Human Sexuality and LGBTQIA+ Rights
In United States history, religion has often been used as a lens through which we understand sexuality and it’s purpose. Fierce debates arose from the intersections of religion, sexuality and politics in twentieth-century America.
What is sexuality? The definition of the term ‘sexuality’ changes based on an individual’s personal beliefs about sex, reproduction, intimacy, and the family structure. ‘Sexuality’ is not only influenced by someone’s physical acts, but also the ideas they have about these acts.
Islam
Resources:
LGBT Voices from Sudan by Mesahat Foundation for Sexual and Gender Diversity
A gay imam's story: 'The dialogue is open in Islam – 10 years ago it wasn't'
Inclusive Islam: Is LGBTQI Halal?: Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV) partnered with Islamic Scholar and Imam Ludovic Zahed to produce and host a workshop tour in June, 2018.
Buddhism
Resources:
Buddhist Sexual Ethics: An Historical Perspective; Buddhist Sexual Ethics: Main Issues; Buddhist & Western Views on Sex.
See Us Clearly: A Buddhist’s View of Transgender Visibility. Buckner, a gender queer and trans Buddhist author talks about trans visibility and unique possibilities for liberation. Read more here.
https://www.lionsroar.com/our-opportunity-to-include-all-genders-in-buddhist-communities/
What is Allyship?
We want to share some core definitions and tools with you to support your work in actively strengthening and building LGBTQ+ affirming communities where every individual can be seen and valued.
One framework for understanding marginalization and oppression is the 4 I’s. This framework helps outline the ways that oppression might play out in four different layers: Ideological, Institutional, Interpersonal, and Internalized. These layers are not mutually exclusive – in fact, they actively reinforce and play off one another. This is a framework that has been developed and refined by many generations of activists of many identities.
(1) Ideological oppression is the idea that one group is somehow more normal, deserving, better, or more moral than other groups.
When applied to anti-LGBTQ+ oppression, ideological oppression may be expressed in terms of religious or pseudo-scientific beliefs that being cisgender and straight is “moral,” “natural,” etc. and that being LGBT or Q is “deviant,” “unnatural,” “hypersexualized,” etc. These ideas are used explicitly and implicitly to justify oppression and marginalization of LGBTQ+ people.
As an ally to LGBTQ+ people, a few ways you can begin to uproot ideological oppression are:
Notice and speak up when you encounter messages that erase, belittle, hypersexualize, or perpetuate taboos against LGBTQ+ people and identities.
Actively promote messages that LGBTQ+ people and identities are deserving of dignity, equality, and belonging.
Notice when you come across (or find yourself making) the assumption that everyone (or most people) are straight and cisgender!
When putting together curricula, book lists, etc., ensure that LGBTQ+ identities are represented.
Learn about and share accurate and respectful information about LGBTQ+ people and identities – be aware of the common talking points used against the LGBTQ+ community and know how these talking points might be answered.
Ensure you’re listening to and learning from LGBTQ+ people, both people in your life, and LGBTQ+ writers, filmmakers, artists, online personalities, and other creators.
(2) Institutional oppression refers to the ways that bias becomes embedded in the institutions of society.
When some groups have access to services, protections, and systems that others do not, this is institutional oppression. This can take place explicitly, when laws or policies directly apply differently to different groups, or implicitly, when seemingly “neutral” policies consistently benefit some groups at the expense of others. Institutional oppression may be facilitated or carried out by individuals as representatives of the institution, and often relies on ideological systems for justification.
Anti-LGBTQ+ institutional oppression includes formal and systemic discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in jobs, housing, access to public services and more; discrimination against transgender people seeking to access healthcare; policies barring transgender individuals from accessing physical facilities or participating in sports, activities, or groups; legal recognition and protections for different-gender families and parents that do not apply to same-gender families or parents, and more.
As an ally to LGBTQ+ people, a few ways you can uproot institutional oppression are:
Assess whether the institutions you are a part of have policies that foster LGBTQ+ equality and belonging. Be aware that sometimes policies that appear neutral on the surface may have disparate impacts on different groups of people, and work towards policies that explicitly promote equity.
Work to ensure that your organizations have policies that explicitly protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination, bias, bullying, and harassment.
Work to ensure that LGBTQ+ people and families have full access to the institutions that you are a part of, from sign-up forms to facilities.
Learn about national, state- or province-level, and local legislation impacting LGBTQ+ rights.
(3) Interpersonal oppression refers to the ways that individual, interpersonal interactions reflect and reinforce the ideas about dominant and marginalized groups that are described above.
Anti-LGBTQ+ interpersonal oppression includes conscious and unconscious homophobic and transphobic humor, slights, or insults; refusing to call transgender individuals by their names or pronouns; invasive questioning and other microaggressions against LGBTQ+ people; or an individual personally denying opportunities to LGBTQ+ people out of their own bigotry. Interpersonal oppression is often informed by ideological beliefs about marginalized groups, and may be supported by institutional oppression of those groups.
As an ally to LGBTQ+ people, a few ways you can begin to uproot interpersonal oppression are:
Actively use the language for identity that the LGBTQ+ people in your community use, and encourage others to do the same.
