Issue #41 -- July 2003

Contents

1. A Radical Social Experiment
2. Supremes Expand "Real Sex"
3. Down There Legalized Down Under
4. Canadians--Really Pro-Marriage
5. Correspondence: When Life Resembles Child Porn
6. "Sadomasophobia" Tied in Knots
 

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1. A Radical Social Experiment

Two and a quarter centuries ago, a group of gifted people got together and envisioned a radical social experiment.They imagined a society in which the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were self-evident--not graciously handed down by an enlightened sovereign, not the conditional gift of a deity requiring obedience, not even granted by the majority of the citizenry. Unlike other philosophers who set out to prove this assumption, the Founders started with this. And went further with it than any group ever had.

This experiment was based on the idea that people should be accountable for their behavior with each other--but not for their thoughts, feelings, or beliefs. They were to be secure in their homes, free from the religious whims of their rulers or the moral imperatives of their neighbors. Except for the New England winters and Deep South summers, it was to be paradise.

And it would be--except to those who can't grasp, or can't live up to, these radical ideas. This experiment actually means that citizens volunteer for a certain discomfort--the knowledge that among us are people believing things that we scorn, spending their life and liberty pursuing happiness in ways that anger, scare, or confuse us. Tolerating these feelings is the price we are all asked to pay for the privileges made possible by this radical social experiment.

July 4 is a good time to stop and reflect on the nature of this tension--between our inevitable dismay about our neighbors, and our freedom to dismay others. Enjoying the second requires that we learn to respect the first. Children, of course, want one without the other; adults should know better.

Contemporary Americans who want everyone to conform to their idea of personal or religious morality are not up to the challenge created by the American Covenant. They don't seem to grasp its extreme nature: that while members of a community may agree on social norms, no belief or thought shall be mandated by any social unit--ruler, deity, local council, employer. Thus, no behavior dictated by mere belief or thought would be either required or prohibited by law. Individual Americans would really be free to spend their life and their liberty pursing their happiness--as they define it, not as the community defines it--in any private, non-exploitative way they chose.

On our country's birthday, in the wake of dramatic Supreme Court decisions that will change our country in both positive and negative ways, you're invited to ponder the thoughts of our Founders, sprinkled throughout this issue. As the American people have continually demonstrated, those ideas, radical 227 years ago, are still radical today. Too many Americans demand to be set free from those radical ideas--and from the responsibility for tolerating their neighbors' thoughts and freedom.

The Founders clearly had an abundance of Sexual Intelligence. To see how much they trusted future generations, view their supreme challenge to us--the Bill of Rights--by clicking here.

2. Supremes Expand "Real Sex"

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ended Texas' right to ban sodomy (oral or anal sex) between consenting adults. Because the law (as in other states) was used mostly to persecute gays, the ruling was seen as a victory for gay rights. While it is that, it is much, much more. Every American should be rejoicing at this affirmation of the basic right to sexual privacy.

Predictably, many "morality" groups are agonizing over this endorsement of the so-called "homosexual agenda" (that powerhouse conspiracy to give gay Americans the same rights as their parents and children). Justice Antonin Scalia himself predicted that this decision would pave the way for homosexual marriage. But it won't happen--not in his lifetime, anyway, nor yours.

Even paleo-conservative New York Times columnist William Safire understands that this Court decision isn't primarily about homosexuality, it's about privacy. Which everyone wants. Of course, conservatives are so nervous about what others want do with their privacy that they're willing to give up some of their own so you can't have too much of yours.

The Court decision is fundamentally conservative (in the best sense) because consensual sexual expression is a basic human right. The government has no power to interfere with this right except insofar as it violently asserts it. No self-respecting conservative ever claims he wants government intrusion into people's lives. What a terrible dilemma these people are in--their suspicion of government versus their suspicion of their neighbors.

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"No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him."
     --Thomas Jefferson

3. Down There Legalized Down Under

By a narrow margin, the New Zealand parliament has legalized prostitution. Licensing, inspections, and employment protection will soon begin.

In America, the criminalization of prostitution discriminates against prostitutes by withholding protections from them that other citizens enjoy. Customers of prostitutes are also currently discriminated against, as they do not get the normal protections that customers of other commercial services enjoy. This is like deciding that beef and chicken will be government inspected but not ham, because the majority doesn't think people should eat ham. Similarly, it would be like deciding that ham-workers shouldn't get the protections that beef- and chicken-workers get because we don't want workers supplying ham to people whom we think shouldn't eat it.

Prostitution dangerous? Let's make it safer. Immoral? Mind your own business. Connected to crime? Legalize and license it. Demeaning to women? Perhaps we should prohibit women from being motel maids and working the graveyard shift at 7-11, too.

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"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     --Benjamin Franklin

4. Canadians--Really Pro-Marriage

Joining Quebec and British Columbia, Ontario's Supreme Court has ruled that laws excluding gays from marrying are unconstitutional. Together, these three provinces hold almost all of Canada's population, making it the third country to legalize same-sex marriage. The court ordered Toronto city clerks to immediately begin issuing marriage licenses to interested gay couples. Sounds like the start of a whole new season for honeymoon capital Niagara Falls--the northern side, that is.

