Sex is a basic principle of personal identity and social organization, continuity and cohesion. Those who say sexual love is "bigger than both of us" are more right than they know. Since sex helps constitute our world and make us what we are, we cannot reduce it to something we define for ourselves as we choose. The modern liberal insistence that we can do so is one basic reason liberal modernity can't last.
Sex is a more contentious topic than ever. The view easiest to articulate in the language of public discussion today is that the only appropriate public standards are that it should be consensual and precautions should be taken to avoid disease and unwanted pregnancy; everything else is a matter of individual choice that others should respect. Since the world seems more complex than that, and many hold a different view, I thought I could contribute to the discussion by setting that view forth as clearly as I could.
These questions and answers present a defense of traditional sexual morality that emphasizes the good of man in society and thus the usefulness of that morality. There are of course other defenses, including natural teleology, personal integrity, honest interpersonal relations, and the need to make sense of sex as part of human life generally. I only touch on such arguments briefly, even though I find them the most compelling, because public discussion today is mostly utilitarian so the arguments relating to social benefits may be more quickly accessible. I also include a collection of references and links to sources and further readings.
For a spoken introduction to the issues raised on this page (requiring RealPlayer) click here. The issues presented here can be discussed in our forum. Your participation is welcome. You can also add a comment at the foot of this page. The FAQ is also available in Polish.
Private conduct doesn't stay private, especially when it involves something as basic to human life as sex. Among other things, private consensual sex gives rise to babies, family life, knife fights, betrayal, self-sacrificing devotion, and STDs. All these things are of concern to persons other than those immediately involved, so public standards regarding the conduct that leads to them can be a good thing if they help promote some and reduce others.
A reasonably coherent common understanding of what behavior is right and wrong. Examples include rules of politeness and everyday moral standards (honesty, trustworthiness and so on). Such standards aren't perfectly fixed and in most ways aren't legally enforceable, but in any society that is not in crisis they are definite enough to be used in judging conduct and firm enough to make it awkward to flout them.
Talk of "enforcement" can be misleading, since the word suggests that public standards are imposed on everyday life from outside. In fact, as a day-to-day matter they are mostly a matter of common understandings and practices that don't need specific enforcement. We grow up viewing them as part of what defines what we are and the world around us is. They tell us what acts are and what they mean, and we mostly choose accordingly.
Even so, violations can become an issue. When that happens consequences depend on circumstances and how serious the violation is. Most often sanctions are not consciously planned but arise directly out of the reactions of those around us. People may look the other way, act embarrassed, make critical comments, refuse to cooperate, shun violators, and so on. Thus, sexual standards, like ordinary standards of honesty and politeness, are enforced in the first instance very informally and by friends and family members.
Nonetheless, attitudes of broader and more formal communities are important as well, and people rightly expect the actions of public authorities to uphold the accepted public standards by which the world runs. How public authorities do that varies greatly depending on any number of things--it's not the same for the standards of politeness and the standards that condemn murder, and it differs from one political regime to another depending on the degree of government involvement in various aspects of social life. As a result, what sexual conduct should be considered wrong and what acts should be penalized, when and how are different questions. To avoid issues of political theory and social morality that have no special connection with sex only the first is considered in these questions and answers.
Certainly. People who act in ways others consider antisocial and wrong do get treated differently. Otherwise society could not exist, and as a practical matter moral education would be impossible. There's nothing special about sex in that regard. People who think racism is bad don't always treat racists the way they treat other people. Liars don't get the same respect as honest men, and sometimes get called hard names, and in special circumstances even get tossed in jail. Of course it's true that differential treatment can go too far. Theft is wrong, but the common-law penalty for stealing goods worth twelvepence (hanging) was too severe. Still, life must go on, and we must recognize and respond to wrong in ways that keep alive our sense of its wrongfulness even though sometimes responses have gone too far.
Who are other people to say what is polite, what honesty requires, what constitutes slander, harassment or betrayal of trust, or how much you should pay to support government operations? Views differ on all issues that have to do with human relations. Nonetheless, distinctions must be made and some distinctions must be made socially rather than individually. Sexuality touches us at the heart of what we are. It is intertwined with our most basic connections to others. It is the root of procreation, the family and the rearing of children, and thus of continued social existence and well-being. Standards that determine what sex is and what it is for are therefore fundamental rules for how we live together that can no more be viewed as a matter of individual choice than the standards of ordinary honesty or the rules of property. We need such standards to define our common moral world so we can agree where we are and what we have a right to expect from each other. Would it really make life better, for example, if husbands and wives had no social support whatever for expectations about their relationship and each other's sexual conduct?
