Attack of the Theocrats!: How the Religious Right Harms Us All—and What We Can Do About It (11 page)

Second, these laws are justified by pointing to an ancient text. Take a step back and think on it for a moment. Assume that I proposed to take away another citizen’s human rights, and that I justified taking away those rights by referring to, let’s say, an ancient, one-thousand-year-old parchment from, say, Romania. You’d say that’s an absolutely wacko justification for denying human rights. However, if I change the hypothetical to a two-thousand-year-old document from the Levant and, if I further assert that this two-thousand-year-old document has supernatural powers, then the politicians fall over themselves bowing low and deep in subservience. How utterly medieval—yet widely accepted in the twenty-first century.

Third, all of these religiously biased regulations against women and various forms of sexuality come down to the premise that “privileged males rule”—perhaps because that’s who wrote the rules back in the Bronze Age, when guys could simply hit or rape any women who dared to talk back. Don’t believe that was the case? The Bible tells us such acts are AOK.

The fact that “privileged guys rule” has been dressed up for such a long time as “holy” is something of a testament to the defining power of religious culture and attitudes. Human sexuality and Bronze Age attitudes about human sexuality are perhaps the central characteristic of fundamentalist and theocratic public policy.

The credence that’s given to these attitudes results largely from the perceived august authority that religion bestows on them. Indeed, one must stand in awe when one considers the cultural power and pervasiveness of religious law that stands to this day.

The roots of such attitudes run deep—and strange. We all know many religions teach sodomy is a sin, right? Yet, here’s a little something about sodomy you may not know: “sodomy,” as originally defined by the Catholic Church in its heyday (as a Notre Dame graduate, where else would I look to for such information?), included heterosexual intercourse with the woman on top. In fact, this form of sodomy was so sinful that the priest alone could not forgive you. If the woman was on top, this required seeking
forgiveness from the bishop. Can you picture this conversation with a priest? “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, er, specifically, I . . .” “Sorry,” says the priest, “That’s way above my pay grade. You’ll have to take that one to the bishop.”

The message? Never let a woman get on top. Keep her down, literally and figuratively. Need more examples? How about Deuteronomy 22:13–21, which says that a woman who is not a virgin bride must be killed. What is with religion’s obsession with this virgin business anyway?

And then there’s Deuteronomy 25:11–12, which says that a married woman must have her hand cut off for touching another guy’s penis, even if nonsexually. This seems to take matters a bit far.

OK, so women get stoning and severed hands. But what about the rules for the guys? Well, Genesis 25:1–6 expressly allows mistresses and concubines for guys. (Sorry, ladies, but scripture is scripture.)

What about the New Testament? First Corinthians 14:34–35 requires that women keep silent and learn from husbands, and First Timothy 2:11–13 tells women to “learn in silence with all subjugation.”

But, heck, aren’t we the America of “independence”––of Wild West–style freedom? Those old biblical rules don’t apply to us, right?

Genital Morality: The Bedroom Police

America does indeed have some Wild West traditions. For instance, in the late 1800s, our Supreme Court ruled that a corporation is a person. In that era they held that these so-called persons had “rights.” These so-called corporate rights included paying slave wages to little children to work in mines. Children lost their fingers in the cotton mills. That was freedom for corporate America in the late 1800s.

Think of it. No laws, federal or state, when it came to protecting children in the workplace. Lots of “freedom,” if you want to call it that, regarding how to exploit poor children in a mine.

Yet in the same era, the government enacted a federal statute—known as the Comstock Act—that made it illegal to deliver or transport “obscene, lewd, or lascivious material.” References to birth control met the obscenity definition of this statute. The man who championed the law to Congress, crusader Anthony Comstock, was one of the most powerful people of whom most Americans have never heard. Comstock just so happened to become the enforcer of the very law he had successfully spearheaded (convenient, no?).

Defining obscenity is ridiculously arbitrary business, so what types of material, aside from information on birth control, did Comstock deem
“obscene”? Well, Comstock called George Bernard Shaw—the only person to win both an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize for Literature—“an Irish smut peddler.” Shaw had written a play about a smart woman who ran a brothel. An early supporter of women’s rights, Shaw was a nonreligious human-rights activist who said, “All great truths begin as blasphemies.”

Comstock made sure Walt Whitman was fired from his government job because Whitman wrote
Leaves of Grass
, which called on the reader to “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” Comstock also got Victoria Woodhull, the first-ever female candidate for U.S. president, imprisoned. Candidate Woodhull advocated free love, women’s rights, lenient divorce, and birth control. You can understand why Comstock threw her in the slammer.

It is written that Anthony Comstock destroyed 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates that would have printed books he did not like, and nearly 4,000,000 pictures. Comstock boasted that he was responsible for 4,000 arrests and 15 suicides. One woman, an advocate for women’s rights and birth control, wrote specifically in her suicide note that it was continual harassment by Comstock that sent her over the edge.

Comstock also had Emma Goldman, a very early advocate of gay rights and a prominent voice for free love, jailed twice for distribution of birth control information. Once Goldman stayed in jail for two weeks rather than pay a fine that she actually could afford to pay. She stayed so that she might meet more of the people in prison and learn from their experiences. Goldman was a bit radical for my blood, but I love her. She called Comstock the leader of the “moral eunuchs” and famously said, “If there won’t be dancing at the revolution, I’m not coming.”

Real Sexual Morality: The Principle of Consent and the Nature of Sex

I suggest that we should indeed have a strong sense of sexual morality, but not the sexual morality of what Emma Goldman called the “moral eunuchs.” As a former assistant attorney general who in my brief time over-saw scores of child-protection cases, and as a ten-year legislator who chaired a sex-crime commission, I suggest that sexual morality can be captured in two words: consenting adults. The word “consent” excludes an inappropriate power imbalance––or it is not true consent. The word “adults,” meanwhile, excludes priests having sex with boys and preachers having sex with teenage girls. Perhaps most importantly, this principle puts men and women on equal footing, unlike the Victorian and Bronze Age morality of men like Comstock.

