Today I got the chance to listen to a lecture by Chai Feldblum, a professor at Georgetown Law School. The lecture was geared primarily to addressing the need to restructure the political debate on sexual orientation in terms of moral discourse. I'll summarize the lecture's critical points:
1. Moral bracketing is the current method for addressing issues of homosexuality in political discourse. An example of moral bracketing is a religious person who is opposed to homosexuality on religious grounds, brackets that belief to allow for the law to provide some protection for homosexuals.
2. Solely relying on moral bracketing weakens the moral arguments that the homosexual community currently has access to. Relying just on an argument that government should stay out of the bedroom, prevents arguing about the actual moral issues.
3. Gender or sexual orientation is a morally neutral, while lack of gender equity is morally bad.
4. The moral argument is then restructured so the debate is focused on the morality of pleasure, the morality of tolerance, the morality of behavior and the morality of government imposing religious ideology (if religious grounds are the only reason you have for abhorring a behavior, then the imposition of penalties for that behavior is an unconstitutional establishment of religion by the State).
I went and checked out the Morals Value Project website and I was hoping for more information, but the project was only introduced officially about a month ago. I will be interested to see how it develops. The website does have some good information on federally mandated abstinence only sex education policies, but that is for another day.
I listened to the lecture and tried to restructure the arguments in a Mormon setting. Obviously when discussing morality within a religion, you don't have the secular constitutional arguments, but I like Professor Feldblum's idea of not seceding the moral high ground so easily. Mormon doctrine is so filled with contradictory messages about sexuality that it fucks up or unfucks anyone who comes in contact with it. Yet, a discussion of ethics and morality relating to sex has relevance, regardless of past, present or future religious affiliations or sexual orientations.
My very first post on this blog was just the kind of moral discussion that I think Professor Feldblum has in mind. What is moral when it comes to sex? What is ethical? What causes harm? What creates pleasure? What creates joy?