There are lots of problems with it, personal, interpersonal and social. I'll concentrate on the social issues because they're probably the most obvious.
Socially, the most evident problem with sexual conduct that violates traditional standards is that accepting it transforms the setting in which men and women deal with each other in a way that radically weakens family life. How we act depends on what we think things are, and what things are for us depends on the idea of them we share with other people and see followed in daily life. What men and women think sex is affects the nature and stability of their relationships. It matters whether they believe it has to do with love, marriage and children, and so is something that by its nature is serious and must be respected, or as a feature their bodies happen to have that they can do with as they please.
To accept as legitimate traditionally proscribed conduct, such as fornication, adultery and homosexuality, is to deny that sex has a specific nature and function that commands respect. If sex has only the significance the parties give it then it is right for men and women to deal with each other in such matters with no preconceptions except that each wishes to find a pattern that satisfies whatever inclinations and impulses he may have from time to time. No one has a right to expect anything particular from anyone else, so trial, error and change are only to be expected. While people's feelings may lead them to make private commitments to each other, feelings change, and the commitments are unlikely to outlast them. There's not much basis for others to take an interest in something so subjective.
Governing sexual life by private impulse and judgment rather than common understandings and standards as to what it is and ought to be makes fidelity and trust far less likely. It destroys the common moral world within which such things can exist and make sense. Lack of fidelity and trust destroys both individual happiness and the conditions that make successful rearing of children possible, which are absolutely necessary for any tolerable society. Stable and functional unions between men and women for raising children are too important to leave to chance and idiosyncrasy. Public moral standards and attitudes must therefore create a setting that fosters and protects them by making reliance prudent. A moral view that brings sexual relations into a publicly recognized order that supports such unions by defining what sex is, and which sexual acts and relationships are legitimate, is thus a necessity.
For one thing, it's believable that people who think sex has to do with fidelity and having children will act differently in the ways described than people who think it has to do with satisfying idiosyncratic feelings and purposes. Where stability of relationships is the issue, it is believable that objective public standards can help deal with something as wandering and persuasive as sexual impulse. For another thing, experience indicates that looser standards indeed have those consequences. Trends regarding family structure and the well-being of children since the sexual revolution of the 1960s are very much in point.
To give a few numbers, in 1960 5.3% of all births in America were illegitimate; in 1999, 33.0%. For blacks the figures were 23% and 68.9%. From 1960 to 2000, the number of marriages per 1,000 unmarried women age 15-plus declined from 73.5 to 46.5, the number of divorces per 1,000 married women age 15-plus rose from 9.2 to 18.9, and the number of couples cohabiting without marriage increased about elevenfold. Not surprisingly, the proportion of children living with both parents plunged from 85% in 1970 to 69% in 1995, and the percentage living with their mother only grew from 11% to 23%.
At the same time the world became far worse for children. The percentage of children living in poverty in America grew by a third from 1970 to 1990, largely as a direct result of illegitimacy and divorce. The evidence for causality in the case of other problems such as juvenile delinquency and suicide is more inferential, but the far greater frequency of such problems among young people from broken families and the huge growth of such problems during the years in which family structure was loosening (and during which spending on education and social welfare increased enormously) are certainly suggestive. It is suggestive, for example, that three out of four teenage suicides occur in a household where a parent is absent and that 5 out of 6 adolescents caught up in the criminal justice system come from such households. Psychological studies of emotional and behavioral problems and anecdotal and impressionistic accounts confirm the conclusion that the family instability associated with looser sexual morals has been catastrophic for children.
Anecdote and impression are also suggestive regarding the relations between the sexes; along with marriage and divorce rates they suggest that those relations are far worse than what they have been and should be. It appears that men and women are different enough to have trouble establishing solid long-term relations if there are no settled standards defining the meaning of sexual connections and what can be expected from them, and they must instead base their relations solely on individual negotiations leading to deals that are likely to last only until one party changes his mind. The sexual revolution, disastrous for children, hasn't made their elders happy either.
There's no need to claim sex is the cause of everything; changes regarding sex haven't taken place in a vacuum. The relation between men and women is fundamental to social order, though. Why expect order anywhere if something so basic is disordered? It seems clear that changes in sexual attitudes are functionally connected to bad trends in a way that makes a reversion to more traditional attitudes a necessary part of reversing the trends. If it's something other than sex that's the real problem then fixing that other thing will involve fixing sex.
