Conservatives Are Still Confused About Consent

October 16, 2017 By Fred Clark

From the video description on YouTube: “In this video, Kelley Schiffman (Yale University) discusses one of the most basic tools in the philosophers’s tool kit: the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions.”

And, yes, this is very basic stuff, which is another way of saying that it’s very important stuff. And thus worth revisiting:

For a textbook example of the monstrous stupidity that can come from failing to grasp this textbook distinction, see David French’s latest rendition of the stock conservative rant about “modern sexual morality.” Or let me save you a click: French doesn’t understand what “consent” means and doesn’t understand it’s moral significance. Specifically, he’s deeply confused about the distinction between necessary and sufficient.

French is not unique in this regard. Some variation of this same non-argument gets rehashed and regurgitated in every other issue of “conservative” journals like National Review, First Things, World magazine, etc. They’ve been repeating this nonsense, exposing their ignorance on this point, for decades. Relentlessly.

This is often, as in French’s perfunctory recitation, expressed in the form of straw-man attacks against “modern sexual morality,” which is dishonestly caricatured as “Anything Goes among consenting adults.”

It’s an immensely frustrating, bewildering “conversation.” And it’s been going around and around in the same circle for decades. It’s based on their failure, or their refusal, to recognize that basic distinction between necessity and sufficiency.

“Consent is necessary.”

“Oh, so you’re saying consent is sufficient!”

“No, not sufficient. But necessary.”

“Ooh, la-ti-dah, consent is sufficient so Anything Goes!”

“We’re not saying that. We’re saying it is necessary. Without consent, nothing goes.”

“So it’s fine by you if a man marries a box turtle!”

“What thuff–?”

“Free love! Anything goes among consenting adults! That’s what you’re saying!”

“No. Again. We’re saying consent is necess–”

“[Starts singing ‘Let the Sun Shine’ from Hair in a mocking, sarcastic voice.]”

Lather, rinse, repeat. After endless cycles of this same bizarre “debate,” I honestly cannot tell at this point whether these folks are genuinely this obtuse, or if they’re doing this deliberately in bad faith. I also cannot tell which interpretation would be more charitable.

Insufficient

The best spin I can put on this in their defense would be some kind of fear-driven slippery slope theory. The hobgoblin of all-sufficient consent is, in their view, such an immense potential threat to their “traditional” sexual morality that it must be guarded against at all costs. Whatever the legitimacy of claims about the necessity of consent, such talk serves to underscore its essential moral significance — and that might lead to a slippery slope in which some might then decide that it is of exclusive moral significance. If we allow any moral value for consent, then some might decide it is the only value, or the ultimate value. And, thus, to guard against that, we must deny that consent has any moral significance. We must pretend that consent is not a necessary condition for sexual morality lest that lead — somehow, somewhere, some day — to others claiming that it is the solely sufficient condition for sexual morality.

It’s likelier, I think, that their confusion over our claims is a consequence of the same confusion they have about their own claims. Their “traditional sexual morality” holds that marriage is a necessary condition for moral sex, but they’ve gotten that garbled in their heads into the idea that marriage is a sufficient condition for moral sex. And if marriage is, by itself, sufficient, then nothing else can be recognized as necessary. (This is, by the way, why they’re losing the argument they want to make in defense of marriage. Because they’ve been so busy asserting the sufficiency of marriage for sexual morality, they haven’t even bothered trying to explain why anyone should regard it as necessary.)

Anyway, I’m now repeating myself — which is probably an unavoidable result of responding to people who are repeating themselves. See earlier:

• But if homosexuality isn’t ‘objectively immoral,’ then Anything Goes …

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

• Consent is a necessary prerequisite for any sexual ethic

Trump and Erdogan and ‘a certain kind of consent’

May 16, 2017 By Fred Clark

“It’s too late now,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in April after ramming through a national referendum that “will greatly expand the powers of his office.”

