It Might Be About Sex

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August 27, 2017    Dr. Roger Ray

Anna Swartz writing for Mic Daily - "I am sick of coming down to the Senate floor to explain to Republicans what Planned Parenthood does," Warren said.

"I am sick of explaining it provides millions of women with birth control, cancer screenings, and STI tests every year," she continued. "I am sick of pointing out again and again that federal dollars do not fund abortion services at Planned Parenthood or anywhere else."

Warren added that despite repeated, fact-based explanations about the proven health value of Planned Parenthood's services, "Republicans would rather base health care policy on politics, than on facts."

According to Warren, denying people access to the care that Planned Parenthood provides will cause harm — despite House Speaker Paul Ryan's claims that the new bill is "pro-life."

Sex is a prime motivator and common denominator for all of us. Even the most prudent, puritanical-appearing individuals may struggle greatly against their sexual appetites and expression.  For evidence one need only look to the many scandals that have rocked the Vatican and fundamentalist churches alike.  Freud observed this prurient struggle in men and women early on in Victorian Vienna. But our sexuality defines us in healthy and altogether essential ways, too.  If you don’t believe your Freudian therapist, just ask Samantha Jones, from HBO’s Sex and the City.   By Mihaela Bernard, MA, LCPC 

In the exhaustingly repetitive way that the media gets on any topic and beats it to death, during the lead up to this week’s solar eclipse, virtually everyone in front of a microphone or a camera felt compelled to tell people not to look at the sun… except for me…. the kind of people who need that reminder are not in the IQ range of my target audience…. Although I did notice that there were shots of President Trump looking at the sun without eye protection… but, as I said, not my target audience.

One of the things that our astral viewing advisors kept telling us was to notice the behavior of animals during the eclipse. Let me tell you what I noticed, no one had to tell them not to look at the sun.

What is wrong with humans that keeps us from being able to do what comes naturally to every other animal in the world? Now, brace yourself for the most amazing homiletic segue in history: Birds and bees to not look into the sun but, as the song says, they do it… that is, they reproduce.

It took me years of struggling with learned prejudices and a few graduate school classes to finally get over believing that everyone really ought to be, and by “ought to be” I mean, “are intended by God Almighty to be” heterosexual. I grew up in rural Kentucky farm country and if I had just let myself pay attention, what I could have recognized before I ever went to Vanderbilt and Harvard is that there are straight, gay, bi-sexual, and gender fluid dogs, chickens, pigs, cats, and cows, and though we didn’t have any penguins on the farms in Kentucky, there are a number of cute stories from zoo keepers about life long, monogamous male penguins. Ironically, this couple was allowed to adopt and raise a chick without court order or media controversy.

I know a lot of people who would entirely blame religion for creating all of the sexual hang-ups we have but let me hasten to point out that there was never a time that the church told people that the could look at the sun with their naked eyes. Which is to say, people can mess up a good thing on their own, even without the help of the church.

Religions, especially in their original forms, tended to safeguard the values that made it possible for them to gathering in larger numbers. Bees protect their hive, and birds protect their nest but people come up with rather complex understandings of property titles and taxes which makes us have to define family more closely and then regulate it.

In ancient Palestine, restrictions against gay relationships probably had more to do with their need to increase the size of their army than it did with their beliefs about God’s views regarding what you do with your naughty bits. Even though conservatives tend to talk about Biblical values regarding marriage and family, they do so ignoring the fact that the preponderance of scripture regarding marriage praises polygamy, not monogamy. Of course, polygamy also serves the goal of increasing the size of your tribe as long as men can have multiple wives but the advantage is rather less if women have multiple husbands.

 In fact, since property followed patriarchal lines of inheritance in ancient Israel, female infidelity was punishable by death…. Again, not so much necessarily out of sexual prudishness as about clear lines of real estate ownership. You can understand most of human history by considering money, sex, and power but power is mostly about money and, ironically, when it comes to property division, an awful lot of sex is about ownership and money as well. So, as they say, follow the money. 

Let me spell this out for you: the notion that the Lord God Almighty is obsessed with your sex life is absurd. God is not a Peeping-Tom or a neighborhood gossip. God is not the life guard at the swimming pool of sexual opportunity.

Religious rules about marriage, divorce, same-sex or even polyamorous relationships have nothing to do with God and have everything to do with what is good for society or what seems gross to deeply repressed people. God is not the bedroom police and your pastor, your parents, and your elected representatives should not give themselves authorities that even God never claimed.

That doesn’t mean that there is no place for sexual mores, I’m not saying that at all, but I am saying that knowing what is right and wrong is never a static issue.

