America Unzipped by Brian Alexander Page B

question to ask, they suggest, is “What is natural” and therefore part of God’s perfect plan? This is precisely the question American states asked when they wrote laws, like this one, in Maryland:
    Every person who is convicted of taking into his or her mouth the sexual organ of any other person or animal, or who shall be convicted of placing his or her sexual organ in the mouth of any other person or animal, or who shall be convicted of committing any other unnatural or perverted sexual practice with any other person or animal, shall be fined not more than one thousand dollars ($1,000.00), or be imprisoned in jail or in the house of correction or in the penitentiary for a period not exceeding ten years, or shall be both fined and imprisoned within the limits above prescribed in the discretion of the court.
    The Penners, like Joe, argue that when it comes to married sex, “nothing is said directly about what is acceptable in our lovemaking activity. Hence what comes naturally must be the product of what we feel inside us.”
    That’s a pretty big loophole. As long as one spouse does not feel violated, let the blow jobs begin. In fact, the Penners and a few other conservative Christian sex advisers were ahead of the government that claimed to be upholding Christian morality. It was not until 1990 that Maryland’s law was found unconstitutional for heterosexual couples, a finding extended to homosexuals in 1998. Similar laws in twenty-four states were effectively repealed in 2003 by the Supreme Court decision in
Lawrence v. Texas,
which struck down Texas’s antisodomy law over the vituperative objections of Justice Antonin Scalia and many of America’s cadre of fundamentalist Christians.
    That decision made anal sex legal, but the Penners don’t approve of anal sex. They dismiss it in a paragraph arguing that it’s dangerous. Unlike every other sex act they discuss, they cite no scripture.
    Masturbation, though, is pesky. The Penners pump their hermeneutical muscles defending their view that masturbation is a natural gift from God. They cite the Song of Solomon again (“One night as I was sleeping, my heart awakened in a dream…My hands dripped with perfume, my fingers with lovely myrrh”), but the argument largely depends on refuting other Bible passages. And, as Joe has told us, there are criteria that must be met in order to assure that a jerk-off session doesn’t veer into sin.
    â€œThe question is often asked,” the Penners write, as if reading my mind, “‘is not all masturbational activity a lustful act?’” Like Joe, they say no if you’re focused on your husband or wife or if, by some amazing act of willpower, you are not thinking about Halle Berry or any other human unless it’s an “unidentifiable person” and you think only in “a peripheral, still-life way.”
    If you’re a kid, the Penners leave the issue of what you can think about—except to say that porn is always bad—a little fuzzy. The head cheerleader at school might pass muster or she might not. This is mysterious. But in case anybody has any doubts about the rightness of their stance that masturbation without sinful lust is acceptable to God, they appeal to the lead general on the side of the Christians in the culture wars, James Dobson.
    Dobson himself wrote a book,
Solid Answers,
in which he calls self-love “as close to being a universal behavior as is likely to occur.” So we should not feel guilty; should not let it become obsessive (a relative term when it comes to teenage boys), lest it cause us to be hooked on porn; and should not slip into using it as a substitute for actual sex once we’re allowed to have actual sex after marriage.
    Dobson’s endorsement of masturbation is now used as cover by other fundamentalists wrestling with demon lust. Dobson says it’s okay, goes the argument. You can’t criticize