The Founding Myth

by Andrew L Seidel

  20

  Perverting Sex and Love: The Seventh Commandment

  VII. “You shall not commit adultery.”

  — Exodus 20:14

  “Sex, sin, and the Devil were early linked.”

  — Arthur Miller, The Crucible, 19531

  “Adultery is the highest invasion of property.”

  — Regina v. Mawgridge, Queen’s Bench, 17062

  Laws regulating sex tend toward the ridiculous. Indiana and Wyoming enacted sodomy laws in the late nineteenth century to punish anyone who “entices, allures, instigates or aids any person under the age of twenty-one years to commit masturbation or self-pollution.”3 To this day, Maryland outlaws oral sex as an “unnatural or perverted sexual practice.”4 And in Michigan, adultery is still a crime.5 This country has a long history of regulating and prohibiting sex. More often than not, it is a history not just of ridiculousness, but of racism, sexism, and discrimination, all actively pushed by Christian churches. The history is still being written. The vice president of the United States, Mike Pence, once called for criminalizing adultery, bemoaning the modern “discomfort with a law against adultery.” He, for one, did not think it an “antiquated sin,” but believed that “the Seventh Commandment contained in the Ten Commandments is still a big deal.”6 Pence is not alone—he’s just not in the right century. Once upon a time, adultery was a crime and a cause for civil action in the United States. The trial that gripped the nation in the 1870s—there’s always one—was newspaper editor Theodore Tilton’s lawsuit against his mentor and pastor, the famous abolitionist minister who preached about “God’s love,” Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, for “criminal conversation.” Basically, Tilton sued Beecher in civil court for $100,000 for committing adultery with his wife.7

  Whether this history of legislating sex is essential to the American founding is unclear, but the Judeo-Christian influence on legislating sexual mores is undeniable and, as this chapter concedes, can be legitimately claimed by Christian nationalists. But upon that history, shame, not a country, should be built, and therefore this commandment demands special attention, even though, like the sixth, eighth, and ninth commandments, it applies only to one’s co-religionists.

  The biblical prohibition on adultery is narrow; it is certainly not as broad as most read it today. Biblically speaking, the prohibition did not pertain to all believers: it applied only to married women. The married woman and her sexual partner were both considered adulterers. But if her husband slept around, or even took another wife, as Abraham, Jacob, Solomon, David, Gideon, and Moses all did, he was not an adulterer. According to The Jewish Encyclopedia, adultery is “sexual intercourse of a married woman with any man other than her husband. The crime can be committed only by and with a married woman; for the unlawful intercourse of a married man with an unmarried woman is not technically Adultery in the Jewish law.”8 The encyclopedia clarifies that a husband can have sex with women other than his wife without breaking god’s commands: “The ancient Jewish law, as well as other systems of law which grew out of a patriarchal state of society, does not recognize the husband’s infidelity to his marriage vows as a crime.”9 A man was an adulterer when he slept with another man’s wife.10 Essentially, adultery was a crime against a husband. Because husbands owned their wives.11

  This raises the question of why a god that passed a prohibition on adultery designed to prevent married women from straying would have chosen a married woman to bear his son, but that is not for me to answer. It may even be fair to say that Christianity is founded on adultery. Joseph and Mary were “betrothed” with solemn espousals when “she was found to be with child,” a child that was not Joseph’s.12 As two scholars on the role of women in the ancient world, Mitchell Carroll and the Reverend Alfred Brittain, have noted, that betrothal and those espousals are “as sacred as…marriage…. The woman was not allowed to withdraw from the contract, and the man could not fail to fulfill his promise unless he gave her a formal bill of divorcement for cause, as in the case of marriage; the laws relating to adultery were also applicable.”13 If that is true, the whole of Christianity may be predicated on Mary’s adultery.

  Of course, the bible, and therefore Judeo-Christianity’s, obsession—and that word is used with all its unhealthy connotations—with sex is not limited to adultery. The adultery commandment is just a symptom of that broader preoccupation. The bible demands that we “Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself.”14 It also prohibits homosexuality,15 cross-dressing,16 sex while or with a partner who is menstruating,17 masturbation,18 lying about your virginity (but only if you’re female),19 being raped,20 and bestiality (an excellent prohibition with a punishment that demands the death of yet another innocent victim: both human and animal are killed.)21

