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|
Throw away sacredness and wisdom and people
will be a lot happier ?
- Lao Tsu |
This column really is about the BDSM community at the end of it,
but to get to where I want to go I first have to give a little history,
bear with me.
The history of the United States is the history of contemporary freedom.
It is the story of a society which grants liberty to more an more
people as its history progresses. At the beginning, it was only the
land owners and rich merchants and artisans who have the vote, the
evidence of liberty. Quickly it was realized that every man had to
have a stake in the government of the state in order to defend and
support it, so the property requirements were eliminated. Next, men
who were property were freed and immediately given the vote, then
women where made full partners in the government, and in the 1960s,
people who were old enough to serve in the military were allowed
to vote. The vote is universal for anyone who would become a citizen
and was old enough to have responsibilities within that government.
But there are other ways in which freedom expresses it self other
than in the vote and participation in the government. The Founders
understood this. Jefferson befriended a Baptist congregation near
his home at Monticello and wrote the Bill for Establishing Religious
Freedom in the State of Virginia. Since few of us have read it I
will quote the most significant part of this bill:
| ...that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy
the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being
called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess
or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him
injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in
common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that
it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion
it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly
honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and
conform to it... |
This is the justification for the first amendment, which
reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the
press; or the right of the people peaceably”. Note
that it says “establishment of religion”,
not establishment of a religion. The Founders were within
living memory of the great religious upheavals that shook
England, and the early colonies in the 17th Century and
were trying desperately to keep religion out of the public
arena.
This sense of freedom was not a universal idea as the
country was being established. There was a fear of “the
mob”, particularly as the country watched the perversions
of the French Revolution. When John Adams, the man who
encouraged the Continental Congress to declare independence,
became president he had already changed his mind about
just how much liberty was acceptable. As a result he
got passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. These acts limited
the rights of aliens, non-citizens, who at the time were
Irishmen fleeing the English oppression in their native
islands. They increased the time needed for naturalization
to 14 years (from 5 years), and made aliens subject to
arbitrary arrest and deportation. The sedition acts essentially
made it a crime to criticize the government. Pres. John
Adams was trying to establish a monarchal form of government,
only where the king was elected. After the arrest of
a grandson of Benjamin Franklin the public was outraged
and in the next election Thomas Jefferson was elected.
He pardoned all those arrested under the sedition act
and paid back their fines, with interest.
Freedom is a messy and dangerous thing. It carries within
its tenets its own destruction. People who wish to limit
freedom, or who are so convinced that they know what
is best for the country must be allowed to speak. This
is particularly true of religionists, as they can always
couch their attacks on freedom under the guise of religious
speech, which is particularly sacrosanct in our system.
Since organized religion has been loosed into the American
Political system, probably sometime around the time of
the Civil War it has been a force for both great good
and great evil in the marketplace of ideas. On one hand,
it was the force behind abolitionism and a hundred years
later, the Civil Rights movement. On the other hand,
it was used as the justification for things like the
Temperance Movement and ultimately Prohibition.
In the arena of sexuality this has been particularly
true. Christianity, the predominant religious belief
of the United States, is an apoplectic religion. One
of the basic beliefs of fundamentalist Christians is
that the world will, at some point end, with the second
coming of Christ. The early Christians believe this very
literally and many of them died expecting this happening
at any moment. As a result, sex became superfluous, why
have children when the world was going to end? And a
cult of virginity arose. Paul in 1st Corinthians (7:8-9)
says,
| To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for
them to remain single, as I do. But if they cannot exercise
self-control, they should marry, for it is better to be married
than to be aflame with passion. |
It is from this and other things that Paul, predominantly, wrote
that sexual repression in the Western World arose. The newest battles
for freedom are being fought on this front. The battle for freedom
that we in the BDSM Community are fighting, along with the GLBT Community
is the battle to love who we want, and in our particular case, how
we want. We are great inflamers of passion, it is our goal, to enflame
passion in someone so much that they reach that elusive thing called
subspace.
Freedom is a messy thing, it requires of us that we create our own
morality, our own sense of right and wrong, which we cannot nonconsenually
enforce on other people. Society can protect itself, but within the
private sphere, and consensual sexuality certainly fits well within
that sphere, a government of free people have no place. This is the
basis of freedom, but as in the past, there are people who do not
understand it. Using antiquated ideas, many taken directly from the
Bible, they find the movement to free our sexuality to be an attack
on American Values, while disregarding the first American value,
liberty.
