Sunday WTF?

May 10, 2015 By Fred Clark

But a man named Ananias, with the consent of his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property; with his wife’s knowledge, he kept back some of the proceeds, and brought only a part and laid it at the apostles’ feet.

“Ananias,” Peter asked, “why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, were not the proceeds at your disposal? How is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You did not lie to us but to God!”

Now when Ananias heard these words, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard of it. The young men came and wrapped up his body, then carried him out and buried him.

After an interval of about three hours his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter said to her, “Tell me whether you and your husband sold the land for such and such a price.”

And she said, “Yes, that was the price.”

Then Peter said to her, “How is it that you have agreed together to put the Spirit of the Lord to the test? Look, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.”

Immediately she fell down at his feet and died. When the young men came in they found her dead, so they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear seized the whole church and all who heard of these things.

James Baldwin is still urgently relevant. The Senate GOP is not.

April 28, 2015 By Fred Clark

James Baldwin’s “A Report From Occupied Territory” was written two years before I was born. Yet David Swanson posted an excerpt from Baldwin’s essay yesterday and it still seems just as urgently relevant as the breaking news in today’s paper. Perhaps even more so:

The children, having seen the spectacular defeat of their fathers — having seen what happens to any bad nigger and, still more, what happens to the good ones — cannot listen to their fathers and certainly will not listen to the society which is responsible for their orphaned condition.

What to do in the face of this deep and dangerous estrangement? It seemed to me— I would say, sipping coffee and trying to be calm — that the principle of what had to be done was extremely simple; but before anything could be done, the principle had to be grasped. The principle on which one had to operate was that the government which can force me to pay my taxes and force me to fight in its defense anywhere in the world does not have the authority to say that it cannot protect my right to vote or my right to earn a living or my right to live anywhere I choose. Furthermore, no nation, wishing to call itself free, can possibly survive so massive a defection. What to do?

Well, there is a real estate lobby in Albany, for example, and this lobby, which was able to rebuild all of New York, downtown, and for money, in less than twenty years, is also responsible for Harlem and the condition of the people there, and the condition of the schools there, and the future of the children there. What to do? Why is it not possible to attack the power of this lobby? Are their profits more important than the health of our children? What to do? Are textbooks printed in order to teach children, or are the contents of these textbooks to be controlled by the Southern oligarchy and the commercial health of publishing houses? What to do? Why are Negroes and Puerto Ricans virtually the only people pushing trucks in the garment center, and what union has the right to trap and victimize Negroes and Puerto Ricans in this way? None of these things (I would say) could possibly be done without the consent, in fact, of the government, and we in Harlem know this even if some of you profess not to know how such a hideous state of affairs came about. If some of these things are not begun — I would say — then, of course, we will be sitting on a powder keg all summer. Of course, the powder keg may blow up; it will be a miracle if it doesn’t.

They thanked me. They didn’t believe me, as I conclude, since nothing was ever done. The summer was always violent. And, in the spring, the phone began to ring again.

Now, what I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco — is true of every Northern city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover — even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity — quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.

This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,” always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.

And yet the same day that I re-read Baldwin’s essay and find it as timely and pertinent as the day it was first written nearly half a century ago, I also read this, from Steve Benen, “Top Senate Republican rejects call for voting-rights fix“:

It was just last month when much of the nation’s attention turned to Selma, Alabama, where Americans saw former President George W. Bush stand and applaud a call for Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act with a bipartisan bill. Many wondered if, maybe sometime soon, Congress’ Republican majority might agree to tackle the issue.

Voting-rights advocates probably shouldn’t hold their breath. Soon after the event honoring those who marched at the Edmund Pettus Bridge a half-century ago, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) dismissed the very idea of working on the issue. “I think Eric Holder and this administration have trumped up and created an issue where there really isn’t one,” the Texas Republican said.

Asked if Congress should repair the Voting Rights Act formula struck down by the Supreme Court, Cornyn replied, simply, “No.”

Yesterday at the National Press Club, another key GOP senator echoed the sentiment.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said Monday he doesn’t expect to bring up legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act, because lots of minority people are already voting. […]

“It depends on what you want to fix,” he said. “If you want to fix more minorities voting, more minorities are already voting.”

Cornyn and Grassley sound faint and distant, as though they were speaking from 1966. Today, in this 21st-century spring of 2015, James Baldwin is more urgently relevant than ever. The Senate GOP is not.

