Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Performance Studies at New York University in the United States. Together with Janet R. Jakobsen, she is the author of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (New York University Press, 2003), which argues for replacing the concept of tolerance for sexual diversity with respect for religious freedom. The following comments are excerpted from Pellegrini's remarks at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics 2003 Annual Seminar. The full text is available at http://www.hemi.nyu.edu/eng/seminar/usa/text/pellegrini_paper.html.
The book grew out of a set of dissatisfactions that Janet and I shared about the impoverishment of public arguments on behalf of lesbian and gay "rights." We believe that an emphasis on "rights" rather than "freedom" is already part of the problem, and that lesbian and gay advocates are asking for too little when they ask for tolerance. (And "we" would certainly be asking for too little if we settle for gay marriage.)
At the center of Love the Sin is the claim that all state and federal laws regulating homosexuality are, ultimately, religion by other means. This is not just about sodomy and sexuality and sexual freedom. There is not exactly a lot of religious freedom going around for religious people who are not Christian, nor for Christians who are differently Christian - never mind for people who are not religious at all. [As Janet has argued in her own work] what religious freedom in the U.S. context currently means is the freedom to act Protestant, even when you're not....
In contrast to this dessicated notion of religious pluralism and its equally thin counterpart, tolerance, in Love the Sin we call for a robust pluralism, a democratic life pulsing with complexity and contestation, and the freedom not just to "be" different but to act differently. This latter freedom-to do oneself differently-proceeds from our recognition ... that selves do not come into the world ready-made, but are rather constituted through life practices and often in collective contexts. Religion is one such site for this kind of self-making. So is sex.
Too often, public discussions about religion and sex proceed as if religion and sex were opposed values. This is especially so in debates over homosexuality and gay rights. However, sexual justice and sexual freedom - and for a wider range of sexual dissenters than such terms as "gay" and "lesbian" capture - are not "anti-religious." They are actually part and parcel of any genuine American commitment to religious freedom. To repeat: to the extent that all U.S. laws and policies regulating homosexuality and denying gay men, lesbians, and other sexual dissidents full inclusion in American life are derived from specifically Christian ideas about the ordered body and "good" sex versus "bad," then, there can be no meaningful sexual freedom until such time as the twin promises of the First Amendment - disestablishment and free exercise - are actually enacted (and not just recited out loud as among the glories of American democracy).
The nutshell argument of the book, is that religious freedom is the condition of possibility for sexual freedom in the U.S., and as a way to get to this strong assertion, we draw an analogy between religious identity and homosexual identity....to jump-start more expansive considerations of not just what it means to be different, but, more centrally, what it means to do our identities differently. This stress on acts constitutive of self ... is offered, in part, as a response to opponents of homosexuality and gay rights who commonly assert that gay rights are nothing but "special rights" for chosen-and bad-behavior. The move to think "gay identity" "like" "religious identity" is also a reproach against mainstream gay rights organizations and advocates, who have attempted to short-circuit moral debates over homosexual "behavior" with analogies between homosexuality and race and, from there, to the assertion that, just "like" racial difference, sexuality too is in-born.... The freedom to be different and act differently should not depend on whether or not an individual is "born that way"....
Finally, Pellegrini challenges feminists and other progressive activists to re-examine their attitudes toward religion:
Now, there are good reasons for feminists, queers, and other passionate defenders of freedom to be worried about the way religion continues to work in U.S. public life. However, such blanket proclamations as "religion is the enemy" forget more than they know. They forget or overlook the many self-identified feminists, gay men, lesbians for whom religion remains a vital site of collective belonging and meaning-making.... Although this fact is often forgotten (by both the Right and the Left), progressive politics in the United States has not always been uniformly "against" religion. Just think of the rich history of progressive movements for African-American civil rights that were anchored in the Black Church; the movements for economic justice grounded in the Catholic worker movement in the U.S. and in Catholic base communities in Central America; long-standing traditions of Jewish progressive politics; and the Quaker movements on behalf of abolition and against war. These social justice movements, their histories and achievements, should make clear that the entry of religion into politics and public life is not in and of itself conservative.
