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False Complementarity and the Semblance of Real Intimacy

July 7, 2010

I’ve added a new page to those that deal with topic of Homosexuality and the Church. It’s a topic often misunderstood or wrongfully attributed to a homophobic predisposition in the Church by its modern homosexualist detractors.

This particular page is an article by Fr. José Noriega, Vice-Chancellor of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome. Fr. Noriega specializes in sexual ethics and is a professor of moral theology. He examines homosexuality not from the point of view as an act against nature but in the light of a moral theological perspective: can homosexual behavior and the inclination at its origin be ordered toward a good life, a life that is complete, fulfilled, and happy?

Married couple’s (male/female) sexual relation can be instrumentalized for the sake of pleasure. Yet the Church seems to view those relationships different from the “instrumentalized” relations of gay couples, which it condemns vigorously. What is the difference between the dormant procreative nature of an infertile couple and those of two gay men or women?

We are, in our Catholic beliefs, embodied souls or ensouled bodies. In John Paul II’s Theology of the Body we learn that “body expresses person.” Fr. Noriega walks us through the homosexual relationship and the nature of the intimacy lived out between two people in a homosexual relationship: “Because the sexual difference is not included as a constitutive element of the persons’ identity, or of the possibility for personal communion, it is in reality only the semblance of real intimacy. It opens up a space for the other, a space that is also physical, but within a false complementarity, because it is not built on the significance of the bodily differences (which are structurally denied from the beginning), but on the satisfaction the two may attain through genital activity.”

False complementarity….a semblance of real intimacy: Christians are called upon to be truth-tellers and Fr. Noriega explains what the truth of homosexuality is here. Unfortunately, the source is Communio and they do not offer the article online but you can purchase the volume of the journal for $12.

Posted in Homosexualism, Theology of the Body | Tagged Fr. José Noriega, Homosexualism | 2 Comments »

The Illusions of Married Personalism

June 3, 2010

Professor Robert P. George

Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. This article is adapted from a speech delivered in NewYork City on March 11, 2009 at a meeting of Socrates in the City and was in the magazine First Things back in 2009. It confronts the notion of “married personalism” raised by a reader of a previous post on the issue of Gay Marriage. It was originally titled “What Marriage Is – and Isn’t.”

Everyone agrees that marriage, whatever else it is or does, is a relationship in which persons are united. But what are persons? And how is it possible for two or more of them to unite? The view typically (if often unconsciously) held by advocates of liberal positions on issues of sexuality and marriage is that the person is the conscious and desiring aspect of the self. The person inhabits (or is somehow associated with) a body, certainly, but the body is regarded (if often only implicitly) as a sub-personal reality, rather than a part of the personal reality of the human being whose body it is. The body is viewed as an instrument by which the individual produces or otherwise participates in satisfactions and other desirable experiences and realizes various goals.

For those who formally or informally accept this dualistic understanding of what human beings are, personal unity cannot be achieved by bodily union. Persons instead unite emotionally (or, as those of a certain religious cast of mind say, spiritually). And, of course, if this is true, then persons of the same sex can unite and share sexual experiences together that they suppose will enhance their personal union by enabling them to express affection, share pleasure, and feel more intensely by virtue of their sex play.

The alternate view of what persons are is the one embodied in both the historic law of marriage and what Isaiah Berlin once referred to as the central tradition of Western thought. According to this view, human beings are bodily persons, not consciousnesses, or minds, or spirits inhabiting and using non-personal bodies. A human person is a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit. Far from being a mere instrument of the person, the body is intrinsically part of the personal reality of the human being. Bodily union is thus personal union, and comprehensive personal union — marital union — is founded on bodily union.

The bodily unity of spouses is possible because human males and females, like other mammals, unite organically when they mate — they form a single reproductive principle. Although reproduction is a single act, in humans (and other mammals) the reproductive act is performed not by individual members of the species but by a mated pair as an organic unit. The point has been carefully explained by Germain Grisez:

Though a male and a female are complete individuals with respect to other functions — for example, nutrition, sensation, and locomotion — with respect to reproduction they are only potential parts of a mated pair, which is the complete organism capable of reproducing sexually. Even if the mated pair is sterile, intercourse, provided it is the reproductive behavior characteristic of the species, makes the copulating male and female one organism.

What is unique about marriage is that it truly is a comprehensive sharing of life, a sharing founded on the bodily union made uniquely possible by the sexual complementarity of man and woman — a complementarity that makes it possible for two human beings to become, in the language of the Bible, one flesh — and thus possible for this one-flesh union to be the foundation of a relationship in which it is intelligible for two persons to bind themselves to each other in pledges of permanence, monogamy, and fidelity.

People who reject this understanding of sex and marriage say that “Love makes a family.” And it does not matter whether the love is between two people of opposite sexes or the same sex. (Those who are clearheaded and candid acknowledge that, by the same token, it would not matter if the love were among three or more people.) Nor does the sexual expression of that love make any difference.

In fact, however, at the bottom of the contemporary debate over marriage is a possibility that defenders of conjugal marriage affirm and its critics deny: the possibility of marriage as a one-flesh communion of persons. If acts that fulfill the behavioral conditions of procreation (whether or not the non-behavioral conditions happen to obtain) are, in fact, capable of uniting spouses interpersonally — thus providing the biological matrix of the multilevel union and sharing of life that marriage is, according to the traditional understanding long embodied in Western law, philosophy, and culture — then truly marital acts differ fundamentally in meaning, value, and significance from intrinsically non-marital sex acts (such as acts of sodomy and mutual masturbation).

Arguments that true marriage is something other than or broader than the union of two sexually complementary spouses necessarily suppose that the value of sex must be instrumental either to procreation or to pleasure, considered as an end in itself or as a means of expressing affection, tender feelings, etc. Thus, critics of traditional norms of marriage and sexuality say that homosexual sex acts, for example, are indistinguishable from heterosexual acts whenever the motivation for such acts is something other than procreation. That is to say, the sexual acts of same-sex partners are indistinguishable in motivation, meaning, value, and significance from the marital acts of spouses who know that at least one spouse is temporarily or permanently infertile. Thus, the argument goes, the traditional understanding of marriage is guilty of unfairness in treating sterile persons of opposite sexes as capable of marrying while treating same-sex partners as ineligible to marry.

Stephen Macedo has accused the traditional view and its defenders of precisely this “double standard.” He asks: “What is the point of sex in an infertile marriage? Not procreation: The partners (let us assume) know that they are infertile. If they have sex, it is for pleasure and to express their love, or friendship, or some other good. It will be for precisely the same reason that committed, loving gay couples have sex.”

Many people find this sort of criticism impressive, and even some conservatively oriented people seem to find themselves stumped by it. Once the core of the traditional view is brought into focus, however, it is clear that the criticism straightforwardly fails because it presupposes that the point of sex in marriage can only be instrumental. It is a central tenet of the traditional view, however, that the point of sex is the good of marriage itself, consummated and actualized in and through sexual acts that unite spouses as one flesh and, thus, interpersonally.

The traditional view rejects the instrumentalizing of sex (and, thus, of the bodies of sexual partners) to extrinsic ends of any sort. Of course this does not mean that procreation and pleasure are not rightly sought when they are integrated with the basic good and justifying point of marital intercourse, namely, the one-flesh union of marriage itself.

Critics of the traditional understanding of marriage who grasp this point must therefore argue that the apparent one-flesh unity that distinguishes marital intercourse from sodomitical and other nonmarital sex acts is illusory and, thus, that the apparent bodily communion of spouses in acts that fulfill the behavioral conditions of procreation is not really possible.

Macedo, for instance, claims that “the ‘one-flesh communion’ of sterile couples would appear . . . to be more a matter of appearance than reality.” Because of their sterility, such couples cannot really unite biologically: “Their bodies . . . can form no ‘single reproductive principle,’ no real unity.” Indeed, Macedo argues that even fertile couples who conceive children in acts of sexual intercourse do not truly unite biologically, because, he says, “penises and vaginas do not unite biologically, sperm and eggs do.”

John Finnis has aptly replied that “in this reductivist, word-legislating mood, one might declare that sperm and egg unite only physically and only their pronuclei are biologically united. But it would be more realistic to acknowledge that the whole process of copulation, involving as it does the brains of the man and woman, their nerves, blood, . . . secretions, and coordinated activity is biological through and through.” Moreover, as Finnis points out, “The organic unity which is instantiated in an act of the reproductive kind is not,” as Macedo reductively imagines, “the unity of penis and vagina. It is the unity of the persons in the intentional, consensual act” of sexual intercourse.

The unity to which Finnis here refers — unity of body, sense, emotion, reason, and will — is central to our understanding of humanness. Yet it is a unity of which Macedo and others who deny the possibility of true bodily communion in marriage can give no account. For this denial presupposes a dualism of person (as conscious and desiring self), on the one hand, and body (as instrument of the conscious and desiring self), on the other hand, which is flatly incompatible with this unity. This dualism of person and body is implicit in the idea, central to Macedo’s denial of the possibility of one-flesh marital union, that sodomitical acts differ from what law and philosophy have traditionally regarded as chaste and honorable marital acts only as a matter of the arrangement of the “plumbing.” According to this idea, the genital organs of an infertile woman or man are not really “reproductive organs” any more than, say, mouths, rectums, tongues, or fingers are reproductive organs. Thus, the intercourse of a man and a woman, where at least one partner is infertile, cannot really be an act of the reproductive type.

But the plain fact is that the genitals of men and women are reproductive organs all of the time — even during periods of sterility. Acts that fulfill the behavioral conditions of procreation are acts of the reproductive kind even where the non-behavioral conditions of procreation do not obtain. Insofar as the point of sexual intercourse is marital union, the partners achieve the desired unity (become “two-in-one-flesh”) precisely insofar as they mate or, if you will, perform the type of act on which the gift of a child may supervene — what traditional law and philosophy have always referred to interchangeably as “the act of generation” and “the conjugal act.”

Now, in some sectors of our culture, the views advanced by Macedo are hardly considered radical. On the contrary, his views about sex and marriage are considered by many to be too conservative, even old-fashioned. He and other defenders of this “moderate liberal” position have been taken to task for affirming the principle of sexual fidelity and criticizing, if usually only implicitly, promiscuity. They have an admirable commitment to the notion of marriage as a permanent and exclusive sharing of life integrated around (but certainly not reducible to) sexual activity. But they think that the nature of the sexual activity just does not matter. Sex is sex. It cannot really unite people as one flesh, but it can enable them to express their affection in a special way.