It is plain that current social problems are not caused by poverty, repression, insufficient formal education, unequal opportunity, or too few social programs. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain why internationally they have grown so much during a period in which prosperity, formal education, and social programs and protections expanded so greatly. Each country has its own story, but the pattern is clear. From 1960 to 1990 throughout the West a decline in marriage rates was accompanied by a much sharper rise in divorce rates (which typically more than doubled) and illegitimacy (which typically rose 4-6 times). At the same time crime rates, welfare costs, and other indicia of social disorder, especially those relating to young people, increased dramatically; crime rates, for example, increased 6 to 7-fold in most Western European countries between 1955 and 1990, while social spending rose enough to cause very large budget deficits in spite of increased revenues and attempts to contain costs.
These changes appear historically unprecedented. English statistics, which are comprehensive and readily available, show an illegitimacy rate that did not deviate much from 5 percent between 1800 and 1960 but by the end of 1992 had shot up to more than 32 percent; the rise in the crime rate has been similarly unprecedented and even steeper. All this has occurred during a period marked on the whole by great advances in prosperity, social protections, and what is considered enlightenment.
It thus appears that family disorder and general social disorder have been closely connected in both timing and degree. Both appear to be linked not to the material circumstances commonly blamed but to a decline in the degree to which people feel that their ties to others are important, binding and reliable. Such connections are what bring people to be responsible and lead stable and orderly lives, and give them something other than the state to fall back on in times of trouble.
The decline can be attributed to a variety of causes, including general conditions of modern life that make people economically less dependent on each other. However, economic and similar conditions may affect but do not determine culture. One of the main functions of morals has always been to counteract bad effects nonmoral circumstances would otherwise have. Accordingly, we have a special need today for moral ideals and standards that promote close and durable connections among particular individuals. Traditional sexual morality and the ideals associated with it promote such connections because they foster the traditional family. It is hard to think of anything that could substitute for them.
An act can be wrong not only because of its specific consequences but also because of the consequences of general acceptance of acts of the same kind. Since man is social and rational, to act by a principle is in effect to legislate that principle as legitimate. For example, it would cause no discernible injury to anyone if I counterfeited enough money to live on, at least if the counterfeiting were skillful enough to avoid detection. It would nonetheless be wrong for me to do so because if counterfeiting were accepted as OK the financial system would come to an end. A similar line of thought applies to acts that people find tempting but if commonly accepted destroy a generally beneficial system of sexual attitudes and customs. The question in each case is what the world would be like if the moral system that the act expresses were universally accepted: in other words, what moral attitudes the actor is enacting and the general consequences of such attitudes.
It's notoriously difficult to get universal agreement on any moral claim, so the question has no specific connection with sex. The same question could be asked about standards regarding theft or assault and battery. The Vikings didn't have the same standards as your great aunt. A practical response is that a self-governing society must be based on reasonably coherent common moral understandings. The members of a society should therefore in general be loyal to the standards that have made the society what it is, and they can legitimately apply those understandings to other members, in sexual matters as in others. The need for coherence makes respect for moral tradition a general obligation.
The claims of tradition are particularly persuasive in the case of sex. Sex is too fundamental, and its effects on our lives are too complex, subtle and powerful, for us to be able to derive a workable sexual morality by reason alone. The best approach is therefore to model ourselves on others like ourselves whose way of life has been successful. That modeling normally takes place as the transmission of a tradition. The presumptive standard for sexual morality is therefore to be found in the traditions of one's own people. Long-established standards may change over time, but the presumption is necessarily in their favor. That's especially true if the standards (e.g., disfavoring adultery, premarital sex and homosexuality) are rationally defensible, are broadly similar to those independently developed by other major civilized peoples, most idiosyncrasies (e.g., the Western proscription of polygamy) seem explicable on some acceptable ground, and attempts at modification or rejection have evidently worked badly.
Such principles work well as a basis for morality in commerce and other settings in which people typically deal at arm's length, the matters at issue can be clearly defined in advance, and disputes can be satisfactorily dealt with through contract and tort liability because money is an adequate remedy and fault and damages can be assessed by third parties.
Sex and having children aren't like that. You never know what you're getting into and it's hard for other people to know what's going on, whether it's consistent with the original understandings of the parties, or how to put things right when they've gone awry. Some parties to the transactions--the children--have no choice at all regarding their participation. Also, in commerce risky transactions can be left to specialists and there are well-developed ways of limiting risk. Not so in the case of marrying and having children, activities in which most people inevitably engage and the major risks of which cannot be avoided without destroying the point of the relationship. The responsibilities of family life are pervasive and last a very long time, and people who enter into them are usually young and inexperienced and can't possibly know how they will feel throughout the long decades ahead. So if standards for relations between the sexes are necessary, commercial principles aren't going to do the job because they are designed to deal with wholly different circumstances.
