Without the human rights angle though, the privacy argument does fall short in cases when sexuality isn’t so private. You caught me…

I don’t see the privacy tactic as having any advantage over the human rights tactic; I think they work best as a team, but winning the privacy fight will make the argument for sexual liberty as a basic human right more solid. Your last point is exactly why; the right to sexuality is one we’re still working on getting ingrained in people’s consciousnesses, while the right to privacy is an oldie (with traditional support from both right and left) that’s fading. (It’s also one of the dividing lines between the socially moderate libertarian Republicans and the socially conservative, statist moral majority, but you knew that.)

Maybe we can work with the one while building up the other, with a nice period of overlap in the middle. I’m using terminology such as sexual freedom and free exercise of sexuality very deliberately…

(and thanks for the thoughtful comment!)

Reading this along a hazy recollection of an RKB post on Roe v. Wade & privacy makes me go in this direction… maybe we (smutmongerers, the Left, us crazy bands of misfits, etc.) would be waging a better battle if we also spoke of sexual rights in terms of human rights. Example — the movement to decriminalize sex work functions along both vectors, human rights & right to privacy, and having seen some orgs attempt to apply libertarian principles of right to privacy — for example, Lawrence vs. Texas, which paves the way to decrminalize sodomy behind closed doors — w/o addressing human rights to choosing one’s own labor and sexual self-determination, I also see some of the failures in a privacy-centric approach.

This is idealistic, but makes sense to me. Sexuality is a social animal. It exists not just within one’s private life, but between one’s private life and the private lives of others, shaping the larger social world. So YES, the trifecta of free speech, sep. of church & state, and right to privacy are foundational, but there’s this other element that the Far Right is playing to here: that some people ought to legislate “private” sexual behaviors because those behaviors have an impact on other’s “private” lives. I think those Far Righters have a small point: yes, two men having buttsex (even if no one sees them, like the koan says) still have an impact on the world. They don’t have a “right” to that sex because they keep it safely shielded from “everyone else” (as if *they* aren’t having buttsex, too!) — they have a right to it because it is a fundamental human right.

So my question would be — what advantages does the privacy tactic have over the human rights tactic? Aside from the fact that far too many people in power don’t even believe in the idea of a fundamental human right to sexuality, of course…