Once marriage and marital intercourse are thus reduced to the status of instrumental goods, the only intelligible point of entering into marriage will be the achievement of some other end or ends. For some, certainly, the end of marriage will be procreation, but whether a particular marriage is a “reproductive alliance” or an alliance for purposes entirely unrelated to reproduction is purely a matter of the subjective preferences of the parties entering into the alliance. In no way is marriage considered to be naturally ordered to the coming to be and nurturing of children. Nor are the contours of the marital state or the terms of the marital relationship understood to be established or shaped by a natural orientation toward child rearing.

Marriage, on this revised understanding, is marked by a plasticity or malleability that sharply distinguishes it from the conception of marriage it is proposed to replace. In this revisionist understanding, marriage is also unnecessary — even for child rearing. If two (or perhaps more) people find, or suppose, that the state of being married works for them, then they have a reason to marry. If not, then marriage is not as a matter of principle understood to be a uniquely, or even especially, apt context for them to structure their lives together.

What about sex? What is the point of that in the revised conception of marriage? What is sometimes referred to as lifestyle liberalism (to distinguish it from the political liberalism of, say, Franklin Roosevelt or Hubert Humphrey) rejects the view that sex is to be restricted to the marital relationship. It certainly has no ground of principle to object to sexual cohabitation outside of marriage. And even with regard to sex apart from stable relationships, lifestyle liberalism is “nonjudgmental.” Its main principle of rectitude in sexual matters is the principle of consent, not, as in the traditional view, the principle of marriage. So long as there is no coercion or deceit in the procurement of sex, sexual choices — as Frederick Elliston, for example — insists, do not raise moral questions.

Even adultery is unproblematic under the lifestyle-liberal conception of marriage if, as in so-called open marriages, there is no deception of a spouse involved. Indeed, under the lifestyle-liberal conception, as defended by Elliston and many others, it is impossible to identify any reason — there are only subjective preferences — for spouses to demand fidelity of each other. Why should they “forsake all others”? What is the point of sexual fidelity? There is no reason, strictly speaking, not to have an “open marriage” — only emotions that some people happen to have and others happen not to have. This is why people who reject the traditional terms of marriage — even those, like Macedo, who do so for putatively conservative reasons, for instance, to make the good of marriage available to people who prefer erotic experiences with partners of their own sex — find it impossible, in the end, to condemn promiscuity and the like, except, occasionally, on pragmatic grounds. Thus Andrew Sullivan, who once framed his case for altering the traditional understanding of marriage in conservative terms, now finds himself affirming the “beauty” and even “spirituality” of anonymous sex — sex among partners who do not even identify themselves to each other by name.

So what is the point of sex in the revised conception? Even if sex is permissible outside of marriage, is it nevertheless an intrinsic part of marriage? The answer has to be no. Under the revised conception, the point and value of sex, even in marriage, is instrumental. Marriage is not, in principle, a sexual relationship. If the partners happen to want to have sex with each other, fine — their goals might be to conceive children, to have or share pleasure or intimacy, or to express tender and affectionate feelings toward each other. But not only is it the case that all these goals can be legitimately pursued outside the marital context, it is also the case that there is no reason to pursue them within the marriage — or at all — if the people involved happen not to desire having sex with each other, or at all. Just as you can have sex without marriage, you can have marriage without sex. Thus, the whole idea of marital consummation — an idea historically central to the philosophy and law of marriage in our culture — loses its intelligibility.

A standard revisionist response to the defense of conjugal marriage like the one I am here proposing is the claim that, even if the traditional position is, from the moral viewpoint, true, it is nevertheless unfair for the law to embody it. Macedo, for example, argues that if disagreements about the nature of marriage “lie in . . . difficult philosophical quarrels, about which reasonable people have long disagreed, then our differences lie in precisely the territory that John Rawls rightly marks off as inappropriate to the fashioning of our basic rights and liberties.” So Macedo and others claim that law and policy must be neutral with regard to competing understandings of marriage and sexual morality.

This claim is deeply unsound. The true meaning, value, and significance of marriage are fairly easily grasped (even if people sometimes have difficulty living up to its moral demands) in a culture — including, critically, a legal culture — that promotes and supports a sound understanding of marriage. Furthermore, ideologies and practices that are hostile to a sound understanding and practice of marriage in a culture tend to undermine the institution of marriage in that culture. Hence it is extremely important that governments eschew attempts to be neutral with regard to marriage and embody in their laws and policy the soundest, most nearly correct, understanding.

The law is a teacher. It will teach either that marriage is a reality in which people can choose to participate, but whose contours people cannot make and remake at will, or it will teach that marriage is a mere convention, which is malleable in such a way that individuals, couples, or, indeed, groups can choose to make of it whatever suits their desires, goals, and so on. The result, given the biases of human sexual psychology, will be the development of practices and ideologies that truly tend to undermine the sound understanding and practice of marriage, together with the development of pathologies that tend to reinforce the very practices and ideologies that cause them.

The Oxford philosopher Joseph Raz, a liberal who does not share my views regarding sexual morality, is rightly critical of forms of liberalism, including Rawlsianism, that suppose law and government can and should be neutral among competing conceptions of moral goodness. He has noted, for example, that “monogamy, assuming that it is the only valuable form of marriage, cannot be practiced by an individual. It requires a culture which recognizes it, and which supports it through the public’s attitude and through its formal institutions.”

Of course, Raz does not suppose that, in a culture whose law and public policy do not support monogamy, a man who happens to believe in it somehow will be unable to restrict himself to having one wife or will be required or pressured into taking additional wives. His point, rather, is that, even if monogamy is a key element in a sound understanding of marriage, large numbers of people will fail to understand that or why that is the case — and therefore will fail to grasp the value of monogamy and the point of practicing it — unless they are assisted by a culture that supports, formally by law and policy, as well as by informal means, monogamous marriage. What is true of monogamy is equally true of the other elements of a sound understanding of marriage.

In short, marriage is the kind of good that can be chosen and meaningfully participated in only by people who have a sound basic understanding of it and choose it with that understanding in mind — yet people’s ability to understand it, at least implicitly, and thus to choose it, depends crucially on institutions and cultural understandings that both transcend individual choice and are constituted by a vast number of individual choices.

Posted in Homosexualism, Understanding Personalism | Tagged gay marriage, Human Sexuality, Personalism, Robert George | Leave a Comment »

Homosexuality and Love’s Duty

June 1, 2010

A new page here:

Homosexuality and Love’s Duty

Posted in Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Homosexualism | Leave a Comment »

Fr. Luc Buyens of the Netherlands

May 20, 2010

Father Buyens during his homily.

This is a homily in which Fr. Luc Buyens of the Netherlands explained to his parishioners (and the protesters who were also present) why he couldn’t give Communion to an openly homosexual man. What with all the media commotion surrounding that and the upcoming confrontation with the Rainbow Sash Movement this next Pentacost Sunday, I think it is interesting to see what Fr. Buyens actually said. Below is the homily in English (emphases mine). Caution: The English can be a tad tortured.

Dear parishioners of Reusel, dear people from elsewhere,

After the feast of carnival last week, on Ash Wednesday we have entered our holy Lent, the Christian time of fasting. For us this is a time of more focus on prayer, the practice of confession and being solidary with our neighbour. A time which Jesus has entered before us in His mortal life. I believe that we, as postmodern people of the 21st century, can still learn from that. When a person chooses for such a time of purification, according to Luke the evangelist, there are three points which become clear.

The temptation to turn stones into loaves… apparently, a lot is possible from the world of spirits. But Jesus replies: “Man lives not by bread alone”, and everyone who knows the Bible, knows what actually follows next: “but by every word of God”. It is sublime to know that Jesus will eventually feed His own with the bread of heaven, which makes us people grow into the ‘living rock’, into the spiritual building that He establishes and of which He is the cornerstone that holds everything together.

But apparently the devil isn’t caught that easily. He comes with a second challenge: “If you therefore will adore before me, all shall be yours”, and Jesus replies, “You shall adore the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve”: the God for Whom every knee must bend. How can we, dear people, adore and honour Him here on Earth?

The only right answer is: there where Jesus shows Himself in the Blessed Sacrament, especially in Adoration. ‘God with us’ in the form of consecrated bread. That is how He shall be with us until the end of days.

And how can we serve Him? In our neighbor, by serving him or her as we would want to be helped ourselves. Jesus lives in the first place in the poor, the small, the abandoned and fragile, the least of all. If we apply God’s word to what is called temptation, the enemy or tempter is sent back from the very start, and so follows the third temptation: Cast yourself down and you will be carried, in other words: the challenge to cross boundaries, to tempt fate as happens so often these days.

What does Jesus say then? “You shall not tempt the Lord your God”. Creature: know your place. Know what you are doing if you want to tempt the Lord your God. Woe that man…

At that point Satan leaves until the designated time to take his revenge, which will cost him dearly, because Jesus’ death has given eternal life to people of good will and the restoration of all things. This is what God’s Church stands for. He who believes and is baptized will be saved from a death that will last forever. From now on man can consider his life from the principle of eternity and let this dictate his values. Jesus entrusted this faith to the Church and, by spreading the Word and administering the sacraments to the people, the Church sanctifies the world.

Following the commotion after pastoral matters were leaked to the press, I would like to say the following. When we Catholics come together to celebrate the Eucharist we do this to consider God’s word and possibly to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist, Communion or Holy Host. “Truly my Body and Blood”, as Christ teaches us.

This ‘bread from heaven’ is one of the seven sacraments of the Church. In 2008 the Dutch bishops published a letter asking the ministers of the Eucharist to make the faithful aware of what communicating in God’s Church means. They gave four models to achieve a good formulation towards the faithful. All four of those models indicate that one can’t receive Communion under certain circumstances, and that, including the amendments in the Code of Canon Law and the Catechism, goes for everyone.

Dear people, why do I mention all this? To tell you that there is nothing wrong when something is lived orderly. There are boundaries for homosexuals and heterosexuals, and for everyone else possible.

There are rules which the Church must apply so that people approach and receive God in the right manner. The Church has the task to keep and protect the people. Especially when they threaten to make mistakes out of ignorance, the Church warns like a concerned mother. On the football field, the referee also engages with a player who acts inappropriately.

It can’t be that in the Church, which is eternal, all rules which stem from the Ten Commandments, are cast aside just like that. When I participate in carnival festivities I know I have to respect their rules and the same goes for when I want to participate actively in the life of the Church. Faith reveals itself in acts and here too the Law is what everything is measured by, to the benefit of all. “One jot, or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled”, the Lord of heaven and earth says.

