosexuality is raised in the context, for example, of a general anti-bullying message, then I wouldn’t give parents a choice to opt out – any anti-bullying teaching that schools choose to give (whether it makes explicit reference to gay kids or not) should be given to all kids in the school.
Some things may be generally a protected category, but there should be cases where the protected category wouldn’t apply. For instance, married vs. single would be a protected category for employment, but dating services certainly shouldn’t be obliged to take married people on an equal basis. In fact, I think, in the interest of freedom and pluralism in personal relationships, that matchmakers of any type should have lots of freedom to openly set standards that exclude people, and solicit customers who welcome that exclusion. If some service wants to set itself up, say, to only match Asian-American men and Native American women who are both over the age of 40 and Jehovah’s Witnesses, it should be free to do so. And if you don’t like the fact that eHarmony doesn’t match same-sex couples, go over to Match.com (or one of many other matchmaking sites).
Nor should adoption agencies be obliged to take unmarried people on an equal basis – even where state law allows unmarried people to adopt. In fact, private adoption agencies (that don’t accept government funding or place children for government agencies) might reasonably be allowed to place restrictions that wouldn’t be acceptable in regular contracts, or in county adoptions or adoptions by groups that received government subsidies (I’d be OK, for example, with a private adoption agency that only worked within a particular faith community, though religion’s normally a protected category).
There may be some cases where it’s reasonable to allow a group to practice a form of discrimination that’s morally repugnant, but at a cost. For instance, I think that the resolution of the Bob Jones University case, where they were able to continue to forbid interracial dating on campus for years, but had to lose their tax exempt status for that, was reasonable. (So was the opprobrium they got from the rest of the country for enforcing that rule.)
Next unrelated topic – Proposition K. belledame222, assembling links for the 11th Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy before the election, has several pro-Prop K links. Prop K would have decriminalized prostitution in San Francisco, and it lost. I didn’t bother looking at or commenting on the proposition before the election, because I’m not in San Francisco. But I’m going to state again the general principles that guide my thinking about laws on prostitution.
First, the law isn’t meant to perfectly reflect morality; many things may be wrong that shouldn’t be made illegal.
Second, though I think that we have a certain right to privacy that covers sexual liberty, I don’t think we should have as strong a right to sexual liberty as to, say, free speech. A big part of the reason for this is that there are degrees of coerciveness in sex, such that, besides the obvious cases of outright physical violence, there are some things that could be experienced as coercive by most women, that could get argued to be “consensual” sex that no one should interfere with (and you can, in fact, find people willing to make such arguments about everything from sexual harrassment to sex with people who are falling down drunk). It’s easier for people to make those dubious “freedom” arguments if one makes sexual liberty out to be a right absolutely as strong as freedom of speech, than if one makes it out to be one that’s implied in privacy rights, but a bit more qualified than something like freedom of speech.
Third, I’m not libertarian about economic arrangements; I think that governments may appropriately set conditions on what you can buy and sell and under what circumstances, in the interest of protecting people from exploitation.
Fourth, the most important interest the government has in prostitution is protecting prostitutes who are subject to trafficking, abuse, etc. That interest is more important than either the morality arguments or the sexual liberty arguments that can be made.
Based on those principles, I believe that, whatever else we do, the prostitutes themselves should be decriminalized. Whether that should be done by going with something like the Swedish system, or whether it should be done by some other form of legalization or decriminalization in combination with cracking down on trafficking and the like, is something that can be argued pragmatically, based on what proves to work. The exact best answer might vary from one jurisdiction to another. But making prostitutes subject to arrest has easily more downside than upside. When there is a victim in prostitution, when there’s someone acting under duress, that someone is the prostitute, and those prostitutes who are in that position should be free to seek whatever help they may need, from police and others.
Final unrelated topic, “casual sex.” There was a thread at Hugo Schwyzer’s blog that digressed into a discussion of the meaning of this phrase. Here are my thoughts. Among the range of attitudes toward sexual morality in this country, you can find “it’s fine as long as it’s consensual and condoms are used as needed,” “it’s fine as long as you’re in love,” and “it’s fine as long as you’re married.” Oversimplifying a lot here, because there’s a lot more of a range in detail than that, but in this case, I want to discuss the “it’s fine as long as you’re in love” position.