Many citizens of Turkey have questioned the legitimacy of the results of that referendum vote, which took place during a period in which the increasingly authoritarian Erdogan was busily arresting journalists, professors, and opposition politicians. But the result — a narrow, 51-percent alleged majority — stands, and so the country’s constitution will be amended to give more power, with fewer checks and balances, to its president.

That president is here in the U.S. today, visiting the White House to meet with President Donald Trump, who was among the very few world leaders who called to congratulate Erdogan after his referendum “victory.” Most leaders of most constitutional democracies did not call to offer congratulations because they did not see increasing authoritarianism in Turkey as a Good Thing. But Trump did.

This meeting would be a major controversy and a big story in more normal times. Hosting a wanna-be strongman who is — at this very moment — actively curtailing human rights and liberties in his own country would be the sort of thing that a normal president and normal White House would be hard-pressed to defend. But we do not have a normal president or a normal White House. We have Donald Trump.

And Trump’s enthusiastic welcome for Erdogan today is barely making any news at all because it’s getting drowned out by yesterday’s blockbuster news that President Trump himself leaked highly classified intelligence to high-ranking Russian officials in the Oval Office.

The story was first reported by The Washington Post’s Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe: “Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador.” It was subsequently confirmed, independently, by The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Buzzfeed. (Lawfare has a good summary of the gravity and repercussions of what it calls a “bombshell” revelation.)

Trump’s defenders rushed to denounce this story as “fake news,” but administration officials offered only non-denial denials. And then, this morning, Trump himself took to Twitter to announce that yep, he did it. On purpose. (It was the same pattern as with last week’s firing of FBI chief Jim Comey. First Trump sends his aides out to deny that the firing had anything to do with the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s ties to Russian oligarchs and mobsters, and then — after they’ve all spent a day going on record saying that — he throws those same aides under the bus by coming forward himself to say that was exactly why he did it.)

LooseLips

This is unprecedented. It’s a huge story and a huge mess. If anyone other than the president had leaked this information in this way, they would be facing criminal charges. America’s ability to receive and respond to intelligence about terrorist threats was just dealt a major blow by the president himself. It’s all astonishing.

Coming on top of last week’s revelations about Trump’s deliberate attempt to quash the FBI’s criminal/counter-intelligence investigation into his campaign, it seems like this should be consequential. After a weekend in which people like James Fallows, Carl Bernstein and John Dean were lining up to explain how Trump’s obstruction of Comey’s investigation is worse than Watergate, we get this.

It’s overwhelming. And that’s the dangerous thing. We’re at risk of being overwhelmed. We freeze up, paralyzed, waiting for the next shoe to drop, even as it’s raining shoes. We can be so transfixed by the spectacle of Trump’s implosion that we become spectators. We watch what Republican Sen. Bob Corker yesterday called Trump’s “downward spiral” and assume it must mean that he is therefore swirling down the drain and will soon be out of sight, out of the way, out of office.

But that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening, rather, is that Trump is actively consolidating his power. He’s appointing judges — the younger the better — to every corner of the federal judiciary. He’s empowering white-nationalist vote-suppression expert Kris Kobach to take his disenfranchisement scheme nationwide. He’s got Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III busily reigniting the “War on Drugs” as a means of felonizing anyone who might vote against him.

Trump is increasingly Nixonian, but he’s not following the same path to disgrace and resignation that Richard Nixon followed. He’s following the path of disgrace and lawless power-grabbing that Erdogan has been mapping out in Turkey.

We can’t expect to just sit back and watch, assuming after every new astonishing revelation that, surely, now someone is at last going to do something about this trainwreck of a petty tyrant. We have to be that someone.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder recently talked with Chauncey De Vega for Salon. Snyder has seen this before. The things happening in Turkey. The things happening here. It isn’t new.

It can be stopped, but it won’t stop on it’s own.

Here’s Snyder:

We have a century of wisdom and very smart people who confronted situations like our own — but usually more demanding — and that wisdom can be condensed.