I have said a lot and I could say more, but I know that I will feel like a useless help who only tried to do his work in good conscience. I did not want to single out anyone. Everything took place in private. I don’t want to discriminate or hurt anyone. I know that there is often a lot of pain and sorrow for the people concerned but also, despite all difficulties, the intention to do and be good.

The Church is called to be specifically close to those concerned and to help them carry the sacrifices of such a disposition as a cross, together with the crucified Christ. I believe that bringing such a sacrifice can be a great blessing to the Church and the world who needs that so much. They who are willing to carry this cross are even invited and encouraged to frequently receive the sacraments and the blessings of the Church to be strengthened to persevere. After every fall or mistake every believer can and must reconcile himself with God through an honest confession, if he wants to sit at the table of the Lord. That goes for every grave sin of any nature.

To you, who have come here in such large numbers, I would like to say that I, as a priest, am willing to suffer for the sign I stand for. Just like I wish to be respectful to each and every one of you I would want to receive the same respect in return. Sadly, I must inform you, that things do not automatically point in that direction. I do not declare war on anyone, but I ask the Lord of heaven and earth that His peace may soon descend on Reusel once more. Our people here do no benefit from what is happening and do not work that way.

To the press I would like to say that I did not want this disturbance. This parish has been entrusted to my care by the bishop of ‘s-Hertogenbosch. This is my workplace that has been given and nothing more. I think that I have given enough clarity and ask that you turn towards persons of the diocese of Den Bosch and specialists in these matters.

In our Church it is not usual that priests act autonomously. In the case that I have been blamed I have only acted after discussion with the bishop and my colleagues.

I wish to close with the word of the great apostle Paul with his words to the Christians of Philippi: “Be followers of me, brethren: and observe them who walk so as you have our model. For many walk, of whom I have told you often (and now tell you weeping) that they are enemies of the cross of Christ”.

“Whose end is destruction: whose God is their belly: and whose glory is in their shame: who mind earthly things. But our conversation is in heaven: from whence also we look for the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ, who will reform the body of our lowness, made like to the body of his glory, according to the operation whereby also he is able to subdue all things unto himself.”

I wish you all a blessed preparation for Easter.

Father Luc Buyens

Posted in Homosexualism, The State of the Catholic Church, Understanding Sin | 4 Comments »

A Recent Announcement by the Rainbow Sash Movement

May 19, 2010

“The Rainbow Sash Movement (Gay Catholics) will enter Catholic Cathedrals nationally and internationally on Pentecost Sunday, May 23, 2010 wearing Rainbow Sashes. The purpose for our Pentecost Sunday presence is to give voice to the voiceless in our Church.

There is something bipolar about a Church that will not give members of the Rainbow Sash Movement communion because they self identify as gay publicly, while at the same time elevating men to the office of Pope, Cardinal, Archbishop, or Bishop who placed the reputation of the Catholic Church ahead of needs of innocent children who were sexually victimized by both predator priests and Bishops. The only word that comes to mind to describe such a dichotomy, in charity, is hypocrite.

Gay Catholics should not be divorced from public self-identification because of sexual orientation. Unfortunately the currency of hierarchical pronouncements is locked in male chauvinistic culture of clericalism. Such statements are based on homophobias that are so out of touch that it bars the use of condoms even to curb AIDS, and encourages Papal attacks on gay and lesbian families.

As to why we wear the Rainbow Sash; we can no longer sit idly by while homophobia takes over the heart and soul of our Church. No longer satisfied with discriminating against LGBT Catholics, the Bishops are now going after our children in Catholic schools. Discrimination against the children of gay parents because of their parents’ sexual orientation is wrong, and only highlights how dysfunctional the current position of the Church has become.

We are not “flaunting” sexuality when we wear the Rainbow Sash. Simply put, if you are not seen, it is unlikely that your voice is recognized as significant enough to be given attention; if you cannot be heard, you cannot combat the prejudice you face, and no one can hear you cry out when you are the victim of injustice, when you suffer intimidation, or worship under institutionalized homophobia.

The love it or leave it mentality is not an option for us. On the contrary the Gospel challenge of love calls us to challenge exclusion with inclusion. In doing so, we follow in the spirit of the early Christians who challenged the exclusion of the uncircumcised.

Disrupting a mass or encouraging others to do so is a grave sin. I guess we are all familiar with attempts in the past but this is a more coordinated and organized effort which I fear will only increase over time. Church teaching on homosexuality cannot and will not change. It is a product of dogma.

That teaching was set forth and encapsulated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under the leadership of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI, don’t you know) in the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, promulgated in 1986. It is as follows:

“The Church, obedient to the Lord who founded her and gave to her the sacramental life, celebrates the divine plan of the loving and live-giving union of men and women in the sacrament of marriage. It is only in the marital relationship that the use of the sexual faculty can be morally good. A person engaging in homosexual behavior therefore acts immorally.”

“To choose someone of the same sex for one’s sexual activity is to annul the rich symbolism and meaning, not to mention the goals, of the Creator’s sexual design. Homosexual activity is not a complementary union, able to transmit life; and so it thwarts the call to a life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living. This does not mean that homosexual persons are not often generous and giving of themselves; but when they engage in homosexual activity they confirm within themselves a disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent”.

“As in every moral disorder, homosexual activity prevents one’s own fulfillment and happiness by acting contrary to the creative wisdom of God. The Church, in rejecting erroneous opinions regarding homosexuality, does not limit but rather defends personal freedom and dignity realistically and authentically understood.”

This teaching cannot and will not change. It is not up for vote. It cannot be influenced by demonstrations or boycotts. It is the view of the Church that groups like the “Rainbow Sash” movement, by their open defiance of this teaching, undermine the authority of the Church, confuse those who struggle with same sex attraction and scandalize the faithful. Finally, they confuse the public as to what the Church actually teaches.

“The dissenting or confused Catholics who support the Homosexual Equivalency movement within the Church insist that the Catholic Church adopt their new doctrine of recognizing gay marriage and the tenets of Homosexualism — which amounts to heresy; what St. Paul warned of as “another Gospel”

But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! As we have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!
Galatians 1:8,9;

And no wonder! Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.
2 Corinthians. 11:14

Why Francis Cardinal George?
Cardinal George has been in the forefront of the defense of marriage and the family and society founded upon it. He is heroic in this stance and deserves our prayer and open, public support. On Friday, February 5, 2010, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops acting through Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I, the archbishop of Chicago and president of the Conference, issued a strong repudiation of the New Ways Ministry, a cousin to the Rainbow Sash Movement. The group is comprised of people who, like Rainbow Sash, openly dissent from the clear teaching of the Catholic Church concerning the immorality of homosexual practice.

Cardinal George has said of them: “They have aggressively opposed efforts to defend marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman. They foster dissent within the Catholic Church and cause scandal and confusion to many of the faithful. They have been publicly and repeatedly reprimanded by the Church. For example, two of their former leaders, a priest and a religious sister, were ordered to resign their positions with the organization and separate themselves from any involvement.”

The Cardinal further said in his notice: “No one should be misled by the claim that New Ways Ministry provides an authentic interpretation of Catholic teaching and an authentic Catholic pastoral practice. Their claim to be Catholic only confuses the faithful regarding the authentic teaching and ministry of the Church with respect to persons with a homosexual inclination.” As for the organization, they responded to the correction by rejecting it whole cloth. In fact, they have encouraged an advocacy campaign to get the Church to change its position.

This decisive action by Cardinal George is to be commended. It was the proper response of a good shepherd and faithful teacher of the Church. It also seems to have increased the ire of the members of the Rainbow Sash movement. They are numbered among those who have been referred to as “homosexual equivalency activists.” They do not accept the teaching of the Church but rather seek to change it.

They also align themselves in the civil arena with those who openly oppose family based on the indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman and want to force society to recognize a legal and moral equivalency between true marriages and cohabitating practicing homosexuals. In these efforts they are led by well funded and strategic groups such as the “Human Rights Campaign” in the United States.

This position is in direct opposition to the heroic and dedicated defense of marriage efforts undertaken by the Catholic Church and the teaching of the Church concerning true marriage as an indissoluble bond between one man and one woman, open to life, and the family and society founded upon it. The leaders of the “Rainbow Sash” movement intentionally confuse the faithful regarding the Church’s clear admonition to respect all persons, including those with same sex attractions, and her absolute prohibition of homosexual sexual activity.

We are in a new missionary age. Let us call upon the Holy Spirit for a New Pentecost for the Church so that she may rise to these challenges. Each parish Church should prepare themselves for the onslaughts to our Faith that appear to be in the offing.

God Bless Francis Cardinal George!

Posted in Francis Cardinal George, Homosexualism, The State of the Catholic Church | Leave a Comment »

The Aspiration to Neutrality

May 4, 2010

John F. Kennedy’s view of religion as a private, not public, affair reflected more than the need to disarm anti-Catholic prejudice. It reflected a public philosophy that would come to full expression during the 1960s and 70s — a philosophy that held that government should be neutral on moral and religious questions, so that each individual could be free to choose his or her own conception of the good life.

Both major political parties appealed to the idea of neutrality, but in different ways. Generally speaking, Republicans invoked the idea in economic policy, while Democrats applied it to social and cultural issues. Republicans argued against government intervention in free markets on the grounds that individuals should be free to make their own economic choices and spend their money as they pleased; for government to spend taxpayers’ money or regulate economic activity for public purposes was to impose a state-sanctioned vision of the common good that not everyone shared. Tax cuts were preferable to government spending, because they left individuals free to decide for themselves what ends to pursue and how to spend their own money.

Democrats rejected the notion that free markets are neutral among ends and defended a greater measure of government intervention in the economy. But when it came to social and cultural issues, they, too, invoked the language of neutrality. Government should not “legislate morality” in the areas of sexual behavior or reproductive decisions, they maintained, because to do so imposes on some the moral and religious convictions of others. Rather than restrict abortion or homosexual intimacies, government should be neutral on these morally charged questions and let individuals choose for themselves.

John Rawls
In 1971 , John Rawls ‘s A Theory Of Justice offered a philosophical defense of the liberal conception of neutrality that Kennedy’s speech had intimated. In the 1980s, the communitarian critics of liberal neutrality questioned the vision of the freely choosing, unencumbered self that seemed to underlie Rawls’s theory. They argued not only for stronger notions of community and solidarity but also for a more robust public engagement with moral and religious questions.

In 1993, Rawls published a hook, Political Liberalism, that recast his theory in some respects. He acknowledged that, in their personal lives, people often have affections, devotions, and loyalties that they believe they would not, indeed could and should not, stand apart from.

