So yes, I'm questioning these traditions, I'm challenging these traditions because they simply aren't representative of all of humanity.
So, think of the groups that get constructed as "other."
White leaves out Racial/ethnic
Heterosexual " LGBTQ+
Male " Female
Affluent " Poor
These are the groups that are on the other side. So those who are racial/ethnic, those who are LGBTQ+/ those who are female, those who are poor. And that is what I realized again with that teenager. It's interesting how my second book starts with that story of that teenager. I was so traumatized by her statement that I had to write a whole book to explain why. Sometime I feel like I should track her down so I could say, "You need to read my book." Because, you know, you really can bring who you are to your reading of the Bible.
And so my work involves reading the Bible in the context of HIV and AIDS and low and behold the same mythical norm appeared. Because groups who are more disproportionately impacted by HIV are racial/ethnic groups, in this country they tend to be the African American population and the LatinX population, LGBTQ+ persons, female - for instance globally there are more female, say in Sub-Saharan Africa, there are more females who are impacted than males - and they tend to be poor in the sense that they don't tend to have access to the various important drugs that medical care could, in fact, offer.
But it gets more complicated than that because there are Christians who have been serving in the area of HIV but the policies that apply for prevention such as ABC, abstain, be faithful and, if all else fails, use a condom really haven't been very successful. And it struck me that really it is a different kind of problem, again it's a systemic problem but it's one where the Christian approach represents the mythical norm. So it makes sense that if it's sexually transmitted just abstain, I mean that's very logical, but it's not very practical. That's basically what I'm saying.
So instead what really needs to happen is we need to take a more systemic approach and it means looking at these systemic issues that actually make People vulnerable to the HIV virus, itself.
I did not come up with this, it was posted on social media and I tried to track down who might have posted it in my feed and I couldn't but this gives you a sense of how you need to view HIV systemically.
If you fight racism, you fight HIV.
If you fight homophobia, you fight HIV.
If you fight sexism, you fight HIV.
If you fight poverty, you fight HIV.
Notice those mythical norm factors track exactly.
But the problem is that the Christian approach very often doesn't take this kind of information into account because it's geared to the mythical norm. The tradition is geared to the mythical norm but the People who are disproportionately impacted are not the ones who were developing the Christian perspective. And so we are caught in a very difficult situation and as a result there are 40,000 People in the United States each year who are still being infected and we need to be able to bridge that.
This is a perfect practical example of how something I first noticed almost twenty years ago happens, it was one of the topics of one of my first posts, online,* that the morality of any moral declaration and policy cannot honesty or morally be separated from the consequences of that moral policy. That became apparent to me during the Bush II regime as his pretense of being a Christian became real and the policies around HIV-AIDS and that which the Republicans in his regime and in the Congress - and some on the Court were guaranteed to do nothing to decrease the numbers of those infected every year.
There is nothing Christian about the consequences of that, as Cheryl Anderson points out so well, it is going to be those who pay for those policies so prissily and preeningly imposed and not the ones making the policy who will be infected, made ill, be left untreated and die. A similar point could be made about the policy of the unmarried, presumably, mostly, non-sexually active (though we know and they know not all of them are) Catholic hierarchy who make some of the most immoral policies on this and who are a big part of why governments in many countries, including the United States, not taking the kind of effective measures that she indicates in her talk. Taking the real life lives of those at greatest risk certainly is part of that but they are exactly the ones who have no say in developing any approach to the problem.
That is especially true for Women who, though practicing fidelity, are infected by their unfaithful husbands or boyfriends, who are the victims of rape, prostitution, etc. They have certainly not had a voice in the moral declarations of any of the Popes up to now, Francis may well be the first one who has ever taken what Women have to say about their lives as seriously as what unmarried men say about them.
I like how she notes that the same refusal to pay attention to those othered groups is a bigger thing than how the Bible has been read and traditionally interpreted. I would also note, how it has been translated and the consequences of that. Important though I think theology and Biblical studies are, those are not the thing that is pushing the band wagon of culture. It is the cultural foundation of privilege that is in control of all of it. The Reagan and Bush I administrations and the Bush II and Trump regimes** never took the Gospels or Epistles seriously about anything in anything they did, their invocation of religion, especially Christianity started and finished in political calculation just as the KGB man Putin plays the corrupt Patriarch of Moscow.
