The famous British author, G.K. Chesterton, said in 1926, “The next great heresy [will be] an attack on morality and especially on sexual morality, and … the madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but in Manhattan.” History has proven him to be a prophet, at least in this area. The modern Western Church is obsessed with sex in a way it has never been before. Sadly, this is not surprising: the Church is only mirroring the culture in which she finds herself, which is one that is obsessed with sex to a degree not seen since the pre-Christian era, over 1,700 years ago. This obsession has affected nearly everything it has touched, and it has touched nearly everything. One of the most important victims of this corruption has also been one of the least-talked about: the concept of freedom, which today increasingly means mostly just sexual freedom. As a result, even in the United States, “the land of the free,” encroachments on our other freedoms no longer concern or offend us the way they did before the New Deal.

Aldous Huxley, the famous British author and satirist, anticipated this development in his brilliant and haunting novel, Brave New World. In the story, set in the 26th century, humanity is largely united into a world State, and war and poverty have been virtually eliminated. The price of these victories, however, is the almost total elimination of human freedom. To ensure that society is completely stable, the state uses biochemical alteration and subconscious suggestion techniques to manage and alter its citizens from conception until death so that they will fit properly into the well-run society. To further make certain that people remain easily controllable, they are actively encouraged to live in an uninhibited sensual and sexual haze, which keeps them focused on immediate gratification and stymies any feelings of discontent or inconvenient questions or musings about freedom or the meaning of life.

The story in Brave New World centers on the experiences of John, an outsider who questions the basic happiness of the people he meets. During one key exchange with Lenina, a woman whom John falls in love with, he points out the myriad ways that people in the Brave New World have no freedom because they don’t have the ability to control their lives due to how conditioned they are. Lenina doesn’t grasp John’s point, so he asks her, “Don’t you want to be free?” Lenina’s reply is terribly instructive and shows how clearly Huxley understood, even in 1932, the essence of the modern definition of freedom. “I am free,” she says, “free to be happy.” For her, happiness is the absence of suffering, discomfort, or pain, and the immediate gratification of her desires, especially her sexual desires. She defines freedom solely as the pursuit of that happiness. This definition of freedom has had a profound effect on US society over the past hundred years.

Starting in the early 20th century, but especially by the late-1930s, the national government in the US began encroaching on individual rights to a degree not seen outside of monarchies or military dictatorships. Ordinary citizens were told that freedoms they had taken for granted for centuries, such as that of a farmer to grow crops for purely personal use on his own property, were null and void. The public generally accepted these radical changes fairly quietly, however, for two reasons. First, many of the biggest changes occurred during, or just prior to, World War II, and people are understandably tolerant of an activist government during a war. And second, during this same time there was a general loosening of restrictions on sex and sexual activities in general society, a process sometimes pursued, and often abetted, by the state.

This general loosening happened slowly at first. Freudian psychology taught that most human motivations are in reality sexual desires, and that the acknowledgement and legitimization of these “repressed” desires were the key to achieving happiness. Once these notions penetrated the collective consciousness of most Americans, people started clamoring for the relaxation or repeal of laws banning contraceptives (which held the promise of fulfilling their heretofore repressed desires with few or no consequences), for liberalized divorce laws (which would make it easier for married partners to pursue their own happiness without the shackles of matrimony), and for the legalization of abortion in many states. The last effort didn’t enjoy anything like the success of the first two, but it was given a major boost when, in 1965, the US Supreme Court blessed the efforts of the people who had worked to make contraceptives legal by declaring that the Constitution protected an unspecified right to privacy which included the use of contraception. From that landmark legal case, it was only a small distance to one of the most contentious Supreme Court decision of the last forty years, Roe v. Wade, a decision which used the arguments in Griswold not only to allow abortions to be performed but to require states to legalize them.

So, by 1973 the US government had encouraged a bevy of sexual freedoms that had not been available to people just fifty years before. Perhaps not coincidentally, the period from 1930-1975 is looked on by many historians as the moment when America began to realize its promise of freedom and equality for all. During this same period, however, the national and state governments and the Supreme Court were limiting, sometimes radically, freedoms that Americans had enjoyed since before the Revolution – such as the freedom to speak one’s mind on controversial issues regarding race or sexual orientation, the freedom to keep and use one’s own property as one sees fit, or the freedom of a business owner to refuse to serve unwanted customers. With regards to virtually all freedoms other than sexual ones, this period was one not of advance but of retrenchment and retreat. (The main exceptions to this were the end of state-sponsored segregation in the South and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.) This retreat didn’t seem to register as such with the great majority of Americans, however, because people now had wildly increased sexual freedoms.