They may regard it as simply unthinkable to view themselves apart from certain religious, philosophical, and moral convictions, or from certain enduring attachments and loyalties.” To this extent, Rawls accepted the possibility of thickly constituted, morally encumbered selves. But he insisted that such loyalties and attachments should have no bearing on our identity as citizens. In debating justice and rights, we should set aside our personal moral and religious convictions and argue from the standpoint of a “political conception of the person,” independent of any particular loyalties, attachments, or conception of the good life.

Why should we not bring our moral and religious convictions to bear in public discourse about justice and rights? Why should we separate our identity as citizens from our identity as moral persons more broadly conceived? Rawls argues that we should do so in order to respect “the fact of reasonable pluralism” about the good life that prevails in the modern world. People in modern democratic societies disagree about moral and religious questions; moreover these disagreements are reasonable. “It is not to be expected that conscientious persons with full powers of reason, even after free discussion, will all arrive at the same conclusion.”

According to this argument, the case for liberal neutrality arises from the need for tolerance in the face of moral and religious disagreement. “Which moral judgments are true, all things considered, is not a matter for political liberalism,” Rawls writes. To maintain impartiality between competing moral and religious doctrines, political liberalism does not “address the moral topics on which those doctrines divide.”

The demand that we separate our identity as citizens from our moral and religious convictions means that, when engaging in public discourse about justice and rights, we must abide by the limits of liberal public reason. Not only may government not endorse a particular conception of the good; citizens may not even introduce their moral and religious convictions into public debate about justice and rights. For if they do, and if their arguments prevail, they will effectively impose on their fellow citizens a law that rests on a particular moral or religious doctrine.

How can we know whether our political arguments meet the requirements of public reason, suitably shorn of any reliance on moral or religious views? Rawls suggests a novel test: “To check whether we are following public reason we might ask: how would our argument strike us presented in the form of a Supreme Court opinion?”As Rawls explains, this is a way to make sure that our arguments are neutral in the sense that liberal public reason requires; “The justices cannot, of course, invoke their own personal morality, nor the ideals and virtues of morality generally. Those they must view as irrelevant. Equally, they cannot invoke their or other people’s religious or philosophical views.”When participating as citizens in public debate, we should observe a similar restraint. Like Supreme Court justices, we should set aside our moral and religious convictions, and restrict ourselves to arguments that all citizens can reasonably be expected to accept.

Liberal “Neutrality” and the Politics of Obama
This is the ideal of liberal neutrality that John Kennedy invoked and Barack Obama rejected. From the 1960s through the l980s, Democrats drifted toward the neutrality ideal, and largely banished moral and religious argument from their political discourse. There were some notable exceptions. Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked moral and religious arguments in advancing the cause of civil rights; the anti-Vietnam War movement was energized by moral and religious discourse; and Robert E Kennedy, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, tried to summon the nation to more demanding moral and civic ideals. But by the 1970s, liberals embraced the language of neutrality and choice, and ceded moral and religious discourse to the emerging Christian right.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Christian conservatives became a prominent voice in Republican politics. Jerry Farwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition sought to clothe the “naked public square”and to combat what they saw as the moral permissiveness of American life. They favored school prayer, religious displays in public places, and legal restrictions on pornography, abortion, and homosexuality. For their part, liberals opposed these policies, not by challenging the moral judgments case by case, but instead by arguing that moral and religious judgments have no place in politics.

This pattern of argument served Christian conservatives well, and gave liberalism a bad name. In the 1990s and early 2000s, liberals argued, somewhat defensively, that they, too, stood for “values,” by which they typically meant the values of tolerance, fairness, and freedom of choice. (In an awkward reach for resonance, 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry used the words value or values thirty-two times in his convention acceptance speech.) But these were the values associated with liberal neutrality and the constraints of liberal public reason. They did not connect with the moral and spiritual yearning abroad in the land, or answer the aspiration for a public life of larger meaning.

Unlike other Democrats, Barack Obama understood this yearning and gave it political voice. This set his politics apart from the liberalism of his day. The key to his eloquence was not simply that he was adept with words. It was also that his political language was infused with a moral and spiritual dimension that pointed beyond liberal neutrality.

Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds — dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets — and they’re coming to realize that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough. They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. . . If-we truly hope to speak to people where they’re at — to communicate our hopes and values in a way that’s relevant to their own — then as progressives, we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse.

Obama’s claim that progressives should embrace a more capacious, faith-friendly form of public reason reflects a sound political instinct. It is also good political philosophy. The attempt to detach arguments about justice and rights from arguments about the good life is mistaken for two reasons: First, it is not always possible to decide questions of justice and rights without resolving substantive moral questions; and second, even where it’s possible, it may not be desirable.

The Abortion and Stem Cell Debates
Consider two familiar political questions that can’t be resolved without taking a stand on an underlying moral and religious controversy — abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Some people believe that abortion should be banned because it involves the taking of innocent human life. Others disagree, arguing that the law should not take sides in the moral and theological controversy over when human life begins; since the moral status of the developing fetus is a highly charged moral and religious question, they argue, government should be neutral on that question, and allow women to decide for themselves whether to have an abortion.

The second position reflects the familiar liberal argument for abortion rights. It claims to resolve the abortion question on the basis of neutrality and freedom of choice, without entering into the moral and religious controversy. But this argument does not succeed. For, if it’s true that the developing fetus is morally equivalent to a child, then abortion is morally equivalent to infanticide. And few would maintain that government should let parents decide for themselves whether to kill their children. So the “pro-choice” position in the abortion debate is not really neutral on the underlying moral and theological question; it implicitly rests on the assumption that the Catholic Church’s teaching on the moral status of the fetus — that it is a person from the moment of conception — is false.

To acknowledge this assumption is not to argue for banning abortion. It is simply to acknowledge that neutrality and freedom of choice are not sufficient grounds for affirming a right to abortion. Those who would defend the right of women to decide for themselves whether to terminate a pregnancy should engage with the argument that the developing fetus is equivalent to a person, and try to show why it is wrong. It is not enough to say that the law should be neutral on moral and religious questions. The case for permitting abortion is no more neutral than the case for banning it. Both positions presuppose some answer to the underlying moral and religious controversy.

The same is true of the debate over stem cell research. Those who would ban embryonic stem cell research argue that, whatever its medical promise, research that involves the destruction of human embryos is morally impermissible. Many who hold this view believe that personhood begins at conception, so that destroying even an early embryo is morally on a par with killing a child.

Proponents of embryonic stem cell research reply by pointing to the medical benefits the research may bring, including possible treatments and cures for diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injury. And they argue that science should not be hampered by religious or ideological interference; those with religious objections should not be allowed to impose their views through laws that would ban promising scientific research.

As with the abortion debate, however, the case for permitting embryonic stem cell research cannot be made without taking a stand on the moral and religious controversy about when personhood begins. If the early embryo is morally equivalent to a person, then the opponents of embryonic stem cell research have a point; even highly promising medical research would not justify dismembering a human person. Few people would say it should be legal to harvest organs from a five-year-old child in order to promote life-saving research. So the argument for permitting embryonic stem cell research is not neutral on the moral and religious controversy about when human personhood begins.

It presupposes an answer to that controversy — namely that the pre-implantation embryo destroyed in the course of embryonic stem cell research is not yet a human being.

With abortion and embryonic stem cell research, it’s not possible to resolve the legal question without taking up the underlying moral and religious question. In both cases, neutrality is impossible because the issue is whether the practice in question involves taking the life of’ a human being. Of course, most moral and political controversies do not involve matters of life and death. So partisans of liberal neutrality might reply that the abortion and stem cell debates are special cases; except where the definition of the human person is at stake, we can resolve arguments about justice and rights without taking sides in moral and religious controversies. But this isn’t true, either.

Same-Sex Marriage
Consider the debate over same-sex marriage. Can you decide whether the state should recognize same-sex marriage without entering into moral and religious controversies about the purpose of marriage and the moral status of homosexuality? Some say yes, and argue for same-sex marriage on liberal, nonjudgmental grounds: whether one personally approves or disapproves of gay and lesbian relationships, individuals should be free to choose their marital partners. To allow heterosexual but not homosexual couples to get married wrongly discriminates against gay men and lesbians, and denies them equality before the law.

If this argument is a sufficient basis for according state recognition to same-sex marriage, then the issue can be resolved within the bounds of liberal public reason, without recourse to controversial conceptions of the purpose of marriage and the goods it honors. But the case for same-sex marriage can’t be made on nonjudgmental grounds. It depends on a certain conception of the telos of marriage — its purpose or point. And, as Aristotle reminds us, to argue about the purpose of a social institution is to argue about the virtues it honors and rewards.

The debate over same-sex marriage is fundamentally a debate about whether gay and lesbian unions are worthy of the honor and recognition that, in our society, state-sanctioned marriage confers. So the underlying moral question is unavoidable.

To see why this is so, it’s important to bear in mind that a state can take three possible policies toward marriage, not just two. It can adopt the traditional policy and recognize only marriages between a man and a woman; or it can do what several states have done, and recognize same-sex marriage in the same way it recognizes marriage between a man and a woman; or it can decline to recognize marriage of any kind, and leave this role to private associations.

These three policies can be summarized as follows:

Recognize only marriages between a man and a woman.
Recognize same-sex and opposite-sex marriages.
Don’t recognize marriage of any kind, but leave this role to private associations.

In addition to marriage laws, states can adopt civil union or domestic partnership laws that grant legal protections, inheritance rights, hospital visitation rights, and child custody arrangements to unmarried couples who live together and enter into a legal arrangement. A number of states have made such arrangements available to gay and lesbian partners. In 2003, Massachusetts, by a ruling of its Supreme Court, became the first state to accord legal recognition to same-sex marriage (policy 2). In 2008, California’s Supreme Court also ruled in favor of a right to same-sex marriage, but a few months after the ruling, a majority of the electorate overturned that decision in a statewide ballot initiative. In 2009, Vermont became the first state to legalize gay marriage by legislation rather than by judicial.

Policy 3 is purely hypothetical, at least in the United States; no state has thus far renounced the recognition of marriage as a government function. But this policy is nonetheless worth examining, as it sheds light on the arguments for and against same-sex marriage.

Policy 3 is the ideal libertarian solution to the marriage debate. It does not abolish marriage, but it does abolish marriage as a state-sanctioned institution. It might best be described as the disestablishment of marriage. Just as dis-establishing religion means getting rid of an official state church (while allowing churches to exist independent of the state), dis-establishing marriage would mean getting rid of marriage as an official state function.