For a lot of people – well, me anyway – this is the most intuitively appealing position at a gut level (a gut level that, of course, sets aside for the moment the question of whether it’s the most defensible Christian standard). Waiting all the way till marriage feels hard, sex when you’re not at all in love feels like using and being used, but sex with love, at a gut level, just feels right. But there’s a flaw in this position, one way in which, even though it appeals to my heart, my head finds it more problematic than the positions I’ve put on either side of it – it has less to do with behavior and responsibilities and treatment of others than with emotions and feelings. You can be really, really in love, and still get an STD. You can be really, really in love, and still wind up with AIDS. You can be really, really in love, and still find out, when your birth control fails (or when your decision to forgo the birth control just this one time, with someone you really love, proves rash) that you really don’t have a relationship that will hold together in the face of expecting a child.
And one of the problems with criticizing “casual sex” is that it’s easy to take that in fuzzy ways that don’t have much to do with really thinking about what responsible sexual behavior involves – “casual sex” is sex if you’re not really, really in love, or sex if you haven’t had the requisite number of dates first, or sex with a number of partners that’s, well, fuzzy, but certainly more partners than I’ve had. So, if you’re going to criticize “casual sex,” be sure to be clear about what sex you don’t consider casual; otherwise people will just fill in their own varied ideas, and pat themselves on the back for not having “casual sex” by their own standards.
Actually setting forth a rationale for what kinds of sexual behavior you consider wise is a different thing. Two of the bloggers I read often are non-worksafe figleaf and Steven Barnes. Both of them talk a lot about sex (figleaf with more explicitness than the much more work safe Steven Barnes). Both of them clearly see sex as a vital and positive part of life. Neither of them seems to have a sexual ethic tied particularly strongly to a particular religious tradition, and neither goes with the old rule that you should need to be married to have sex. And both are pro-choice, as well as, of course, pro-birth control.
But beyond that, the guidelines they set seem to be very different. figleaf, who likes to call himself a “prudish libertine” or a “libertine prude,” has lots of ideas about what ways of approaching sex are desirable, but none of them require any level or intimacy or relationship between the partners (assuming both enthusiastically consent). Steve has said that it’s wisest not to have sex with anyone from whom you wouldn’t take a 2am phone call a year later, and that it’s not good to have sex under any circumstances where you wouldn’t be around long enough to know if a pregnancy resulted. Now, the thing about this advice is, whether you think it’s the right place to draw the line or not, it’s a clear place to draw the line, and not an arbitrary one. I think this kind of advice is rationally defensible in secular terms (and the 2am phone call example rather appeals to me), but simply letting people read whatever they want into “casual sex,” not such a good idea.
November 7th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Excellent, excellent point about clearly defining “casual sex” before using the term. In fact I seem to be a case in point!
I’m actually *way* closer to Steven Barnes that I evidently make myself out to be. I think sex should be quite intimate — that “willing to take a call at 2am” is actually a good metric. I just think we should be comfortable being intimate with more people. And not to draw moral equivalences here but I don’t think I’d feel comfortable having *dinner* with someone I wasn’t willing to take a 2am call with. In other words I might seem casual about, well, casual sex (whatever that means) because I’m so serious about intimacy. (I’d have to search to find them now but I’ve several times I’ve fairly harshly dismissed the conceit that sex can ever really be “no strings attached.”)
Hmm… I wonder “intimacy” is used by different people as, well, casually as “casual sex.”
Funny you should mention this, Lynn. My partner and I were talking about where I want to go with my writing. I’m *really* chaffing at this whole anonymity thing and she’s chaffing at questions about “so what *does* your husband write about?” And one of the things that came up for me is that without more face-to-face dialogue it’s really hard for me to know how I’m perceived, what people expect from me, or even what they come to the site looking for.