Smart people saying smart things (3.20)

March 20, 2015 By Fred Clark

Conor P. Williams, “David Brooks Is Mistaking Poverty’s Symptoms for Its Causes“

The column’s real sin is to mistake symptoms for causes. And Brooks does so because it’s ideologically comfortable to cast stones at the poor for their behavior, and ideologically uncomfortable to admit that their behavior is partly an outgrowth of extreme inequality and social immobility. Blaming the poor for abandoning social norms around reproduction and child-rearing makes our glass houses a bit comfier. It makes it easier to ignore our low tax rates and weak safety net. It makes it easier for us to ignore dramatic inequities in our education system. It lets us blame, and scorn the poor. And nothing gladdens the proud human heart quite like judging the weak.

Lisa Sharon Harper, et. al., “An Open Letter to Franklin Graham”

As your brothers and sisters in Christ, who are also called to lead the body, we are disappointed and grieved by your abuse of the Holy Scriptures. You lifted Hebrews 13:17 out of its biblical context and misappropriated it in a way that encourages believers to acquiesce to an injustice that God hates. That text refers to church leadership, not the secular leadership of Caesar.

Are you also aware that your commentary resonates with the types of misinterpretations and rhetoric echoed by many in the antebellum church? Are you aware that the southern slavocracy validated the systematic subjugation of human beings made in the image of God by instructing these enslaved human beings to “obey their masters because the Bible instructed them to do so?”

Robin DiAngelo, interviewed by Sam Adler-Bell, “Why White People Freak Out When They’re Called Out About Race”

I lead primarily white audiences in discussions on race every day, in workshops all over the country. That has allowed me to observe very predictable patterns. And one of those patterns is this inability to tolerate any kind of challenge to our racial reality. We shut down or lash out or in whatever way possible block any reflection from taking place.

Of course, it functions as means of resistance, but I think it’s also useful to think about it as fragility, as inability to handle the stress of conversations about race and racism

Sometimes it’s strategic, a very intentional push back and rebuttal. But a lot of the time, the person simply cannot function. They regress into an emotional state that prevents anybody from moving forward.

Kevin M. Kruse, “A Christian Nation? Since When?”

The most important clergyman for Christian libertarianism, though, was the Rev. Billy Graham. In his initial ministry, in the early 1950s, Mr. Graham supported corporate interests so zealously that a London paper called him “the Big Business evangelist.” The Garden of Eden, he informed revival attendees, was a paradise with “no union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes, no disease.” In the same spirit, he denounced all “government restrictions” in economic affairs, which he invariably attacked as “socialism.”

Rockstar Dinosaur Pirate Princess, “Consent: Not actually that complicated”

If you say “hey, would you like a cup of tea?” and they um and ahh and say, “I’m not really sure…” then you can make them a cup of tea or not, but be aware that they might not drink it, and if they don’t drink it then – this is the important bit – don’t make them drink it. You can’t blame them for you going to the effort of making the tea on the off-chance they wanted it; you just have to deal with them not drinking it. Just because you made it doesn’t mean you are entitled to watch them drink it.

If they say “No thank you” then don’t make them tea. At all. Don’t make them tea, don’t make them drink tea, don’t get annoyed at them for not wanting tea. They just don’t want tea, ok?

Appalling results from a small study of college men highlight a public safety emergency

January 12, 2015 By Fred Clark

First, let’s be clear — this is a single study from a single location with a tiny sample size. I mention this not as a criticism of the study, but because it’s something I’ve been repeating over and over to try to reassure myself that maybe the world isn’t as horrible as this study seems to suggest.

So keep in mind that these are, at most, initial findings. Before we can draw any solid conclusions, the awful results here will need to be repeated and confirmed with larger studies conducted at multiple locations. That, at least, is what I keep telling myself after reading Tara Culp-Ressler’s dismaying — and potentially disturbing and triggering — write-up of the study for ThinkProgress, “1 in 3 University of North Dakota Men Surveyed Would Rape a Woman If They Could Get Away With It.”

That’s a frightening headline. The details are, if anything, even worse:

Nearly one in three college men admit they might rape a woman if they knew no one would find out and they wouldn’t face any consequences, according to a new study [“Denying Rape But Endorsing Forceful Intercourse: Exploring Differences Among Responders”] conducted by researchers at the University of North Dakota.

But, when the researchers actually used the word “rape” in their question, those numbers dropped much lower — suggesting that many college men don’t associate the act of forcing a woman to have sex with them with the crime of committing rape.

According to the survey, which analyzed responses from 73 men attending the same college, 31.7 percent of participants said they would act on “intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse” if they were confident they could get away with it. When asked whether they would act on “intentions to rape a woman” with the same assurances they wouldn’t face consequences, just 13.6 percent of participants agreed. …

“The No. 1 point is there are people that will say they would force a woman to have sex but would deny they would rape a woman,” Sarah R. Edwards, an assistant professor of counseling psychology at the University of North Dakota and the lead researcher for the study, told Newsweek.

