Premarital sex is not automatically promiscuous, and rape can be inflicted upon either a man or women by either a man or a woman. Evangelical misconceptions regard all sex outside of a legal marriage as a dehumanizing and destructive even if it occurs in a context of mutual consent and mutual commitment, while they regard rape as something men commit against women instead of a sin anyone with a functioning body could carry out against anyone else. Even with these idiotic misunderstandings that can be refuted by reason alone without any actual examples one has experienced, it is still clear that rape is the more severe offense against another person, yet evangelicals as a whole will spend far more time talking about premarital sex or promiscuity than rape. The former seems to get far more attention in sermons and articles than the latter.
Evangelicals might say that it is more likely that the members of a church or circle of friends will have promiscuous or casual sex than that they will sexually assault or rape someone--which is probably true in one sense. What they overlook if they stop there is that the frequency of a particular act does not make it a worse act than something else. This would only make it more common. Although a common error or sin deserves attention, both in people's individual reflections and in social settings, a graver error or sin like rape sometimes deserves more attention simply because it is more severe, especially given that the sexist misunderstandings and double standards associated with rape based on the gender of the victim or offender are likewise more serious than the misconceptions about promiscuity.
Regardless of how many more people would rather be promiscuous than rape someone, rape is by far the worse sin of the two. One involves emotional immaturity or at least a lack of commitment, a lack of self-control, and the potential to spread sexually transmitted diseases and a degree of heartbreak, but brings nothing worse than these. The other involves violence or manipulation that coerces a person to engage in sexual acts against their will, victimizing a person. There are not automatically victims in promiscuous sex as there are in rape unless one of the partners is betraying a spouse or significant other or enticing the other with deceptive words. To a lesser extent, objectification can be present in promiscuous sex, but genuine objectification can be rare since it is the utter disregard for or apathy towards everything about a person other than their sexual usefulness.
The insistence that premarital sex, even though not all premarital sex is Biblically sinful [1], merits more personal contemplation and social attention than rape is just one of numerous inverse priorities that evangelicals have. In a distorted theological ideology where tradition is emphasized over truth and assumptions over logical proofs, it is actually not abnormal for the Biblical immorality of promiscuity--or even committal, consensual sex between lifelong partners outside of a legal marriage--to be emphasized over the Biblical immorality of rape. If a supposed Christian is truly to stupid to reason out why rape is more harmful and severe than promiscuity independent of moral frameworks, perhaps reading the reactions prescribed in Mosaic Law will shock them. Promiscuity is not given any default punishments at all, while rape is assigned the death penalty in Deuteronomy 22.
No comments:
Post a Comment