Thankfully, bold voices, like those of Goldman, eventually started to tear away at biblical “morality” and increase freedoms for women. Economics have changed things for women, too. So has science—and Mexican yams, the prime ingredient of “the Pill.”

The Pill was first marketed in 1960, and by 1969 more than half of college coeds had used it. Through the science of studying sexuality and reproduction, women’s sexual options have grown much broader—and they may grow broader and more autonomous still.

Consider a recent study by Meredith Chivers. This is the type of study that could be upsetting to fundamentalists. It basically involved showing a lot of different kinds of porn to people of different sexual orientations, but its results illustrate an interesting point about the nature of our sexuality.

The results? Straight guys tend to be aroused primarily by erotic images of women. Gay men tend to be aroused primarily by erotic images of men. No shocks so far. Lesbians are a bit more variable, but, in general, they tend to be aroused primarily by erotic images of other women. However, self-identified straight women tend to get aroused by, well, a lot of things. Erotic images of men, sure, and, yes, images of gay male erotica. Counterintuitively, self-identified straight women tended to get most turned on by erotic images of women.

The results of this study reflect perhaps not so much a change in women’s sexuality as, maybe, the beginnings of a new era in which women (heretofore restricted by patriarchy) will be free to, as the old song goes, “act naturally.” Women should not be required by anyone anywhere to do anything in bed, certainly not at the command of men. Neither should they be prohibited from doing whatever they choose with a consenting adult.

But acting naturally is not so naturally accepted by the likes of Anthony Comstock, nor is it acceptable to his modern-day counter-parts––men like David Vitter, Mark Sanford, and John Ensign. You know the type. Our sexual overlords.

Just as we should be open-minded about female sexuality, let’s take a fresh look at male sexuality as well.

Let us begin with the “million-dollar challenge.” I first heard this idea from Dr. R. Elisabeth Cornwell, an evolutionary psychologist. Dr. Cornwell has repeatedly offered this challenge in her classes. She first asks the men in the class to consider this hypothetical: leaving out women with whom they have some prior relationship or flirtation, could any one of them persuade a woman in the class to have sex with him prior to midnight that night? If successful, the man would get a million dollars, but if he failed, he would
have to pay a million dollars. Of course, no force or coercion of any kind can be contemplated. The man cannot offer the woman a cut of the proceeds or even hint at any financial gain. This is all down to persuasion.

I’ve tried Dr. Cornwell’s hypothetical in my talks around the country, and, when I pose the question, the males look about sheepishly, sometimes forlorn, but only rarely does a male raise his hand. Women tend to find this result most amusing, particularly when the same hypothetical is posed to them. Why? Well . . .

Knowing the predisposition of males toward sexual offers, women consistently raise their hands in far greater numbers than men. Women, and men, tend to get a good laugh at the expense of the hapless and predictable male of our species, while they both acknowledge a sociological truth. Women are less inclined to say “yes” when it comes to this subject and men are much less inclined to say “no.” This reality is neither praised nor condemned. We simply recognize, with many exceptions, a general tendency. It is a marked gender difference. As Dr. Cornwell puts it, women tend far more than men to be the “gatekeepers” of sex. Women tend to think long term and, with exceptions of course, generally see long-term partnerships as a higher priority than a fling. It may be that, as sexism fades, there will be less stigma to women initiating sexual advances, but these are the results for now.

I’m a feminist not because women and men have no differences—we do. I’m a feminist because neither gender is superior or inferior to the other. I keep a poster of my hero Eleanor Roosevelt on my office wall because she was such a great human being. It was her actions, the choices that she made, and the policies she pursued that made her such a wonderful example to us all. Her gender and her sexuality were not the defining aspects of her greatness. And as the torture-endorsing Eva Peron and Margaret Thatcher demonstrate, no gender is perfect.

As a feminist myself, I’m confident most feminists don’t agree with the extreme views expressed by Andrea Dworkin, who said, “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women.” She also said, “I think that men will have to give up their precious erections and begin to make love as women do together.” Sheesh. Talk about lack of inclusiveness.

So when do we get to the part where we all just lighten up about sex? The angry condemnations regarding sex, from the Right and the Left, are prissy, prudish, harsh, and humorless. And these condemnations, these sexual police brigades, are at the heart of fundamentalism and some forms of political correctness.

Better to accept the opposite sex as fellow human beings, wildly imperfect though we may be. Among any civilized people, regardless of one’s predilections, no means no. Consequences, including, in many cases, prison, is the proper result for those who don’t take no for an answer. Everyone must understand that, while flirtation is one of life’s most enjoyable activities, no must be accepted with aplomb. But we still need to lighten up and let people—gay or straight, man or woman—be who they naturally are. We also need to understand that “who you are” can never include coerciveness, or expectations of privilege.

Passion with Good Humor, Candor without Sexism

Now, back to the early 1960s and Don Draper. The Don Draper character is tall, dark, and handsome, but he is often just plain dark. Even so, many women throughout America find something compelling—and alluring—about this character. The blogosphere brims with interest, expressed by women, regarding Don Draper. Why? Perhaps it’s in part because Don Draper for all his blatant faults avoids the disingenuous and oily posing in which many men indulge (“Me? Think of sex? Oh, no. Not me!”)

But there is something more that Draper displays: skill. We are, all of us—in a way that goes beyond the sexual—attracted to skill.
Mad Men
would simply be a soap opera were it not that the writers show us that Don Draper cares about his skill as an ad man and strives for high-quality work.