Xtra article: Sexual freedoms demonstrative of other liberties?

[Volpina Vance]

And while sexual freedom is important in its own right — as in, why should the government tell people what to do with their bodies? — Bright also said it’s a proxy for other kinds of freedoms. If you want to see how seriously a country takes its civil liberties, look no further than its sex laws. When there’s a clampdown on sex, it’s usually a portent of other bad things to come.

Later, in an interview with Xtra, Bright elaborated.

“It’s the first thing to go,” she says. “If you took the whole world, and looked at their legal and public policy and compared them to the general state of democracy in the nation, you would notice that how draconian the society is correlates with the amount of freedom they have to conduct their sexual lives how they want.”

Legal and political battles over sex work, polygamy, HIV nondisclosure and abortion could redraw the boundaries of our sexual lives. Meanwhile, our privacy is under attack, Vonn says, making our private sexual lives more open to government scrutiny than ever before.

Over the past 20 years, the courts have increasingly turned away from what they call the “community standards test,” a kind of public — read Christian — morality and toward what they call the “harm” test, says Kevin Kindred, a lawyer in Halifax and a volunteer with the Nova Scotia Rainbow Action Project. The Supreme Court used this model to analyze cases that challenge everything from marijuana to corporal punishment of children.

And it’s optics — symbolic politics, according to Oraa — that are driving another private member’s bill. In May, Parliament had the first hour of debate on Conservative Stephen Woodworth’s private member’s bill that calls for a special committee to discuss when life begins. An incremental approach to reopening the abortion debate was also put forward by Conservative Ken Epp in 2009, when he proposed that killing a fetus should be a distinct crime from killing a pregnant woman.

“It’s such an easy, infantile distraction,” Bright says. “They may have terrible economic practices, they may be facing corruption charges, there may be problems with the justice system, but just start shouting about children watching something shocking on television — it’s very juicy.”

Full article here.