So take your pick there as to which part of that is most disturbing. Is it that 13.6 percent of male college students in the study willingly volunteered to identify themselves as rapists? Or is it that an additional 18.1 percent of male college students freely volunteered that they would rape women, but don’t even recognize that this makes them rapists?

Put together, that total of 31.7 percent — nearly one in three — is a staggering finding of pervasive predatory criminality. Here we have one in three UND male students freely admitting that the only reason they refrain from “forcing a woman into sexual intercourse” is that they might be caught and punished.

That suggests one necessary first step in response, which involves blunt, forceful law enforcement. In the short term, and at the crudest level, it tells us that the threat of getting caught must be immediate, tangible and certain, and the punishment must be consequential and severe. If one in three male college students says that they only refrain from attacking women due to fear of a criminal/legal deterrent, then that criminal/leal deterrent needs to be made more forceful and obvious as an urgent matter of basic public safety. We need VAWA on steroids.

But the vast scope of the problem here also suggests that it’s beyond the capability of law enforcement to handle on its own. We can ask the police and the justice system to maintain law and order and public safety when the criminal element in society is a small percentage of the population, but when that element makes up a third of the male population, then a law enforcement response, on its own, will be neither adequate nor sustainable. Law enforcement can’t be asked or expected to work in a context in which legal enforcement is the only deterrent to crime — in which 31.7 percent of the male population freely admits that they’ll prey on others if they’re not stopped by police. Police aren’t equipped to handle such a context — for that we would need prison guards.

What we see here, in other words, is evidence of a complete breakdown at multiple levels of society. These are college students, remember. These are educated young men whose applications included their involvement in all sorts of extracurricular civic activities, and who were able to provide glowing letters of recommendation from mentors and civic leaders, teachers, coaches and pastors. These are young men who have excelled in and been commended by multiple spheres of civil society, with all of those spheres failing to recognize or to respond to the fact that these young men are also fundamentally warped, damaged and misshapen. This is part of what we mean when we talk about rape culture.

Changing that context therefore means fixing what has gone wrong with schools, sports, churches, and every other organization that was involved in the character formation of these character-deformed men.

Culp-Ressler offers a brief, but helpful, discussion of those implications from this study:

The push to address sexual assault on campus has sparked a widespread discussion about “rape culture,” a term once relegated to the feminist blogosphere that has recently become more mainstream. Rape culture refers to the larger societal norms that allow rape to thrive — the lack of consequences for people who commit rape, the assumption that this type of sexual behavior is a normal aspect of gender relations, and the obscuring of rape as a serious crime. Participants’ responses to the University of North Dakota study fit neatly into this worldview.

Previous studies have revealed similar attitudes among both men and women. Asweeping international survey of men conducted by United Nations researchers found that most men who had perpetrated rape simply believed they had the right to take control of women’s bodies. A survey of U.S. teens found that many young men are manipulating their partners into sex and getting away with it. And a study that focused specifically on teenage girls in the United States found that most of them assume sexual coercion and violence is normal, because they think men simply can’t control their sex drives.

In order to reach the population of men who don’t currently associate forcible sex with rape, the lead authors of the new study suggest education programs that focus on defining sexual consent and encouraging healthy relationships. Simply pushing an anti-rape message won’t necessarily reach those men, they point out, because they don’t think of themselves as rapists.

Similarly, the schools, teams, clubs, churches, businesses, etc., that have trained these young men to be sexual predators “don’t think of themselves” as training academies for rapists. But that is evidently what many of them are.

Sanctuary

December 30, 2014 By Fred Clark

Scot McKnight shares this story from Caitlin McGlade of the (Arizona) Republic, “Arizona churches join sanctuary movement for immigrants“:

Eleazar Misael Perez Cabrera sleeps in the music room at Shadow Rock United Church of Christ in north Phoenix.

Spiral notebooks lean between shelving cubes along one wall. Black and tan filing cabinets line another. A piano stands opposite Cabrera’s twin bed.

He has stayed there since Nov. 17.

The church has become his home, his sanctuary. But for how much longer? He shrugs. The 31-year-old Guatemalan immigrant knows this at least: He is safe.

Cabrera and Shadow Rock Church are part of a growing movement of activist congregation leaders who believe the United States has violated human rights by deporting millions of immigrants to unsafe countries and separating families.

They have opened spare rooms, kitchens and bathrooms to immigrants who fear deportation and to pressure authorities to pass reform that provides more comprehensive paths to citizenship.

And, generally, those immigrants are safe from deportation as long as they don’t leave the church. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a policy that discourages agents from conducting arrests at places of worship, schools or hospitals.

This has echoes of the Sanctuary movement of the 1980s, when American churches sheltered refugees from the proxy wars of Central America. But the roots of the idea are far, far older than that.

Charles Laughton and Maureen O'Hara as Quasimodo and Esmeralda in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (1939). — Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara as Quasimodo and Esmeralda in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1939).