Both in the main point and your discussion of my blog you’ve provided both an important data point (I neglect to mention intimacy even though I think it’s pretty critical) and a nice principle for dealing with it (define your terms more clearly) rather than *helplessly* letting people read whatever they want into it.
(I say “helplessly” because while people will famously always read whatever they read into any piece of work it’s within my capacity to at least install metaphorical highway markers.)
Thanks!
figleaf
November 7th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Ms. Gazis-Sax,
I think I was one of the people with whom you were debating at Hugo’s blog. It’s true that at one end, the definition of casual sex gets blurry, and we might need some better guidelines. But at the other end of the spectrum, there are some types of liaisons that no one could reasonably call anything but casual. If you hook up with someone whose name you don’t even know, then it seems to me that would count as casual sex by anyone’s definition.
I’m not really a liberal so I would ground arguments against prostitution not just in terms of exploitation but in terms of natural law arguments about sex being intrinsically connected to emotional intimacy. It’s certainly true though that prostitution is by its nature exploitative.
November 7th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Casual sex is sex outside of marriage. It’s called fornication.
“Oh no, I can’t bear to hear that. Such a horrendous strangulation on my freedom and my desire to fulfill my desires. How antiquated. How stifling and unnatural. Just look around and see how happy people have become since we did away with that absurd notion. Long live the sexual revolution which has only just begun. AIDS, STDs? That shouldn’t be much of a problem. Just give those kids good sex education classes. Don’t teach to abstain. Teach them how to have safe sex and then those millions and millions of hormone bursting teenagers will understand how to enjoy their bodies to the fullest. Condoms! Yes condoms. Boys and men love to wear condoms. The pill. Yes, the pill. Be double safe. And of course if you should become pregnant, don’t forget we can always snuff out that bit of tissue.
Why inhibit the fulfillment of our concupiscence? Say what? Don’t give me that concupis whatever. We adults need to teach kids how we can enjoy our bodies. Hmm. Maybe Tantric yoga might help or the Kama Sutra. That should be spiritually uplifting as we immerse ourselves in bodily pleasures.
And adultery? What a terrible term to use especially when there is consent among married people to have multiple sex partners, even simultaneously. We should fully enjoy our bodies because even you fundies think, our bodies and sex are God given. Oh, the joys of casual sex.
Ah yes, and prostitution. People should have the right to sell their bodies. We all sell our bodies and our minds when we go to work and get paid. Why discriminate against sex workers? They shouldn’t even be called prostitutes or whores. They’re doing a public service. They should form unions and demand their rights. And don’t you dare call casual sex whoredom. Haven’t you seen those bonobos chimps? That’s how we should be. Free to experience the delights of our bodies. It’s a ‘make sex not war’ philosophy we all need to learn.”
The culture of death and depravity encapsulated.
November 7th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
figleaf: Yeah, I remember your posts about “no strings attached” sex – they made a lot of sense to me.
Hector: Hi, good to see you here. Yes, I’d expect that hooking up with someone whose name you don’t even know would count as “casual” by anyone’s definition. But I’m still concerned about how people who are in that broad gray area use the term.
On, “I’m not really a liberal so I would ground arguments against prostitution not just in terms of exploitation but in terms of natural law arguments about sex being intrinsically connected to emotional intimacy,” I’d partly agree with you, and partly not. Where I’d agree is that the natural connection between sex and emotional intimacy makes buying sex from prostitutes problematic. But I don’t think that’s the business of government – government’s business is limited to stuff like duress and exploitation – not to broadly enforcing what natural law might be about sex. So whatever government should be doing about prostitution should be guided more by principles related to those areas. I guess that does make me a liberal, here. (The flip side of that is that the ethics of sex can’t be reduced to the rather minimal things that it’s appropriate for government to enforce.)
November 7th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
“Casual sex is sex outside of marriage. It’s called fornication.”
Sex outside marriage, though, is the clearer formulation. It’s important to actually say what the boundary is that you’re defending, because in fact lots of people disapprove of “casual sex,” some of whom are, in fact, having “casual sex” by your (or indeed by many people’s) definition.