What's wrong with having both if both are helpful? The issue is whether social acceptance of concrete rules that people can rely on and that define their situation and its significance promotes successful relationships, not whether something else is also a good thing that contributes to the same goal.
Some rules might do that, others are necessary to make such things possible. Nothing is more featureless, loveless and impersonal than chaos.
Pursuits as varied as economic life and poetry can be injured by too many rules; nonetheless, some objective rules (the rules of property and contract; standard commercial practices; conventions of versification; the grammatical and other rules that constitute a language) are needed for them to thrive. The proof of the pudding is in the eating: Are individuals stronger now than in the past? Have relations between the sexes improved in the past 40 years? Is family life better? Are children better off?
Social institutions that relate to fundamental things like sex succeed in channelling impulse reliably by integrating culture and nature, and can't be defined arbitrarily. They must be based on basic realities that don't change. The sexual bond between a man and a woman naturally gives rise to children, and therefore to a long-term connection that links the generations and transcends the immediate desires and interests of the parties. The institution of marriage strengthens, orders, and further defines that natural connection. It has accordingly been a fundamental social institution in all times and places, unlike "gay marriage," a modern eccentricity.
It follows that there is no reason at all to expect "gay marriage" to have anything like the institutional strength of normal marriage. Further, much of the strength of marriage has been its specificity, and its position in a network of related practices and understandings that define what sex is, what its place and importance in human life are, what men and women are, and what they owe each other. Recognition of "gay marriage" would separate marriage completely from such things, and so seriously weaken it as an institution while doing very little for homosexuals.
Sometimes they can, sometimes there are problems. For example, if one standard (e.g., avoidance of promiscuity, illegitimacy, and divorce) prevents costs then those who adhere to it won't want to pay the costs created by those who reject it. Some costs, like higher criminality rates among teenage sons of single mothers, are very hard to avoid when people live side by side. Others, like AIDS, can be avoided by turning your back on your dying neighbor, but that's not a solution everyone likes to live with.
In addition, people find it easiest to live with those who hold compatible views about basic patterns of human relations. For example, those who think racial equality is important are often uncomfortable in the company of people who make racist jokes, to the extent that they would not want to live in a society in which such conduct was generally practiced and approved. Those who think a certain pattern of dealing between the sexes is important have analogous feelings.
Moral standards that relate to basic aspects of human life are necessarily social as well as individual because they establish understandings and coordinate actions in ways needed for certain goods to be achieved. If a man thinks relations between men and women should follow a certain pattern, he's going to find it much harder to live that way if that's not the pattern the women he meets expect and think they can count on. He's going to find it difficult to maintain the pattern in his household if the people his family meet, the TV shows they watch, and his children's teachers tell them it's stupid. That's true whether the pattern is "men and women are equals", "personal choice should be respected", or "virginity before marriage is good."
People act less in accordance with the formal rules they say they accept than their understanding of what things are. That is especially true where strong emotions and impulses are involved. What something is for us as a moral matter is not something we can just make up. It normally depends on the whole network of attitudes and habits with which we have grown up and find ourselves surrounded, and that defines the world for us. If all our lives people have treated sex as whatever you make of it then that will affect how we act in stressful situations regardless of our intentions in cooler moments. In contrast, if people uniformly treat sex as something important tied to an objective order of things that promotes stable personal and family life, and if those who reject that understanding are scorned (as those called racists, and those who accept the understanding of sex presented on this page are now scorned), then that is very likely to be what sex is for us and we will be much more likely to act accordingly.
The claim that traditional sexual morality discriminates against women, if true, makes it hard to understand why they have always been its most vigorous proponents and why its weakening and the consequent growth of marital instability and illegitimacy have so extensively feminized poverty. On the face of it, the "one man/one woman" rule is most burdensome to socially and materially successful men who like variety and are in a position to get what they want, rather than to women, who are less likely than men to view sex as a consumer good.
The fact of the matter is that the decline of traditional sexual morals has led to vastly increased victimization of women and children. The pattern is clear and pervasive. Married women living with their husbands are the least likely of all women to be victims of violence. Much "teen-age sex" is in fact statutory rape of young girls by adult men. The great majority of child abuse cases involve children living in a household without the father present. And since child sexual abuse is typically a crime of stepfathers and mothers' boyfriends, fatherlessness greatly increases its risk. Nor are the effects of disorderly sexual lives limited to a single household or generation--boys who grow up without fathers are far more likely to engage in violent behavior than those who grow up in two-parent homes, and the children of divorce are likely to form unstable sexual connections themselves.