The opinion writer Michael Kinsley defends this policy as a way out of what he sees as a hopelessly irresolvable conflict over marriage. Proponents of gay marriage complain that restricting marriage to heterosexuals is a kind of discrimination. Opponents claim that if the state sanctions gay marriage, it goes beyond tolerating homosexuality to endorsing it and giving it “a government stamp of approval. “The solution, Kinsley writes, is “to end the institution of government-sanctioned marriage,” to “privatize marriage.” Let people get married any way they please, without state sanction or interference.

Let churches and other religious institutions continue to offer marriage ceremonies. Let department stores and casinos get into the act if they want. . . . Let couples celebrate their union in any way they choose and consider themselves married whenever they want.

And, yes, if three people want to get married, or one person wants — to marry him or herself, and someone else wants to conduct a ceremony and declare them married, let ‘em.

“If marriage were an entirely private affair,” Kinsley reasons, “all the disputes over gay marriage would become irrelevant. Gay marriage would not have the official sanction of government, but neither would straight marriage.” Kinsley suggests that domestic partnership laws could deal with the financial, insurance, child support, and inheritance issues that arise when people co-habit and raise children together. He proposes, in effect, to replace all state-sanctioned marriages, gay and straight, with civil unions.

From the standpoint of liberal neutrality, Kinsley’s proposal has a clear advantage over the two standard alternatives (policies 1 and 2): It does not require judges or citizens to engage in the moral and religious controversy over the purpose of marriage and the morality of homosexuality. Since the state would no longer confer on any family units the honorific title of marriage, citizens would be able to avoid engaging in debate about the telos of marriage, and whether gays and lesbians can fulfill it.

Relatively few people on either side of the same-sex marriage debate have embraced the disestablishment proposal. But it sheds light on what’s at stake in the existing debate, and helps us see why both proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage must contend with the substantive moral and religious controversy about the purpose of marriage and the goods that define it. Neither of the two standard positions can be defended within the bounds of liberal public reason.

Of course, those who reject same-sex marriage on the grounds that it sanctions sin and dishonors the true meaning of marriage aren’t bashful about the fact that they’re making a moral or religious claim. But those who defend a right to same-sex marriage often try to rest their claim on neutral grounds, and to avoid passing judgment on the moral meaning of marriage. The attempt to find a nonjudgmental case for same-sex marriage draws heavily on the ideas of nondiscrimination and freedom of choice. But these ideas cannot by themselves justify a right to same-sex marriage. To see why this is so, consider the thoughtful and nuanced opinion written by Margaret Marshall, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court; in the court’s ruling in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health (2003), the same-sex marriage case.

Marshall begins by recognizing the deep moral and religious disagreement the subject provokes, and implies that the court will not take sides in this dispute: Many people hold deep-seated religious, moral, and ethical convicEons that marriage should be limited to the union of one man and one woman, and that homosexual conduct is immoral. Many hold equally strong religious, moral and ethical convictions that same-sex couples are entitled to be married, and that homosexual persons should be treated no differently than their heterosexual neighbors. Neither view answers the question before us. “Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”

As if to avoid entering into the moral and religious controversy over homosexuality, Marshall describes the moral issue before the court in liberal terms — as a matter of autonomy and freedom of choice. The exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage is incompatible with “respect for individual autonomy and equality under law” she writes. The liberty of “choosing whether and whom to marry would be hollow” if the state could “foreclose an individual from freely choosing the person with whom to share an exclusive commitment. “The issue, Marshall maintains, is not the moral worth of the choice, but the right of the individual to make it — that is, the right of the plaintiffs “to marry their chosen partner?”

But autonomy and freedom of choice are insufficient to justify a right to same-sex marriage. If government were truly neutral on the moral worth of all voluntary intimate relationships, then the state would have no grounds for limiting marriage to two persons; con-sensual polygamous partnerships would also qualify. In fact, if the state really wanted to be neutral, and respect whatever choices individuals wished to make, it would have to adopt Michael Kinsley’s proposal and get out of the business of conferring recognition on any marriages.

The real issue in the gay marriage debate is not freedom of choice but whether same-sex unions are worthy of honor and recognition by the community — whether they fulfill the purpose of the social institution of marriage. In Aristotle’s terms, the issue is the just distribution of offices and honors. It’s a matter of social recognition.

Notwithstanding its emphasis on freedom of choice, the Massachusetts court made clear that it did not intend to open the way to polygamous marriage. It didn’t question the notion that government may confer social recognition on some intimate associations rather than others, nor did the court call for the abolition, or disestablishment, of marriage.

To the contrary, Justice Marshall’s opinion offers a paean to marriage as “one of our community’s most rewarding and cherished institutions.” It argues that eliminating state-sanctioned marriage “would dismantle a vital organizing principle of our society.”

Rather than abolish state-sanctioned marriage, Marshall argues for expanding its traditional definition to include partners of the same sex. In doing so, she steps outside the bounds of liberal neutrality to affirm the moral worth of same-sex unions, and to offer a view about the purpose of marriage, properly conceived. More than a private arrangement between two consenting adults, she observes, marriage is a form of public recognition and approval. “In a real sense, there are three partners to every civil marriage: two willing spouses and an approving State.” This feature of marriage brings out its honorific aspect: “Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family.”

If marriage is an honorific institution, what virtues does it honor? To ask that question is to ask about the purpose, or telos, of marriage as a social institution. Many opponents of same-sex marriage claim that the primary purpose of marriage is procreation. According to this argument, since same-sex couples are unable to procreate on their own, they don’t have a right to marry. They lack, so to speak, the relevant virtue.

This teleological line of reasoning is at the heart of the case against same-sex marriage, and Marshall takes it on directly. She does not pretend to be neutral on the purpose of marriage, but offers a rival interpretation of it. The essence of marriage, she maintains, is not procreation but an exclusive, loving commitment between two partners — be they straight or gay.

Now, how, you might ask, is it possible to adjudicate between rival accounts of the purpose, or essence, of marriage? Is it possible to argue rationally about the meaning and purpose of morally contested social institutions such as marriage? Or is it simply a clash of bald assertions — some say it’s about procreation, others say it’s about loving commitment — and there’s no way of showing one to be more plausible than the other?

Marshall’s opinion offers a good illustration of how such arguments can proceed. First, she disputes the claim that procreation is the primary purpose of marriage. She does so by showing that marriage, as currently practiced and regulated by the state, does not require the ability to procreate. Heterosexual couples who apply for marriage licenses are not asked about “their ability or intention to conceive children by coitus. Fertility is not a condition of marriage, nor is it grounds for divorce, People who have never consummated their marriage, and never plan to, may be and stay married. People who cannot stir from their deathbed may marry.” While “many, perhaps most married couples have children together (assisted or unassisted) ,“ Marshall concludes, “it is the exclusive and permanent commitment of the marriage partners to one another, not the begetting of children, that is the sine qua non of civil marriage.”

So part of Marshall’s argument consists of an interpretation of the purpose or essence of marriage as it currently exists. Faced with rival interpretations of a social practice — marriage-as-procreation versus marriage-as-exclusive-and-permanent-commitment — how can we determine which is more plausible? One way is to ask which account makes better sense of existing marriage laws, taken as a whole. Another is to ask which interpretation of marriage celebrates virtues worth honoring. What counts as the purpose of marriage partly depends on what qualities we think marriage should celebrate and affirm. This makes the underlying moral and religious controversy unavoidable: What is the moral status of gay and lesbian relationships?

Marshall is not neutral on this question. She argues that same-sex relationships are as worthy of respect as heterosexual relationships. Restricting marriage to heterosexuals “confers an official stamp of approval on the destructive stereotype that same-sex relationships are inherently unstable and inferior to opposite-sex relationships and are not worthy of respect.”

So when we look closely at the case for same-sex marriage, we find that it cannot rest on the ideas of non-discrimination and freedom of choice. In order to decide who should qualify for marriage, we have to think through the purpose of marriage and the virtues it honors. And this carries us onto contested moral terrain, where we can’t remain neutral toward competing conceptions of the good life.

I have one more post from Michael Sandal but I think what this one does is show you that the tired defense of marriage as between one man and one woman because marriage is for procreation is just that, tired. Far better to reflect upon the virtue of homosexuality and to discuss that with same-sex marriage advocates. Look at these two reflections on the case for homosexuality as a normative behavior:

The Church refuses to believe that can a condition be “normal” or “natural” when statistics show it leads to early death; sexual addiction and promiscuity; inability to procreate normally; numerous health problems including STDs, cancer, hepatitis, HIV/AIDS and other life-threatening diseases; drug and alcohol abuse; and a high risk of depression and suicide.

According to the Catholic Medical Association: Well-designed research studies have shown several psychiatric disorders to be far more prevalent in teenagers and adults with same-sex attraction. These include major depression, suicidal ideation and attempts, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, conduct disorder, low self-esteem in males and sexual promiscuity with the inability to maintain committed relationships. It is important to note that “homophobia” is not the cause of these disorders as most of these studies were done in cultures in which homosexuality is widely accepted.

This report also notes that 39 percent of males with same-sex attraction have been abused by other males with same-sex attraction. The Family Research Council has also published a report, Getting it Straight: What the Research Shows About Homosexuality , that has a chapter on the health risks involved for those with homosexual lifestyles, including reports from the Center for Disease Control, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the John Hopkins University School of Public Health and others. “The significantly elevated health problems experienced by homosexuals [are] most often the direct consequence of engaging in specific sexual acts and behavior patterns … that are common among homosexuals.”

These papers directly contradict the Marshall opinion argued above. “The destructive stereotype that same-sex relationships are inherently unstable and inferior to opposite-sex relationships and are not worthy of respect.” turns out to be a stereotype without a firm basis in fact.

If you would like to explore more, this is a challenging view of the neutrality topic that Dr. Sandal introduces to his ideas on justice:

http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2009/12/09/reading-selections-from-%e2%80%9cthe-illusion-of-moral-neutrality%e2%80%9d-by-j-budziszewski/

Posted in Homosexualism, Understanding Justice | Tagged abortion, fairness, freedom of choice, John Rawls, liberal neutrality, Neutrality, same-sex marriage, Stem Cell Debate, Tolerance | Leave a Comment »

Suspended From Catholic Dot Com

April 22, 2010

I recently was banned from Catholic.com forums for coming down too strongly on a young man who would not communicate with a lecturer who was ridiculing the Catholic Church. It appeared to be a college instructor babbling the usual low rent accusations againt the Pope and I gave the young man some links to payingattentiontothesky and materials to read to refute the lecturer. Marshal your facts, state them calmly and quietly — and don’t apologize for them — was my advice.