“We all sell our bodies and our minds when we go to work and get paid.”
An argument I’m not wild about; even if one doesn’t start from any real sense of a special meaning to sex, it’s pretty clear that having to sell your body in a sexual way when you really didn’t want to, because your financial circumstances are desperate is experienced by a whole lot of people as different from having to do some other job that you really don’t like all that much, because your financial circumstances are desperate. The former can wreck sex for the person doing it; that latter just wrecks typing, or cubicles, or housecleaning, or suchlike things. And getting your orgasms from someone who might be experiencing the job as a life of quiet desperation is worse than, say, getting your bedpan changed by someone who really dislikes changing bedpans – you could have done without that orgasm if it was an ordeal for the person giving it.
I’m not big on prostitution as delight, just on harm reduction for prostitutes.
November 7th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Mind you, I have no objection to speaking of “casual sex” as long as you do include enough explanation that it’s clear what you mean by the words.
November 7th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
“Sex outside marriage, though, is the clearer formulation.” Sappho
That’s right.
And “fornication” is the assessment of “casual sex.” It’s illicit.
November 8th, 2008 at 7:37 am
Sappho,
The ‘we all sell our bodies when we work, so what’s wrong with prostitution’ argument is really curious, actually. It’s the inverse of one of the old Marxist/Socialist arguments against capitalism. The socialists argued:
1) prostitution is wrong
2) most exchanges on the capitalist labor market are in some way like prostitution
3) therefore, capitalism is also wrong.
an argument which I really find more compelling than the inverse which the libertarians like to expound. if prostitution isn’t wrong, then it seems to me we have a hard time saying that anything is really ‘wrong’ outside the most clear-cut examples of murder, robbery, rape, etc. and we lose our ability to make finer and more profound moral judgments about society.
Needless to say, I don’t agree with Mr. Solano, and I would point out that many of the spiritual and emotional goods which are found in Christian marriage can also be found in some nonmarital sexual relationships. If two people really love each other then I really don’t see why a civil marriage certificate is so important. I think that arguments from Scripture are always much stronger if they can be backed up by some sort of natural-law argument.
You should visit my blog, I have an election post up there and would appreciate thoughtful comment!
November 8th, 2008 at 8:10 am
Hi Hector,
As I’m hoping everyone understood, my comment under quotations was pure parody. What exactly do you not agree with?
November 8th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Thanks for the invitation to check out your blog, Hector; I’m finding your latest post on abortion interesting.
November 8th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Jose Solano,
Well, I don’t agree that premarital sex is always illicit. I think that a sexual relationship should be judged by whether it achieves some or all of the goods that are meant to exist in a Christian marriage (love, self-sacrifice, companionship, procreation, theunion of opposites, the image of communion with God that is implicit in coition). Some types of sexual behavior, such as masturbation, incest, and adultery are wrong because they detract from these goals or do not fulfil them. But there are many premarital relationships which seem to me to be healthy and fulfilling of these goods, and many of them often end in marriage and children.
I do wish that social conservatives as you appear to be, would stop bringing up abortion in the context of discussion of sexual morality. Abortion isn’t a sex issue, it’s a life issue. There are plenty of people who are against premarital sex but OK with abortion (especially in Asian countries). You simply discredit the pro-life cause when you do that.
November 8th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
You wrote:
Second, though I think that we have a certain right to privacy that covers sexual liberty, I don’t think we should have as strong a right to sexual liberty as to, say, free speech. A big part of the reason for this is that there are degrees of coerciveness in sex, such that, besides the obvious cases of outright physical violence, there are some things that could be experienced as coercive by most women, that could get argued to be “consensual” sex that no one should interfere with (and you can, in fact, find people willing to make such arguments about everything from sexual harrassment to sex with people who are falling down drunk). It’s easier for people to make those dubious “freedom” arguments if one makes sexual liberty out to be a right absolutely as strong as freedom of speech, than if one makes it out to be one that’s implied in privacy rights, but a bit more qualified than something like freedom of speech.
