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‘Erotic liberty’ — Al Mohler’s new slur is really a sad confession

‘Erotic liberty’ — Al Mohler’s new slur is really a sad confession

Last updated on: May 21, 2015 at 5:44 pm by Fred Clark

‘Erotic liberty’ — Al Mohler’s new slur is really a sad confession 2015-05-21T17:44:54-04:00 Fred Clark

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Al Mohler still hasn’t given up on his awkward crusade to turn “erotic liberty” into a hot new buzz-phrase. He seems certain this is clever — and wholly unaware that he sounds like poor Gretchen from Mean Girls trying too hard to make “fetch” happen.

Apart from just sounding silly — I’ve noted earlier that “Erotic Liberty” sounds like a bootleg album from Prince or P-funk, or like a “new reality series from Cinemax exposing the sordid post-curfew nightlife of Jerry Falwell’s flagship fundamentalist university in Virginia” — it’s also a dehumanizing reductionist insult. It’s intended to be a dehumanizing, reductionist insult. Straight-married white Christians, Mohler is suggesting, are capable of love. But LBGT people, he is saying, are capable only of “erotic” lust.

The nastiness of this newfangled slur is transparent and deliberate. Al Mohler is pushing the phrase “erotic liberty” because he wants to be a jerk. And, well, that’s one aspect of this effort that’s actually working — it’s certainly succeeding in making Mohler more of a jerk. (See Brian Pellot’s Religion News Service piece “Al Mohler’s ‘erotic liberty’ is an offensive misnomer for LGBT rights” and my earlier post “Al Mohler’s ‘erotic liberty’ is a sinful, unbiblical, indecent, nasty lie“).

Inventing new dehumanizing slurs might help Mohler to rally his most-committed troops, but it’s not an effective approach to persuading any of his would-be followers who might not already be 100-percent devoted to Mohlerism. Yes, I’m sure that when they first heard him try out the phrase, Denny Burk and Owen Strachan said, “Awesome, boss! That’s great! Someday I hope I’m just like you!” But that’s what they say in response to everything Mohler says, and outside of his circle of obsequious henchmen, this “erotic liberty” business is a punchline and a horrifying embarrassment.

Perhaps the main reason the phrase is so ridiculous is Mohler’s inability to understand how it is heard and perceived by anyone who’s not desperately seeking tenure at Southern seminary or Boyce College. Mohler and his circle can only hear “erotic liberty” as an accusation, but the rest of the world hears it as an unconscious confession. The phrase, as Mohler is trying to use it, only makes sense if you accept Mohler’s premise — which is that “erotic” has, and can only have, negative connotations. For Mohler and his Mohlerettes, “erotic” means dirty. It means sex — and sex is a bad, naughty, nasty, filthy thing. (And not, like, the good kind of naughty, nasty or filthy.) For Mohler, in other words, “erotic” means “shameful.”

Thus the vast gulf between what Mohler intends his new slur to communicate and what the rest of us actually hear whenever he employs it. He denounces “erotic liberty” intending us to understand that LGBT people are subhuman beasts, slaves to their genitalia who are incapable of the emotional and spiritual depth we fully human persons possess.

But every time he says “erotic liberty” and tries yet again to make this buzz-phrase a thing, all the rest of us can hear him saying is this: “I, Richard Albert Mohler Jr., am deeply ashamed that I have a penis and that it sometimes gets hard.”

And, yes, that makes us laugh — and, yes, we’re laughing at him. But it’s a nervous laughter, tinged with sadness and pity for this miserable creature so horribly uncomfortable in his own skin — so horribly uncomfortable that he has skin. For Mohler, this apparently goes beyond the mortification of the flesh. He’s mortified by his flesh. His confession is unwitting and unaware, but it’s so vulnerable and nakedly genuine that we can’t help but feel that tinge of pity even despite his making that confession in the midst of his attempt to insult, demean and dehumanize others in order to deny them their civil rights and human dignity.

But there are other important reasons that “erotic liberty” will never work as the slogan Mohler thinks it can become. To consider those, we will have to do something Mohler himself is apparently incapable of doing — which is to set aside all thoughts of the shamefulness of Mohler’s penis in order to consider what this phrase, “erotic liberty,” could possibly mean legally.

What could it possibly mean to say that citizens’ “erotic liberty” is not their essential human right, but some kind of limited, contingent privilege to be monitored and regulated by the state? What would it mean to empower the state with the authority to carry out such monitoring and regulation? Could any state so empowered to govern the most intimate thoughts and consensual deeds of its subjects be limited or restrained in any other area? I don’t see how.

Mohler is determined to invent a false and weird conflict between “erotic liberty” and “religious liberty,” but the two things — as actual meaningful concepts rather than pliable slogans and epithets — are actually closely linked. Both belong to the category of things that must be regarded as intrinsic human rights because any state empowered to monitor or regulate them would be invited to become totalitarian.

So again, please, Al Mohler: Stop making the rest of us have to think about your penis. Stop trying to make “erotic liberty” your hot new slogan. You’re not doing what you think you’re doing. It’s not working.

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