He replied by way of praising me for my “position” but like a true modern relativist knucklehead he thought his teachers (“journalists”) could easily parry it and it was pointless to pursue. He added a [Sigh] to his reply. I found his inability to defend his faith frustrating and called him “gutless.” For a lack of charity I have been suspended from the forums for 2 weeks (my second offense – seems I lack charity dealing with abusive atheists as well). Sigh.

Actually it is not so much charity I lack as much as I am clinically depressed and the latter manifests itself as rage and anger. I have a trick I use in emails and other postings to web forums where I write wildly accusatory notes and then go through and cleanse them of words like “gutless,” using “lack courage,” in its stead, etc. I missed that one (gutless), I guess.

Knucklehead is so perfectly descriptive of the moral relativists in our midst I probably would have left that in. I’d hate to think I got canned for that one.

I have tried to stay away from the media and the Pope – it’s the sort of issue that gets me boiling – but over the past year I have made some posts and reading selections on the issue of homosexuality and the Church. It’s kind of hard to avoid. On the most part I go where my faith directs me – solving questions of “person” most recently and posting the things I’ve read about it.

As for the “ongoing crisis in the Catholic Church,” George Weigel has written “The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother — thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture.”

He adds: “Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years—some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests — a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared. Six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members.” In many ways the safest place in North America for a child is the Church and we have Pope Benedict more than any other figure to thank for that.

Yet the sexual abuse story in the media remains a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the main actor in the sexual abuse of the young with overtones of a sinister ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving the recycling of sexual predators whose predations continue unabated today. That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago and the policies adopted by the Church appear to be working means nothing to this story line.

In truth the story is really about taking the Church down and removing it as both a financial resource and voice in the public debate over public policy. Quite simply, if the Catholic Church is a global criminal conspiracy of sexual abusers and their protectors, then it has no claim to a space in the public square debating public moral arguments. So the drum beat remains strong and the pro-abortionists and homosexualists in the media make it a daily occurrence.

The Church does not avoid its own responsibility for this current situation: “Reprehensible patterns of clerical sexual abuse; misgovernance by the Church’s bishops in the U.S.; patterns of corruption in Ireland and Germany; clericalism; cowardice; fideism about psychotherapy’s ability to “fix” sexual predators — all played their roles in the recycling of abusers into ministry and in the failure of bishops to come to grips with a massive breakdown of conviction and discipline in the post-Vatican II years.” No one denies this and the Pope himself has urged us all to do penance.

Weigel defines the current situation here: “The Church’s sexual abuse crisis has always been that: a crisis of fidelity. Priests who live the noble promises of their ordination are not sexual abusers; bishops who take their custody of the Lord’s flock seriously, protect the young and recognize that a man’s acts can so disfigure his priesthood that he must be removed from public ministry or from the clerical state. That the Catholic Church was slow to recognize the scandal of sexual abuse within the household of faith, and the failures of governance that led to the scandal being horribly mishandled, has been frankly admitted — by the bishops of the United States in 2002, and by Pope Benedict XVI in his recent letter to the Catholic Church in Ireland. In recent years, though, no other similarly situated institution has been so transparent about its failures, and none has done as much to clean house. It took too long to get there, to be sure; but we are there.”

Yet the despicable March 25^th piece of yellow journalism in the New York Times has obscured all this progress and with revelations in Ireland and Germany ignited a global media firestorm about this current Pope. It has also clearly revealed the motivations and intentions of those who oppose the Church and their agenda to remove it as a financial resource and discredit it as voice of moral leadership.

Once again gay activists are out pedaling their lies and distortions. It’s not about homosexuality they say but “pedophilia.” While there is a clear, well-documented and strong correlation between male homosexuality and child sexual abuse, activists deny this and charge anyone for bringing it up as a “gay basher” or “homophobe.”

They prefer to cite studies concerning “pedophiles” that center on children six years old or younger. Pedophilia is a sickness where sexual orientation has as much relevance as race. But in older children, pubescent or post-pubescent children, homosexual pedophiles are usually classified as “ephebophiles” and the evidence is overwhelming. Six out of seven children victimized in the gay priest crisis were of such age.

In fact gay literature and culture is centered upon the natural links between a homosexual orientation and child sexual abuse. Many “gay” organizations and leaders not only admit to, but support, the sexual abuse of children by homosexuals. An editorial in the San Francisco Sentinel, a member of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalist’s Association, claimed that the love between men and boys is at the foundation of homosexuality.

These are main line views and not extremist at all: White House “Safe Schools Czar” Kevin Jennings is on record praising the founder of the North American Association for Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), Harry Hay whose organization is devoted to promoting homosexuality between boys and men. All of this is documented in a scrupulously researched paper by Brian Clowes that I have summarized here.

Homosexual defenders of NAMBLA have declared that “man/boy love is by definition homosexual,” and that “man/boy lovers are part of the gay movement and central to gay history and culture,” part of “the Western homosexual tradition from Socrates to Wilde to Gide,” and part of “many non-Western homosexualities from New Guinea and Persia to the Zulu and the Japanese.” Denying that would be like a heterosexual denying a Lolita myth or the existence of trophy wives. Yet homosexualists blithely posit such nonsense and call people like myself or Brian Clowes homophobes for stating these simple truths. All we are doing is quoting what they are saying! Not to mention the other paradoxes that lie at the root of their public cry for normalizing homosexual behavior.

I take the heat for saying these things in countless online forums but lose a sense of charity when dealing with Catholic brothers who tell me Church teaching is “an admirable point of view.”

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A Homosexualist Paradox

December 10, 2009

In Evil and the Justice of God, N. T. Wright begins by noting how the Enlightenment project for the perfection of man and the elimination of evil has received some severe checks, from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to the indiscriminate slaughter of the last century. Even so, the modern attempt to abolish original sin was never abandoned, although substitutes had to be found in Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche.

Postmodernism is not helpful on the subject, often branding as evil what it deems politically incorrect. We might add here that when Wright gets around to discussing the evils of the modern age, his list drips with the sort of ecclesial leftism one expects from the Anglican establishment: Third World debt, American military adventurism, capitalism, and industrial pollution. The author thinks the United States’ response to 9/11 “immature,” that we thought we could somehow “eliminate evil” by bombing the Taliban, but he proposes no alternative.

Despite these political hiccups, Wright’s discussion of evil is provocative. He begins by warning against the temptation to “solve” the problem of evil in any obvious way. Even the most sophisticated theodicies (attempts to justify God in the light of evil) run the risk of trivializing the problem. Evil is not a puzzle to be solved, but rather a question to be lived. A person who suffers the loss of a loved one does not want to hear what philosophers have to say on the subject; in fact, if that person suffers in the right way, he or she may be far closer to “solving” the problem of evil than any philosopher.

“What the Gospels offer,” according to Wright, “is not a philosophical explanation of evil, what it is or why it is there, not a set of suggestions for how we might adjust our lifestyles so that evil will mysteriously disappear from the world, but the story of an event in which the living God deals with it.” Which means that the ultimate “solution” to evil is the sufferings of Christ. God is not going to remove evil from His creation; He is not going to push the “restart” button. Rather, starting at Calvary, He is going to allow evil to be part of the solution. He is going to use it to help bring into existence the “new heaven and new earth” we read about in Revelation.

Wright points out that the blessed state on the other side of the Parousia, where evil will have no purchase whatsoever, is to be achieved only “through suffering love.” Until then, evil will remain present in our personal lives and in the world at large. Its role in our redemption will never be entirely comprehensible, and we have to take on faith the words of St. Thérèse of Lisieux that “God does not permit unnecessary suffering.” Being an Anglican, it is understandable that Wright’s discussion of evil mostly sticks to Scripture; but it may be that, until the beatific vision, the final word on the subject is to be found, not in any texts, but in the lives of the saints.

In this respect it may instructive to recall these words of John Paul II:

“It is significant that in their preaching the prophets link mercy, which they often refer to because of the people’s sins, with the incisive image of love on God’s part. The Lord loves Israel with the love of a special choosing, much like the love of a spouse, and for this reason He pardons its sins and even its infidelities and betrayals. When He finds repentance and true conversion, He brings His people back to grace. In the preaching of the prophets, mercy signifies a special power of love, which prevails over the sin and infidelity of the chosen people.

In this broad “social” context, mercy appears as a correlative to the interior experience of individuals languishing in a state of guilt or enduring every kind of suffering and misfortune. Both physical evil and moral evil, namely sin, cause the sons and daughters of Israel to turn to the Lord and beseech His mercy. In this way David turns to Him, conscious of the seriousness of his guilt; Job too, after his rebellion, turns to Him in his tremendous misfortune; so also does Esther, knowing the mortal threat to her own people. And we find still other examples in the books of the Old Testament.

At the root of this many-sided conviction, which is both communal and personal, and which is demonstrated by the whole of the Old Testament down the centuries, is the basic experience of the chosen people at the Exodus: the Lord saw the affliction of His people reduced to slavery, heard their cry, knew their sufferings and decided to deliver them. In this act of salvation by the Lord, the prophet perceived his love and compassion. This is precisely the grounds upon which the people and each of its members based their certainty of the mercy of God, which can be invoked whenever tragedy strikes.

Added to this is the fact that sin too constitutes man’s misery. The people of the Old Covenant experienced this misery from the time of the Exodus, when they set up the golden calf. The Lord Himself triumphed over this act of breaking the covenant when He solemnly declared to Moses that He was a “God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” It is in this central revelation that the chosen people, and each of its members, will find, every time that they have sinned, the strength and the motive for turning to the Lord to remind Him of what He had exactly revealed about Himself and to beseech His forgiveness.

Thus, in deeds and in words, the Lord revealed His mercy from the very beginnings of the people which He chose for Himself; and, in the course of its history, this people continually entrusted itself, both when stricken with misfortune and when it became aware of its sin, to the God of mercies. All the subtleties of love become manifest in the Lord’s mercy towards those who are His own: He is their Father, for Israel is His firstborn son; the Lord is also the bridegroom of her whose new name the prophet proclaims: Ruhamah, “Beloved” or “she has obtained pity.”
Dives In Misericordia
John Paul II

I recently went on a very liberal discussion forum and attempted to advance the Church’s teachings as it applied to the Manhattan Declaration. I found the discussion on gay marriage at an immediate standstill and the cries of homophobia raining upon my head. And that for simply asking whether the words “healthy, happy, young and gay” didn’t present a kind of cognitive dissonance when encountered. While no one would take me to task for “young, successful and black” the cognitive dissonance of which would suggest that our society still suffers from racism in some form (that could be argued but not by me), the former was almost immediately smoked out as an attempt to “decry the problems of gay America — which are exaggerated anyway — and urge measures that can only prevent their amelioration.” I swear I hadn’t even breathed a “measure.”

