It may have been another nation’s politics, but few GLBT Canadians were left unaffected by the events of November 4th. The evening peaked with the image of a weeping Jesse Jackson, as a struggle for civil rights over a century long was capped by something people had not thought possible: the election of an African-American to the Presidency. The joy was short-lived, though, as the votes regarding Proposition 8, a proposal to change the State constitution in order to ban same-sex marriage, started to roll in.

With the achievement of same-sex marriage fresh in Canadians’ minds, many of us could feel how it must have felt for the thousands of couples who had grasped the right to marry, only to have that potentially taken away from them by a majority vote (at the time of writing, there is no certainty whether any of the marriages that had occurred before the vote will be recognized legally).

The dichotomy of the victory and losses on the same night (two other states also voted to amend their constitution in a similar manner, and the State of Arkansas voted to prevent gay couples from adopting) resulted in an argument as to whether GLBT rights even constituted a civil rights struggle, some negatively comparing our struggle to the African Americans’. One former Presidential hopeful, Mike Huckabee, even declared that “here is the difference: Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. John Lewis got his skull cracked on the Selma bridge...” an argument that totally negates a history that includes Matthew Shepard, Gwen Araujo and far more.

But it is true that the struggles are different. And it’s not because race is something that one is born with, while conservatives still insist that being gay or trans is a choice - something that is hotly contested and which the existing medical evidence tends to disprove. The difference is that one of the struggles has gone on much longer, and it’s not the one that most would expect.

Western civilization loves its metaphoric wars: the war on terrorism, the war on hunger and poverty, the war on drugs. Except that it doesn’t really talk about the war on sex, probably because it goes so far back into history that nobody even recalls the war ever being declared. It’s a war that fulfills society’s other Machiavellian mandate by fabricating enemies from gay people, fabricating enemies from gender-variant people, fabricating enemies from sex trade workers, fabricating enemies from consenting partners who engage in just about anything outside of traditional sex designed for procreation; to a degree, even fabricating enemies from the entire female sex. It’s hard to even guess when Adam and Eve discovered shame to begin with -- perhaps while stamping out rival religions that sported blatantly nude and sometimes intersexed idols. What we do know is that the canonization of celibacy as a virtue began with some early Gnostic thinkers, and found its way into Christian tradition first through the post-Christ Disciple Paul, later through copyists and translators (such as the radically pro-celibate Origen) and those charged with compiling the New Testament. As Gnostic sects moved throughout the Middle East, variations of the concept found their way into Islam and some Eastern traditions. Because of the shame that can be generated by a basic fundamental human need, even people who live honest, compassionate, giving lives can be made to feel flawed, wicked and filthy in their god’s eyes. People would see through any other manufactured kind of self-loathing and spirit-breaking by condemning any other human function -- not breathing, eating, sleeping, even defecation -- but because there’s pleasure involved, sex becomes the perfect source of guilt.

Essentially, the message of celibacy is this: working 24/7 for god’s (i.e. the church’s) benefit = good, stopping to enjoy any pleasure in life = bad. Paul wrote: “I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried or betrothed woman is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit. But the married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband. I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord.” (I Cor. 7:32-35)

For centuries, this demonization of a natural, instinctive, biologically-driven human need (with the specific exception, of course, of the continued propagation of the species) has been used to instill obedience from faith populations. Shame has been used to secure submission and to distract from the faults of society in order to find faults in ourselves and each other. This is not applicable to just one faith, nor is it all churches either, but regardless of what one believes about churches now, it has to be recognized that this pattern was instituted repeatedly and usually ruthlessly throughout human history. It is a useful tool, and various faiths have made optimal use of it.

For centuries, women bore the consequences of the war on sex, taking the blame for introducing the apple to Adam, taking the blame for “inspiring mens’ lusts” and causing temptation. Faiths developed tenets regarding how women were to dress, regarding subservience to their husbands; regarding customs that developed into diverse twists like female genital mutilation or social mores that later evolved into manufactured psychiatric diagnoses of “nymphomania”; regarding their status as property and as a gender whose opinions and needs were to be disregarded.