… The thing that matters the most is to realize that in moments like this your actions really do matter. It is ironic but in an authoritarian regime-change situation, the individual matters more than [in] a democracy. In an authoritarian regime change, at the beginning the individual has a special kind of power because the authoritarian regime depends on a certain kind of consent. Which means that if you are conscious of the moment that you are in, you can find the ways not to express your consent and you can also find the little ways to be a barrier. If enough people do that, it really can make a difference — but again only at the beginning.

… Be as courageous as you can. Do you actually care enough about freedom that you would take risks? Do individuals actually care about freedom? Think that through. I think if enough of us take the little risks at the beginning, which aren’t really that significant, this will prevent us from having to take bigger risks down the line.

We are still at a stage where protest is not illegal. We’re still at a stage where protest is not lethal. Those are the two big thresholds. We are still on the good side of both of those thresholds and so now is the time you want to pack in as much as you can because you could actually divert things. Once you get into a world where protest is illegal, then the things that I recommend like corporeal politics, getting out on the streets — they have to happen but they are much riskier. It’s a much different kind of decision.

You have to accept there is a time frame. Nobody can be sure how long this particular regime change with Trump will take, but there is a clock, and the clock really is ticking. It’s three years on the outside, but in more likelihood something like a year. In January 2018 we will probably have a pretty good idea which way this thing is going. It’s going to depend more on us than on them in the meantime. Once you get past a certain threshold, it starts to depend more on them than on us, and then things are much, much worse. It makes me sad to think how Americans would behave at that point.

… Don’t obey in advance because you have to start by orienting yourself against the general drift of things. If you can manage that, then the other lessons — such as supporting existing political and social institutions, supporting the truth and so on — those things will then come relatively easily if you can follow the first one, which is to get out of the drift, to recognize that this is the moment where you have to not behave as you did in October 2016. You have to set your own habits now.

Consent is necessary. This is not complicated.

October 17, 2016 By Fred Clark

I will be repeating myself here because apparently this needs to be repeated: Consent is necessary. This is the first, unavoidable aspect of any sexual ethics or ethical sex. It starts with consent.

But every time we repeat that simple, modest claim, we get denounced by so-called “conservatives” who go off on mighty rants condemning us as though we had said something very different. Those rants all rail against the idea that consent is sufficient — that it is the whole, and only, aspect of any sexual ethics or ethical sex. That ethics ends with consent.

Their bewilderment is bewildering. What is it about the conservative mindset that prevents them from being able to grasp this fundamental distinction? This is pretty elementary stuff, after all — necessary vs. sufficient is literally Chapter 1 textbook stuff in Logic or Ethics 101. More than that, it’s a basic distinction every student has to grasp before even signing up for such courses lest they mistakenly think that signing up for such Pre-req 101 courses means they’ve completed all the requirements for their major.

“One does not live by bread alone,” Jesus said. Bread — food — is necessary, but not sufficient. Without food, we would starve to death, but food alone is not sufficient — we also need clean water, air to breathe, grace, and a sense of purpose. The necessity of food does not cancel out the necessity of those other things, which is to say bread is necessary, but “bread alone” is not sufficient.

Again, not complicated. Whether or not they use the precise terminology, this necessary vs. sufficient distinction is something conservatives understand and are capable of applying when it comes to a thousand other things. But not to sex. Something in their brains recoils and misfires, and every repeated assertion of the necessity of consent provokes a boilerplate rant condemning the foolish “liberal” idea that consent is sufficient.

Here, for example, is blowhard talk-radio guru Rush Limbaugh speaking last week:

The left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. … If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it’s perfectly fine – whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there’s no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. … Consent is the magic key to the left.

Limbaugh somehow managed to recite this rant without using the stock phrase used in 99 percent of its incarnations: “Anything goes!” But that’s still his argument — that “the left” believes that as long as there’s consent, then “anything goes.”

But that’s not the claim. The claim is not that consent is sufficient, but that it is necessary. The claim is not that with consent, “anything goes,” but rather that without consent, nothing goes.