My amazement with this forum is that some of those most active in heaping scorn and ridicule define themselves as Catholic. They are, of course, of the cafeteria variety who do not put gay marriage or abortion on their plates at the buffet. These apologists for homosexualism simply refuse to acknowledge the problems besetting our gay brothers in America. So “gay”, ipso facto, must be healthy when seen in one perspective; yet when advocating the ineluctable nature of the gay/lesbian fate, the homosexualists immediately don the guise of the suffering servant: “O Lord how can you accuse of choosing to be this way!” I’d gotten as far as presenting this paradox before the homophobic rain began to fall.

Andrew J. Sodergren, of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family presents supportive evidence this way:

“Those who argue that homosexual inclinations are “natural” utilize a problematic understanding of nature that needs to be challenged. This understanding of nature refers to that which is innate and unchosen within a person. “I did not choose to be the way I am.” “I discovered my homosexuality within me.” Moreover, a certain normative quality is attributed to this nature such that it can and should dictate my actions. Nature as such is good, or at least neutral in respect to ethics, so the modern mentality holds that whatever I am naturally disposed to do I should do as long as it does not involve violating the rights of others.

A Christian anthropology, however, comes to very different conclusions about “nature”. Human nature, in a Christian sense, does also have a normative content to it. As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith says, “There can be no true promotion of man’s dignity unless the essential order of his nature is respected” (CDF, 1975, no. 3).

In creating the world, God inscribed a certain order in it. Thus, the true nature of things and their fulfillment can be understood only in light of God’s design. This is especially salient when we are speaking of desires that arise within the human heart for Christian revelation recognizes the reality of original sin.

At the start of human history, our first parents rebelled against God’s plan and by their action, brought disorder into the world: “Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state” (CCC, no. 404).

The Fathers of the Church taught that human nature is one and thus all human beings participate in the same nature. Thus, when our first parents marred their likeness to God through sin, the whole human family was affected by it. Thus, the human nature that each human being inherits is disordered. Original sin is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it; subject to ignorance, suffering, and the dominion of death; and inclined to sin – an inclination to evil that is called “concupiscence” (CCC, no. 405).

Every evil in the world is traceable back to this fundamental disruption at the beginning of time. Indeed, another crucial aspect of Christian anthropology is that human nature involves a unity of body and soul such that the human person is not wholly identifiable with either taken separately but exists as a composite of the two. In other words, the body and the soul are intrinsically united.

The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature (CCC, no. 365).

Therefore, when we say that original sin has wounded human nature, this includes both physical and spiritual effects. In this way, the doctrine of original sin can account for every sort of genetic or biological defect, disease, or disorder as well as all kinds of human suffering and inclinations to do evil. With this understanding of fallen human nature, a Christian anthropology would have no difficulty accommodating research (past or future) implicating a substantial inherited component to homosexuality.

Clearly, this understanding of original sin is essential when we are speaking of the moral quality of human inclinations. Because of original sin, a certain disorder resides in the human heart such that one often desires that which is contrary to the moral law. Therefore, even if homosexual inclinations are entirely inherited, this does not mean that they necessarily correspond with human nature in the original sense, as God intended it. Moreover, as Christ made clear in his preaching, it is the original, created order that has normative weight to it, not this transitory fallen state:

Some Pharisees approached him, and tested him, saying, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatever?” He said in reply, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate” (Mt 19.3-6).

Thus, the inclinations that arise in the human heart must be tested according to objective moral norms because the human nature we encounter in this age of history, though wounded by sin, is still called to the same norms of behavior intended by God “from the beginning.” Why? Because God created us “out of love for love” (John Paul II, 1981, no. 11); His wise, loving plan permeates all of created reality. Therefore, to follow the norms given to us by our Creator and Redeemer is in no way an imposition or alienation but a call to happiness. The moral law given to us by God is a blueprint by which human beings can achieve their fulfillment. This implies another fundamental truth of Christian anthropology: human nature is wounded, but it is not totally corrupted. Man still has freedom. Though weakened by sin and prone to misuse, the human person still possesses the ability to make free moral choices and, by cooperating with God’s grace, grow in holiness and maturity.

Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when direct toward God, our beatitude (CCC, no. 1731).

The proper, beatifying use of freedom requires God’s grace. Only with His help can we properly see the truth and act in accord with it. Thankfully, God desires all men to be saved and abundantly supplies the means for it to happen.

Which brings us very much back to what John Paul II was saying in support of N. T. Wright’s Evil and the Justice of God.

Posted in Apologetics, Homosexualism | Tagged Andrew J. Sodergren, Dives In Misericordia, Evil and the Justice of God, gay marriage, John Paul II, N. T. Wright, Original Sin, unity of soul and body | 3 Comments »

“Is It Really Me They Spite? Is It Not In Fact Themselves, To Their Own Confusion?”

July 7, 2009

The (Church’s) teaching is that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered,” and those who experience homosexual desires are to be lovingly supported in striving to live chaste lives. Sexual identity is at the root of personhood, every person is either man or woman and is not psychologically whole until they develop the maleness or femaleness that is constitutive of their personality. The problem with those struggling with same sex attraction/ambivalence is a condition of psychological deficit and they need help to develop the maturity and wholeness that alone will bring them true peace and freedom. What a person in this situation most needs is loving, affectionate, non-sexual friendship with others of the same sex. Experiencing this may make it easier for them to seek complete healing.

The Church urges firm resistance to the grim doctrine that homosexuality is simply a matter of fate, and the dehumanizing idea that one’s core identity is determined by one’s sexual desires. “Homosexual” means someone with dominantly same-sex desires, while “gay” refers to a person whose self-identity is determined by such desires. It is a meaningful difference and it is the latter that has waged war against the Church’s understanding of homosexuality. This understanding has been defined by the gay community as homophobia, even though it is the gay community that through its institutionalized self loathing prolongs a lack of healing, a fuller understanding of the condition and a war with bigots that affects every homosexual living in the country.

There is a need to get past the pervasive propaganda of the gay-lesbian activists who try to block at every point the dissemination of the truth about same-sex attraction and the possibility of healing. But it is crucial to understand that this activist component is not representative of the ordinary person struggling with the homosexual condition, who deep within senses a desire to be part of the heterosexual norm yet has been told that this is impossible and that he or she must strive to have the homosexual condition accepted as normal.

Quite simply the Church refuses to believe that can a condition be “normal” or “natural” when statistics show it leads to early death; sexual addiction and promiscuity; inability to procreate normally; numerous health problems including STDs, cancer, hepatitis, HIV/AIDS and other life-threatening diseases; drug and alcohol abuse; and a high risk of depression and suicide.

According to the Catholic Medical Association: Well-designed research studies have shown several psychiatric disorders to be far more prevalent in teenagers and adults with same-sex attraction. These include major depression, suicidal ideation and attempts, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, conduct disorder, low self-esteem in males and sexual promiscuity with the inability to maintain committed relationships, it is important to note that “homophobia” is not the cause of these disorders as most of these studies were done in cultures in which homosexuality is widely accepted.

This report also notes that 39 percent of males with same-sex attraction have been abused by other males with same-sex attraction. The Family Research Council has also published a report, Getting it Straight: What the Research Shows About Homosexuality, that has a chapter on the health risks involved for those with homosexual lifestyles, including reports from the Center for Disease Control, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the John Hopkins University School of Public Health and others. “The significantly elevated health problems experienced by homosexuals [are] most often the direct consequence of engaging in specific sexual acts and behavior patterns … that are common among homosexuals.” The complete Church position is documented in the companion page I am presenting Causes of Homosexuality: A Christian Appraisal of the Data.

Father John Harvey, O.S.ES. has done wonderful work through Courage, offering support groups for those struggling to maintain a chaste life and pursue therapy. Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, co-founder with Drs. Charles Socarides and Benjamin Kaufman of the National Association for Research and Therapy for Homosexuality (NARTH), as well as Dr. Jeffrey Satinover and Dr. Maria Valdes, have done important work in therapy for those with the homosexual condition.

Early intervention is the key to therapeutic help and prevention. Adolescents need to be helped to solidify their sexual identity in these sensitive years while a mature sexual identity is still developing. The pressures of gay/lesbian propaganda to present the homosexual condition as a positive choice needs to be resisted and opposed because it is based on a lie about the human person. A better understanding about how the homosexual condition develops could help families to pay attention to the critical years when sexual identify develops.

Although the creation stories of Genesis are centered upon a man and a woman, they remind us of the fundamental blessing and challenge shared by all persons: the gift and call not to be alone, to be with and for others and to contribute to the development of the world. Here is where we can see the power and grace of sexuality. In the experience of erotic desire, our other-directedness and interdependence find powerful expression. We are drawn out of ourselves and caught up in the other person. We are then faced with the challenge of real loving. Male or female, homosexual or heterosexual, single, married or celibate, the real test is whether or not we desire and love others in their real otherness, or whether we only want to take possession of them or try to make them extensions of ourselves. Sex is not the only way to express and nurture loving union, but it is one of the most intimate and powerful. Like other aspects of our lives, however, it can also be thoughtless and even exploitative. It is one of the most basic powers in human existence of liberation or domination, fulfillment or alienation, grace or sin.

Robert George has noted that “Although not all reproductive-type acts are marital, there can be no marital act that is not reproductive in type. Masturbatory, sodomitical, or other sexual acts that are not reproductive in type cannot unite persons organically: that is, as a single reproductive principle. Therefore such acts cannot be intelligibly engaged in for the sake of marital (i.e. one-flesh, bodily) unity as such. They cannot be marital acts. Rather, persons who perform such acts must be doing so for the sake of ends or goals that are extrinsic to themselves as bodily persons. Sexual satisfaction, or (perhaps) mutual sexual satisfaction, is sought as a means of releasing tension, or obtaining (and sometimes sharing) pleasure, either as an end in itself, or as a means to some other end, such as expressing affection, esteem, friendliness, etc. In any case, where one-flesh union cannot (or cannot rightly) be sought as an end-in-itself, sexual activity necessarily involves the instrumentalization of the bodies of those participating in such activity to extrinsic ends.”

Some may wonder what sex and erotic love have to do with the great commandment of love, which is at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition? In the NT, such love is called agape and refers directly to our love for God and neighbor (Matthew 22:34-40). Many writers have viewed agape as the selfless, disinterested, and above all, dispassionate charity which Christians are supposed to have for others. Of course that usually made it the clear opposite of eros, sexual love, which was seen as self-directed, possessive and passionate. I think such a view is wrong.

