Six months ago, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court ruled that the US Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. On September 16, Mahsa Amini died in a hospital in Tehran, Iran under suspicious circumstances. On December 13, President Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA).

At first glance these events may seem unrelated. In truth they are intertwined and correlated, each one part of a centuries old debate about the role sex and gender should play in organizing human societies and apportioning human rights.

The tectonic plates of the political landscape have been transformed by Dobbs, which galvanized pro-choice voters in midterm elections. It also created divisions among former allies and gave rise to controversial new tactics in the pro-life movement.

Abortion supporters won six out of six midterm ballot initiative contests, including Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. This has forced anti-abortion groups to effectively abandon democratic consensus and refocus their efforts on sympathetic courts and states where gerrymandering produced a legislature more conservative on abortion than the population it represents.

Dobbs also exposed pro-life absolutists to new scrutiny. Ten states have passed bans which lack exceptions for either rape or incest, and in most cases lack both. In several states, legislators have proposed laws to prosecute women who terminate a pregnancy, and anyone who helps them do so, with murder.

This tactic is logically consistent within the religious context of the antiabortion movement. Religious partisans frame abortion as a debate over fetal personhood. If personhood begins at conception, as state law in Oklahoma now declares, then terminating a pregnancy at any stage is the murder of a person.

Imagine surveilling the body of every woman for the diploid blastomeres that appear roughly 30 hours after a fertilized zygote is created. Now imagine that the moment those diploid cells emerge, the state grants itself a compelling interest in that uterus, and thus the power to regulate the way that woman manages her body, her diet and her activities.

Absurd in practical terms, this framing rejects the biologically inspired legal compromise SCOTUS attempted in Roe v. Wade, which established fetal viability as the de jure boundary of personhood. Prior to fetal viability, which occurs between 23-24 weeks of gestation, most Americans support a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy without state interference.

What animates the demand for such radical changes in public policy? The short answer is religion, and its boundless obsession with sexuality. A preoccupation with female sexuality exists within Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity. But arguably its fullest contemporary expression is found in fundamentalist Islamic states.

Since the 1979 Revolution, Iranian women have been required to cover their hair in public with a hijab. Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old of Kurdish descent, was arrested by the Iranian “Guidance Patrol” over an improper hijab and died two days later from severe head injuries.

Credible reporting before and after this incident has established that the Iranian regime routinely employs the use of rape, torture and even murder to enforce unpopular gender roles that limit the public lives, individualism and sexuality of women. In the months of protests that have followed Amini’s death, human rights organizations claim over 18,000 protesters have been arrested and more than 450 killed by Iranian security forces.

Iran’s repression of women in the name of religion is not unique. Just this week the ruling Taliban announced that women in Afghanistan would no longer be allowed to attend universities. This action is simply one more step on a path toward removing Afghani women from public life, as the Taliban did during their first reign of Sharia-inspired tyranny.

Within every mainstream religion lurks an ideology that circumscribes sexual behavior, principally by controlling gender roles. And because men merely inseminate, while women gestate, the burden of a gendered morality falls predominantly upon women.

In his Dobbs concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas foreshadowed that a conservatively emboldened SCOTUS might soon overturn Obergefell v. Hodges. Thomas declared that the Due Process Clause of the Constitution “does not secure any substantive rights” and therefore all of SCOTUS’ previous substantive due process decisions were “demonstrably erroneous”.

Anticipating that possibility, the RFMA repeals the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which empowered states to ban gay marriage. Instead, the RFMA compels all states and territories to recognize the validity of same-sex marriages that were performed in a jurisdiction where such marriages are legal. This will not prevent conservative state legislatures from outlawing gay marriage in the event Obergefell is overturned.

In another compromise, the RFMA codifies a right to oppose same-sex unions on religious principles, shielding religious schools and groups from federal compulsion over nonprofit tax status based on their stance on gay marriage. SCOTUS’ opinion in Obergefell explicitly acknowledged that “many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here”.

This shield does not apply to interracial marriage. In Bob Jones University v. U.S., SCOTUS had previously ruled that “racially discriminatory institutions cannot be viewed as conferring a public benefit” and thus do not deserve tax exempt status, principally because all three branches of the federal government had firm policies prohibiting racial segregation. After President Biden signed the RFMA, all three branches of federal government were officially on record recognizing the reasonableness of those who hold traditional marriage viewpoints.

Perhaps this explains why Justice Thomas is comfortable abolishing the privacy rights earlier courts inferred from the Due Process Clause, even though Loving v. Virginia relied on the same legal foundation. Content that the legality of interracial marriages like his own will not be challenged, Thomas and his religious supporters appear eager to unwind the legal protections SCOTUS previously afforded to sodomy, gay marriage, and the legal availability of contraceptives.

Sex has everything to do with conservative animus toward abortion, gay rights and “female promiscuity”. The impulse to control sex - who has it, with whom, and how – is part of a blueprint for living that all religions perpetuate in some fashion. But ancient provenance does not excuse those impulses from scrutiny and dissent in modern democratic societies.