  Many of the sex regulations are as sexist as they are absurd. The bible declares that menstruating women are unclean,22 but allows polygamy.23 Fathers may sell their daughter into sexual slavery, but only to another Israelite.24 Soldiers may sexually enslave any female virgins after they’ve killed the virgins’ men.25 Men can get away with rape, if they pay the victim’s family 50 shekels and marry the victim.26 There are many prohibitions against having sex with family members, but men have a duty to impregnate the wives of their dead brothers.27 Biblical heroes even trade in flesh. David purchased a wife by giving his future father-in-law, King Saul, one hundred foreskins of the king’s enemies.28

  The bible authors also demand—as part of the covenant with god—that all males have a part of their genitals removed:

  This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. Throughout your generations every male among you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old, including the slave[s]…. Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”29

  “Cut off from his people” in this instance is both an unfortunate pun and a regular biblical punishment that meant killing or banishing the person. Other books of the bible reiterate the divine covenant’s demand for an ounce of flesh.30 Even the New Testament advocates it; Paul circumcises Timothy.31

  The Christian bible tries to halt the biblical sex craze by endorsing celibacy.32 Recognizing that “sexual immorality” is unlikely to stop, Paul concedes that people may get married, even though it would be better if they remained unmarried and celibate, like him. The bible treats marriage as a safety valve, necessary because people are not pious enough to abstain.

  There might actually be a twisted sort of logic to religious leaders imposing these rules on followers. Perhaps the true rationale behind the sexual commandments and Christianity’s unnatural enthusiasm for celibacy is not to curb immorality, but rather to guard the primacy of one’s relationship with the religion. Jesus has to be more important than anything else, including your husband, wife, or lover. He said so himself: “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother.”33 His followers’ love and attention must be directed toward Jesus first. Family can have what is left over.

  Destroying relationships that elevate loyalty to one another above loyalty to the leader is typical in totalitarian systems. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston and Julia betray each other and repudiate their love while being tortured by the Ministry of Love (a title that some apply to Jesus’s ministry). Of all the agencies operated by Big Brother, the “Ministry of Love was the really frightening one.”34 Its goal “was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act.”35 Sex is a threat to the leader:

  All marriages between Party members had to be approved…and—though the principle was never clearly stated—permissio
n was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children…. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes.36

  Sterilizing sex and degrading that lovely and loving act to the lowest form of uncontrolled reproduction should ring familiar bells for Christians, particularly those raised in more conservative churches. Sex, when done properly, fosters and improves loving relationships, creating loyalty outside of the church. Judeo-Christianity’s and Big Brother’s goals are chillingly similar: “trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it”37 to ensure loyalty to the leader, not to one another.

  The Catholic Church uses the same rationale to control its priests. According to Catholic law, Canon 277, “Clerics are…bound to celibacy which is a special gift of God by which sacred ministers can adhere more easily to Christ with an undivided heart and are able to dedicate themselves more freely to the service of God and humanity.”38 An “undivided heart” is preferred because the church and its god do not want followers to love anyone in this world above the church. Allowing them to do so weakens the church. Clerical celibacy dates back to at least 300 CE, when, according to the Catholic Church, it decided that “all clerics who exercise a ministry…must abstain from relations with their wives and must not beget children; those who do are to be removed from the clerical state.”39

  Jesus himself lays down the most vile and controlling sexual law by making it impossible to obey the adultery commandment: “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”40 This commandment then, at least as interpreted by Jesus, is meant to make believers feel guilty and, in doing so, builds their spiritual debt. Lusty, guilty sinners are bound more tightly to the person who can expiate their sin, Jesus, and later to his deputies, the priestly caste, every time they even think of having sex. That perpetual guilt binds people to their church and is the basis of thoughtcrime, which appears undisguised in the final commandment (see chapter 21).

  THIS SAD LEGAL CATALOG, with all its totalitarian leanings, has infected American law. Judeo-Christianity presumes the power, intelligence, and feasibility of legislating the bedroom behavior of two consenting adults, and this arrogance has been responsible for immense pain and discrimination throughout American history.

  Until 1967, penalties for miscegenation—mixed-race sex, relationships, or marriages—were common, and had been since the colonial period.41 Hugh Davis, in 1630, received the earliest recorded punishment in the colonies for “lying with a negro.” Davis was “soundly whipped before an assembly of Negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and the shame of Christians by defiling his body in lying with a negro; which fault he is to acknowledge next Sabbath Day.”42 Notice that this crime had no victim; rather, it was a crime against “God” and against other Christians who were not involved or harmed.

  The unconstitutional anti-miscegenation law that the Supreme Court struck down in 1967 in the famous Loving v. Virginia case was similarly based on religion, as the trial judge explained: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents…. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”43

  Another example of Judeo-Christianity’s sexual legislation is America’s history of discrimination against homosexuals. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals wrote in 1976, “There is no dispute that religious forces motivated the original laws proscribing sodomitic acts.”44 When the Supreme Court initially upheld laws criminalizing sodomy in 1986 in Bowers v. Hardwick, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that “decisions of individuals relating to homosexual conduct have been subject to state intervention throughout the history of Western civilization. Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judeo–Christian moral and ethical standards.”45 When the court overturned these prohibitions in 2003, it disagreed with the Bowers outcome but did not dispute the religious nature of such prohibitions. The majority confirmed that “the condemnation [of homosexuality] has been shaped by religious belief ”46 and cited a historiography article that argued:

  The primary historical justification for penalizing crimes against nature reaches back to the early Christian era and the Middle Ages. Following the lead of Saint Paul, early church fathers synthesized ideas from Christianity’s Jewish heritage and Roman context to create a regime whereby sex and pleasures of the body were considered presumptively suspect—morally valuable only when engaged in for procreative purposes within marriage.47

  The Bowers Court’s reliance on Judeo-Christian principles was historically accurate, but legally wrong. American courts cannot uphold laws for religious reasons; nor can our government legislate religion. The government must have valid secular reasons for its legislation. When overturning Bowers, the Court wrote, “The issue is whether the majority may use the power of the State to enforce [religious beliefs] on the whole society through operation of the criminal law.”48 The Court concluded that Bowers “was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today. It ought not to remain binding precedent. Bowers v. Hardwick should be and now is overruled.”49

  Judeo-Christian principles reared up in the push to criminalize sodomy, but also in the attempt to ban gay marriage. When the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, it noted that the House of Representatives intended DOMA to express “both moral disapproval of homosexuality, and a moral conviction that heterosexuality better comports with traditional (especially Judeo–Christian) morality,”50 a sentiment correctly struck from our laws.

  What goes on in the bedroom of two consenting adults is no business of the state. When the state does intrude, it is often with a law based on Judeo-Christian principles, like those embodied in the seventh commandment. The influence of these principles cannot be denied. But such laws are a shameful part of America’s past, and the sooner we purge that venomous influence, the better.

  In a way, even this influence proves the larger point of this book. Judeo-Christianity’s influence leads to unconstitutional laws that courts are forced to strike down because Judeo-Christian principles conflict with the higher principles of our Constitution. Justice Harry Blackmun, in his powerful dissent in Bowers, made this same point:

  The assertion that “traditional Judeo-Christian values proscribe” [sodomy] cannot provide an adequate justification for [the law]. That certain, but by no means all, religious groups condemn the behavior at issue gives the State no license to impose their judgments on the entire citizenry. The legitimacy of secular legislation depends instead on whether the State can advance some justification for its law beyond its conformity to religious doctrine…. Thus, far from buttressing his case, petitioner’s invocation of Leviticus, Romans, St. Thomas Aquinas, and sodomy’s heretical status during the Middle Ages undermines his suggestion that [the law] represents a legitimate use of secular coercive power. A State can no more punish private behavior because of religious intolerance than it can punish such behavior because of racial animus.51

  The American government cannot punish citizens for violating religious laws, and all citizens are freer and our society better for this. Judeo-Christian principles have corrupted our laws, but the greater constitutional principles are finally rooting out and eliminating their poisonous effects.

  21

  Misogyny, Slavery, Thoughtcrime, and Anti-Capitalism: The Tenth Commandment

  X. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

  — Exodus 20:17

  “The enacting clauses past without a single alteration, and I flatter mysel
f have in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.”

  — James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, on the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 17861

  The final commandment is triply disturbing. First, the Judeo-Christian god allows, for the second time in his ten moral precepts, slavery. Second, he recognizes that a wife “belongs to” her husband; women are chattel, like the slave, ox, or donkey. Third, he criminalizes thought. Thoughtcrime is the defining feature of totalitarian regimes.2 Slavery is discussed in detail in regard to the fourth commandment (see chapter 17), and we will touch on it again in chapter 24. But the tenth commandment’s treatment of women and criminalization of thought must be addressed. The former is one way in which Judeo-Christianity can legitimately claim to have influenced America’s founding, and the other is opposed to the most basic freedom the Constitution protects.

  Remember the Ladies

  “I long to hear that you have declared an independancy—and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”