This same obtuseness — the same hostile inability to understand the necessity of consent — can be seen in the thousands of social media posts from “conservative” Christians eagerly pointing out “liberal hypocrisy” over the use of the word “pussy.” It’s hypocritical, they insist, for “liberals” to be upset with Donald Trump for saying the word pussy when so many others they don’t criticize are using that word too. Why, Beyoncé herself uses that word in a song!

pussyriot

Their confusion and incomprehension seems genuine. They seriously seem to believe that Trump’s comments were upsetting to others solely because he uttered the word “pussy” — completely overlooking what the rest of the world found deplorable, that he was boasting of sexual assault, of grabbing women “by the pussy” without their consent. Such staggering incomprehension is only possible due to these “conservative” folks’ utter inability to grasp the necessity of consent.

We see this same incomprehension manifested in many other ways, such as the constant appalling refrain from religious right types that not criminalizing same-sex couples will inevitably result in legalizing pedophilia and bestiality. Apart from the deliberate cruelty of that claim, it’s simply dumb — appealing only to those unable and unwilling to understand the meaning and primacy of consent.

The stubborn conservative refusal to understand this is as weird as it is frustrating. The idea is so utterly simple and basic, but it just makes them angry. Just look at that astonishing statement from Limbaugh. He’s furious about a basic tent of criminal law, blaming some conspiracy of “the left” for the idea that the absence of consent is what distinguishes rape as a crime. It’s easy to get so distracted by the offensiveness of his remarks there that one can miss noticing how unfathomably stupid that is.

So you “leftists” are saying that sex without consent is rape? Well, yes. That is what we’re saying, and also what criminal statutes in every state say, because that’s what these words mean. Yet even when he’s repeating that back to us, he’s unable to understand it.

What accounts for this angry incomprehension?

I suspect in part this dates back a generation, to conservative backlash against hippies and Woodstock and Aquarian fantasies about free love — the 1960s version of an idea that has always periodically emerged in various would-be utopian communities throughout history. So part of why conservatives can’t hear us when we say “consent is necessary” is because they’re too busy arguing with the vestigial hippies in their heads.

But I think the larger problem is that conservatives just don’t like the idea of sexual ethics or ethical sex. They’ve imagined they don’t need any of that because they have a much simpler, more categorical solution of their own: marriage. That’s the whole of conservative sexual ethics — or what conservatives appeal to instead of sexual ethics. Marriage, they want to believe, is necessary and sufficient for ethical sex.

The logic of this two-part assertion often leads to some ugly conclusions — such as the refusal to accept that raping one’s spouse is possible. But set aside the ghastlier implications of this way of thinking for now and consider the self-defeating nature of this two-part claim. This is a big reason why the defenders of “traditional sexual morality” have been unable to defend traditional sexual morality. Specifically, they’re so focused on defending the claim that marriage is sufficient, that they have failed to make any case that marriage is necessary.

This undermines their purported traditional morality in two important ways. First by distorting it — the claim that marital status alone is sufficient goes beyond, and thereby obliterates, the very ideas they’re trying to defend (just consider any traditional marriage vows — which consist of far more than, “OK, you’re married now so anything goes!”). And second by preventing them from paying any attention to the need to defend the necessity of marriage, which ought to be the essence of their argument.

This indefensible notion of the sufficiency of marriage is, I think, a major driver of their hostility to accepting the necessity of consent. If marriage is, in itself, sufficient, then nothing else can be necessary. Not consent, or dignity, or safety, or fidelity, or love, or a prudent concern for not scaring the horses. So they cannot accept or acknowledge or engage with the necessity of consent because that would force them to concede that their claims for the “sanctity of marriage” mean something other than the all-sufficiency of marriage and that they’re actually going to have to think responsibly about this stuff rather than just relying on the binary categories of married/not-married to do all their thinking for them.

I’m not going to do all of their homework for them, but it seems to me that what these folks ought to be doing is making a positive case for the necessity of marriage. That seems much more like what they want to be arguing for, but they’ll never be able to do so until they accept and acknowledge that marital status cannot be the only necessary consideration.