Feminists often reject traditional sexual morality as part of traditional relations between men and women. The reaction reflects ideology more than a practical concern for women's well-being. If sex is simply a matter of personal choice it's not likely to give rise to obligations that can be relied on. The disappearance of enduring obligations regarding sex burdens women far more than men for reasons that are both emotional -- women are more concerned with commitment--and practical--reduced reliability is much more troubling if you're the one with the baby. A feminism that truly favored women would recognize women's real needs, and favor traditional morality.
What about those for whom any system of things doesn't work? What about large muscular men with vehement appetites, minimal intelligence, and violent tempers who find the restraints imposed by modern criminal law unbearable and would have been happier as Visigoths? What about people with an intense psychological need for uniformity, stability and discipline who find that for them the multicultural capitalist consumer society doesn't work? Such people don't write books that get favorable reviews in mainstream publications, but they exist and suffer.
As discussed, the pattern is clear that sexual immorality leads to violence and abuse. Nonetheless, some people don't like its restraints. All social institutions that deal with fundamental matters seem oppressive to those who for whatever reason have come to think they shouldn't have to comply with them. The economic system requires us on pain of poverty to get up and go to work every day, sacrificing the best hours of our lives to the requirements of other people. The legal system demands that we deny what seems our own nature by restraining our impulses, and the political system can require us to sacrifice our very lives in its defense. Since we are social beings, the normal response to such necessities is to bring children up to accept the demands that must be met, to view meeting them as part of what it is to be a good person, and to show only very limited tolerance toward those who refuse to comply. It's unclear why the response in the case of sex should be different. No system pleases everyone; the point is to have a system that works tolerably well as a general thing, and in particular one that deals adequately with such utterly fundamental issues as the relation between the sexes and the care and education of children. Once such a system exists it may be possible to find piecemeal ways of mitigating burdens in special situations, but it's absurd to make such things the center of attention.
The changes are well-accepted only in particular circles. Those social circles include the elites now dominant, but the debate continues in the society at large. So far it has been as one-sided as the debate on government intervention in the economy during most of the last century, in part for a similar reason--the changes promote a transfer of power from informal, local and traditional institutions to formal and centralized ones, and so favor the interests and outlook of those in a position to dominate the discussion. So far those favoring the changes have had their way on the whole, but the visible results of their success have made their position far harder to defend, and the debate is therefore far from over.
People are fond of saying such things. On the other hand, the bond between mother and child is assuredly universal. As to that between man and woman, Mencius says that "a man and woman living together is the most important of human relations" (Bk. v, p. A, 2); Genesis says "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother; and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh" (2:24); the Iliad is the story of a war fought to undo an adulterous elopement and the Odyssey that of a man's struggle to return to his wife and son, a son's search for his father, and a woman's loyalty to her husband; and the Ramayana is the romance of Rama and Sita, husband and wife. Examples could be multiplied. So the view that there is something special and basic about the group consisting of a man and a woman with their children, about fidelity and loyalty and trust within that group, and about the social conventions and standards that support those things doesn't seem to be an invention of the American '50s or the English Victorian Age.
Too complicated to treat exhaustively. In general, though, getting rid of traditional sexual morality greatly weakens family life, and tends to make the market and the bureaucratic state the only serious principles of social order. People who believe in the rationality and comprehensive competence of the market or state (i.e., libertarians and socialists) often favor sexual freedom, because it undermines competing institutions like family and kinship. So do people (experts, academics, lawyers, judges, functionaries, media and advertising people) whose position is enhanced by making everything a matter of money, politics and formal rulemaking carried on by professionals.
A basic political question regarding the abolition of traditional sexual morality, therefore, is whether a tolerable society is possible in which market and state are the only authoritative institutions. One problem with such a state of affairs is that radical weakening of family connections has bad cultural consequences that spill over into all aspects of social life. A more specific problem is that experience shows that reliance on the state to deal comprehensively with welfare needs becomes insupportably expensive. Nor are commercial relationships adequate to such needs. Small children aren't able to take care of themselves by participating in the market, and commercial insurance can't cover all personal misfortunes because doing so would be the equivalent of establishing a comprehensive welfare system with all the inefficiencies and moral risks that would entail.