That has not changed significantly in many parts of the world, but it has changed in Western society. With the vote, divorce, abuse and harassment awareness, workplace rights, the (glacial) move toward wage equality and much more, women are gradually shedding their status as the scapegoat of society. Certainly, rigid faith elements keep resurrecting abortion as a debate and spin that “motherhood is the highest calling” is still used to pooh-pooh ambitions (“oh that’s nice dear, you have a career -- but when are you going to have children?”). But the declaration of “Our Bodies Ourselves” has eroded a Province in the War on Sex once occupied and effortlessly dictated by brands of faith. It has become dangerous for even the Vatican to oppose the movement toward womens’ rights for fear of losing more tithers than would be kept under its thumb. It has become prudent for churches to refocus on new threats, some real, some manufactured, in order to unite their followers, ready to donate, ready to volunteer, ready for war. Our neighbour to the south has provided a very clear demonstration of this breakdown of priorities in its highest level of office: the outgoing President had lied his nation (and others) into a multi-billion-dollar war that cost thousands of soldiers’ lives, and hundreds of thousands of lives in the invaded country, and was re-elected... the previous one was impeached for a blowjob.

And of course, here’s where we come in. Returning to the original concept of celibacy, of opposition to sex for pleasure rather than procreation, it becomes easy to point the finger at sexual orientations, gender identities, pornography and intimate behaviours like consensual BDSM, sex-positive play, even oral sex and masturbation, which fall outside what is narrowly defined as heteronormative. Churches treat homosexuality and transsexuality as “the greatest threat to Western Civilization” (as one devout U.S. Senator recently called them) because to faith institutions, frankly, they are. With each legislative victory and the gradual changing of hearts and minds, the Church is losing its most effective tool of rule, mobilization, political sway and funds generation: shame. With the gradual movement of GLBT and sex-positive communities toward acceptance and protection, the churches’ right to condemn, incite and inflame are eroded.

The significance of all of this is that the move toward equality, recognition and respect may never be completely ended until the war on sex has been addressed, perhaps not until it has abated completely, if that’s even possible. This has been made more complicated by the fact that because this definition of “morality” has dominated social culture for so long, it is not just faith-driven anymore. History shows us a long series of pendulum swings from progressive to reactionary to progressive to reactionary, with the war on sex being one of the reactionary’s timeless secret weapons. Anti-sex “morality” was a tool used by the emergent Nazi regime to garner support and unity (Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft a.k.a. Institute for Sexual Research was one of the first targets to be destroyed), was used by Europeans to justify the genocide of Native peoples, was used by political factions to engineer the assassination of rogue kings… and without addressing the underlying issue, the gains we make today might be just as vulnerable to a swing to the right - especially if it is a harder push than the 8 years of W that we have just seen next door, or if the minority leash is taken off the Harper Government.

In Canada, we’d started out on the right footing decades ago, with Pierre Trudeau’s declaration that the Government needs to stay out of the bedroom. But that is all just lip service if Canada Customs is still given license to seize whatever material it likes being shipped to Little Sister’s Bookstore. What we need to do is to start with our own attitudes, those of venues where we have some authority (i.e. Government), and those of our next generation. A millennia-long struggle is not likely to end over the course of a single lifetime. Instead, it is necessary to recognize that activism did not end with the accomplishment of same-sex marriage in Canada. If we allow ourselves to grow complacent and believe that the “last serious battle” has been won, we will quite likely be in for an unfortunate surprise. The ongoing work to deal with HIV, the recognition of gender identity and gender expression in discrimination and hate crimes legislation, the development of Social Justice 12 and the resistance of a B.C. School District to it – these are the fronts on which the struggle continues. And when Bill Siksay still has difficulty getting his own party (NDP) to stand behind Private Members’ Bills that would establish transgender rights and protections, there is still much to do.

”Mercedes Allen is a writer who blogs at http://dentedbluemercedes.wordpress.com/, has been featured on bilerico.com, PageOneQ and others, and has also developed the website at AlbertaTrans.org as a resource for transgender information and support.”