The idea of sacred spaces as refuge is an ancient one. We can find it in the Hebrew scriptures, in the laws establishing cities and places of refuge for the persecuted and for the guilty alike. And in medieval times, churches often served as such places of safety for those fleeing death, imprisonment or exile (provided, of course, that those seeking refuge were not fleeing death, imprisonment or exile at the hands of the church).

The idea is embedded in our language, in the way the word “sanctuary” has evolved to mean both a sacred space and a refuge or preserve. Christians gather in the sanctuaries of churches, places set apart for worship. We also establish sanctuaries for wildlife, places set apart to preserve that which is threatened.

The long history of this idea of sanctuary surfaced this summer in Ferguson, Missouri, when police raided a school building adjacent to St. Mark’s Church that the church had set apart as a “safe haven” for protesters following the killing of Michael Brown. That incident raised odd echoes of the ancient practice as reports attached great implicit importance to the question of whether police had ventured into the holy ground of the church itself or just into the proximate property that was not itself a “sanctuary.”

Sanctuary has always been a murky, tangled concept. These places of refuge lack any tangible power to enforce their claim as safe spaces. Thus while the right or rite of sanctuary exists as a challenge to the power of the Powers That Be and a reminder of their limits, that right is also dependent on the consent of the powerful. In the story above, Eleazar Cabrera isn’t protected by law, but by custom. (The name of the church — Shadow Rock — is evocative. The shelter of sanctuary may not be so much from the strength of a rock, but from the idea of its shadow.)

Sanctuary is, in one sense, a powerful expression of the separation of church and state, but it is also, in a sense, a reflection of their inevitable entanglement. The concept also raises a fascinating question of cause and effect: Are sacred spaces recognized as refuges because they are sacred? Or are they sacred because they are recognized as places of refuge? Are they able to stand against the Powers That Be because they are holy? Or are they holy because they stand against the Powers That Be?

At its best, I think, the idea of sanctuary embodies the best of the church. It can be a refuge, a safe place for those who have no where else to turn. It can be a place that defends the otherwise defenseless. The needy and desperate should be able to flee to the church for refuge — to pound on its door, crying “Sanctuary,” and to be welcomed in and given shelter.

But the beauty of that is, sadly, shown more in its absence than in its actuality. The story of Shadow Rock and its rescue of Eleazar Cabrera stands out because it is exceptional.

This hopeful story of sanctuary stands in stark contrast to the heartbreaking story of Leelah Alcorn, a 17-year-old transgender girl in Ohio for whom the church was anything but a sanctuary, refuge, shelter or safe haven.

The sanctuary that turned away this child was not a sanctuary at all. It was not a sacred space. It was, and is, unholy.

State lotteries and truth in advertising

November 14, 2014 By Fred Clark

Politically, state lotteries seem as untouchable as they are indefensible. They’re predatory and regressive — a reverse Robin Hood scheme that takes from the poor to give to the wealthy to the tune of $68 billion a year. But they’re guaranteed to endure because they combine two of Americans’ favorite pastimes: gambling and victim-blaming.

State lotteries divide the public into two constituencies: Those who lose money to them and those who do not. Or, more forcefully, Losers and Freeloaders. Neither constituency is likely to support any change in the current state lottery system other than an expansion of it.

It seems almost impossible to persuade the Freeloaders to oppose the lotteries because they’re aware that these crooked games account for billions in state revenue for which, as it stands, they don’t have to contribute a single dime. The lotteries afford them the opportunity for perfectly legal free-riding and they’re not interested in any change that would involve them having to begin paying their fair share. Freeloading is a sweet deal and they’d like to keep it, thank you very much.

But it’s not just about the money for the Freeloaders. State lotteries provide them with something that Americans treasure far more than money. Lotteries also offer them the chance to indulge in the national pastime — basking in moral superiority. Not only do the Freeloaders get to look down on the Losers as their moral and intellectual inferiors, but the lottery also reassures them that this is How The World Ought To Be. It reinforces the just-world mythology that says the poor deserve to be poor because they’re careless with money, uneducated, impulsive, etc.

As for the former group, the Losers, well, telling people “You’re being a sucker” is not the easiest way to win political support. We can euphemize and rephrase that message more tactfully, of course, but there’s no way to change the substance of it.

The problem is not just that such a message is off-putting, but that it triggers a host of cognitive defense mechanisms that prevent it from being heard and accepted. No matter how delicately and cautiously the subject is raised, people who are being taken advantage of tend to deny that is the case. None of us wants to admit that — due to desperation or greed or credulity — we’ve allowed ourselves to be swindled. Con-artists of all stripes count on that. That’s a key tool of their trade. They rely on the fact that most victims would rather continue to be swindled than to admit they’d ever been the victim of a con in the first place. They rely on the fact that their victims are more likely to get angry with someone who sees them as victims than they are to get angry with those who victimize them.