Interrupt, question, or otherwise disrupt anti-LGBTQ+ jokes and insults when you encounter them.
Learn more about common anti-LGBTQ+ bias and microaggressions, and work to create cultures in which bias and microaggressions are minimized and feedback from LGBTQ+ people is welcomed and attended to.
If you make a mistake, apologize and gracefully figure out how to repair the harm!
(4) Internalized oppression refers to the ways that marginalized people or groups can take in the messages about them that are communicated by ideology, institutions, and interpersonal interactions.
When we are surrounded by constant stereotypes and negative messages, it takes active work to reject them and build empowerment, and positive identity. Undoing internalized oppression is healing that LGBTQ+ people need to do for and among ourselves, so it’s not necessarily work for allies to do. But allies can and should be committed to unlearning anti-LGBTQ+ ideology, ending anti-LGBTQ+ institutional policies and practices, and interrupting anti-LGBTQ+ interpersonal oppressions. Having dedicated, caring, and active allies helps LGBTQ+ people clear our minds and hearts of internalized anti-LGBTQ+ oppression.
(5) Some thinkers also talk about a 5th “I” – oppression and bias can also be Implicit.
Implicit bias is not a separate level of oppression, but is active at all four levels. It refers to the attitudes, stereotypes, and assumptions that we hold without even being aware of it. Implicit bias often runs counter to our consciously held values. These biases are communicated to us through media, language, institutions, leaders, family members, and more. We all take in explicit and implicit messages about LGBTQ+ people and identities, and these messages work their way into our understandings of the world. April Baskin describes implicit bias as a set of “factory settings,” basic operating ideas in our minds that we can especially revert to when we are already under stress or in a hurry.
As an ally to LGBTQ+ people, a few ways you can counteract implicit bias are:
Be in authentic friendships, relationships, and community with LGBTQ+ people. There are LGBTQ+ people in all communities, and the LGBTQ+ community is incredibly diverse. This does not mean going out of your way to find LGBTQ+ people to befriend for the sake of “diversity,” but it does mean being aware of ways that identity might play out in the relationships with LGBTQ+ people who are already in your community and your circle.
Immerse yourself in the media that LGBTQ+ people are putting out into the world. There is a wealth of brilliant literature, podcasts, blogs, art, film, and more, by and about LGBTQ+ people. This will also give you an opportunity to disrupt implicit biases about who LGBTQ+ people are and what we are like, by encountering the tremendous diversity within the LGBTQ+ community.
Practice self-awareness. In general, we did not create or choose the anti-LGBTQ+ biases that we are exposed to on a daily basis. By identifying anti-LGBTQ+ messages and comparing them to our consciously held values, we can lessen their impact.
And most of all, SLOW DOWN. Our biases typically pop up when we act or speak without giving ourselves time to think. When responding to any new or challenging moment, give yourself a moment to pause, assess, and act in ways that align with your values.
The Birth Control Movement
In the mid-1910’s the Birth Control Movement began to form and grow with the help of free thinking radicals and social reformers in New York.
The Birth Control Movement revealed two key developments in American society:
“…The growth of deep, consequential divisions among Christians regarding sex - more specifically, the morality of non-procreative sex within marriage.” (Moral Combat, R. Marie Griffith)
“…the far-reaching politicization of these divisions, involving a ferocious contest over political power and the law.” (Moral Combat, R. Marie Griffith)
The 1920’s proved to be a decade of provocative change that went hand-in-hand with the Women’s Rights Movement. By the early-1930’s, advocacy for the use of contraception within marriage was growing.
Court Cases
“These forces - gender, science, knowledge, free speech, and modernity - collided over birth control in the 1920’s and sparked nationwide debates over sex.”
Suggested Reading - Moral Combat: Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics
Moral Combat employs narratives that explore the various dimensions involved in historical debates regarding women’s rights. Intersection of religion, sexuality, and politics have been a perpetual source of conflict in the United States, especially since the emergence of the women’s suffrage movement and subsequent shifting family structures. Religious groups present themselves as influential social and political mobilizations, and individual beliefs about sexuality and morality can be simplified and categorized within these groups. Religion provides a filter through which the political world can be navigated. Inversely, political parties utilize endorsement from religious groups to gain power.
Griffith’s purpose in providing narratives that define the sexual revolution is to clarify the relationship between American politics, religion, and sexuality. Traditional family values were the center of the conservative argument for restrictions on sex. The battle over sex education in the 1960’s exposed the paranoid temperament many parents had about what their children learned about sex in school, so proliferation of sex information received mixed responses.
Supporters of progressive reform in sex education felt that it would cure “social problems like venereal disease among teens, rising divorce rates, and alarming statistics about teen pregnancies” by using “sex education as “preventative medicine”. (Griffith, 167) Conservatives argued that sex education would encourage sexual immorality among American youth “by separating instruction in human reproduction from education in “the higher ideals of marriage”.
