Making Love Just

Sexual Ethics for Perplexing Times

Marvin M. Ellison

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780800698843
• eBook ISBN: 9781451424409
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

Why Do We Have to Keep Talking about Sex All the Time?

Serious talk about sexuality is inevitably about society.

THOMAS LAQUEUR ¹

As a Christian ethicist, my short answer to this question of why we must keep talking about sex, sexuality, and sexual ethics is because harm is being done. This harm burdens both individuals and the community, and it causes suffering. Moreover, this harm is caused by injustice. In order to bring healing and hope, we must pursue a broad social justice agenda that embraces a passionate commitment to sexual justice.

To begin with, in cultures strongly influenced by traditional Christian norms about purity, women, and sexuality, as one social theorist has quipped, sex is “presumed guilty until proven innocent.” ² Given this negativity, it is hardly surprising that many people try to avoid this topic altogether, or when they do manage to talk about sex, they often become defensive, reactive, and judgmental. As many people attest, fearful and shaming messages about sex have had all sorts of negative consequences in their lives, but silence about these matters can be just as debilitating if not more so. For this reason, Peggy Brick, a sexuality educator, has dedicated her book to adolescents and young adults this way: “To the young people of this nation who must find their way to sexual health in a world of contradictions—where media scream, ‘Always say yes,’ where many adults admonish, ‘Just say no,’ but the majority just say . . . nothing.” ³

That we keep talking matters. But why?

Because a cultural crisis is disrupting sexuality
and conventional mores

Remaining silent or becoming speechless does little to curb the mindless chatter about sex and sexuality, much less stop the negative messages, because these tend only to escalate during times of disruptive cultural change when moral panics surface about loss of moral certainty, sexual immorality, and the disintegration of family life. Currently, as we witness a worldwide crisis of literally global proportions, we are encountering not only a tumultuous time of rapid change, but more significantly a protracted and very difficult period of structural transformation in which social relations at every level are being altered, from economic arrangements in a globalizing economy to the reordering of power between men and women in the family and throughout the social order. In the midst of this historic restructuring, cultural battles over sexuality, gender, and family are raging everywhere as deeply contested personal and social struggles about the human good, normative patterns for family life, and the legitimacy of cultural authority.

What are the rules for sexual intimacy, and who gets to define and enforce them? These questions are at once highly personal and highly political. As sociologist James Davison Hunter explains, “Cultural conflict is about power—a struggle to achieve or maintain the power to define reality.” ⁴ Therefore, sex and sexuality are far from frivolous or inconsequential matters that only detract attention from the so-called weightier matters of poverty, racism, war, and ecological degradation. Rather, these “intimate matters,” far from being sealed off from larger sociocultural dynamics, are embedded in, and reflective of, these more global transformations.

For this reason, at a time when human suffering nearly exceeds our moral imagination’s ability to grasp, we must regain moral perspective about our lives-in-relation from the global to the intimate, especially at a time when many people, out of pain and fear, are either turning inward and blaming themselves for their suffering and bewilderment or turning outward to look for enemies and scapegoats who can serve as the culprits for their upset and misery. Attending to sexuality has become morally imperative these days because, as Gayle Rubin puts it, it is at times like this when “people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality.” Therefore, she cautions, “sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress.” ⁵

Because the way we talk about sex, sexuality, and sexual ethics can lead to justice or injustice

While it is imperative that we speak, we must exercise great care about what we actually say about these tender matters. Making a compelling case that harm is being done and that the appropriate response is sexual justice requires us to “change the subject” in two distinctive ways. First, we need to change what is being talked about by shifting the topic of conversation away from the misplaced preoccupation with homosexuality and sexual difference and focusing instead on race, gender, sexual, and economic oppression and the pervasive patterns of sexualized violence in this society. Second, we need to change who the subject is that is speaking and listened to. What is shaking the foundations is a global power shift as women and LBGT persons of all colors and classes claim the right to be the subjects of their own lives and participants in the renewal of their spiritual traditions. Morally speaking, constructive critique and alternative visions emerge only as persons are no longer silenced or positioned as objects of other people’s discourse (as if aliens or merely abstractions) and when, instead, they become self-defining subjects, real persons with whom to enter into dialogue. When the participants at the table change, so does the conversation.

