In defense of sexual honor codes

Fact No. 1: Sex outside of wedlock happens on college campuses—even at schools founded on and operated in accordance with religious principles.

Fact No. 2: It’s challenging for male star athletes to resist sexual temptation, especially when they have no shortage of attractive women offering their bodies to them. It was the Kryptonite that caused Tiger Woods, once seemingly invincible on the golf course, to become a shadow of his once-dominant self—and cost him his first marriage. It’s also why athletes who wait on sex until marriage are an anomaly in the sports world. Tim Tebow, the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback who led the University of Florida to two national titles in college football, and A.C. Green, who played in the NBA for 18 seasons and won three championships with the Los Angeles Lakers, are perhaps the most prominent examples. To the best of the public’s knowledge, both abstained from sex until marriage until they were in their 30s, and their public commitment to chastity has won them admiration from some and scorn from others eager to expose them as phonies.

All of those things come to mind when I examine the saga of Jake Retzlaff.

The star quarterback at Brigham Young University last season, Retzlaff fled the Utah-based Mormon school for Tulane University in New Orleans roughly a month before the start of the college football season. His exodus from BYU stems from his admitted violation of the school’s honor code, which—in accordance with Mormon teachings—prohibits sex outside of marriage. However, the story may be worse than Retzlaff is making it out to be. A woman filed suit against Retzlaff in 2023 accusing him of raping her. Regardless, had he stayed at BYU, Retzlaff would have been suspended for seven games—roughly half the Cougars’ season.

A scholarship player at BYU, Retzlaff is now a walk-on at Tulane, meaning he’s paying for the chance to play his final season of college football. And the redshirt senior may not even win the starting job with his new team despite having posted numbers that place him squarely on the radar of NFL scouts: Last season, Retzlaff passed for nearly 3,000 yards and 20 touchdowns in leading Brigham Young to an 11-2 record and a triumph over Colorado at the Alamo Bowl.

Sadly, Retzlaff’s story is one we’ve heard all too often in sports. It’s why former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer is no longer employed despite being exonerated from accusations of sexual assault. And adultery was the excuse the late Kobe Bryant used to cover himself when the Lakers legend faced rape accusations back in 2003.

In 2021, Oral Roberts University’s presence in the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament proved controversial. Whereas most schools that enter the 68-team tournament as the 15th seed in its bracket would be celebrated for knocking off higher-seeded Goliaths like No. 2 Ohio State and No. 7 Florida to reach the tourney’s Sweet 16, ORU drew fire for its supposedly outdated, biblically-based mores concerning marriage and sexuality. Since-fired USA Today columnist Hemal Jhaveri called the Oklahoma-based Christian university’s views “wildly out of line with modern society and the basic values of human decency.”

Are they, though?

Old fashioned as the religious views on marriage and sexuality enshrined in their codes of conduct might seem in today’s highly sexualized world, I think religious schools like Brigham Young and Oral Roberts get it right. (Say what you will about BYU’s Mormon theology in general, which I strongly disagree with.) Proverbs 5:3-4 warns that “the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil. But in the end, she is bitter as wormwood.” That bitterness can take a variety of forms. Among them, no doubt, is facing a rape accusation from a woman who regrets her decision (or feels she was manipulated), wanted a long-term relationship but didn’t get one, or was always intent on extorting money from her star athlete lover.

Jhaveri accused ORU of “fetishizing chastity.” And the conservative-leaning website OutKick sadly treated Retzlaff’s defection from BYU to Tulane as cause for celebration, proclaiming that the quarterback can now “have all the premarital sex he wants! No suspensions for that in ‘Nawlins.”

But we’ve seen the destruction wrought when consenting, non-married adults cross the line sexually: Tarnished reputations, broken hearts, men conceiving babies with multiple women and having little to no presence in their children’s lives, court battles over child support, millions of abortions—I could go on. Such disastrous consequences are no doubt why the Bible calls believers to “flee sexual immorality” (1 Corinthians 6:18). Call me crazy, but preventing those things seems very much in line with basic values of human decency.

As late conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh once rightly declared (pun intended), “Abstinence prevents sexually transmitted disease and pregnancy—every time it’s tried.” Athletes at religious colleges and universities would thus do well to adhere to their schools’ calls to sexual purity, and the secular world should perhaps pause to consider that those schools’ honor codes are actually a good thing.