James Poulos, doctoral candidate in Government at Georgetown and blogger at First Things, writes at AFF Doublethink:
Alas, ours is not the most sexually transgressive age by far, though it is assuredly one of the more permissive and remissive. As Andrew Sullivan has quipped, “The culmination of the sexual revolution was at 4 a.m. in the Mineshaft in the late 1970s. It is not the civil marriage of two elderly lesbians in a town hall in California in 2008.” . . .
Yet, out of the contradiction and imprecision, a common point of reference, a cultural rule of thumb, has arisen. We are given to understand that there is no legitimate ground on which to criticize someone for pursuing, exploring, and expressing ‘their sexuality’—so long, of course, as they don’t ‘harm anyone else’ in doing so. Further, we believe that there is no ground, period, on which to criticize the achievement of our full capabilities ‘as sexual beings’ but for the puritanical religious ground of sin. Absent an idea that some pursuits of sexuality are sinful, we think, no conceptual framework for attacking them exists. And therefore, because the only possible ground for disapproval is illegitimate, anyone who disapproves is speaking illegitimately, whether inside politics or out of it.
See also Poulos’ discussion, at the Atlantic, of his coinage of “Pink Police State” as a term to describe the combination of “growing sphere of libertinistic freedoms” with “shrinking spheres of political liberty and the practice of citizenship.”
