Sex and Right, Part 2

By their own standards, the Islamist governments are quite merciful. People aren't hanged for every sexual offence. They are only hanged for very serious crimes like prostitution, incest, homosexuality, and adultery. Other kinds of extra-marital sex are punished with some kind of judicial corporal punishment, which usually consists in beating a clothed woman or semi-nude man with a rod as big as a yardstick. "In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful..."

In the first post of this series I mentioned a 3-shelf hierarchy of prohibitions which (I failed to say) just about everybody uses. At the top, in shelf A, are the things that are so wrong that they should be punishable by law. In the middle, in shelf B, are things that shouldn't be punished by law, but which people have a right to disapprove of. At the bottom, in shelf C, are those things that are so benign that individuals should be free to choose them without fear of either public or private censure. The purpose of this series is to examine the ways people put different sexual acts in different shelves.

Last week I looked at one kind of religious argument, the teleological argument. This week I'll look at something much broader - religious argument in general.

Most of us stick religion in shelf B. Government shouldn't be in the business of telling us which religious beliefs and practices are correct and which ones aren't. Religion is a matter of God, not a matter of government, and so long as we're not hurting others we should be allowed to believe and practice as we see fit.

If government shouldn't be in the business of telling us which religious beliefs are correct and which ones aren't, then it shouldn't be basing its laws on religious belief. To do so would be to pick one religious belief as more valid than another.

Let's take idolatry as an example. If government started enforcing Biblical rules against worshipping idols, we would all think of that as too radical, for a couple reasons. For one thing, every Catholic church and Hindu temple would be burnt to the ground and all their priests would be stoned to death. For another, government would have picked one religious belief (that no physical thing should be an object of religious devotion) over another religious belief (that physical things may be used as objects of religious devotion if they are understood as only symbols of God), and in so doing would have made a "law regarding the establishment of religion".

Now what would happen if U.S. laws about sex were based on religious belief? I really don't know. Clinton and Lewinsky might have been executed for adultery. But if the law against adultery were based on the Bible, Clinton might have been congratulated and offered Lewinsky's hand in marriage. The bottom line is that more than a million different people have more than a million different ideas about what God says about this sexual act and that sexual act. If government were to pick the "sex between a married man and unmarried woman is not adultery since the Bible defines adultery only as sex between a married woman and a man who isn't her husband" view, then it would be establishing that religious view as more valid than the "any sex between a married man or woman and a woman or man not married to him or her is adultery" view.

If government shouldn't be assigning religious belief, then it shouldn't be citing religious belief, either. Blasphemy and idolatry fit into shelf B and not A; so should illicit sex, if the reason to condemn it is God's will. If you want to put a sexual act in shelf A and not B or C, then you have to find a better reason than "it's an abomination before God."

Before you spout off that I want rape legalized, let me assure you that I do believe some sexual acts should be punishable under the law. There are standards we already use to find which religious acts should go into shelf A and which religious acts should go into shelf B. We could use similar standards for sex. Jefferson hints at these standards when he says: "it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."