For the record, I think that marriage can be an excellent framework for supporting and nurturing the many things that ethical sex and sexual ethics require. I am not convinced it is the only such framework. In the parlance of our conservative neighbors, I could thus be said to have “rejected” or “abandoned” traditional morality.

Fair enough, but they should recognize that I have done so, in part, because they have refused to offer an argument not to — focusing instead on their indefensible, and ultimately odious, claim that marriage is not just necessary but sufficient. That has led them to reject the necessity of consent and, thereby, to equate their “traditional morality” with the defense of sexual assault. Their rejection of the necessity of consent, in other words, makes their traditional morality seem immoral.

Consent is a necessary prerequisite for any sexual ethic

May 27, 2015 By Fred Clark

Libby Anne of Love, Joy, Feminism has written several of the most insightful responses I’ve seen to the horrifying revelations of the history of sexual abuse by reality TV personality Josh Duggar, and to the disastrously inept response from his famous family. This is a story from her native tribe — the white evangelical/fundamentalist Christian patriarchal homeschooling subculture of Bill Gothard, the Quiverful cult, the Vision Forum, “courtship” and all the rest. While she has since gotten free of that world, she still knows it intimately, and you won’t find a better interpreter or translator of that world and its ways than Libby Anne.

(To back up that praise, consider this post: “My concerns about the Duggars.” And then consider that it was written more than three years ago.)

In that capacity as a translator and interpreter of the Duggars’ white Christian subculture, Libby Anne is particularly helpful when it comes to explaining why the members of that tribe — the Duggars and their defenders — seem mystified at the way the rest of the world is responding to the news of Josh Duggar’s past (perhaps) pattern of sexual abuse. She writes about “Josh Duggar and the Tale of Two Boxes” — a post that builds on her older post, “A Tale of Two Boxes: Contrasting Sexual Ethics.” That original post has become an indispensable piece of my own mental vocabulary because it does such a fine job of articulating the shape and the limits of evangelical sexual ethics — at least as popularly understood and practiced.

The Tale of Two Boxes clarifies a great deal, as I’ve written about before (see “Sex and theology” and, more recently, “Here’s that ‘Anything Goes’ rant about evangelical sexual ethics“). The basic idea is that for white evangelicals and other so-called social conservatives, all forms of extra-marital sex are considered sinful, while marital sex is good. This produces a system with two — and only two — categories to be considered: Married and Not-Married. And thus it creates a system that asks one — and only one — question when evaluating the ethical status of any given sex act: Are the actors married to one another?

The end result is Libby Anne’s Two Boxes:

Here’s how Libby Anne applies this to the case of Josh Duggar and the irreconcilably different understandings of his actions held by his defenders and those who are appalled by his deeds:

Social conservatives tend to divide sexual acts into “marital sex” and “non-marital sex.” For social conservatives, child sexual molestation is in the same category as gay sex or consensual premarital sex. When divided in this way, sexual molestation doesn’t look all that different from consensual premarital sex — though both are considered sin. This is why the Duggars can talk about Josh’s “mistakes” the way they do—as though it were simply him going too far with a girlfriend, or viewing pornography. Because for them, they’re in the same category—sexual contact before marriage.

Progressives do not have ethical or moral problems with premarital sexual intercourse — but they very much have a problem with child molesting. To conservatives this can look like an inconsistency — even hypocrisy — but it’s not. Progressive sexual ethics center around consent. Sexual contact that is consensual is okay. Sexual contact that isn’t consensual is not okay.

Consent is, indeed, the key factor here. But note that the problem is not only that this essential factor is absent from the “conservative” Two Boxes scheme. That Two-Boxes framework also prevents those steeped in it from comprehending the role that consent plays for the rest of us.

That, in turn, leads to the absurd cartoon straw-man that such conservatives love to mock and dismiss whenever the matter of consent comes up. Hence the reaction of my old friend the Kuyperian Marine, who could never seem to hear the word consent without sarcastically responding, “As long as its between two consenting adults, then anything goes!” This was an intelligent guy — a man with a Ph.D. in ethics who is capable of immensely subtle and principled thought on a host of other subjects. But he was unable to grasp the vital ethical importance of consent because he was so steeped in Two-Boxes ideology.

