Nadiem, the only millennial and arguably the most “woke” minister in President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s Indonesia Onward Cabinet, recently set off a moral panic among conservative Indonesians who fear that the cosmopolitan, American-educated minister is encouraging promiscuity at universities across the country.

The trigger behind this moral panic was a ministerial regulation Nadiem enacted to combat campus sexual violence through provisions that he believed would offer a clear mechanism for resolving allegations of sexual assault in academia.

The regulation has been met with criticism from Muslim groups that have taken issue with the phrase “without consent” as a key element in the definition of sexual assault. Their argument is that this is a foreign and liberal concept and that it is being wielded by the state to “legalize” extramarital sex, at least implicitly, as long as it’s consensual.

To put it another way, having sexual flings on campus is perfectly halal.

Nadiem defended the regulation, stressing that its aim was to eradicate campus sexual assault, which he has lambasted as one of the “great sins” in the education system, and that it neither justified nor endorsed consensual extramarital sex among students.

But his argument has fallen on the deaf ears of conservative, who have chosen to turn the policy into another ideological battle in the long-waged culture war over sexual (mis)behavior in post-authoritarian Indonesia, particularly in the contexts of sexual ethics, sex education and women’s sexual rights.

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