In order to live a tolerable life people need to be able to rely on each other as well as on money and the state, and in a modern nontribal society that requires strong families as a practical matter. Intelligent libertarians and socialists should realize that their favored institutions -- markets and state bureaucracies -- are not the answer to all problems, and that they will not be able to realize the good things they hope from them unless room is made for family life and social standards that support it and make it authoritative. An intelligent libertarians and socialists would therefore be a sexual right-wingers.
The individual is a member of society, so the conflict can be overstated. Man is a social animal, and his connections to others are part of what makes him what he is. It follows that his duties to society are not external impositions but are basic to his humanity and personal integrity. Acceptance of traditional sexual morality is loyalty to a way of life that makes possible trust and loyalty between the sexes and generations and so a life worthy of a human being. In a world that dissolves human connections to the extent our present one does, it is hard to see how such a life is possible without something very like traditional sexual morality. Rejecting that morality is therefore a rejection of humanity.
Rejecting traditional sexual morality puts one at odds with humanity in other ways as well. Sex is fundamental to the human personality and physical constitution. It has a natural function just as hunger and the digestive system do. That function has to do with reproduction, the rearing of children, and enduring ties between men and women. Despite modern fantasies, human life can not be reconfigured at pleasure. The fully human life--that which is best for man--must respect natural human functioning in fundamental matters that affect the whole of life. A good life therefore uses sex in ways connected with its natural ends. To do otherwise attacks the order of human life and turns it into a chaos of conflicting and misdirected impulse and feeling.
To move from the natural to the spiritual, sexual experience suggests something timeless and absolute. It dissolves personal boundaries and makes people defenseless against each other. It's far too expressive to be understood as a free exchange of pleasures at arm's length. To engage in it without seeing it as part of a union extending far beyond the act itself and the particular desires and intentions of the parties is to fail to mean by it what it cannot help but mean. It is to turn something that touches our inmost being into a lie, to pretend to give ourselves while doing nothing of the kind, to betray the other person and dishonor oneself. Such an act cannot be part of a life worth choosing. Slang expressions for sexual acts are routinely used to mean "make useless," "abuse and disorder grossly," and the like. Such expressions warn us of dangers inherent in sex.
One of the things that makes human life human is that it is a system of meanings and symbols. Since sex is basic to human life it is basic to that system. In every culture gods are male or female, and even impersonal understandings of reality include masculine and feminine elements such as the Yang and Yin of the Far East. Even grammatical gender is a sign of the pervasiveness of sex in our understanding of things. To treat sex as lacking intrinsic meaning, as a purely technical and individualistic matter that can rightfully be used simply as one pleases, is to disrupt and flatten the shared understandings of man and the world that are necessary for a truly human life. It is an expression of nihilism: if something that affects us as deeply as sex has no intrinsic meaning, what does?
As in the case of any moral clash, we can try to persuade each other. Differing attitudes toward sex have to do with differing understandings of the world and human nature. Those can and do change, and changes can have an enormous influence on conduct. Modern attitudes toward sex are based on a combination of atomic individualism and technocratic faith that has long ceased to be plausible, and as public understandings evolve they are likely to seem less attractive. So there is some prospect for successful discussion.
If persuasion doesn't work then accommodation may be possible, although to the extent the clash relates to things that are fundamental to social life separation may become necessary. Public standards sometimes accommodate difficulties of compliance by maintaining the standards when violations become an issue but not prying too vigorously into what's out of sight. To the extent people think social separation called for (some people might not want to live with the medical consequences of promiscuity or the social consequences of high illegitimacy and divorce rates, while others might not want to live with what they see as puritanical morality), it could be realized within a loose federal system that permits states and localities to act in accordance with their own moral standards and eliminates cross-community transfer payments, such as public education, social security and welfare, that have the effect of forcing one lifestyle to subsidize another.
A final possibility is overriding your views or mine by force. Current examples of the use of force include public school curricula that oppose traditional moral views (the compulsion lies in compulsory tax support and compulsory attendance laws) and laws against discrimination on the basis of marital status and sexual orientation.
We shall see. What people find natural depends on the social institutions among which they grow up and that surround them, and social institutions are very flexible over time and tend to evolve to provide what's needed. If sexual freedom causes serious enough problems in individual and social life it won't last. If it means that people and societies don't reproduce it will certainly disappear. How the necessary restraints will be inculcated and reinforced under circumstances of open and instantaneous worldwide communication is of course an interesting question. Presumably the great flexibility of modern social networks will be adequate to the task if it has to be done. People are very inventive in configuring their dealings with each other to do what is needed.