Perhaps many people may not agree with my analysis of the situation. Perhaps they may think that I’m being overly simplistic, or going too far with my analysis. If this is so, however, it might be because the most people generally don’t consider most freedoms besides sexual freedoms to be legitimate anymore. Take, for instance, our freedom of speech. It’s supposed to be as basic a freedom as we have, but it can be radically limited if it doesn’t involve sex. I can be fined thousands of dollars or even arrested if people think what I say is “hate speech,” or if they think my words unduly influence an election. If I choose to express myself through topless dancing, however, I am probably safe. This conflation of “freedom” with “sexual freedom” is further illustrated by the general reaction to two recent US Supreme Court decisions: Kelo v. New London and Gonzales v. Carhart.

Most people probably have never heard of Kelo v. New London or don’t know what it’s about. Kelo is a Supreme Court decision that allows local governments to take people’s houses and property from them without their consent – not to use it for something like a freeway that the government pays for and which everyone in the community can use, but to give it to a private company that wants their land and can’t get it from them any other way. In this case the government of New London took Susette Kelo’s house and land from her against her will because it thought that her property could be put to more financially profitable use than what she was doing with it. By sanctioning New London’s actions, the Court essentially declared that citizens own their property at the pleasure of the state. This is standing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights on their heads, to put it mildly. What was the general public reaction to this decision? Mostly ignorance. Some unsustained outrage that soon slipped into apathy. A generally muted protest. This for the near-abolition of one of the basic rights mentioned in the Bill of Rights and the original version of the Declaration of Independence: the right to one’s own property.

Now take Gonzales v. Carhart. Most people probably don’t know the name, but they probably do know what it’s about: partial-birth or late term abortions. Specifically, Carhart was the case where the Supreme Court approved Congress’s 2003 ban on certain forms of abortions performed in the 7th, 8th, and 9th month of pregnancy. The mainstream media duly covered Kelo. They howled over Carhart. For days, and even weeks, after the decision they discussed, debated, hailed, and criticized the opinion. This for a decision affecting at most 5% of all abortions (and that’s being conservative), which themselves affect, at most, 5% of the general population (which is also being conservative). In other words, at least 99.75% of Americans were probably not affected by Carhart. Usually decisions that affect such a tiny number of people warrant a short news blurb and no more – the kind of dismissive treatment that Kelo, a decision that conceivably affects anyone who owns a house, actually received. This state of affairs may seem ridiculous to some, but in one way it makes sense: Carhart threatens to mess with our sexual freedoms; all Kelo threatens to do is take our homes and property away.

Some modern thinkers acknowledge this radically redefined notion of freedom. They admit that the past seventy years haven’t been one long expansion of freedoms, but that quite the opposite has happened. Bruce Ackerman, the famous legal scholar, is one such honest thinker. In Foundations, the first volume in his three-part study of the Constitution, Ackerman admits that the New Deal curtailed or eliminated many freedoms in America. But, he insists, these curtailments and eliminations are offset by … a radical increase in sexual freedoms. There has been an exchange, and in Ackerman’s views, it is basically a wash.

Taking this view, a person may say, “Perhaps we are less ‘free’ today, as people understood ‘free’ a hundred years ago, but what of it? Today we also don’t accept blatant discrimination and we don’t force people to repress their sexual identities. If some of the technical freedoms that people thought so important two hundred years ago are the price for making America into a more tolerant and understanding country, who would argue that the price isn’t worth paying?” To someone concerned about the kind of society the Founders intended to create when they wrote the Constitution, however, no other freedom is really worth having in the absence of those “technical freedoms.” If everything I own, if my very rights to move about freely or speak my mind when I feel compelled to, can be taken from me by my government whenever it sees fit, why should I care if I have a new freedom to pursue certain pleasures that society once frowned upon?

It is hard to deny that several changes in American society that accompanied the growth of sexual freedom (such as the end of the acceptance of racial or sexual discrimination, or increased economic security for the elderly) were desirable. But the manner in which they were accomplished has eroded some of our most basic freedoms and made it easier to continue to do so in the future. If enough citizens finally become aware that our new freedoms, as well as our “tolerant and understanding” society, have come at the price of our ability to control what we own and what we can say, perhaps we as a society will finally be able to ask the all-important question: is this price worth paying?