Behold, a virgin shall conceive...

The Christian Right, as both Dagmar Herzog and the Republican nomination of Sarah Palin make abundantly clear, is not anti-sex. “We are the ones with the babe on the ticket”, gushes the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh. “Run to the arms of your prince and enter your dream”, advises the author, media star and abstinence-before-marriage advocate Lisa Bevere in her book Kissed the Girls and Made Them Cry, on sale at Palin’s old Pentecostal church in Wasilla. Evangelical conservatives have outflanked their enemies: “Christian sex”, and not what the revolutionaries of the 1960s had to offer, turns out to be “the most amazing sex on God’s Green earth”.

All of this is not really surprising. Protestantism from the very beginning defined itself as being, roughly speaking, on the side of sexuality. Being married, the Reformers argued, was not second best; the putative celibacy of Catholic priests, monks and nuns was not only theologically misguided but also a front for hypocrisy and perversion. Methodism was attacked in the eighteenth century for being too sexy; what else was one to make of all its excited talk about “love feasts”? And even if, in early twentieth-century America, the peccadilloes of preachers were not exactly condoned, they were explicable as the all too human failures of men in a world where passion might well break its bounds. God forgives sinners. Still, there was something new going on in the last three decades of the twentieth century.

Nada menos que Thomas Laqueur escribe sobre Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics en el Times Literary Supplement. Cosita güena.