Who are we to tell others what they should feel, or how they should act on those feelings? What consenting adults do in private is none of anyone else’s business. As Woody Allen observed when he married his former girlfriend’s adopted daughter, ‘the heart wants what the heart wants.’
Legally speaking, my sexual relationships are my concern only. We live in a free country and, so long as I am not hurting anyone else, I can pursue my individual rights in this area without interference from government or the law. Similarly, society allows me to follow my desires and cannot judge me for them. Friends, family and others are frequently good enough to encourage me to take the choices that I think will make me happiest.
This mentality is so taken for granted that we barely dare question it any more. Yet it is a cultural blind spot you could drive a truck through. On personal, family, and national levels, we can no longer pretend that what people do in private has no effect on others, just because they don’t see it happen.
Ken Livingstone tried to claim in April that the fact he had fathered five children by three women was irrelevant because ‘no one in this city cares what consenting adults do as long as you don’t involve children, animals or vegetables.’(1)
However, one of the country’s most senior judges showed greater insight when he warned the following day that family breakdown has now reached catastrophic levels, that family courts are overstretched to the point of collapse, and that the ‘never-ending carnival of human misery’ witnessed there is the source of ‘almost all of society’s ills’.(2)
Two years ago a report by Iain Duncan Smith quantified some of the financial costs of these ills. Family breakdown alone costs the UK taxpayer somewhere in the region of £24 billion per year, largely in benefits payments; include the educational underachievement and crime that so often go hand-in-hand with this and the price tag spirals to over £100 billion.
The cluster of consequences of relationship breakdown – a stark reminder that our cultural mantra of ‘consenting adults in private’ is hopelessly inadequate – requires a rethink of our understanding of social deprivation.
One journalist described the confusion of relationships, low-level neglect and emotional instability that is so common, but that only raised eyebrows when it was the backdrop to nine-year-old Shannon Matthews’s disappearance in February, as ‘emotional poverty, poverty of the soul’.(3)
This is the subject of the Jubilee Centre’s forthcoming book, Just Sex? Why it's never just sex.(4) In our pursuit of individual freedom, which encompasses sexual liberty, we have lost sight of something more profound. The networks of relationships that once gave us our identity and support have become stretched and redefined. In many ways – as advertisers and the media so often exploit – sex has become a substitute for real intimacy. In reality, the chaos that results usually serves only to undermine those relationships further.
We argue that Judaeo-Christian standards for sexual morality are an antidote to this relational chaos. With its concerns for stable marriage, justice, and awareness of third-party impacts, the Bible’s prioritisation of a healthy society above individual rights – sexual or otherwise – has never been more relevant.
1 Metro, 4 April 2008.
2 Sarah Womack, ‘Breakdown in families “as harmful as global warming”’, The Telegraph, 5 April 2008.
3 Melanie Reid, ‘Shannon Matthews is the new face of poverty’, The Times, 17 March 2008.
4 Scheduled for February 2009, IVP.
By Guy Brandon at the Cambridge-based Jubilee Centre www.jubilee-centre.org. Printed with permission.
