Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

Conclusion: Open Endings, Dreaming America

Conclusion Open Endings, Dreaming America The tolerance of “love the sinner, hate the sin” is antidemocratic. Democracy has to mean more than coercive homogeneity. For those who are the measure of the norm there’s no great problem because their values form the center of public life and national identity; but for those who are in any way different from this dominant identity—whether in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, physical ability, religion, citizenship, politics, or ethics (in other words, a lot of people)—to be included in the dream of America requires setting aside, hiding, or bracketing what makes them different in the first place. Likeness may be a criterion for membership in private organizations, but it can never be a requirement of belonging in a democracy. How then to resist and challenge exclusion and at the same time change the terms of inclusion? Is it possible to build a public that allows for robust contestation and radical pluralism, rather than one split by divisions between those who are the same and those who are different? 149 In order to consider these questions, we must think about sex, and we must think about sex differently. Relatedly, because sex is so peculiarly linked to religion in America, to think about sex differently mandates thinking about religion differently. As we argue in the first half of the book: If (1) American national identity is dependent upon a sense of moral purpose, and (2) moral sensibilities are collapsed into religious belief, and (3) sexual behavior is made out to be the last and best measure of the moral, then (4) religiously derived sexual regulation plays a formative role in our national life. Nowhere is this sexual regulation made more clear than in the range of federal and state laws and policies directed at homosexuality . State laws criminalizing consensual sex between persons of the same sex are held to be constitutional, as is discrimination against homosexuals in quasi-public organizations like the Boy Scouts, as is the restriction on even speaking homosexuality in the military, as is the refusal to grant gay people the rights and privileges of marriage. In the second half of the book, we ask: How could it be otherwise? That is, if the first half of the book has laid out the problems that we face and their context , in the second we offer alternative visions for politics and ethics. We seek to reanimate the possibilities for forms of public life that do not just enact a constricted “general public” or fall out into the division between “us” and “them.” Moreover, because the current structure of public life induces social movements to reiterate the terms of exclusion, we seek to change not just this phantom “general public,” but also those social movements that challenge the structure of the public. Thus, our critique is as concerned with those movements from “the margins,” including movements for lesbian and gay rights, as it is with the mainstream. We think that these movements for social change must themselves change if they are effectively to transform the public. Tolerance is not enough. Rather, we must radically reorient our understandings and our practices of freedom , including sexual freedom. CONCLUSION 150 Sex is not a luxury, but a good: a vital resource for remaking the social and saving our lives. Crucially, we cannot decide in advance what new forms of social life and ethical relation alternative sexual praxes might give rise to. The dream of this book is also the utopian dare of a robust, contestatory, and radically inclusive America—one that lives up to its promise of freedom and justice for all. CONCLUSION 151 ...