Why is it that religious conservatives have no sexual ethics?
This is Bryan Fishcher, of the American Family Association:
Once you allow sex between two people of the same sex, there is no place to stop. You can’t stop just with homosexuality. You can’t stop with polygamy. You can’t even stop with pedophilia. You wind up going all the way to sex with animals.
And this is Fred Clark in response:
In other words, if you ask Bryan Fischer why raping a small child is wrong, he would say it is wrong because it is an instance of sex outside of the context of marriage between one man and one woman. Not because it is coercive. Not because it is rape. But because, for Fischer, straight-married sex is always Good, and any other kind of sex, not being straight-married sex, is always Bad.
This is not “traditional religious ethics.” It isn’t ethics at all. It’s a single check-box formula for determining whether or not any sexual act is Fischer-Approved.
This lack of moral sense, this failure to grasp the notion of consent, this outright dangerous code is hardly unique to Fischer. Islam also has strict rules about sex, which have little to do with consent. Such different worldviews can lead to a basic disagreement on the nature of “good”.