Sexuality is a justice issue. As biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann emphasizes, “In biblical faith the doing of justice is the primary expectation of God.” ⁶ To be sure, justice is multidimensional, but by all accounts sexual or erotic justice is one of the most neglected, trivialized, and even feared dimensions of a comprehensive social justice agenda. Claiming a passion for erotic justice just doesn’t sound very Christian, does it? There lies the crux of the problem. It is an understatement to say that faith communities—and here I mean Christian churches—have difficulties dealing with sex. Although much attention continues to be directed toward women’s changing roles, nonmarital sex, and the “sin of homosexuality,” the reality is that Christians struggle not only with these particular issues but with sexuality as a whole. Massive cultural change, declining denominational influence, and internal dissension do not ease matters.

In trying to gain our bearings in the midst of these swirling dynamics, my wager is that acquiring fresh moral insight about these concerns will depend on three things: first, our facing conflict and working through it rather than evading it; second, our listening to and learning from people who have been hurt, silenced, and rendered invisible by church teaching and practice; and third, speaking up about gender, sexual, and other forms of injustice and calling the community and ourselves to account for reordering relationships so that all may thrive. In this grand project, survivors of sexual and domestic abuse, LBGTQ persons, sexually active divorced and single people, people living with physical and mental disabilities, elders as well as youth, people living with HIV/AIDS, and many others have stories of faith and struggle that can amplify, correct, and revitalize the church’s inherited wisdom about sexuality and sexual ethics. If moving forward requires engaging people’s lived questions and discovering fresh moral insight, it will also require courageous leadership to foster the kind of hospitality, mutual respect, and safety that will actually enable us, in Nelle Morton’s felicitous phrase, “to hear one another into speech.” ⁷

Because sexuality is indispensable to our humanity

Novelist May Sarton in her book At Seventy wrote, “This is the best time of my life. I love being old.” Someone asked Sarton, “Why is it good being old?” She replied, “Because I am more myself than I have ever been. There is less conflict. I am happier, more balanced, and . . . more powerful. I felt it was an odd word, ‘powerful,’ ” Sarton said, “but I think it’s true. I am surer of what my life is all about, have less self-doubt to conquer.” ⁸ If I may paraphrase Sarton, I would say, “This is the best time of my life. I love being gay.” I agree with her that in claiming one’s self-respect, including one’s self-respect as a sexual person, one stands to become happier, more balanced, and, yes, more powerful. Whenever people honor the goodness of their lives, including their sexualities, and whenever they touch that place within them where their passion and spiritual hunger meet, they often discover sources of personal integrity and spiritual empowerment.

Despite all the disquietude about this topic of sex and sexuality, the truth of the matter is that sexuality remains an indispensable component of our humanity. No doubt we humans would be something without our sexualities, but we would surely not be fully recognizable as humans if we could not experience the delight, and sometimes the pain, of living relationally as friends, lovers, and life companions or if we did not feel strong desire for entering into communion with others through tender touching. By sexuality, I mean not only genital sex, but more broadly our embodied capacity for intimate connection. Erotic desire seeks physical, emotional, and spiritual embrace of others, the world, and God, the sacred source of life. By spirituality, I mean our response to the movement of the sacred in our midst. Any spirituality worth having these days will have at its center a desire for justice as communal right-relatedness. Justice making pays attention to how people’s well-being is enhanced or diminished by prevailing patterns of social power and vulnerability. The work of justice is an ongoing, never-ending process of remaking community by strengthening relationships and correcting whatever harms people, other earth creatures, and the earth itself.

A progressive Christian framework appreciates how justice, as communally secured respect and care for persons and the earth, is foundational to good loving. Moreover, a just society and a just church will foster the moral freedom of persons, without distinction, to love and be loved and responsibly express their desire for intimate, respectful connection. ⁹ This is not to say that everyone must be sexually active, genitally speaking, much less married or partnered, to be complete as persons, but it is to recognize that if we deny whole segments of the community the right (and responsibility) to be sexual persons and to do love in and through their bodies, then we have denied them their full humanity. In other words, we dehumanize persons by oversexualizing or desexualizing them.

