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

Notes

Notes Notes to the Introduction 1. Richard L. Berke, “Flurry of Anti-Gay Remarks Has G.O.P. Fearing Backlash,” New York Times, June 30, 1998, A1. 2. For those familiar with the influence of Foucault in our academic work, it may seem strange that we advocate freedom, given that Foucault is one of the most prominent critics of politics organized around freedom. His critique goes to the heart of modern freedom, whether it is the freedom offered by political liberalism or that envisioned by a more radical politics of liberation. At the end of the first volume of The History of Sexuality , for example, Foucault leaves us with only an enigmatic reference to “bodies and pleasures” and the vague possibility of “practices of freedom” that might be distinct from concepts of overarching freedom and liberation. In his later work, particularly in the third volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault attempts to develop an ethics that avoids some of these liberal and liberationist problems. Our aim is to consider what it might mean to pursue practices of freedom and in so doing shift the meaning of freedom as it is invoked in public debates about sexuality. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), and Volume III: The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage Books, 1986). 3. U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, “A Jubilee Call for Debt Forgiveness: A Statement of the Administrative Board of the United States Catholic Conference,” April 1999, and “A Good Friday Appeal to End the Death Penalty: A Statement of the Administrative Board of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops,” April 2, 1999. 4. Qtd. in Traci C. West, “The Policing of Poor Black Women’s Sexual Reproduction,” in God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life, ed. Kathleen M. Sands (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 138. We must also note the irony of President Clinton’s public hand-wringing about the putative sexual irresponsibility of teenage girls. 5. Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 198. 153 6. Writing for the majority that struck down Texas’s criminal abortion statute, Justice Harold Blackmun asserts: “For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman’s attending physician.” Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 113 (1986). Available at http://members.aol.com/abtrbng/410us113.htm. 7. Bowers v. Hardwick 478 U.S. 186 (1986): 186a. 8. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 9. Judith Stacey, In The Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); and Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in LateTwentieth -Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 10. This assumption dates back to at least the eighteenth century, when the Scottish philosopher David Hume attempted to place religion on rational grounds. Hume thought religion was socially useful because it provided moral guidance. He also believed that by studying different religions we could locate common or shared principles and that these shared features provided an objective basis for moral decision making. The point to emphasize here is that, for Hume, religion can provide a basis for moral knowledge. Hume’s views are emblematic of his own time, but they remain influential today. For a fuller discussion of these issues, especially as they pertain to the “reinvention ” of religion in modernity, see Robert Baird, “Late Secularism,” Social Text 64 (Fall 2000): 123–36. 11. See Janet R. Jakobsen, with Ann Pellegrini, “Dreaming Secularism,” Social Text 64 (Fall 2000): 1–27. 12. See Rebecca T. Alpert, Voices of the Religious Left: A Contemporary Sourcebook (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2000). 13. Katie Geneva Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988). Notes to Chapter 1 1. In suggesting that the meaning and experience of sex have changed over time and that sexual identities are modern inventions rather than timeless categories of human NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 154 life, we are here aligning ourselves with social constructionist accounts of sexuality. Such a viewpoint is buttressed by the work of many historians of sexuality, among them George Chauncy, John D’Emilio, Carolyn Dinshaw, Lisa Duggan, Michel Foucault, Estelle...