The Berks Barrister Summer 2017 - 25

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"People should be excited about this topic," Don Smith
explained with a characteristically-mischievous look, handing
me a copy of Sex and the Constitution by Geoffrey Stone. "The
Constitution?" I asked. "Yeah, the Constitution," he smirked.
Sex and the Constitution attempts to trace various streams of
social views of sex in Western society from the classical period
down to the present and to prove that the Constitution was
dependent on the more libertine schools of thought about sex,
rather than our founders' conservative religious views. Ultimately,
Stone concludes that our founders would "rejoice that our nation
has taken an important step in our protection of human dignity"
by the redefinition of marriage and the limiting of state power to
legislate abortion, presumably because he so rejoices.
The book is a hefty 537 pages, and its unmanageable scope
soon exposes the author's narrowness. His profound ignorance of
classical literature leads him to make absurd claims about ancient
views of sex in a desperate and utterly unpersuasive effort to
prove that social and moral regulation of sex are an abnormal and
uniquely Christian misadventure.
Stone's cherry-picked examples from classical literature come
off as transparently lazy, as does his choice of sources. For example,
his views of Greek sexuality are based entirely on second-hand
sources, and heavy analysis is invested into an obscure pantomime
of Herondon, a lewd and extremely minor Greek writer, in an
attempt to prove the normalcy of the bawdy behavior described in
the play. This is the equivalent of some future scholar analyzing a
porn director's commentary on one of his short films to determine
what was considered normal sex in our time. This simply doesn't
pass muster for a "scholarly" work.
In another telling example, Stone chooses a quote from a
Roman poet threatening a sexual assault on his rival to prove that
the Romans condoned all manner of sexual activity. Putting aside,
for the moment, the implications of Stone's apparent endorsement
of sexual assault as legitimate sexual activity, any student of
Roman literature can tell you that Roman Senators, orators and
poets delighted in making up and exploiting the supposed sexual
peccadillos of their rivals, and that "exposing" the behavior of a
rival is more likely a statement of that practice being in disfavor.
(See, e.g., Cicero, by Anthony Everitt). Stone's mischaracterization
of the works of Catullus and Ovid are akin to a 43rd-century

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scholar choosing at random from the comments section of a 2015
YouTube video to prove that it was a compliment in our time to
say that an American President was born in Kenya.
Stone builds a narrative about how Christians overcame
"sporadic" and "ineffective" persecution ("Mr. Stone? Nero for you
on Line One") to use political power to force Augustinian fears
about sex on the frightened world populace. Not only does Stone
overstate Christian political power in the late Roman empire,
but he has clearly never read his source material: Augustine's
tongue-in-cheek prayer in his auto-biographical Confessions
that God would "give me chastity . . . but do not give it yet" is
meant to humorously demonstrate the constant war between
fallen physical desire and spiritual aspirations that can only be
cured by faith in Christ. Stone uses it to argue that Augustine
hypocritically advocated a dualistic "sex for me, but not for thee"
attitude. His criticism of Augustine and his Christian mafia
also ignore the efforts of Octavian (Caesar Augustus) and other
Continued on page 26

Summer 2017 | 25
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The Berks Barrister Summer 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Berks Barrister Summer 2017