Spiritually empowered justice advocates find the courage to say no to apathy, abuse, and injustice, as well as strength to say an equally resounding yes to joy, creativity, and compassion. That’s the good news. The bad news is that so few religious people live comfortably with their bodies or at ease with sexual difference. Fear of sexuality and deep suspicion of the erotic are pervasive in the church. No wonder Christians are often viewed as lifeless and devoid of passion! When people fear sensuous touch and become repressive about sexuality, they risk becoming controlling, rigid, and unfeeling. In the process, they lose touch with what brings joy as well as sorrow to themselves and others and often become disconnected from, and therefore unresponsive to, the world around them. Put humorously, they earn the appellation of “God’s frozen people.”

Because it is time to stop injustices from being sexualized

A fearful people are also likely to project their fear and discomfort about sex and sexuality onto others. In our time the overlapping communities of LBGTQ people, people of color, and people living with disabilities have become the cultural repositories or moral dumping ground for other people’s dis-ease about sensuality and the body. People with disabilities are dehumanized whenever they are desexualized as “imperfect bodies” for whom sex and embodied intimacy are considered unseemly. As sociologist Thomas Gerschick explains, “People with less-normative bodies, such as people with disabilities, are engaged in an asymmetrical power relationship with their more-normative bodied counterparts, who have the power to validate their bodies and their identities.” ¹⁰ He then illustrates this social power dynamic by citing a teenager living with a chronic, body-crippling condition who remarked, “I think [others’ conception of what defines a man] is very important because if they don’t think of you as one, it is hard to think of yourself as one or it doesn’t really matter if you think of yourself as one if no one else does.” ¹¹ Our social interactions not only validate our identities (or not), they also provide occasions for approval or sanctioning, depending on our conformity to cultural norms and values. Failure to comply with prevailing codes of normalcy can lead to judgments not only about our (mis)behavior, but also about our “realness” as persons who measure up or not.

Because of white racism, the institutionalized belief in the superiority of one racial group over all others and its right to dominance, black sexuality is subject to relentless stereotyping and projections of white fear onto black bodies. Womanist theologian Delores Williams observes that white culture “considers black frightening, dangerous and/or repulsive—especially when this is the color of human bodies.” ¹² White fear of and suspicion toward black sexuality give racism an energy and edge, constructed on the degradation of black bodies and on white determination to control them. People of color are caricatured as hypersexual and, therefore, less rational and more prone to be “out of control.” As ethicist Miguel De La Torre explains, “Whites [have] projected their own forbidden desires onto darker bodies.” This eroticization of race has been used to justify white control and exploitation, including sexual exploitation, of people of color. This cultural construction is, in fact, “so woven into white America’s identity that it has become normalized in the way many whites have been taught by their culture to see bodies of color.” ¹³

Until people get honest and take responsibility for their own confusions and struggles, non-normative communities will continue to be used as moral scapegoats and disenfranchised as “inferior outsiders,” which is historian John Boswell’s term for LBGTQ persons, whom he regards as “the most obvious ‘outsiders’ in the modern West.” Socially defined outsiders stand in contrast, on the one hand, to “distinguishable insiders,” such as blue-eyed and brown-eyed people or, say, Presbyterians and Lutherans, whose difference...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Where Do We Draw Our Lines, and Why? An Invitation to Ethical Inquiry
• 1 Why Do We Have to Keep Talking about Sex All the Time?
• 2 What Makes “Good Sex” Good?
• 3 Is It Still Adultery if the Spouse Has Alzheimer’s?
• 4 Is Same-Sex Marriage a “Must” or a “Bust”?
• 5 Why Don’t Batterers Just Leave and Rapists Just Cease and Desist?
• 6 Is “Pro-Choice” What We Mean to Say?
• 7 What Do We Have to Learn from, as Well as Teach, Young People about Sex?
• Epilogue: How Far Can We Draw Outside the Lines and Still Be in the Picture?
• Notes
• Index