Even though we want to give permission to consenting adults to be intimate with the person or persons they choose, defining a consenting adult is not all that easy. Many 15 year-olds are more mature than many of their 18 year-old peers but I suspect that none of us would want to see sexual self-determination granted to 15 year-olds. And even though we typically think of an 18 year-old as having reached adult status, we still don’t want doctors hitting on patients, or attorneys on clients, or pastors on parishioners, or professors on students because power relationships draw legitimate consent into question.

Still, even when professors were forbidden to date students, no college required professors who were married to former students to separate or divorce. After my recent speaking engagement at a conference for parents of young men who are incarcerated for sex crimes, a friend of mine wrote to me to tell me that his now 50 year marriage began when he was a 17 year-old dating a 12 year-old girl. He married her when she turned 17. So, their relationship worked out but I bet if his daughter, when she was 12, wanted to date a 17 year-old, he would likely have had a fit.

It is difficult to talk about in inter-faith circles but the prophet Muhammed initially married an older woman and he was monogamous for 25 years. But then he married a dozen women, including the six year-old Aisha. The shocking fact that he married a child was somehow thought to be ameliorated by the fact that he did not consummate the marriage until she was nine but that would hardly calm the outrage in modern society.

Even in the seventh century, many of Muhammed’s peers were very critical of this marriage. Still, Aisha was apparently proud of having married the prophet and she was singularly important in the organizing and composition of the Quran and in the leadership of the movement when the prophet died. 

I’m not trying to baptize any of these relationships which are clearly inappropriate, cruel, or immoral in our eyes. I’m just saying, different cultures and different times have conflicting values on the meaning of consent. Our sexuality is the product of millions of years of evolution. Our sexual rules are the product of 10,000 of civilization. In any head to head contest between evolution and civilization, evolution will always have the upper hand.

As a religious professional, I want to say very clearly that religion has no business claiming divine authority over any love relationship. It is not up to theologians to dictate the rules of marriage, divorce, dating, or intercourse. But sex is always a matter of meaning and of ethics. 

While we need to liberate our sexual lives from religious guilt, we do need effective laws and rational punishments to protect our children from sexual assault and exploitation. And we need meaningful and enforced regulations that protect students, patients, clients, and parishioners from predators in positions of authority.

Freedom and liberty are two of the things we say make America great but there is no small measure of hypocrisy when it comes to conservatives trying to limit the freedom and liberty of people to simply be who thy are.

The political party that constantly calls for smaller government and fewer regulations, still seems to want to legislate requiring the completely medically unnecessary and invasive procedure called the transvaginal ultrasound for women seeking an abortion

Now, I don’t want to go all Freudian on you here in church, but who would you say had some issues here… the woman seeking an abortion or the state legislator who wants to stick this device inside of women? Clearly, this isn’t about health and it isn’t about life… it is about power.

At the same time they spent billions trying to keep gay and lesbian people from marrying the person of their choice… and with Trump’s latest ban on transgender folk serving in the military, they are still trying to preserve a kind of legalized sexual apartheid in America. 

There is almost always some economic or social stability reasoning cited but, as Trump cited the medical expenses related to gender realignment surgery for transgender members of the service, he refused to consider the fact that the military already spends ten times that much on erectile dysfunction prescriptions for active duty military. I’m not saying that Trump as some personal reason to target transgender military members while refusing to talk about impotent men…but if you see a connection you will get no argument out of me.

It is manifestly evident that the battle over funding of Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with being pro-life or about cutting the Federal budget.

It is about power. It is about throwing red meat to conservative voters at the expense of young women, primarily women from economically disadvantaged families. Planned Parenthood does tons of good and spends no Federal tax dollars on abortion and yet Republicans make it a political football as if young women’s health mattered not at all.

Sex may not always be about love but it sure does need to be set free from real estate and power. In our age, with increasingly clear lines of gender equality and more rational acceptance of difference in sexual orientation and more fluid understandings of our sexual selves, it is possible to just let people do what the birds and the bees have been doing without the benefit of either clergy or congress for all of time.

I have heard it said that humans and dolphins are the only animals that have sex for pleasure. I don’t know that I buy that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAwcoFoAk_k

Eagles mate while in a spiraling decent, sometimes exceeding 60 miles an hour…. There has got to be an easier way to lay an egg! When lions copulate, they will sometimes mate as many as 50 times in a day… I can buy once or twice in pursuit of a cub but once Mufasa gets past a dozen, am I the only one who thinks there is something else going on here?

Sex is normal and natural and should never have been turned into a political football or a source of religious manipulation. One of the things that really would help to make America great would be if we got politics out of the bedroom and allowed what the birds and bees made famous to return to simply being a free and liberal way of being human.

So, I have two pieces of advice:

Relax and mind your own business.