Evil and Sexuality

Even as strides are made in freeing human sexuality from the shackles of religious morality, sexuality and evil continue to overlap in an array of fields, including the arts, psychology, and policy. The conflation of sexuality and evil has not only been the basis of historical legislation criminalizing sexual practice, but is alive and well in purity culture, abstinence-only sex education, and punitive legislation against even the most consensual adult sexual behaviour. From the UK’s Section 28 clause in the Local Government Act 1988, which prohibited the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities, to their 2014 law banning squirting and facesitting from British-made pornography, moral judgements about sexuality continue to inform laws. Some questions of sexuality are laden with so much moral stress that automatic assumptions about good and evil fall flat in response. The Satanic Temple has recently demanded the right to abortion as a religious freedom, in the face of the US State of Texas’s ban of abortions after 6 weeks, which has been widely interpreted as a vicious attack on female sexual freedom and bodily autonomy. The Satanic Temple cites their religious law, “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.” While Satanism draws up images of evil in public imaginations, who is truly evil, Satan or the State?

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