Germany and the Netherlands have legalized sex work wholesale. The “Swedish model” makes selling sex legal but keeps buying it illegal — Norway, Iceland, and France have followed that framework. And here in America, brothels are famously legal in Nevada.
.. But Lopez observed that, when sex work is legal, sex workers aren’t just free to not worry about the cops, they’re free to go to the cops if anything goes wrong. Furthermore, because sex workers no longer had to fear prosecution, the potential for police corruption (i.e. cops demanding sex from workers) also dropped.
Sex Education Around The World
A mammalian egg was first seen only in 1827, and before the 1840s, no one knew that human females ovulated monthly; the menstrual cycle remained a mystery, as did what determines the sex of a human embryo. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species transformed the study of evolution and genetics. Meanwhile, the development of germ theory and the discovery of antibiotics launched a series of campaigns to eradicate contagious diseases.
.. However tempting it is to see the debate over sex ed as a proxy war between the state and the family or between science and religion, this perspective misses the way a fight once figured as a battle between traditionalists and modernists has come to be figured as a battle over rights: the left invokes the rights of women and children; the right invokes the rights of parents and families.
The Changing American Sex Scandal
It supplies, as Barney Frank noted, the mordant thought that the three men who were trying to take charge of the Republican-controlled House as it gravely decided to alter American constitutional history were, in sequence: Newt Gingrich, who’d had a long affair while his first wife lay ill, and then, as Speaker of the House, cheated on his second wife with a Congressional aide (who became his third wife) during the impeachment; Bob Livingston, who was nominated to succeed Gingrich but passed on the job when it became known that he’d had affairs with several different women; and Hastert, the ultimate recipient of the Speakership, a man with some pretty dark sexual secrets of his own. Family values, all over.
.. The sexual exploitation of an intern, even an entirely willing and eager one, would surely be judged more harshly now than it was then—as a worse thing than Clinton’s defenders still want to admit.
Unraveling the Church Ban on Gay Sex
The archbishop has justified of his decision on the grounds that homosexual acts are “contrary to natural law.” Unlike many religions, Catholicism insists that its moral teachings are based not just on faith but also on human reason. For example, the church claims that its moral condemnation of homosexual acts can be established by rigorous philosophical argument, independent of anything in the Bible.
.. But it also holds Thomas Aquinas’s view that there can never be a genuine conflict between these two sources. Therefore, any apparent conflict results from our failure to understand what either God or reason is saying.
Most important, there is no assumption, in any given case, that we must resolve the conflict by revising the apparent conclusion of reason. For example, the church (eventually) decided that the scientific claims of Galileo and Darwin were correct and required revisions in teachings based on biblical passages suggesting otherwise. It is, therefore, an open question whether to accept the reasonable conclusion that homosexual acts need not be immoral and reject the view that this is what the Bible says.
.. There is considerable discussion among biblical scholars on this issue, with many suggesting that the passages that seem to condemn homosexual acts in general actually refer only to certain cases such as homosexual rape or male prostitution. But even if the biblical view is that any homosexual act is immoral, the Bible’s support for this view is no stronger than its support for the morality of slavery. Christian scholars argue that the acceptance of slavery (even in the New Testament, by Paul) merely reflects the limited perspective of the Bible’s human authors (similar to their belief in geocentrism or six-day creation) and does not reflect God’s revelation.