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5. Valuing Sex
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5 Valuing Sex What does it mean to take sex seriously as a site for the production of values? Sexual relations are human relations, and the activity of making sex forges these relations. We use the language of “making sex” (rather than “making love”) because , as we stated in the previous chapter, we don’t think that the value of sex necessarily depends upon whether the people involved are in love. But even more fundamentally, we believe that there is no one act or set of acts that constitutes “sex”—there are as many ways to make sex as there are people. “Making sex” better captures the agency and the imagination involved in sexual relations than does the term “having sex.” This agency is ethical agency, which involves how we relate to each other—sexually and otherwise. Throughout this book we’ve been pursuing some deeply counterintuitive ideas about the role of religion in American public life, the insufficiency of tolerance as a basis for democratic differences, and the mutual entailment of religious and sexual freedom. All these claims make possible alternative understandings 127 of sex, ethics, and freedom. In turn, these alternative understandings make possible new forms of social life. This is not newness for the sake of newness, but change for the sake of making a variety of subject positions more inhabitable, more survivable, than they currently are. We are thinking about the situation of homosexuals and other sexual dissidents certainly, but we are also cognizant of the high costs that can come with inhabiting even the most traditional of “nuclear families.” As we’ve argued, it’s difficult in America to produce a language of values (never mind sexual values) that isn’t framed in religious and, particularly, in Christian terms. This produces a situation in which values translate as Christianity , and vice versa. Here is another example of this American common sense at work. In October 2001, as their patriotic response to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the city council of Ringgold, Georgia , voted unanimously to post the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer at city hall—along the corridors outside the courtroom (“All Things Considered ,” NPR, October 16, 2001). Anticipating challenges from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other civil libertarians, the city decided to hang up another plaque, one that would represent an alternative, nonreligious point of view. (Evidently, the religious point of view could be crystallized in the Ten Commandments and Lord’s Prayer alone.) The plaque representing the moral alternative to religion was blank. In Ringgold’s public imagination, religious values are “Judaeo-Christian values,” and non–Judaeo-Christian values are formless , without content, empty. Are these the only choices: religious values or no values? If it’s difficult for many Americans to imagine moral possibilities that are not ultimately grounded in religious claims, this problem becomes even more acute when it comes to sex. When sex is construed as the problem and religion as the solution, there is little room to think about sex itself as a kind of ethical relation and still less room to think about sex as a practice of freedom. Freedom is supVALUING SEX 128 [35.172.231.232] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:05 GMT) posed to be the first principle of American democracy. But the free exercise of sex is virtually unthinkable. When sexual freedom is contemplated it raises the specter of licentiousness, not liberty. Sex seems to be the one area in American life where we will not let freedom reign and where the mere suggestion of freedom seems nonsensical at best and highly immoral at worst. Connecting sexual freedom to religious freedom, as we are proposing, may seem like an impossible —to some, even an offensive—undertaking. Objections to our argument can come from two different directions. One set of objections, commonly heard in contemporary public discourse, comes from those (usually sexual conservatives) who think that sexuality requires regulation and that such regulation is a moral imperative. Another set of objections comes from progressives who worry that any use of the language of values will necessarily result in some form of coercive regulation. Perhaps surprisingly, our response to these two sets of critics is similar: Not all uses of the language of values are the same; not all ethics are geared toward regulation. Conservatives are often used to rattling off a litany of harms that are attendant to sexual freedom (harms that could...