I’m an emotional abuse survivor. And the overwhelming majority of the really nasty sexual harassment I have been through has been verbal.
Among other things, this has made me really quite jaded about the idea that speech cannot be harmful, coercive, or in need of control so as not to harm other people.
November 8th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
I would add that I have found people making the argument that since it was just words, no harm could have been done. Because responding to someone dealing with serious trauma with “You know, you can just not let them hurt you like that. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me” is so bloody helpful and supportive.
November 8th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
That’s a fair point, Dw3t-Hthr – speech can be pretty darn harmful, too. But it’s still a pretty darn harmful thing that has heavy (though not absolute) constitutional protection.
I have heard from other people who’ve experienced emotional and physical abuse and found the emotional abuse worse, though; I think the “sticks and stone” rhyme is more wishful thinking than real.
November 8th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Hi Hector,
We may be no more than a hair’s breath away from similar perspectives. I do have a category of “common law” marriages and I even have an understanding of possible sex at the time of betrothal. I wouldn’t refer to either of these as “casual sex” if there is real commitment.
You say, “a sexual relationship should be judged by whether it achieves some or all of the goods that are meant to exist in a Christian marriage (love, self-sacrifice, companionship, procreation, the union of opposites, the image of communion with God that is implicit in coition).” That’s essentially what I say except I would leave out the ambiguous word “some” and then add “indissoluble.”
I do think you are quite mistaken if you imagine the issue of abortion should be separated from the discussion of sexual activity and “casual sex” in particular. Abortion is clearly assumed as a possible safeguard against pregnancies resulting from casual sex or even so-called planned families within marriage. In my parody I link abortion with pill popping as a next step in guiltless and protected “casual sex.” “Protection” for the mother but certainly not for the baby.
I happen to be a social liberal not a social conservative, indeed, a liberal Democrat. It’s unfortunate that so many today imagine that identification with promiscuity and decadent behaviors in general must be trademarks of liberal thought. That’s really libertine (libertinaje) and not liberal.
November 9th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Jose Solano,
No, I don’t think abortion is part and parcel of the ’sexual revolution’ (I really hate that term). Most Latin American societies, and some European countries like Poland and Ireland, have very strict laws against abortion, but are these days, from what I can tell, reasonably liberal in matters of sexual morality. Conversely, Asian countries tend to be conservative in matters of sexual morality but also pro-abortion. Personally based on Latin American people that I know, I think that their attitude towards sexuality (reasonably liberal but also pro-child and anti-abortion) is probably the healthiest.
If abortion was banned I doubt there would be a great cultural move towards seeing premarital sex as always illicit. People would stop having so much _casual_ sex, they would be more careful about safe times of the month, and use birth control more often, and there would probably be more adoptions and more unwed/early motherhood, but we would not have a return to 1950s sexual morality, for better or worse.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Long time no see, Jose. But you’re kind of missing the point here – the people complaining about “casual sex” are not the ones who argue that all sex outside of marriage is illicit. There’s no need to refer to sex as “casual” if you mean outside of marriage – there is nothing casual about two people who have a loving, long-term non-marital relationship, but certainly you would define it as illicit. “Casual” is meaningless except to define others’ non-marital sexual relationships in contrast to one’s own.
I am intrigued by your conflation of non-marital fornication and marital sex in the context of birth control and abortion.
November 10th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Hi mythago, hope you’re getting better. You may need to reread what I’ve written as you don’t appear to be understanding what I’ve said. As for your “conflation” story, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. “Non-marital fornication”? Is there any other kind?
The word “casual” has many meanings. I’ll of course use it as I please to get my message across. I am pleased that you find what I’ve said at least intriguing. Maybe you’ll ponder it a little more.
November 10th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Mythago,
Something isn’t ‘meaningless’ just because the boundaries are blurry. As the saying goes, the existence of dawn and twilight don’t mean that we can’t draw a distinction between light and dark.
November 10th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Fascinating analogy Hector.
November 11th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
it’s from Burke, I believe.