Conservative political figures across the U.S. admitted being frightened by the possibility of gay Americans traveling to Canada in droves and returning married--and demanding recognition for their marriages. And so a coalition of right-wing religious groups has launched a campaign to amend the U.S. Constitution. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO) has introduced the "Federal Marriage Amendment" (H.J. Res. 56), which would define marriage as exclusively involving a man and a woman. It would also invalidate all state and local domestic partnership laws, and rescind laws preventing discrimination based on marital status (a problem for millions of unmarried, cohabiting heterosexual couples). Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says he'll support this constitutional amendment because gay marriage isn't "moral" under America's dominant religious doctrine.

What a bad, bad idea this is. And how sad that American leaders can't see that our beloved Constitution requires that gay couples be allowed to marry.

Centuries ago, the American state governments were given a monopoly on legal marriages, similar to their monopolies on licensing drivers and physicians. Since these legal marriages confer government- and commercially-recognized rights, states are obligated to give all citizens equal access to the fruits of this monopoly.

We all know that states can't discriminate against gay people who want to get driver's licenses or establish medical practices. Similarly, marriage is a legal right for citizens who meet basic demographic criteria, primarily minimum age. A government pledged to a separation of Church and State cannot withhold this right on religious, moral, or "traditional" grounds.

Religions that believe in more stringent criteria for marriage--that it must be, say, monogamous, uni-racial, blessed by a congregation, witnessed by a drunk relative, or whatever--should go ahead and pitch their vision to congregants. If they can persuade their flock to go along with it, fine. The human appetite to be externally regulated appears virtually unlimited, and so religions will always have motivated customers for their marital endorsement. Let them go ahead and withhold their blessing from their members' same-gender marriages if that's their ideology.

But government cannot prohibit marriage because of gender any more than it can because of race, ethnicity, height, or ugliness. Until the late twentieth century, 30 American states did parcel out the right to marry according to both race and ethnicity. We now describe those anti-miscegenation laws as antiquated, cruel, and embarrassing, and government has agreed that it has no right to make such laws. The identical logic applies to same-gender marriage.

Besides, are conservatives caretaking the institution of marriage so well that they should be its exclusive protectors and definers? It's pretty arrogant for them to sponsor a Defense of Marriage Act when their record at preserving marriage is so poor. These days, heterosexuals are slower to get into marriage and quicker to get out of it than ever before. So let's let people who are begging to get in have a go at it. And if gays can't make marriage work either, maybe we should re-think the whole damn idea.

By the way, am I the only one who notices that last week's Newsweek cover ("No sex, please, we're married") was followed by this week's issue on gay marriage--complete with cuddling cover couple? Maybe gays will do this marriage thing better. They certainly have a pile of heterosexual mistakes to learn from.

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"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
     --Thomas Jefferson

5. Correspondence: When Life Resembles Child Porn

Last issue (#40), we described the disposition of Pete Townshend's arrest for viewing child porn websites. He claimed he was doing research for his autobiography, which discusses his childhood molestation (first reported in issue #36). Three years ago (issue #18), we described the arrest and jailing of 22-year-old Brian Dalton for diary entries of his fantasies about torturing and sexualizing children.

Such cases raise the question, Whose life is it anyway? Who owns what part of your imagination and your past? Last week, one reader wrote:

"I have been in therapy for years on issues of domestic violence and sex in my childhood. A transcription of my therapy tapes would be graphic in detailing what, who and how people had sex with me before I was 16. My therapist is supportive of my publishing this, but I am concerned that I could be prosecuted on the basis of porn laws. Is my life my own to write about?"
--"Mary"

If you can't write about your fantasies (ugly though they might be) and you can't write about your past (ditto), what else might you be restricted from describing in the future? What it felt like to get an abortion? Your fantasy of giving an ex-husband AIDS? Same-gender curiosity or fantasy at the YMCA? A dream in which you make love with Jesus?

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"The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people."
     --George Washington

6. "Sadomasophobia" Tied in Knots

There's very little that's new in sex. But a few weeks ago I was privileged to hear the results of two new studies of individuals who play with sexual sadomasochism--erotic power play, as my San Francisco colleague Bill Henkin calls it.

Researchers from the Los Angeles Sexuality Center, led by Dr. Pamela Connelly, have now shown scientifically that S/M players are no less emotionally healthy than non-players. Indeed, in many areas they were healthier.

Saying that someone is no more sick than the average vanilla hetero may be damning with faint praise, but if that's America's standard, then let's use it. Let's use this validated scientific data in custody battles, job discrimination suits, and in the training of psychotherapists and physicians. And let's eliminate the urban legend that people who like to spank or be spanked are acting out some kind of abusive background. This is Freud gone wild, the bastard child of Oprah, Dr. Laura, and well-intentioned but misguided child molestation activists.

In 1974 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders (the DSM), deciding that homosexuality itself was not an expression of pathology--but, rather, a sexual orientation. As Dr. Charles Moser and others have been saying for years, S/M is more an orientation than an erotic menu selection. Connolly's study shows that people with this orientation are more like everyone else than they are different. In a wiser future, what other erotic predilections--now pathologized and thus punished in family court proceedings--will we realize are orientations rather than paraphilias or deviance?

For now, start remembering the word Sadomasophobia. Connolly coined it to mean, like homophobia, a fear and hatred of a sexual orientation not one's own. One day, divorced parents warring over child custody will be prevented from using an ex-mate's S/M practices as evidence of parental unfitness. The kids of those parents will be in debt to researchers like Connolly, Moser and Ottawa's Peggy Kleinplatz.

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You may quote anything herein, with the following attribution:
"Reprinted from Sexual Intelligence, copyright © Marty Klein, Ph.D. (www.SexEd.org)."