Notes on the Sexual Revolution

We often think that the guiding principle of the sexual revolution was sexual freedom. This view is not false, but it’s not the full picture. I don’t deny that the sexual revolution aimed to reduce censure and expand freedom. When it comes to sex, our society is far more permissive than it was two generations ago. My point is that the revolution went far deeper, to implicate and alter our relation to our bodies. It sought to overturn the authority of nature.

Freedom from fertility, symbolized by the Pill, was always more fundamental than freedom from censure. Freedom from fertility detaches sexual intercourse from the responsibility for new life. This severing allows progressives to reframe sexual morality in terms of personal choice and fulfillment. If there are no consequences, who can object to what people do with their bodies, as long as partners provide consent?

The technological ability to detach sexual intercourse from fertility was never fail-safe. Abortion was and remains a necessity for the sexual revolution. It functions as the backstop for the revolution’s promise that sex can be consequence-free. (In recent years, abortion rights have been rebranded as reproductive freedom.) In spite of this limited recognition of the natural reality of sexual relations, over the last two generations, the West has adopted the remarkable view that sex is “naturally” infertile. As we hear over and over again, sex is an expression of love and source of pleasure. In the revolutionized world, children are a choice.

In this view, sex has nothing to do with its evolutionary (if you are thinking scientifically) or created (if you are thinking biblically) origins—unless we decide on rare occasions to reap the fruit of the self-evident truth that procreation is the central purpose and consequence of sexual intercourse. This technological inversion of reality underwrites the normalization of masturbation and other sexual acts, such as sodomy. When I was active in the debates about sexual morality in the Episcopal Church, I came to see that homosexuality plays a central symbolic role in the sexual revolution. Homosexual relations are to be celebrated, because their intrinsic sterility realizes the most fundamental form of sexual freedom: freedom from our embodiment.

But there’s a great deal more to the sexual revolution. Our bodies are fertile. We have within us the potential for new life. The sexual revolution promises to free us from this natural fact. Our bodies are also imperfect and fragile. Some people’s bodies suffer from defects that render them infertile. Others inherit DNA that burdens them with disabilities and makes them vulnerable to diseases. Most of us wish that we were taller or skinnier or more attractive or more intelligent. Nature is often generous, yes, but at times she can be parsimonious, even cruel. Our embodiment carries the curse of mortality. From dust we have come, and to dust we shall return. The sexual revolution promises freedom in these realms as well.

The biblical tradition endorses uses of human intelligence to remedy the defects of our bodily condition, guard against disease, and restore health when possible. But these measures—technology in the broad sense—operate within a substantive conception of what it means to flourish as an embodied creature, to live in accord with nature. The sexual revolution departs from the biblical tradition. It seeks to escape from the limits of nature.

In other words, the sexual revolution is (and has always been) about far more than sex. In the alphabet soup of gay rights, the L, G, B, and even Q would seem to concern whom one has sex with and how. But today’s inclusion of transgenderism shows otherwise. “Gender-affirming care” for pre-adolescent children has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the most fundamental ambition of the sexual revolution: to liberate us from our bodies and the limits they impose. (Some argue that I misjudge the sexual component, because allowing children to “consent” to transition lays the legal groundwork for allowing children to “consent” to sex with adults.)

Viewed in this way, we can see that the sexual revolution promotes the ideals that underwrite eugenic abortion. Medical technology has advanced a great deal since the heyday of eugenics in the early twentieth century. In that phase, those who wished to free humanity from our bodily vulnerability to imperfection had to adopt the crude technique of sterilizing those who were most likely to pass along defective DNA. Today the medical-industrial complex employs prenatal testing, and eugenics are practiced under the sign of choice. Eugenic abortion is so widespread in Europe that in many countries almost no children with Down syndrome are born.

Doctor-assisted suicide is another aspect of the sexual revolution. It does to mortality what artificial contraception does to fertility. The Pill makes fertility a choice; gay rights make the sex of our partners our choice; “gender-affirming care” purports to make the sex of my body a choice. Doctor-assisted suicide follows the same pattern: The hour and means of our deaths are matters of choice.

Eugenic abortion and doctor-assisted suicide are on track to converge. In Belgium, young people with advanced terminal illness may receive the “medical therapy” of “assisted dying.” Canada has made similar provisions, expanding this “right” to young people. I foresee further expansions of the practice of killing for the sake of freedom from afflictions of the body. Afflictions of the soul are next. Already in Canada, depression and other forms of mental distress qualify one for “assistance in dying.”

Sexual freedom, gay rights, abortion, transgenderism, eugenics, and euthanasia are major elements of the Rainbow Reich, the regime that is ascendant in the West. Other aspects include reproductive technologies that make all the bodily elements of fertility—egg, sperm, and womb—matters of choice, as well as nontherapeutic cosmetic surgery and techniques of bodily enhancement. True, these phenomena seem quite different. In ethical reflection, sexual acts are analyzed quite differently from killing, which in turn is different from nontherapeutic medical treatment. But all aspects of the Rainbow Reich reject the limits imposed by our bodies, and together they amount to a rejection of the authority of nature. Progressives may not articulate this principle, but they sense an underlying unity, hence the political convergence of these issues into a united front, a manifestation of the “intersectionality” represented by the symbol of the rainbow. I’m quite sure that the vast majority of those who endorse LGBTQ rights also support abortion, euthanasia, assisted reproductive technologies, and other measures. At every turn, these practices overturn the authority of nature, making our bodies into sites of personal choice.

The sexual revolution has erected the Rainbow Reich. Its ambition is to restructure culture and morality so that our lives may be conducted in nearly complete freedom from our bodies. The allure should be self-evident. The Rainbow Reich preaches a gospel of sorts, for in its most fundamental form, freedom from our bodies evokes the possibility of everlasting life, freedom from death’s final word. Like so much of progressive politics, this ambition is a perversion of the biblical tradition. What God has created is good, and his ambition is to redeem us as embodied creatures. In the true gospel, the crucial choice runs in the opposite direction than does choice in the false gospel of the Rainbow Reich. God chooses to be incarnate, to take on our flesh, so that we might be freed from our bondage to sin and death, freed to say “yes” to his promise of eternal life with him, a promise made good in the final resurrection of our bodies.