[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Religion and Human Sexuality
We Americans have subjected ourselves to many a public conjunction of religion and sex. First came the Moral Majority in 1979, the rise of the Religious Right, and the minting of family values as the new currency of politics. Religious and moral values were invoked by Supreme Court justices in 1986 when they decided that homosexual sodomy was not entitled to constitutional privacy. Since the Defense of Marriage Act became federal law in 1996, religious authority has been called upon by social conservatives as they attempt, state by state, to legislate an exclusively heterosexual definition of marriage.
Opposition to sex education in public schools has become a key organizational point for the Religious Right, which often establishes school boards as its local base. Abortion and gay rights remain the social issues in regard to which religious groups are most politically visible and have become ideologically (if not logically) linked with the whole agenda of religious conservatism, from school prayer to reduced taxation and diminished government. In the 1990s teen pregnancy and single motherhood in general have been invested with tremendous social significance and, particularly with the Personal Responsibility Act of 1996, remanded to the special care of "faith-based" organizations.
We could list many more conjunctions of this type, but the culmination (let's hope) was the unprecedented spectacle of a president forced to confess a sexual affair on television. Although Bill Clinton's initial response was to insist that the matter was private, he was quickly given to understand that nothing less than an altar call would be politically demanded of him. And that he performed at the prayer breakfast of September 21, 1998, in the language of "a broken and contrite heart," which he cited from his personal Bible, followed by well-publicized sessions with a team of spiritual counselors. For a short season, clergy and theologians of every sort enjoyed......