More importantly, though, many of the Losers forfeiting their money in state-run lotteries already know it’s a crooked game. They know that the odds against winning any meaningful sum are astronomical. But when such a microscopically slight hope is the only hope you have, you don’t want to see that taken away. They recognize that it’s very close to impossible to escape their fate with a winning lottery ticket, but they also recognize that everything else is a rigged game too and that the astronomical odds against changing their lives via the lottery are still better than the astronomical odds of changing their lives through any of the work or opportunities they will otherwise be allowed to pursue.

Many of the Losers know the lottery is a lie. But they know that the just-world mythology of the Freeloaders is an even bigger lie. The lie of the lottery may offer them nearly nothing, but the bigger lie offers them absolutely nothing. And choosing nearly no hope over absolutely no hope is a rational choice.

Both constituencies, then, are invested in supporting the status quo. So the politics of state lotteries seems unstoppable. It seems we’re likely to see them expand and grow — siphoning away billions more every year from the poorest people in order to give more free subsidies to the wealthiest.

And this depressing reality, even more depressingly, seems like a metaphor for the whole of American politics. The game is rigged and there’s nothing that can be done.

This is why George Orwell made lotteries such a central theme in 1984. When we speak of “Big Brother” or condemn something as “Orwellian” these days, most of the time we’re talking about intrusive surveillance or “Newspeak” or subservient, incurious media. But everything Big Brother did in 1984 was dependent on the lottery. Of all the lies Big Brother told, the lottery was the lie that made everything else possible — the lie that kept the proles in line. As long as the public loved the lie of the lottery, Big Brother’s reign was secure. The lottery was the lie that ensured he had the consent of the governed — the consent of the oppressed.

John Oliver and his team at Last Week Tonight provided an excellent overview of the perversity of America’s state lotteries:

Most of that is really good. (Oliver leans a bit too heavily on the troubles that winning a lottery can bring, which is not a compelling argument — particularly not since, as Oliver shows, it’s a problem that it’s ridiculously unlikely any of us will ever have to worry about.)

The strongest aspect of Oliver’s piece, I think, is his focus on the massive and massively misleading advertising campaigns for these state lotteries. That’s important, because those advertisements explain how and why those who play the lottery have come to fall for this con. It’s not because they’re stupid or innumerate. It’s because they’ve been lied to — repeatedly and constantly, on TV, on the radio, on billboards and buses and from the counters of every convenience store. They’ve been lied to about the likelihood of winning. And they’ve been lied to about the purported social benefits of the lottery itself.

The state lotteries are sold with lies. And those lies are told with the full authority and credibility of the states themselves.

Maybe you’re thinking that’s an exaggeration. After all, false advertising is illegal. Those state lottery ads aren’t legally allowed to say things that aren’t true.

That’s true for most advertising. We have strict truth-in-advertising laws that prevent marketers from making false claims about the benefits of their products or from hiding their potential downside. That’s part of why, for example, those long legal explanations are part of ads for an auto leasing offer. Or why those long lists of potential side effects are part of every pharmaceutical ad. Truth-in-advertising laws are also why every other form of legal gambling — from McDonald’s Monopoly Game to mutual fund managers — has to include statements of odds or reminders that no single anecdote should be regarded as a typical outcome or that one example of past performance does not imply future results.

But here’s the thing: State lotteries are exempt from truth-in-advertising laws.

States dependent on lottery revenue aren’t eager to, um, advertise that fact. The same marketing teams who earn billions conceiving and promoting all of that state-lottery advertising have also worked hard to ensure that this fact is not near the front of the public’s mind. So let me repeat that again:

State lotteries are exempt from truth-in-advertising laws.

And this, I think, offers some promise for changing the politics of state lotteries. This is a way of taking them on without prompting a defensive response from either the Losers or the Freeloaders. We don’t attack the lotteries themselves, we attack their exemption from truth-in-advertising laws.

I think that has promise even if such a campaign never succeeds in ending that exemption. Simply increasing public awareness of that exemption would do a great deal to undermine the appeal of these rigged games. It would do a great deal, I think, to increase awareness that the games are, in fact, a very bad bet. (Which they are. A pick-three lottery ticket has a 1-in-1,000 chance of winning, with a payout that’s far, far less than 1,000-to-1. And the bigger jackpot games are even worse.)

Anyone who was forced to defend this exemption wouldn’t have an easy time of it. They would find themselves having to argue, simultaneously, that: A) We are not lying to you! and B) We must fight to preserve our legal right to lie to you. Point B will make Point A much harder for most people to believe.

Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly … in bed

October 31, 2014 By Fred Clark

I both praised and poked a bit of fun at the long list of qualifying adjectives that ethicist Dave Gushee employs when defending a “covenantal-marital” approach to sexual ethics. The key factor, he says, is marriage — but then he quickly has to say what all he means by marriage, clarifying and expanding the meaning of it. A marriage covenant needs to be “faithful and exclusive” and to be “loving, nonexploitative, noncoercive, reciprocal …”

The same thing happens when we look for more than just a momentary glance at any other proposed sexual ethic. Others may say the key factor is mutual consent — but then they quickly add a similar wall of adjectives to clarify that what they mean by consent also includes many of the same qualities. Or a Lennonist may say “All you need is love,” but then again we see the rush of adjectives to explain what they mean — and do not mean — by “love.” (In a sense, that’s what the apostle Paul does, beautifully, in 1 Corinthians 13.)

In every case, these lists of qualifying and expanding adjectives are needed, I think, because of the intrinsic oddity of trying to talk about “sexual ethics” as something separate and distinct from, you know, just plain ethics. All that other stuff we talk about under the umbrella of ethics for the majority of our lives when we’re fully clothed and out of bed can’t be set aside when we turn to the matter of sex. That, it seems to me, is the pitfall for a lot of discussion of “sexual ethics” — it tries to set all that aside to focus on this particular thing as wholly distinct. And it’s not. It’s a part of our lives, not apart from our lives.

All the rest of what we think of as ethics shouldn’t stop at the bedroom door, replaced there by the separate sub-category of “sexual ethics.” Creating such a separate category creates the danger of exempting that category from all the other stuff we think of as ethical obligations, duties, rights and wrongs. Rather than risk segregating “sexual ethics” from the rest of our ethics, we might be better served by some variation of that silly game we play with fortune cookies. We should reaffirm what we already know or believe about ethics … “in bed.”

If anything, all that other stuff that constitutes the rest of our ethical thinking and practice becomes more important during sexytime, because that is where we encounter one another at our most vulnerable. We’re naked, exposed, open and extended to one another. If we’re doing it right, we’re poised to surrender control to one another. Given all that, it’s strange that most talk of “sexual ethics” mainly involves the preconditions and the context for that activity without addressing the activity itself.*

Part of the weirdness that flows from this separation of sexual ethics can be seen in the way we turn away from the rest of our ought-talk when anything remotely suggests that sexuality is part of the equation.

Think of Micah 6:8. That verse has always been a favorite of mine because growing up in central Jersey we would pass the nearby synagogue where it was carved in huge letters on the wall facing West Seventh Street: “DO JVSTICE • LOVE MERCY • WALK HVMBLY WITH THY GOD.”

Here’s the full verse: “God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

That passage is familiar enough for most Christians that if we quote the first part of it’s question — “What does the Lord require of you?” — it will usually prompt them to give Micah’s answer: “To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

But if we raise that same question in any context that suggests sex or sexuality is anywhere in the mix, then we’ll get a very different answer.

Ask, “What does the Lord require of you as a single person?” or “What does the Lord require of you as a spouse?” or “What does the Lord require of you as someone who is LGBT?“** and the ensuing discussion won’t sound anything at all like the last half of Micah 6:8.

That’s a weird move. Ask a conservative white evangelical “What does the Lord require of you when it comes to human sexuality?” and they will respond “Chastity until lifelong biblical marriage between one man and one woman.”

That’s the wrong answer.

Even if you believe that’s proper sexual ethics, Micah still says that’s the wrong answer. The right answer doesn’t go away just because genitals are part of the discussion. We may want to add to the right answer, to expand on it and clarify it for particular contexts, but we still have to start there.

What does the Lord require of you when it comes to human sexuality? To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God.

God has told you, O mortal, what is good. God has told you, O single people, what is good. God has told you, O married people, O straight people, O queer people, O all people, what is good.

And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* About which, let me just say this much: The Golden Rule is always important as an ethical guide — reciprocity is one aspect of justice and we should always strive to do right by one another. But it’s also practical. The character-building practice of the Golden Rule in all of life helps train us to appreciate and to negotiate — in both senses — the difference between our various diverse ideas about “as you would have them do unto you.” (My favorite beverage is strong black coffee. The Golden Rule doesn’t mean that I should insist everyone gets strong, black coffee, but rather that they get to enjoy whatever their favorite beverage is just as I get to enjoy mine. If my guest prefers tea, then the Golden Rule says I need to learn to make a good cup of tea.)

** No one ever asks “What does the Lord require of you as a cis-het/straight person?” because as the normative majority, people like me enjoy the privilege of not being defined/bounded by our sexuality the way we insist everyone else must be. We’re free to go about our lives as though we don’t have a sexuality, just like we white people don’t have a race/color/ethnicity. It may be impossible to overstate how much time and energy this frees up, or how much psychic/emotional toil this spares us.