His confusion, and that of countless others, arises from misunderstanding statements like the one Libby Anne makes when she says that “Progressive sexual ethics center around consent.” His sexual ethics center around marital status, so he assumes — incorrectly — that this means consent must play an identical role in progressives’ sexual ethics to the role marital status plays in his own thinking. He assumes, in other words, that those hippy progressives also have Two Boxes.

To put this all another way, for social conservatives, marriage is necessary and sufficient for ethical sexual activity. When they hear folks like Libby Anne (or me) emphasizing the essential importance of consent, they therefore assume that we are, in turn, arguing that consent is necessary and sufficient for ethical sexual activity. But that’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying consent is necessary. Period.

Ethical sexual activity must be consensual. Take away mutual consent and you take away the possibility of ethical sexual contact. Mutual consent is the necessary starting point, the prerequisite for the possibility of ethical sex. But the presence of mutual consent alone is not sufficient to guarantee that, therefore, “anything goes.” It’s not as Two-Boxes simple or zipless as that. (Any attempt to posit a scenario in which mutual consent would be both necessary and sufficient would involve carefully constructing a simplified hypothetical in such a way as to acknowledge multiple other factors by way of excluding them from consideration in that particular case.)

The real task facing social conservatives is to make a convincing case that marriage is a necessary condition for ethical sex. Many of them aren’t even trying to make that case because they’re too busy defending the indefensible proposition of Two Boxes ideology — the claim that marriage is a sufficient condition for ethical sex. They seem to think that arguing for the necessity of marriage would be a step back from arguing for its sufficiency — and therefore a kind of retreat or wavering or compromise.

But it’s only a retreat from something absurd and morally reprehensible. I can respect and converse with someone who argues that both marriage and consent are necessary conditions for ethical sexual activity, but if someone is arguing that marriage is sufficient, then they cannot believe that consent matters (apart from a once-and-for-all-time “I do”) and that is a perspective I cannot respect or abide.

Trust, control, permission, consent

January 28, 2013 By Fred Clark

“Civility is a great friend of the status quo.”

“As a thought exercise, how many predators would have to be on the team before you’d no longer feel like cheering?”

“please, let’s stop saying ‘we let women lead’ and ‘i just feel like one of the guys’ and start living out a new story, together.”

“It’s a ‘nice’ form of dehumanization, but it’s still dehumanization nonetheless.”

I’ve passed her on the stairs many times, but never knew her history until I read this post.

“Who owns and control’s one’s body, especially when it comes to women: is it the individual herself or the community, through enforced practices of honor, virginity, veiling, and marriage?” (via)

“It is not their talking points that are the problem, it’s the beliefs that inform the talking points that are the problem.”

“The problem isn’t the wisdom of this advice; the problem is that this advice is necessary.”

“Oh, how I missed the certainly, the simplicity, the assurance that if you just follow the recipe, your life and family will turn out beautifully.”

“Better fathers and husbands means men abandoning male privilege and outdated gender roles.”

“For the authorities at our evangelical camp, a paradigm of sexual ethics that even acknowledges consent is seen as ‘watered down’ or ‘less biblical’ since it’s diverging from the typical Protestant stance on sexual relationships: no sex before marriage. Period. End of conversation.”

“At the moment the numbers are small, and they tend to keep fairly quiet about their change of heart, but the change is beginning.”

“The percentage of Americans who believe homosexuality is a sin has decreased significantly over the past year.”

“It’s time for the baptized to claim the priesthood of that baptism and to stand up, shake the dust off their sandals, and abandon a church where its hierarchy practices apartheid.”

“If I signed this, it would be a betrayal not only of myself but of my fellow priests and lay Catholics who want change.”

“As the Episcopal Bishop of Rhode Island, I support the bill before the General Assembly that would allow same-sex couples to marry in our state, not in spite of my Christian faith, but because of it.”