Resources:
Suggested Reading - Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth Century United States
Introduction: More than Missionary: Doing the Histories of Religion and Sexuality Together
By Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton and Heather R. White
“In much historical writing, the modern sexual system is understood to be a direct consequence of the putative decline of religion in modern America, or secularization. Whether this thesis is directly stated or tacitly assumed, it informs many historians’ understanding of the relationship between the two zones of historical experience. According to the landmark survey of the history of U.S. sexuality Intimate Matters by John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman—still the only book of its scope—the modern period is characterized by “a commercialized sexuality,” and “sexual relations are expected to provide personal identity and individual happiness, apart from reproduction.” In identifying the engines of change, these authors cite “the economy, the family and politics” as helping to drive what they refer to as sexual liberalism…”
“To approach religion as a key analytic term in the recent history of sexuality means rethinking a presumed teleology of recent historical change. Religion, no less than sexuality, has been a site for invention, contestation, and change during the twentieth century. These changes further intersect with a range of processes that have forged twentieth-century culture and politics, especially racialization, state formation, gender construction, and economic organization.”
Narratives about Sexuality in the U.S.
Winnifred Wygal’s Flock: Same-Sex Desire and Christian Faith in the 1920’s
By Kathi Kern
“No one would mistake Winnifred Wygal (1884–1972), a career Young Women’s Christian Association worker, for a bohemian sex radical of the 1920s. Yet as the passage above suggests, the author and reformer forged an erotic life that challenged both the conventions of heterosexual “companionate marriage” and the concomitant emergence of homosexual “pathology” that characterized early twentieth-century domestic relations.
Her perception of the boundless capacity of God’s love emboldened Wygal to engage romantically with a number of different women, including Frances Perry, her companion from 1910 to 1940, as well as multiple other women who became, as she sometimes put it, part of her “fold.” Rather than seeing Christian commitment as constraining of human and sexual connection, Wygal maintained that personal relationships were intimately “related to our sense of God.” She adamantly rejected the idea that her nonmonogamous, same-sex sexuality was abnormal and instead longed to find God’s love through people and work.” (Kern, p. 17)
Sex is Holy and Mysterious: The Vision of Early Twentieth-Century Catholic Sex Education Reformers
By James P. McCartin
“Aiming to make age-appropriate sex instruction standard in Catholic schools…educators hoped to instill a clear sense of moral boundaries and spotlight health threats that could befall sexually active youth. But they also aspired to impart an enduring moral sensibility, capable of aiding students through their lives, of which sexuality was an integrated part. Opting for an affirmative approach, they emphasized that sex was both “natural” and “sacred”—at once impelled by strong biological and emotional drives and bound to the spiritual nature and destiny of the human person. Rather than prescribing restrictive moralism designed merely to suppress sexual desire, these educators promoted an elevated sense of human sexuality and encouraged a heightened capacity for thoughtful reflection on the topic. In the process, they indicated a capacity for fluid engagement with a range of perspectives on sexuality but also demonstrated that Catholic approaches to sex were not universally condemnatory and routinely outdated, as critics have frequently asserted.” (McCartin, p. 72)
Family Planning is a Christian Duty: Religion, Population Control, and the Pill in the 1960s
By Samira K. Mehta
“Focusing on the language of responsible parenthood shows that, as much as the Pill caused moral anxiety in some quarters, it also provided a new landscape for Protestant moral agency. Leaders at the highest levels of mainline Protestant ecumenical cooperation encouraged making deliberate and prayerful decisions about when to have children, decisions that took into account the health of one’s own marriage and finances, the rights of children and one’s capacity to fulfill those rights, and broader social issues, particularly population explosion, as a central responsibility of Christian marriage. Protestant leadership argued that technological advances, including vaccinations, antibiotics, and birth control, created the obligation to use them for social good. They then justified the use of contraception as a social good based on scientific evidence of the dangers posed by a rapidly expanding population and on doctrine from various denominations and scriptural interpretation of both family life and ‘stewardship of the earth.’” (Mehta, p. 165)
“While race was rarely explicitly mentioned (and when it was, authors often decried using eugenics against racial minorities), race was implicit in the conversation— Africans and Asians were depicted as the people most likely to be hurt by an expanding population and therefore were implied to be most in need of birth control. While the responsible parenthood discourse sought to distance itself from racially motivated eugenics, the distance was not as great as might have been hoped for: arguments about social class in the United States often noted the high percentage of African Americans among the “lower class” of people whom responsible parenthood advocates hoped to reach…” (Mehta, p. 166)
Ask Yourself…
What attributes are we describing as religious? What attributes are we describing as sexual?
In what ways do religion and religious practices shape the meanings and practices of sexuality?
“Consequently, we are left on both sides with a perplexing oil-and-water narrative: religion and sexuality are each present primarily in the other’s absence.”
Michael Foucault’s “The History of Sexuality”
“Up to the end of the eighteenth century, three major explicit codes-apart from the customary regularities and constraints of opinion-governed sexual practices: canonical law, the Christian pastoral, and civil law. They determined, each in its own way, the division between licit and illicit. They were all centered On matrimonial relations: the marital obligation, the ability to fulfill it, the manner in which one complied with it, the requirements and violences that accompanied it…”
