Sex must be sacred because it is a psychological necessity that it be so. The proliferation of ritual, religious significance, taboos, ideals, legends, and art across the entire world that focus on sex is an inescapable universal phenomenon. We cannot help but turn sex into a temple, a god, a ritual, an idol. It is too deeply rooted in our connection to beauty, to the past, to the future, to our species, to our physical self, to our complex social structures, to our emotional self, to our strengths and beauties, to our weaknesses and flaws and vulnerabilities, not to be sacred. It is fundamentally sacramental by its nature, whether we wish it to be or not.
And the curious thing is, sex will acquire this sacredness and become an object of obsession, identity, and passionate defense no matter where our society locates its theory about it and what is valuable and permissible and desireable. You can change the values, but you can’t fundamentally change the approach. You just change where it stands. The object of your theory will always become better, an ideal, something to be defended. And the threats to it will always be rejected, reprehensible, something that must be attacked and repelled and resisted, because it is an attack upon the sacred, a keystone of our connection to divinity and our identity in it.
In a way, it doesn’t matter whether the threat is homosexuality or heteronormativity. I’m not saying that it’s arbitrary where you fix a society’s sacred center. In fact it will have large practical consequences upon its fundamental structure, and must, because of how essential to all levels of human reality and life sex is. But the sacredness is necessary, it is a necessary byproduct of what sex is. And so in that sense it doesn’t matter where you fix your ideal, as far as that goes. The whole retinue of the sacred will travel with it, wherever the tent of meeting is pitched.
So, then, the question is not whether sex will be sacred, but upon what ground that sacredness will be built. What walls, what center, what god, will be defended, and what the practical outworkings and consequences of choosing such an idol will be. What conditions of humanity will flow through us from such a point of contact with our divine ideal? No doubt we will all see some things protected and other things rejected. The question is simply which things, and how will they affect what form our society and our lives take?
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