“The only excuse I have is that somewhere, in the back of my brain, I know that it is more repulsive in some evangelical circles for a woman to sound Marxist than to say the word penis.”

“They clearly didn’t believe us. They didn’t trust us.”

“Our moral goal should be to struggle against those real barriers — poverty, racism, and anti-female cultural oppression — that prevent authentic choice from being a reality for every woman.”

“Women have been arrested, institutionalized, or subjected to unwanted medical interventions due to their pregnancies.”

“I will never understand why people who hate abortion don’t love Planned Parenthood and tithe to it like it was their church, because they have prevented more abortions than all the fire-and-brimstone preachers on the planet combined.”

“It’s a bit of a relief that Bryant abandoned the pretense of giving a damn about women’s health. And a bit more of that kind of candor will also perhaps inhibit judges from taking such pretenses seriously.”

“Even if Roe survives as before and the wave of anti-choice state legislation flowing from the 2010 Republican landslide retreats, we still have to come to grips with the fact that a significant if decisively outnumbered minority of Americans, for reasons ranging from religious doctrine to fear of women’s sexuality, view or claim to view legalized abortion as a ‘Holocaust,’ and themselves as akin to the anti-Hitler resistance.”

Misogyny isn’t new; consent shouldn’t be confusing

July 8, 2012 By Fred Clark

Helen Lewis at the New Statesmen shows us “What online harassment looks like.” It’s an awful, potentially triggering, collection of “Obscene images, hate sites, and a game where people are invited to beat you up.”

This is disturbing and disturbed. It’s hateful, hate-filled stuff posted by boys who simply hate women. These boys hate women viscerally and violently.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course.

Amanda MacInnis of Cheese-Wearing Theology is taking us on a tour of similar harassment during the Protestant Reformation. Here’s the second post in her series: “Invectives: Examples of Reactions to Women in Leadership in the Reformation.”

I’d never heard of John Knox’s treatise, “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,” but geez, that man had issues.

I can begin to understand the sort of cautiously conservative church person who sees some of those “keep silent” clobber verses and takes them as supporting limits on women’s participation in the church. I think those folks are utterly wrong, but I can appreciate that they’re at least basing their wrongness on something other than straight-up misogyny and a seething hatred of women.

But the kind of invective MacInnis collects here can’t be explained as a mere attempt to elevate the clobber verses into an eternal rule. You only write like that when you despise women.

For this collection of invective, as with Lewis’ more recent collection of online examples, it doesn’t seem we’re really seeing a “reaction” to women or to anything any given woman has ever said or done. For these men, hatred of women seems to be the starting point, not the conclusion, response or reaction they want to pretend it is.

* * * * * * * * *

American Family Association culture-warrior Bryan Fischer doesn’t understand consent.

Or, perhaps, Bryan Fischer doesn’t think that consent does, or should, have anything to do with sex:

Once you allow sex between two people of the same sex, there is no place to stop. You can’t stop just with homosexuality. You can’t stop with polygamy. You can’t even stop with pedophilia. You wind up going all the way to sex with animals.

In other words, if you ask Bryan Fischer why raping a small child is wrong, he would say it is wrong because it is an instance of sex outside of the context of marriage between one man and one woman. Not because it is coercive. Not because it is rape. But because, for Fischer, straight-married sex is always Good, and any other kind of sex, not being straight-married sex, is always Bad.

This is not “traditional religious ethics.” It isn’t ethics at all. It’s a single check-box formula for determining whether or not any sexual act is Fischer-Approved.

Yes, this makes Fischer a foolish moral imbecile. But it also makes him dangerous. He is arguing, vehemently, that consent is of no moral consequence. Bryan Fischer may not understand what rape is, but he’s working hard to defend it anyway.

12/30 Flashback: Safe spaces

December 30, 2022 By Fred Clark

From December 30, 2014, “Sanctuary”

For more on the subject, see also:

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.

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.

10/31 Flashback: Secondary ethics

October 31, 2022 By Fred Clark

From October 31, 2014, “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly … in bed”

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?

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* 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.