Some initial steps are obvious, such as doing away with the social standards that have grown up in favor of unrestricted sexual liberty (e.g., certain antidiscrimination rules and the prejudice against criticizing people in such matters). Possibly the ease under modern circumstances of voluntary self-segregation by lifestyle and the difficulty in fluid modern economies of maintaining state responsibility for individual welfare will also play a role. If people can no longer depend on the state for education and support in misfortune and old age then family ties and the sexual ideals and standards that support them will tend to grow in importance. We live in very interesting times, unfortunately.
No conservatism worth having can accept the '60s revolution regarding sex and sex roles. The revolution wasn't just another set of modifications to practices and secondary principles that are always changing anyway. Like the Bolshevik Revolution, it was a genuine modernist revolution that has created an unprecedented situation at odds with any normal way for people to understand themselves and live together.
Feminism permits distinctions of sex to have no net effect on any human connection that matters, and the sexual revolution complements feminism by making consensual sexual relations a purely private affair that does not legitimately concern anyone but the persons immediately involved. The two movements thus deprive sex of any social function, and so divorce social order from connections and distinctions that are absolutely basic to personal identity, the continuation of the human race, and the integration of the individual into society. Apart from a few speculations like Plato's Republic nothing of the kind has ever been thought of before, and there is no reason to think the innovation will work let alone benefit anything.
Specific problems are obvious:
In short, the '60s revolution, by privatizing sex, destroys the status and stability of family life and so deprives the non-rationalized aspects of human life of any setting in modern society in which they can establish and articulate themselves authoritatively. The aspects of life in which humane values reside therefore become indistinguishable from private fantasies or consumer goods. The result is the modernist nightmare that conservatism exists to oppose, the fully rationalized social world. In that world there are thriving markets in sex, religion, culture and personal identity, every possible consumer choice is there, but for that very reason none of those things can touch us deeply. Any other result would violate the principles of tolerance and inclusiveness on which our feminist and liberationist custodians so strongly insist. The result is that we become sexless, Godless, cultureless ciphers, an undifferentiated mass of human material to be instructed and guided by therapists, organized by personnel departments, and manipulated by advertisers and propagandists. How can anybody cooperate with any of that and be taken seriously as a conservative?
It seems that sexual morality has two aspects:
Neither aspect makes sense given an understanding of human action that reduces rationality to satisfaction of desire and formal standards like maximum equal freedom. Hence current confusions.
The understanding of morality and public order that's authoritative today holds that sex can't have any meaning that's publicly recognized. Freedom and equality demands that each of us construct its meaning for himself. Anything else would be institutionalized oppression that touches on the most intimate aspects of what we are. Such views are integral to modern ways and ideals. Since that's so, the only possible goal of sex education is to show possibilities, develop the ability to choose, and fight the notion that some choices are somehow worse than other choices.
Such ideas, like all others, have consequences. Here are a couple:
The problem, it seems, isn't corruption in a basically good system but the very practices that create and ideals that inform our system of public life. People think common sense will act as a limitation on the principles publicly professed. How can that happen, though, when opposition to common sense -- to "deeply rooted social prejudices and stereotypes" -- is proclaimed and enforced as the loftiest of all principles? Much more today than in the 60s, to live a good or even tolerable life is to be a dropout.
The modern view of sex and "gender" is decisively anti-Christian. That's not simply because the modern view is opposed to tradition, Christian tradition like all other tradition, but because it reflects a habit of thought that trivializes Creation and makes the Incarnation senseless.
The problem is that modern sexual views deny intrinsic meaning to the physical world. In particular, they deny intrinsic meaning to the part of the physical world closest to us, our bodies, and especially to the aspect of our bodily life that, as they say, "makes the world go round." Sex and the difference between the sexes, it is said, have only the significance and function one chooses individually to give to them. But if that's true of something as basic, as pervasive, and as symbolic as sex, what is it not true of?
If the world is only what the individual makes of it, it's not clear why it matters that God said it was "very good." On the modern view, God can speak for himself. Something as basic as the meaning and goodness of the physical universe has consequences everywhere. In particular, for the Incarnation to make any sense at all it must be possible for what a man says and does to express divinity sufficiently to permit recognition. The claim God was incarnate in a pebble, for example, wouldn't make sense. But if what can be seen and heard of a man--his physical actions--have only that significance each of us gives them, how can they express anything but what we ourselves invent? As a vehicle of revelation they become useless.
Here then is the problem: if sex has no intrinsic meaning, then neither does anything in the world. But if that's so, then it becomes impossible for God to communicate with us through things in the world. All meaning becomes something we create for ourselves. Which is one reason the teaching on sex (and for that matter on women priests) is not something that can be made optional within Catholicism.
