Some religious and political leaders have cynically tapped into fear of sexual anarchy in order to promote the pro-life movement.\u00a0 I contend this is not only not pro-life, but that it pisses God off.<\/p>\n
There is a subterranean and sometimes right-smack-in-your face anxiety that some Christian men and women have about sex without consequence.\u00a0 There is a current running within Christianity that sexuality is dangerous unless channeled toward a clear and discernible purpose beyond the two people beloved by one another.\u00a0 Different writers in the Christian tradition have emphasized varying purposes for sexual desire, but some Christians seem to focus in almost exclusively on one \u2013 pregnancy.\u00a0 Sexual desire is God\u2019s way of making babies, so the implicit argument sometimes goes, and if I experience desire apart from that purpose, I have failed to give God God\u2019s due.\u00a0 But the form of the question distorts the answer.\u00a0 If one begins with the root anxiety that sexuality is anarchic unless purposed, then the answer of \u201cchild\u201d becomes punitive.\u00a0 Parenthood becomes the price that women and men must pay for desiring their beloved.<\/p>\n
This is a gnarled-up twist of a significant strand in Christian body politics, and it distorts the witness that children are a gift.\u00a0 When this strand starts by being twisted with fear of sexuality, children are a due punishment for desire \u2013 an act of justice that, if circumvented, supposedly can turn God\u2019s creation into a ghastly mess of wanton abandon.<\/p>\n
I have to give credit where credit is due.\u00a0 My oldest daughter named this years ago at a pro-life event where I had been invited to speak.\u00a0 She was about 12 at the time, and sorting through her own sense of sexuality.\u00a0 I had done a fairly good job, I pray, in conveying that her body is not dangerously ridden with desire, but beautifully created by a God who wants her to know joy.\u00a0 In conversation with the men at the event (and men significantly outnumbered women at this particular event) she picked up on the sense that, for too many of them, pregnancy is retribution for sexuality itself.\u00a0 She picked up on the fact that too many of the men there had a kind of loathing about sexuality, and a sense that sexuality without due consequence is the root of many other evils. \u00a0She used the term \u201ccreepy\u201d to summarize the event.\u00a0 She was right.\u00a0 It was creepy.<\/p>\n
This way of thinking may be particularly attractive during times of generalized fear over matters that don\u2019t have a fig to do with whether or not a woman wants to have non-procreative sex with her beloved.\u00a0 When people can\u2019t find work, when elders have a sense that things are changing too fast, when more and more of my neighbors speak a different language than mine, when we fight two brutal wars that seem to have resolved nothing, well, maybe at least we can make women who have sex pay their due.\u00a0 I\u2019m not saying this is a conscious, front-of-my-brain sort of impulse.\u00a0 It is often buried deep down in the moral gut of a Christian imagination \u2013 restore societal order by making this one core fact of life \u201csimple\u201d again.\u00a0 Sex = Baby.<\/p>\n
And in the visceral logic of this thinking, cutting social programs for women and children may, for some pro-life people, make perfect sense.\u00a0 Why should others be forced to pay for your individual inability to control your sexual desire, or for your community\u2019s inability properly to discipline your people\u2019s desire?\u00a0 Children are the consequence of your urges, and you should pay for their food\/education\/care yourself.\u00a0 And\/Or, your community\/neighborhood\/culture has become wanton with sexual anarchy, and the right way to correct this is for you people to have to bear more babies and begin to deal with the due consequences of your sexual anarchy.\u00a0 This is the pro-life version of the \u201cyour child, your choice, your responsibility\u201d economics that I named in my second book as a constant danger of pro-choice liberalism.<\/p>\n
This is also why being anti-abortion and pro-death penalty makes perfect sense to some people.\u00a0 Both children and the death penalty are about justice \u2013 about what people should be forced to pay for their actions.\u00a0 People who have sex should pay with birth.\u00a0 People who commit particular crimes should pay with their lives.<\/p>\n
I call poop on this mess.\u00a0 Whatever a Christian theology of the body was meant to be, it can\u2019t be this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some religious and political leaders have cynically tapped into fear of sexual anarchy in order to promote the pro-life movement.\u00a0 I contend this is not only not pro-life, but that it pisses God off. There is a subterranean and sometimes right-smack-in-your face anxiety that some Christian men and women have about sex without consequence.\u00a0 There […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[166,164,161,16,165,167],"class_list":["post-1430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","tag-abortion","tag-general-assembly","tag-moral-mondays","tag-north-carolina","tag-real-talk","tag-theology-of-the-body"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7EotM-n4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1430"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1435,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1430\/revisions\/1435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}