* Incorporating The Outcome from olvlzl May 19, 2006
On first hearing that the "christian" right had come up with chastity rings, fingers weren't the first appendages to come to mind. Know what I mean? Then I heard about their even weirder sister. Ceremonies in which very little girls, indeed, symbolically give their reproductive organs to their daddy for safe keeping. He then is to hand them over to the groom at her wedding. I might not be the most financially savvy guy but this is sufficiently brazen as to glow like the sun. Electra becomes money. Keepin' it is a growth industry.
For those who might find this neo-folkway just too strange or the overhead too high there is the alternative of abstinence "education" carried out by private contractors at public expense. In this alternative, misinformation and all too temporary fear take the place of custom jewelry. The short history of this quaint idea is complete with evidence that it doesn't work very well. It also seems to have the unintended effect of leading young people who just can't keep it to engage in more dangerous activities than protected sex.
This evidence doesn't seem to bother proponents one little bit. They deny the evidence but I suspect that even if they did accept it they wouldn't mind much. If the recent stories about sexual moralists' opposition to the most recent vaccine which will prevent potentially fatal venereal disease is any indication it would seem that they might see it as another mark... ah, teaching opportunity. Making certain that the wages of sin are death would seem to be their goal.
Much as I'd like to turn this into a piece about the statistical evidence of their depravity, that will have to wait. My purpose is to investigate the morality of traditional sexual taboo from a different angle. Incorporating the outcome.
The traditional moralist holds that it is essential to issue a flat ban on prohibited activities, end of question. A flat ban with no exceptions. No alternative consideration is necessary for morality to be satisfied. In fact, to consider anything else would weaken the flat ban and thus be wicked in itself. That experience has shown throughout recorded history that the ban will not be followed doesn't matter. That enormous suffering and even death result from to impossibility of many, if not most people keepin' it within the confines of monogamous, heterosexual marriage is not a downside to the traditional sexual moralist. They just ignore it. Deaths of women who bear their eleventh child before they reach the age of thirty, venereal disease, children who can't be cared for, grinding poverty, ... all taken in stride by the traditional sexual moralist. Even those who don't find this suffering good in the sight of the Lord find it insufficiently awful to reconsider a single word of the flat ban.
Well, here's a thought. Any moral proclamation that causes suffering, disease and death is evil. Any moral teaching that willfully ignores the pain it causes is phony morality and should be junked. For those who think the left has no moral absolutes, there is one for you. Replacing scientifically based sex education with this kind of exercise in sadistic pseudo-morality is evil. No matter how longstanding, it is superstitious and evil and destructive of the public good. It should be prohibited for public money to go to this pseudo-religious clap trap. And a clap trap it is.
This kind of stuff isn't confined to sex education. Ending needle exchange programs is another clear example. Drug addicts exchanging HIV and hepatitis is a direct result of needle exchanges being made impossible by the War on Drugs industry and their moralist camp followers. We have ample evidence that needle exchange programs work to lessen the horrors of disease among drug addicts. Addictive drugs, and some which aren't addictive, are allegedly banned because they cause suffering and in the case of addictive drugs that is true. To assert that you are banning them to prevent suffering and then to ignore HIV transmission is to be the direct cause of suffering more awful than the addiction. Treating addiction as a moral failing punishable by death instead of a treatable disease has led us into the obscenity of the war on drugs we find ourselves in today.
Many children being born with HIV are a direct result of the lies of the chastity industry and the drug moralists. Their suffering is taken with remarkable equanimity by these protectors of public morals. Any feeling person with an intact brain can see that their suffering is morally unacceptable. Any person of good will can see the calm acceptance of children and adults dying of entirely preventable AIDS is absolute proof of the moral decay of traditional sexual moralists. These facts definitively impeach the moral pretensions of religious conservatives and it would be entirely immoral for the left to let them get away with it another minute without a fight.
How about this for some real sexual morality. Ignoring preventable suffering resulting from the inability of people to go without sex is evil. People who ignore suffering and so help more of it into the world are evil. Ignorance is a leading cause of suffering. So is discouraging the use of condoms.
** No presidency which is not the result of a majority vote by the voters should ever be considered and administration, it is an illegitimate regime.
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