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GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.2 (2005) 309-310



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Glorious Freedom

Sexual and Religious Liberation in America

Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini. Boston: Beacon, 2004. xvii + 174 pp.

Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini's Love the Sin is a provocative, engaging, and original work that speaks to a range of audiences. At times its well-wrought prose elegantly conceals its theoretical sophistication and great cleverness. The text cuts across queer, American, religious, and cultural studies. In places Love the Sin will sound familiar to those who observe the politics of homosexuality in the United States. Tolerance is not freedom; it creates an us-versus-them mentality and permits hatred. Jakobsen and Pellegrini maintain that the American privatization of religion masks a particular kind of Protestant Christianity contained even in the most secular public discourses. Through discussions of two decades' worth of legal crises surrounding homosexuality, Jakobsen and Pellegrini remind the reader that America is not the secular society it poses as. While that point may sound like old news, the refreshing perspective offered in Love the Sin represents an opportunity to demystify and even reclaim religion in American culture, a space that queer scholars have too often avoided.

A central assumption of Love the Sin is that sexual liberty—not the assimilationist goal of tolerance of certain identities, but freedom and indeed redemption of behaviors—should be the aim of an LGBTQ rights movement. Jakobsen and Pellegrini suggest that such a goal can be accomplished through the comparison of sexuality to religion in American culture. Incomplete religious freedom in the United States is dependent on a secularized Christian ethics built into the foundations of the society. Politics and religion have normalized heterosexuality in [End Page 309] such a way that queerness, whether religious or sexual, exists at best as tolerated otherness rather than in full communion with the state. Jakobsen and Pellegrini chronicle the ways that the queer person is disenfranchised, as is anyone outside the "Judaeo-Christian tradition"—a problematic category in itself, as they note. Thus sexual and religious liberationists ought to strive against the tendency to adopt heteronormative or Christian-inflected assimilationism.

To theorize sexual dissidence in American culture, Jakobsen and Pellegrini maintain that one should employ models of religious rather than racial otherness. The authors are committed to demonstrating how an essentialist identity-based focus distances sexual orientation from sexual practice. Alluding to 1980s AIDS culture, in which person and behavior were separated by the phrase "Love the sinner, hate the sin," the book's title draws attention to the invisibility of and ambivalence about sexual freedom in American public culture. Jakobsen and Pellegrini contend that the free practice of sexual acts between consenting adults ought to be viewed much as the freedom of religious practice is—or, rather, should be—understood. The limitations to sexual freedom bear witness to the restrictions on religious freedom.

The final chapter of Love the Sin may be the most intriguing. "Are these the only choices: religious values or no values?" (128). "Not all uses of the language of values are the same; not all ethics are geared toward regulation" (129). While Jakobsen and Pellegrini argue for a more authentic public secularism, they also promote a broader diversity in public expression of recognized values by both religious and nonreligious voices. The sexually queer person struggles with how to respond to a pervasive and potentially annihilating Christian discourse. The religious dissident, sexually transgressive or not, attempts to claim a public place in a dangerously regulated culture, a culture that identifies a narrow set of values and perspectives associated with the sacred and forces him or her to choose between those values and a superficial secularism. The American is enslaved to the binary of religion versus sex. Love the Sin's iconoclastic arguments have much to contribute toward the liberation of all of these individuals in society.

Frederick S. Roden is assistant professor of English at...

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