People are drawn to fundamentalism because the long for the kind
of certainty that liberty can never give. I have heard fundamentalists
using the same arguments used by the opponents of the American Revolution
for the divine right of Kings. They believe that because the President
is chosen by God, using the election process as his tool, we must
obey the President as we would a king. They are anti-science because
science has a habit of disrupting the certainties they get from their
Bible, or from their own thoughts. In 2003 Dr. Charles Moser gave
a paper he had written with Dr. Peggy Kleinplatz which proposed that
the classification “paraphilia” be taken out of the DSM,
the manual used to diagnose mental illness, one of the discussants
on the panel to discuss this paper said this:
| “What
is needed is not more research," NARTH's Joseph Nicolosi
countered in response to reports describing the symposium. "What
psychology really needs for its advancement is not another
study, but a more accurate worldview. That worldview must
take into account our creator's design, which inevitably
involves gender complementarity. (Nicolosi, L. A., (2004) "Should
these conditions be normalized?" American psychiatric
association symposium debates whether pedophilia, gender-identity
disorder, sexual sadism should remain mental illnesses, Retrieved
from http://www.narth.com/docs/symposium.html December 20,
2004) |
NRATH is an organization
which promotes the “curing” of
homosexuality. Another group, allied with them, the Concerned Women
for American have been trying to block hotels from letting us hold
events at them. The LA times did an article on them Dec. 27. Here
is just a portion of their very hard core agenda.
| Robert H. Knight,
director of the group's Culture and Family Institute, an
in-house think tank, is among those who object
to the use of Nonspecific holiday greetings instead of Christmas
ones. He says "millions of Americans are waking up to
the fact that the phrase 'Happy Holidays' is less a happy greeting
than a pointed assault on our civil liberties." (Cooper,
R.T. & Neuman, J., 2093, Dec 27, They Stand firmly for
what's on the right, Los Angeles Times, Retrieved Dec. 27,
2003 from http://www.latimes. com/news/politics/) |
Our problem with groups like this is just going to get worse over
the next 4 years as they begin to flex the political power that they
thought they showed during the last presidential election. These
groups are not the kind of fascistic, violence prone right wingers
that existed in the middle of the 20th Century, but sophisticated
lobbying groups who know the techniques of non-violence and how to
manipulate the news media.
These are the threats that our sexual freedom. We can take a certain
comfort in the fact that the people leading them are growing old.
Beverly LaHay, the 75-year-old founder of the group cannot find someone
to take over for her (Los Angeles Times Article) and that a great
many of these groups are run by people from the Silent Generation
of the 50s, which I suppose is why they want to turn back the clock
to that time, so it just might be a matter of waiting them out.
But then what kinds of mischief can they commit before they begin
to die off? But this mischief is, perhaps the best way to defeat
them. The fundamentalists have a weakness. They only listen to themselves.
There is a 4 billion dollar business in Fundamentalist entertainment
because they don’t want to be a part of the general culture,
but this means that they only listen to themselves and they do not
understand just how silly they can seem to the general public, so
the election results, if the Bush administration takes the poll results
about “moral values” too seriously, may be a blessing
in disguise because it will scare the American public that they might
lose some of their hard won freedoms from the latter part of the
20th Century. This is why the idea that those who believe in liberty
should not back down for the sake of appealing to the fringes of
these groups. Like all cults, they have no fringes, you either scare
their followers away or you have to deal with the whole group. Rather,
if you come onto one of these groups in your dealings out in the
world, you have to get them to say something scary, like the above
quotations and make sure that the media hears it.
Because we in the BDSM community are seen as pretty crazy ourselves,
we have to make sure that we come off, at least in our debates with
the right, as intelligent and more flexible than the right. We are
the champions of sexual freedom, not just of beating on our sex partners.
We are the ones who do not object to the secret fantasies which have
been bothering you, we will not judge them or tell you that you are “lustful” or “perverted” for
having them.
Once you have established that, just ask the fundamentalist how he
or she feels about “Happy Holidays” as a solstice greeting,
or whether they feel that the end of the world is at hand. Or more
to the point how they feel about masturbation, and what kind of sanctions
are needed to control it (sewing up someone’s scrotum?). Enough
of these kinds of questions and I suspect that we will find the fundamentalists
fading back into the woodwork from where they came. |
|
