George Carey and kinky sex
The Rt. Revd. and Rt. Hon. The Lord Carey of Clifton, formerly the Archbishop of Canterbury, is opposed to kinky sex. That doesn’t just mean he doesn’t want to partake of kinky sex; he doesn’t want anyone else to partake either.
Writing in the News of the World1, George Carey comments on the fall-out of Max Mosley’s libel victory against that paper. He makes two points;
“The first victim is Free Speech itself. Without public debate or democratic scrutiny the courts have created a wholly new privacy law. In itself that’s bad enough”.
To an extent, I agree with him. I do not like judicial activism; certainly, it is the place of Parliament and not the courts to decide whether there should be a right to privacy. I’m not sure myself where the limits should be drawn, although I think it is a case of shades of grey rather than an absolute decision one way or the other. I’d add that I think the Government should deal with the issue, thorny as it might be, rather than keep us in the Article 8 ECHR-induced limbo we currently occupy.
Carey’s remarks, though, are somewhat sinister when we take into account his second complaint:
“[P]ublic morality is the second victim of this legal judgement. Unspeakable and indecent behaviour, whether in public or in private, is no longer significant under this ruling.”
The assumption made there is that kinky sex is unspeakable and indecent; I’d contend that it is speakable - I’m doing it now and I understand that there are many websites where people prove it to be speakable on a regular basis - and that indecency is a very subjective quality. Beyond that, any serious notion of liberty has to include the right to do what you want (the debate comes in about what restrictions should be placed on that right). It is not just the state that can intrude on people’s rights; the press and many other organisations can as well.
“In the past a public figure has known that scandalous and immoral behaviour carries serious consequences for his or her public profile, reputation and job. Today it is possible to both have your cake AND to eat it.”
Why should this only apply to people in the public eye? Or should we, in an inversion of Ruskin2, say that a local businessman should only expect to be harangued in the local rag while a national businessman, although till then confined to the financial pages, should expect a national pillory? Does this prelate honestly say that there are different morals depending on your public profile or, rather, how much running the gutter press think they can make out of you?
There is also the question of morality. I’m guessing that Carey would consider adultery more grave a crime than engaging in kinky sex (their being no reference in the Decalog to it), but there is no specific mention of that in his article.
“Max Mosley claimed that what consenting adults do with each other behind closed doors—however depraved, brutal and repugnant—is both private and harmless. I think that is deplorable. And I believe most people would ridicule his claim. This is a bleak, deeply-flawed “anything goes” philosophy. It is also dangerous and socially undermining, devoid of the basic, decent moral standards that form the very fabric of our society.”
Actually, I don’t ridicule the claim; I endorse it. So long as it is safe, sane and consensual, I don’t really care how much it might deprave the noble Lord, brutalise his tender sensibilities or cause him to screw up his face in repugnance. To do otherwise is an affront to liberty; his attitude is as dangerous and socially undermining as to go the other way and assert an absolute right to privacy.
Bartholomew weighs in as well.
xD.
PS A little while ago, Kit Roskelly wrote a piece called Kink 101 for The F Word’s blog about feminist attitudes to BDSM. While the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, I think that the issues of consent and liberty are similar and it is instructive that the opposition thereto is given in a similar fashion from similar sources in both instances.
1 - Read whatever you want about the News of the World using a former archbishop to defend it in the name of public decency, but the use of ecclesiastical majesty in this manner comes, for me, close to simony
2 - “[...]and it ought to be quite as natural and straight-forward a matter for a labourer to take his pension from his parish, because he has deserved well of his parish, as for a man in higher rank to take his pension from his country, because he has deserved well of his country.” John Ruskin, A Joy For Ever, 1857
