A Long Ago Defense of Sexual Liberty

The burning of the knight of Hohenburg with his servant before the walls of Zürich, for sodomy, 1482

In addition to power and money one of the things that has always defined religion and religious leaders is a desire to control others.  And given that the majority of Christianity's history has been dominated by bitter supposedly celibate men in the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church, one of the areas of control that became an obsession was the control of other peoples' bodies and their sex lives. If the bitter old men could not openly enjoy sex, then they wanted to make sure that no one else did either. Throughout time their have been rebellious free thinkers who are not afraid to think or question the all too often oppressive status quo.  One such person was British thinker and essayist Jeremy Bentham.  Andrew Sullivan notes the publishing of previously unpublished writings of Betham which would make the bitter old queens at the Vatican and the sexually frustrated males at the Southern Baptist Convention have conniptions.  Here are excerpts:

Jeremy Bentham’s collected writings on religion and sex have recently been published for the first time. Bentham argued for a perspective on sexual morality that was, to say the least, unusual for his era:

If an activity did not cause harm, Bentham had argued as early as the 1770s and 1780s, then it should not be subject to legal punishment, and had called for the decriminalization of homosexuality. By the mid-1810s he was prepared to link the problem not only with law, but with religion. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was taken by ‘religionists’, as Bentham called religious believers, to prove that God had issued a universal condemnation of homosexuality. Bentham pointed out that what the Bible story condemned was gang rape. Paul’s injunctions against homosexuality were also taken to be authoritative by the Church. Bentham pointed out that not only did Jesus never condemn homosexuality, but that the Gospels presented evidence that Jesus engaged in sexual activity, and that he had his male lovers — the disciple whom he loved, traditionally said to be John, and the boy, probably a male prostitute, who remained with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane after all the disciples had fled (for a more detailed account see ‘Not Paul, but Jesus’). …

Bentham looked to ancient Greece and Rome, where certain forms of homosexual activity were not only permitted but regarded as normal, as more appropriate models for sexual morality than that which existed in modern Christian Europe.

 Bentham attacked the notion, still propagated by religious apologists, that homosexuality was ‘unnatural’. All that ‘unnatural’ meant, argued Bentham, was ‘not common’. The fact that something was not common was not a ground for condemning it. Neither was the fact that something was not to your taste. It was a form of tyranny to say that, because you did not like to do a particular thing, you were going to punish another person for doing it. Because you thought something was ‘disgusting’ did not mean that everyone else thought it was disgusting. You might not want to have sex with a sow, but the father of her piglets thought differently.

These writings were, for Bentham, a critical part of a much broader attack on religion and the ‘gloomy terrors’ inspired by the religious mentality. By putting forward the case for sexual liberty, he was undermining religion in one of the areas where, in his view, it was most pernicious.

Conservative fundamentalist religion is a pernicious evil whether it be Christian or Muslim in its dogma.  The main goal is to degridate individuals and give power to the clerics who are ultimately only concerned about their own power, ability to control others and wealth.