Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance
Love the sin: Sexual Regulation and the limits of Religious Tolerance
By Janet Jacobsen and Ann Pellegrini
New York University Press
175 pages, $17.00
As we enter a new stage in the “culture wars,” U.S. conservatives and even some liberals have found it useful to, once again, rely on sex-talk as the electoral boogeyman. In this tight race, queers have had the great misfortune of becoming the dearest electoral asset of the right. In the U.S., sex-talk is more often than not mixed with religious talk. Sex and religion are rarely – if ever – separated in American public discourse, and the constitutional principle of the separation of Church and State is often set aside when it comes to dealing with sexual matters. Both State courts and the Supreme Court itself have drawn on Judeo-Christian principles to render judicial decisions that affect the public and private lives of millions of Americans. In this context, the LGBT community has found it useful to frame its fight for equality on the basis of “tolerance” and a discourse that promotes “normalization” vis-à-vis mainstream America. But, is the rhetoric of “tolerance” useful in the fight for freedom and equality as a community outside of the mainstream?
According to Janet Jacobsen and Ann Pellegrini, authors of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the limits of Religious Tolerance, not only does the discourse of tolerance not contribute to achieving freedom and justice as the major way of understanding a range of differences in the United States, but at the same time it begets that which is supposed to fight: violence. The notion of tolerance, which emerged in Early Modern Europe as a response to the “wars of religion,” is today presented as a sign of open-mindedness, a panacea to hate; yet in fact, as the authors contend, tolerance is “exclusionary, hierarchical, and ultimately non-democratic.”
In chapter 2, the authors discuss the practical limitations of the current rhetoric on “tolerance” in advancing the cause of the LGBT movement and establishing freedom for all. In actuality, the worn-out rhetoric of “tolerance” sets up a counterproductive claim by dividing the American landscape into an “us” versus “them” mentality. Consequently, “tolerance establishes a hierarchical relation between a dominant center and its margins.” The problem with this, as the authors argue, is that this same center-margins relationship comes into the foreground whenever and wherever the “public” is asked to tolerate those on the margins, at the same time conveying the divisive message that at some levels homosexuals are not fully American, and thus not fully human. Being the object of tolerance does not represent full inclusion in the American social, political or cultural landscape, but “rather a grudging form of acceptance in which the boundary between us and then remains dangerously clear.”
So dangerous, that in fact “tolerance” reflects itself as part of everyday forms of violence towards queer peoples. By introducing “tolerance” into the equation, the victims of heinous homophobic or transphobic hate crimes are positioned by the mainstream media and public on an equal footing with the perpetrators. For instance, following the gruesome assassination of Matthew Sheppard, Time magazine entitled their cover “The war over gays” instead of the more appropriate “The war on gays.” Consequently, the “them” of public discourse is not necessarily or exclusively identified with the attacker(s), but is also applied to the victims over whom “we” (‘normal,’ mainstream America), fight.
Further, the authors take issue with the “born that way” argument frequently used by the LGBT community. If the “tolerance” argument falls drastically short of promoting democracy, the “born that way” argument only exacerbates the problem. Jacobsen and Pellegrini rebut the “can’t change, can’t help it” logic as far too narrow to provide anything more than the type of liberal tolerance the authors vehemently challenge. After all, civil inclusion and full participation should not hinge upon “benign immutable differences.” The authors suggest recasting arguments from one emphasizing “genetic” traits to another based entirely on sexual freedom and ethics: in their view, “it does not matter how one becomes homosexual, because there is nothing wrong with homosexuality."
In the second half of the book, the authors propose alternative visions for politics and ethics by drawing upon extended analogies between freedom of and from religion, and freedom of sexual practice. Instead of using Judeo-Christian values as moralistic guiding poles in the public sphere, the authors envision a truly diverse and free society where the Constitutional principle of separation of Church and State is thrust into its final stage and extended to the realm of sex. Thus, instead of thinking of sex – and in particular homosexual sex - as an object of moral concern and regulation, society should understand sex itself as a rich realm for the production of positive values. However, this can only happen if religion ceases to be the necessary condition for all values.
The book invites the reader to consider an option that the queer community envisioned in the 1970s, yet buried along the way following the trail of the “normalization” discourse: the necessity of fighting for genuine sexual freedom for all. By giving the LGBT community a new language to escape both the traps of toleration and the seduction of appealing to “mainstream” heterosexual values, the book provides a refreshingly new and even renewed idealism to the community.