Richard Gula, a catholic moral theologian, has suggested that “hospitality” conveys the sense of agape.The heart of hospitality is being caught up in the feelings and needs of the other. Above all, it depends on attentiveness. It is not merely disinterested etiquette. In the Bible, hospitality involves the deeply affective dimensions of family, friendship and reverence. In the present context, this might remind us that everything about us as humans is ultimately directed towards and finds fulfillment in others, in the human community, and finally in God.

Eros and agape are not opposed. Sexual love is called to be an expression of delight in the other, desire for the other and self-gift to the other. Delight, desire and self-gift come to unique expression in the vulnerable, hope-filled play and pleasure of making love. However, sex rarely creates or communicates these things ex nihilo. It will be authentic and satisfying, a grace and blessing, in the measure that it expresses and celebrates the delight, desire and self-gift that occur in the many different dimensions and events of everyday life. And it will reveal its saving, liberating power in the measure that the partners find their interest, attentiveness and commitment to the larger human community nourished and strengthened.

We are, the Church teaches us, more, immeasurably more, than our sexual desires. And morally disordered desires are hardly limited to homosexuality or to sexual desires of any kind. Those who succumb to homosexual desires are, like all sinners, to be loved and assured of the transforming power of God’s forgiveness. In law and social practice, they should not be subjected to unjust discrimination, but neither should the practices that define “the gay community” be put on a social or moral par with the union of man and woman in marriage.

In the gay community, it would seem, the maxim is: love the sin and love the sinner, but hate anyone who calls it a sin or him a sinner. Better yet, brand them homophobes, fascists, crypto-Nazis and make every discussion a cause for ad hominem attack. Not every Christian is a bigot although many do lurk there. They use theological language that has no place in most discussions with those who suffer from same sex attractions.

Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder. Homosexuality has been called a deviation, an irregularity, a wound. The fact that an act is called an intrinsic evil tells us two and only two things.

First, it tells us why an action is wrong — because of the “object” of the acting agent’s will. To identify the object of an action, one has to put oneself in the shoes of the one acting, and to describe the action from his perspective. The object is the immediate goal for which that person is acting; it is “the proximate end of a deliberate decision”

Second, the fact that an act is intrinsically evil tells us that it is always wrong to perform that type of act, no matter what the other circumstances are. A good motive cannot make an act with a bad object morally permissible. In other words, we may never do evil so that good may come of it. To echo an example used by both Pope John Paul II and St. Thomas, a modern-day Robin Hood should not hold up a convenience store at gunpoint in order to give the money to a nearby homeless center. Robin Hood’s good motive (altruistic giving) does not wash away the bad object or immediate purpose of his action (robbery).

But to say that an act is intrinsically evil does not by itself say anything about the comparative gravity of the act. Some acts that are not intrinsically evil (driving while intoxicated) can on occasion be worse both objectively and subjectively than acts that are intrinsically evil (telling a jocose lie). Some homicides that are not intrinsically evil are worse than intrinsically evil homicides. Furthermore, the fact that an act is intrinsically evil does not by itself tell third parties anything at all about their duty to prevent that act from occurring.

For an act to be morally wrong, however, any single defect will suffice. It can be performed for the wrong motive; if I give alms solely in order to earn fame, then my act is morally wrong. It can be performed under the wrong circumstances; it is entirely good for a newly wedded couple to consummate their union, but not in the church vestibule immediately following the ceremony. Most significantly for our discussion, the immediate “object” of the acting agent’s will can be disordered or defective. Because an act takes its identity primarily from its object, Catholic moralists say that an act with a defective or disordered object is “intrinsically” evil.

Intrinsically evil acts are acts that are wrong by reason of their object, not by reason of their motive or their circumstance. The Splendor of Truth (No. 80) states that they are “‘incapable of being ordered’ to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image.” Consequently, they can never be morally good, no matter what the intended outcomes. What are some examples? It is always wrong to act with the intention of killing an innocent human being, no matter what the context or larger motivation. This prohibition rules out not merely contract killing but also intentional killing of the dying in order to end their suffering, intentional killing of unborn children and saturation bombing of cities in wartime..

The church has taught, however, that there are other intrinsically evil acts that have nothing to do with violent assault. Not surprisingly sex, like death, also provides fertile ground for their identification. Masturbation, homosexual acts and contracepted heterosexual acts are all, according to Catholic moral teaching, intrinsically evil, in part because “they close the sexual act to the gift of life” (Catechism, No. 2357). It is never licit for a married couple to use contraception, even if a pregnancy would threaten the life of the woman and the baby she carried. The church teaches that if natural family planning does not provide sufficiently reliable protection, the couple must refrain from sex until menopause rather than use contraception even once.

One might argue, in response, that contraception in this case is acceptable because of the serious threat to the mother and child. Pope John Paul II, however, rejected that form of argument in The Splendor of Truth. No virtuous motive and no other feature of an intrinsically evil act can make it a good act, although it can mitigate the wrongdoing substantially. To hold otherwise, according to the pope, is to be a “proportionalist” and thereby to place oneself outside the Catholic moral tradition.

Over the centuries, Catholic moralists have also identified other acts as intrinsically evil. For example, lying (defined as making a false assertion with the intent of deceiving) has often been identified as an intrinsically evil act. Consequently, it too is always wrong. So it is wrong to lie to the F.B.I.; it is also wrong to tell your Aunt Edna that you think her purple sunflower hat is fabulous if you think it is hideous. While such a lie would be intrinsically evil, it would not be a serious evil. To recognize that an act is intrinsically evil does not necessarily mean that it is a grave evil, either objectively or subjectively. While the church has long taught that all sexual misdeeds are objectively serious, it has also recognized that subjective culpability can vary from case to case. Objectively speaking, lying is not always seriously wrong. And few moralists would deny that contraception is less seriously wrong than abortion, which involves the taking of human life.

Furthermore, not all intrinsically evil acts involve a significant violation of justice, the precondition for making an act illegal. No serious candidate for national office maintains that masturbation, homosexual acts or contraception should be outlawed in the United States today; and most Catholic legal theorists, whether conservative or liberal, would agree with them.

At this point, someone might object: “The foregoing reflections may be true about intrinsically evil acts in general, but not about intrinsically evil acts involving the taking of life—particularly innocent life. Surely these must be the worst acts of all and the greatest acts of injustice, and therefore are the acts that the law needs to condemn most harshly.” But even this claim does not hold up under closer scrutiny. Intrinsically evil acts do not necessarily make for the worst form of homicide, with respect either to the subjective culpability of the killer or to the objective wrong done to the innocent victim. The following two examples ought to make that clear.

Consider first a man who burns down his own building one night for the insurance money, foreseeing but not intending that a single mother at work there will die in the blaze. He does not want her to die; her death forms no part of his purpose or plan. He simply does not care whether she dies or not. Now this is a heinous act, revealing great depravity on the part of the perpetrator and causing great harm to the victim. It is not, however, intrinsically evil. The object of his act, to burn down his own building, is not wrong in and of itself. The act is wrong because of its motive (theft by insurance fraud) and because of its circumstances: the likelihood that an innocent woman would lose her life in the course of it.

Contrast this with a situation involving an elderly man suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease. Fearful of undergoing a protracted and difficult death, he begs his wife to kill him. Finally, she acquiesces to his pleas and kills him painlessly with an overdose of barbiturates. The wife has committed an intrinsically evil act. She has intentionally killed a helpless, innocent person. Her act is seriously wrong, yet her personal blameworthiness is mitigated by her motive of alleviating suffering. Moreover, the objective injustice is mitigated by the fact that her husband not only consented to the act, but begged her to do it.

The law ought to prohibit both acts, because both harm the common good. At the same time, however, the legal system ought to recognize that the first act, which is not intrinsically evil, is morally worse, both subjectively and objectively, than the second act, which is intrinsically evil. District attorneys would be eager to prosecute the death-dealing defrauder to the full extent of the law, but many of them would decline to press a murder case against the wife whose love and loyalty to her suffering husband took a deeply misguided form.

Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are a supreme dishonor to the Creator

But let us also examine the consequences of impiety, so that not even the slightest shadow of doubt remains in our minds that no one can prevail against God. In the prophet Jeremiah we read these words addressed to God: “All who abandon you will be put to shame” (Jeremiah 17:13). The abandonment of God leads to personal confusion and the feeling of having gone astray. “Lost” and “gone astray” are the words most frequently used in the Bible when sin is spoken of: the lost sheep, the lost son. – .

The very word to translate the biblical concept of sin in Greek, hamartia, contains the idea of being lost and having failed. The same term was used when speaking of a river that flows away from its original course and is lost in the marshes, and of an arrow which misses its aim and is lost. Sin is therefore radical failure. A man can fail in many ways: as a husband, as a father or as a businessman. A woman can fail as a wife or as a mother; a priest can fail as a pastor, as a superior or as a spiritual director. But these are all relative failures; there is always the possibility of compensation; one may fail in all these ways and still be a most respectable person, even a saint. But it is not so with sin; through sin one fails as a creature, that is fundamentally, in what one “is” and not in what one “does.”

This is the only case where the words of Jesus about Judas apply to a person: “It would have been better for that man if he had never been born” (Matthew 26:24). Man, in sinning, believes he is offending God, whereas, in fact, he is “offending” and mortifying only himself, to his own shame: “Is it really me they spite”, God says, “is it not in fact themselves, to their own confusion”? (Jeremiah 7:19). By refusing to glorify God, man himself becomes “deprived of the glory of God.” Sin offends God, that is, it saddens him greatly, but only in so far as it brings death to man whom he loves; it wounds his love.

This is an essay is generated from four sources: Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Kathleen Curran Sweeney, Robert P. George, M. Cathleen Kaveny and Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa.

Posted in Homosexualism | Tagged agape, Causes of Homosexuality: A Christian Appraisal of the Data., Eros, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, gay, Homosexual, intrinsic evil, Kathleen Curran Sweeney, M. Cathleen Kaveny, Pope John Paul II, Richard Gula, Robert George, same sex ambivalence, same sex attraction, The Splendor of Truth | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Homosexualism’ Category

False Complementarity and the Semblance of Real Intimacy

The Illusions of Married Personalism

Homosexuality and Love’s Duty

Homosexuality and Love’s Duty

Fr. Luc Buyens of the Netherlands

A Recent Announcement by the Rainbow Sash Movement

The Aspiration to Neutrality

Suspended From Catholic Dot Com

A Homosexualist Paradox

“Is It Really Me They Spite? Is It Not In Fact Themselves, To Their Own Confusion?”

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