The New Normal: Reforming Sexual Ethics for Global Justice

Sexuality is perhaps the most intimate way one can relate to another human being. This sacred dimension ought not be repressed or oppressed. To deny others access to their full flourishing, to a relationship of intimate union, is to deny their very humanity.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

For several decades, sexual ethics has been the subject of critical scrutiny and careful revision within the academy, seminary, pulpit, pew and bedroom. And for a very good reason. With the rise of women's liberation and the slow, but steady momentum gained by the bold and brave activists of the queer community, people are beginning to see with greater clarity that women and queer folk alike are human beings created with the fundamental human right to realize full flourishing in both the public and private spheres. Insofar as humans are wired to be sexual beings, the erotic dimension of our lives is but one means to realize the end of full flourishing. While moral norms within sexual practices such as mutuality, fidelity, love and justice remain rightfully at the forefront of talk about sexual ethics, the equation for what an "ideal" sexual relationship looks like is rapidly changing.

Listening is the first requirement of doing the work of justice. Emerging insights about sexuality and gender, in light of human experience, are situated at the heart of the renewal of sexual ethics. Right reason, formed within the life of a community, informs us that not every sexual union can be biologically procreative. Tragically, this ideal is not even possible for some committed heterosexual couples whose efforts to conceive a child are stymied by infertility. But do we have the audacity to say that their union, their love for each other, is unfruitful? Mutuality, fidelity, love and justice, among others, are universalizable moral norms within sex. This is confirmed by human experience. The norm of procreation is not. Full stop. This, too, is confirmed by human experience.

With the goal of procreation no longer hailed as the ultimate moral norm of sexual union, but as one of several fruitful goods that could result from sex, the door is opened to empower those sexual minorities on the margins to lay claim to their humanity as they have been created. Our queer sisters and brothers, by their very lives, by their sometimes welcomed and oftentimes unwanted and awkward presence in church, and by their celebrated public display at annual pride parades, take their place in the everyday, ordinariness of lived existence. Queer people are never going to go away. We might as well get used to them.

This is the new normal. It's not the type that is depicted on the television sitcom. It's certainly not a queer community whose public face is oftentimes white and male. And, believe it or not, it's more basic than marriage equality. The new normal is a global phenomenon. It's the basic, human right for all people everywhere to be treated as a human being, to be treated with dignity, respect, and fairness. The new normal isn't about toleration, but about appreciation. The new normal isn't about fear, it's about love.

But you cannot have the new normal without a global reform of sexual ethics. If the sexual practices of queer people remain cast as "other" or "perverse," then the hate crimes, suicides, criminalization, bullying, violence and outright murder of our queer sisters and brothers will continue worldwide. Sexual ethics is, in fact, tied up with the commitment to a global project of social healing.

Ethics is the theory of discerning the good and living in right relation. It's about the proper ordering of relationships, of living and loving for justice and for the common good. Sexuality is perhaps the most intimate way one can relate to another human being. And humans are, at their very core, social beings. This sacred dimension of the human person ought not be repressed or oppressed. To deny others access to their full flourishing, to a relationship of intimate union, is to deny their very humanity. Furthermore, to ignore human experience is antithetical to the doing of ethics. Experience is the touchstone of knowledge; experience is the place of divine revelation.

Noteworthy figures like Margaret Farley, Shawn Copeland, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Aana Marie Vigen, Carter Heyward, Robert Cummings Neville, Patrick S. Cheng, and Marvin Ellison, to name but a few of the people who have a stake in this project and who have influenced my own studies and writings on ethics, take their place within the tradition alongside a great line of prophets who continue to call our global church to greater unity. We must follow in their footsteps to enact a vision of love and justice that can create the context for the emergence of God's great kin-dom. On earth as it is in heaven.

Originally published on Chet Jechura's blog, Some Just Words.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot