Teaching Moral Sex by Kristy L. Slominski

Author:Kristy L. Slominski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Religion and the New Morality in Early SIECUS

In the initial years of SIECUS, Calderone elaborated upon principles of the new morality within her work. For example, she addressed her rejection of externally imposed dictates and her demand for individual responsibility in a talk she delivered as SIECUS president nearly thirty times in 1966 and 1967. “The basic morality,” she proclaimed, “can never be outer-posed—whatever the source of the imposition. The greatest obedience we can show is to that inner morality that we ourselves impose upon ourselves. We commune with and listen to God each in our different ways.”82 In Calderone’s formulation, the Quaker religion’s inward-turning spirituality supported the new morality’s encouragement of personal accountability. Emphasis on the individual was simultaneously a turn toward God.

Others adapted the new morality to their efforts to promote comprehensive sexuality education, taking it beyond frameworks of liberal Protestantism. For example, Isadore Rubin, a SIECUS board member who held a doctoral degree in Public Health and served as editor of Sexology magazine, associated situation ethics with the humanistic liberalism that he promoted. For him, it stood for rejection of “inflexible absolutes” and teaching “internalized controls” to replace external social controls.83 Rubin situated these principles near the middle of a continuum between extremes of “traditional repressive asceticism” and “sexual anarchy.” He cited Robinson and other Protestant theologians who influenced his understanding of new morality. However, while Fletcher put love at the center of his situation ethics, Rubin argued that sex educators in a pluralistic society needed to elevate more general democratic principles such as respect for truth and critical reasoning, the equality and dignity of every person, the right to self-determination, and the importance of working together for the good of society.84 Despite this important difference, both Rubin and Fletcher rejected traditional approaches to morals and empowered individuals to make moral decisions.

Alongside nonreligious adaptations like Rubin’s, liberal Protestant sex educators continued to invoke the new morality as an important religious contribution to the movement. William Genné, secretary of SIECUS and director of the NCC’s Commission on Marriage and Family Life, expounded upon its theological meanings: “The theological new moralist, in contrast to the secularist, believes that the ultimate sanction for a system of values or morality rests above any person or group of persons. Even the teachings of the churches as well as the acts of men and nations stand under the judgment of the Creator who is also Lord of History.”85 In his perspective, the turn away from legalistic rules reflected more than the social scientific trend away from repression; it was a turn toward a specific vision of God’s relationship to humanity. Rejecting associations of the new morality with permissiveness, Genné asserted that it was “no easy-going, pleasure seeking, fun morality. It demands a rigorous self-evaluation of every personal act as in the sight of God. It cannot accept the rightness of any sexual act that two mutually-consenting adults may do without evaluating this in the light of all we know about the ultimate meaning and purpose of sex as created by God.

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