Here’s that ‘Anything Goes’ rant about evangelical sexual ethics

October 29, 2014 By Fred Clark

As we’ve discussed here many times, the problem with the white evangelical sexual ethic is that it isn’t one. At a popular level in the white evangelical subculture, the place that needs to be occupied by a reliable, credible sexual ethic is occupied instead by what Libby Anne calls “The Tale of Two Boxes.”

This is a system with two, and only two, categories for considering whether any given sexual act or practice is good or bad, right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy, harmful or peachy-keen. It asks one and only one yes/no question: Are you married? In it’s simplest form, Libby Anne’s Two Boxes looks like this:

The long history of a Two Boxes approach helps us understand some of the confusion and reflexive terror that white evangelicals express in response to the possibility of marriage equality. They’ve trained themselves to think solely in terms of Unmarried Sex Is Bad and Married Sex Is Good, so the possibility of same-sex couples having good, God-approved married sex sets them scrambling, realizing for the first time perhaps that this Two Boxes system is woefully inadequate and can’t account for many of the ideas they’ve been trying to cram into it or to draw out of it.

In the realm of formal, academic evangelical ethics, things tend to be clearer and more sophisticated than the crude and clumsy Two Boxes approach that dominates at the popular level. But even these scholarly ethicists are at a disadvantage because it’s not easy to talk about a Christian sexual ethics within a tradition that, as Barry Taylor notes, has “very little sense of a comprehensive theology of sexuality.”

These scholarly evangelical ethicists are also up against the difficulty of having to, at least in some sense, work backwards. As I’ve said here before, “forbidden” and “not forbidden” are supposed to be the conclusions derived from ethical work, not the starting point.

Having said all of that, though, many white evangelical ethicists do manage to discuss sexual ethics in a way that is more meaningful, more practical, and more true, than the popular True Boxes approach. They clarify and qualify what they mean by the category of marriage, and why it is that marriage is for them a necessary condition, and what it is about marriage that provides and allows for this ethical significance.

My friend Dave Gushee has done this in a host of books and articles in which he fleshes out in more substantive ways the “covenental-marital” sexual ethic he references in his new book Changing Our Mind. The short chapter in that short book doesn’t give him much space to revisit that larger argument, but he nods toward it with a wall-of-adjectives approach, writing of: “the covenantal-marital sexual ethical standard — one person, for life, faithful and exclusive, in a loving, nonexploitative, noncoercive, reciprocal relationship.”

Those adjectives won’t allow for a clumsy Two Boxes approach that says all married sex is good because it occurs within marriage. Gushee’s description shows he needs more than just the category “Married” to conclude something is good. It also needs to be “loving, nonexploitative, noncoercive, reciprocal” among other things.

That’s good! But it’s undermined by his earlier discussion of supposed alternatives to this “covenantal-marital sexual ethical standard.” That discussion includes something that seems like boilerplate from some weird list of stock phrases that it seems the evangelical ethicists guild requires its members to insert in all such discussions.

The guild seems to have fashioned this mandatory boilerplate in the 1960s or 1970s, back when John Updike was publishing his earliest novels. And like an early Updike novel, it seems both moralistic and dated — far removed from any conversation that’s going on now.

Here’s that bit in Dave’s new book:

Much of contemporary western culture would say: An appropriate sexual ethic is to do whatever you want to do sexually if it doesn’t hurt anybody who doesn’t want to get hurt while having sex — or perhaps, with a bit more refinement, if it doesn’t involve the exploitation of a minor or an impaired person or doesn’t risk pregnancy or disease. Let’s call this the mutual consent ethic. Other than that, anything goes.

Some, refining their ethic to a somewhat higher and more demanding level, would say: An appropriate sexual ethic is to find a person to love, and to restrict sex only to that person for as long as that relationship shall last. Let’s call this the loving relationship ethic.

Christianity has historically said: God’s plan for sexual ethics requires a man and a woman to make a binding lifetime marriage covenant with each other (before God, church and state, representing civil society), and to remain faithful to the promises of that covenant, including fidelity and exclusivity, until one partner dies a natural death. Let’s call this the covenantal-marital ethic. It bans all non-marital sex, infidelity, abandonment and divorce (with rare exceptions), making celibacy the only alternative to marriage.

Here’s the problem with that, and why it gives me the howling fantods every time I encounter this bit. The argument here is that the so-called “mutual consent ethic” is inadequate because mutual consent is not sufficient. The “loving relationship ethic” is also dismissed because it is not, by itself, sufficient. And then the covenental-marital ethic is commended as the only sufficient approach.

