On Monday Washington Post columnist Christine Emba wrote a piece headlined “Let’s Rethink Sex.” It’s a commendable essay in a lot of ways, but the headline is a bit misleading in the sense that it advocates rethinking a view of sexuality that much of the country never signed on to in the first place, and indeed, spent decades warning about the consequences of. And I don’t know if Emba is consciously massaging her point so as not to turn off the Post’s audience, but the prescription for addressing the Great Sex Panic of 2017 skirts political realities lest they become uncomfortable for liberal readers:
Again, it’s worth noting that it wasn’t “society” writ large that boarded the sex train—it was the culturally influential liberal elites who control the universities, the media, and the entertainment industrial complex. Further, there’s a giant subculture who never boarded the train. They’re called religious believers. This isn’t to say that Christians and Jews and Mormons and Muslims all completely abstained from premarital sex—obviously they didn’t. But they never formally moralized it and have always viewed premarital sex as damaging to one’s spiritual health, in addition to warning against the negative temporal consequences.
Accordingly, when Emba segues into how to reintroduce virtue as means of grounding relationships as opposed to the fig leaf of “consent” . . . well, yes, obviously. But this prompts so many bigger questions.
First, how exactly does one reintroduce “prudence, temperance, respect and even love” to the strata of society where sex outside of marriage can never even be discouraged, let alone judged negatively? To a society where generations of fatherless children have precious few examples of male commitment to relationships? To a society where generations of women have been taught that the life growing inside of them is completely expendable? The society Emba is talking about was molded by birth control, abortion, no-fault divorce, and a celebration of hedonism. And it was utterly predictable that such a society would evolve into one where relationships are based on an ultimately dangerous and degrading sexual Darwinsm.
None of which is to say that America was free of injustice—sexual or otherwise—50 years ago. It wasn’t. But social progress is rarely an untempered good and it isn’t like there haven’t been other sectors of society—those outside of Emba’s field of vision—who didn’t spent the last half century warning about the costs of sexal “liberation.” The entire body of Judeo-Christian thought has held that certain institutions regulating sexual behavior, protecting women, and supporting families, were worth maintaining and preserving. A great many Americans have even advocated conserving these institutions—and to whatever extent people failed in their own practice, their personal hypocrisy was the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
Liberals, on the other hand, have been quite explicit about the fact that their long-term project was to destroy these same institutions. (The Obama administration even threatened the tax exempt status of churches and synagogues over their unwillingness to condone sex outside of marriage.)
The political divide breaks down like this: Conservatives believe that people should have a maximal amount of freedom when it comes to their opinions, possessions, and income—but also that people should retain the right to make judgments about both the idea and practice of virtue. And when conservatives make such judgments, they’re told that they’re “intolerant.” (Though the standards for intolerance shift by the hour. In 2009, you could object to same-sex marriage in polite society. Today if you have misgivings about Medicaid paying for sex changes for 16 year-olds without parental consent—even though it’s illegal for that same kid to buy a beer—you’re a bigot.)
On the flipside, modern American liberals have a laundry list of freedoms they’re dying to curtail: what kind of soda you can drink, what words you can say, what firearms you can own. But there is no belief more sacred to the liberal mind than total bodily autonomy when it comes to sexual and reproductive behavior, regardless of the consequences.
Ultimately, I applaud Emba for smuggling a defense of virtue, as well as a condemnation of “a sex-above-all ethic,” into the pages of the Washington Post. But the fact that such obvious observations are a rarity in the pages of America’s big newspapers speaks to a troubling imbalance in America’s moral dialogue. Whether liberals want to acknowledge it or not, conservatives have embraced a large degree of social progress in the last 50 years on everything from women in the workplace to rejecting overcriminalization of marijuana use.
It’s way past due for liberals to meet conservatives halfway on some some important social issues. A good first step is acknowledging that conservatives were right about sex all along: That there is a connection between sex and virtue, and that our politics and our culture should do everything possible to strengthen this connection.