Two problems (at least) arise here. First is that the standard of sufficiency prevents consideration of whether or not the mutual-consent and loving-relationship arguments may be necessary. And second is the implication that marriage satisfies this standard of sufficiency.

As we’ve already seen, Gushee’s own argument is better than this elsewhere. We’ve already seen that he believes — correctly! — that marriage, by itself, is not sufficient. That’s why that wall of adjectives was necessary: “loving, nonexploitative, noncoercive, reciprocal,” etc.

Notice what that list includes — what it has to include: mutual consent and loving relationship. The very things that got waved away earlier in the discussion turn out to be necessary after all.

The inadequate treatment of those things also muddles the claim that a conservative evangelical ethicist needs to be defending about marriage itself. That claim cannot be — as the wall of adjectives demonstrates — that marriage is a sufficient substitute for a sexual ethic, a la Libby Anne’s Two Boxes. The claim these ethicists need to be defending, rather, is that marriage is a necessary component for a credible Christian sexual ethic. It’s difficult to argue for the necessity of marriage in sexual ethics if you’re half-convinced that you’re trying to argue for the sufficiency of it.

I think the problem of this boilerplate language here comes from working backwards. Evangelical ethicists already know what the correct answer has to be, so it can be difficult for them to muster much patience to deal with any alternatives. Those alternatives thus can get caricatured and quickly dismissed in a way that undermines not just them, but the evangelical ethicists’ own arguments.

In the particular case of Gushee’s discussion here, I think he’d have been on stronger ground if he had engaged the actual substance of the competing ethical approaches. That might have allowed him to acknowledge that mutual consent cannot be dismissed just because it is not, by itself, a sufficient ethic. His argument would have been stronger if he had, instead, recognized mutual consent as a necessary, but not sufficient, component of any credible sexual ethic.

But that would involve deviating from the standard boilerplate that evangelical ethicists seem to have been stuck on for decades.

The most infuriating part of that boilerplate is this: “Other than that, anything goes.”

Feh. Another old friend of mine who is also an academic Christian ethicist recites this phrase all the time, always derisively. (Yes, I have multiple friends who are academic Christian ethicists. Welcome to my world.) “As long as its between two consenting adults, then anything goes,” he says, always as though he’s quoting someone. And yet he’s usually saying it in response to arguments from people who haven’t actually said that.

I’m sure that it’s possible, if we search hard enough, to find that some people actually are arguing “Other than that, anything goes.” The world is large and it’s possible to find some people actually arguing almost anything. So, yes, I’ll grant that someone, somewhere in 2014 is still clutching their first edition of Fear of Flying and discussing mutual consent as the end point, the whole, the sum, of sexual ethics. And they may even use the very same Cole Porter lyric that every evangelical ethicist loves to quote, insisting that, beyond mutual consent, “anything goes.”

They may glibly approve of affairs, betrayals, promise-breaking, and scaring the horses. They may shrug away the myriad forms of power imbalances that can coercively produce a veneer of mutual consent. They may have so little regard for personal safety that they insist there can be no valid negative response to the Beatles’ question, “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” because, hey, if there’s mutual consent, then “other than that, anything goes!“

But while it might be possible to find someone who is actually arguing that, it will be much harder to find anyone else who’s paying attention to them or who takes that argument seriously.

When mutual consent is discussed today, it is almost always held up as a necessary condition — a necessary starting point. That’s been true for more than a decade now and this discussion has been fruitful, constructive and insightful.

It’s frustrating, then, to keep tripping over this “other than that, anything goes” cliché, because it means that evangelical ethicists haven’t been listening to or participating in that discussion. They still only seem able to hear mention of mutual consent as some dusty Aquarian claim that it is the sufficient sum of sexual ethics. And so they respond dismissively, thereby apparently missing and dismissing the vitally important fact that any credible sexual ethic must include mutual consent as a necessary, essential ingredient.

That dismissal — particularly in its crudest, Two-Boxes form — can lead to some ugly ideas about wifely duties, treating marriage vows as a lifelong, irrevocable, unchangeable granting of perpetual consent. And that can get really bad, really fast.

When I encounter that dismissive stock phrase — “Other than that, anything goes” — I see an argument that doesn’t take consent seriously. And that makes it an argument I can’t take seriously.

That’s why I tend to be disappointed by my academic evangelical ethicist friends when I turn to them for “fresh thinking about what Christian sexual ethics should look like.” If you’re really looking for such fresh thinking, then one of the best places to turn these days is to the ongoing, incisive vivisection of evangelical purity culture that’s unfolding right now. This is happening mostly online in social media, and it’s being done, mostly, by young women. These young women may not have the academic credentials and institutional support of the professional ethics guild, but they respect the vital importance of consent, they’re wicked smart, and they have the advantage of not working backwards.