It's become routine to say that current Anglican disputes are really about scriptural authority or unity of doctrine within the Anglican communion rather than sex. To my mind that doesn't wash. At bottom the basic issue is always truth, in this case the truth about sex. If the right answer is that its human meaning has no intrinsic connection to natural function, so that it becomes what we make of it, then that will also be the correct interpretation of scripture and ultimately the only acceptable basis for unity of doctrine.
It seems rather that the issue is what might be called Christian physics--the nature of the physical world--and in particular Christian anthropology--the nature of man as embodied. It is basic Christian doctrine that the physical world expresses higher things. God made the world and called it good, and the heavens therefore proclaim his glory. Even more pointedly, the Incarnation demonstrates that the human body can fully express the divine. People could see and hear Christ and recognize him as God.
Sex is basic to human life and extraordinarily expressive. To dissociate its significance from its physical and vital function is to open a gap between grace and the natural world that seems unbridgeable. If the extraordinarily expressive sexual aspects of the human body express nothing very definite, even in relation to sex, so that what you do with them is entirely up to you, then how can the human body possibly be expressive enough for the Incarnation to be real and recognizable? It may be possible to believe such a thing, but to my mind it doesn't sit very well.
They finally did it: New York legislature passes "gay rights" bill. The Republicans had been keeping the bill bottled up in committee, but brought it to the floor as a political pay-off to a homosexual organization that had endorsed the Republican governor for re-election. It passed the Assembly and Senate by solid-to-overwhelming margins.
There are a thousand explanations why this sort of thing happens. One difficulty in opposing the advance of "gay rights" is that many opponents have had difficulty articulating the reasons for their opposition. I've made some suggestions on that point here at
Turnabout. A point I don't think I've covered is the relationship between Christianity and homosexuality, an issue that is almost never articulated well.
The Christian attitude toward homosexuality isn't a matter of Bible passages that happen to be there for some unknown reason. It's integral to the faith. The Incarnation -- God made flesh -- requires that flesh be able to express deity in a way recognizable to us. For that to be possible the human body must have meaning and purpose that we recognize rather than create. Otherwise flesh could express only our own arbitrary interpretations. The "progressive" view of sexuality, that it's a free human construction, is at odds with the kind of meaningful physical world that is necessary for the Incarnation to make sense. Sexuality is central to the expressiveness of the human body, and if it had no meaning or purpose apart from our choice it's hard to see how the human body could. The modern view of material existence as raw material to be used for whatever purposes we happen to have makes it impossible for material reality to express anything outside our own intentions. As a manifestation of that view, "gay liberation" is at odds with the doctrine of the Incarnation.
A sexual leftist who calls himself a cultural conservative asked someone on an email list
Why don't we ponder what you consider "perfection" when it comes to sex? What are these "standards" to which you aspire? A sublime feeling of oneness with your beloved? A knockout orgasm? Or does "perfection" lie in knowing what you're NOT doing?
My response:
An excellent question. Because it's such a good question the answer depends on very basic features of human life. If one's view is that the moral reality of human life is generated out of individual sensations and longings then the first two answers might seem appealing. Unfortunately, those answers don't really satisfy anyone. That's why romantic love is so closely associated with death, and why in practice it doesn't lead to the eternal faithfulness one would expect from "sublime oneness."
The reason the first two answers can't be satisfying is that human experience is not self-sufficient. It requires something beyond it to give it sense and unity. The "knockout orgasm" and the sublime unity one hopes to find in the arms of the beloved are attempts to get beyond experience while staying within the limits of experience. They can't work. Intense experience is still just experience, and when it passes the illusion of "something more" that it generates passes too.
So what to do? Since the road of excess leads to disillusionment rather than directly to the palace of wisdom, one possibility is the road of limitation. So a good beginning is Mr. [X]'s third possibility, avoiding the things that the voice of cultural tradition says you should avoid. As the tone of his question suggests, though, in the long run that's not enough either.
What's needed is a grasp of what motivates the prohibitions. One motivation is that sex points to something permanent and fundamental to human life that is beyond immediate experience. The incompleteness of the sexual experience by itself and the sort of thing required to fulfill it are already understood in the longing for a "sublime feeling of oneness" of which Mr. X speaks. Man is body and soul, practical and spiritual, individual and social, time-bound and capable of participating in enduring things. So what's needed to do justice to sex is an arrangement that makes it integral to the joining of two persons in a permanent union that is practical as well as spiritual and provides the physical and spiritual link between those two persons and the extension of the human race in space and time.
In short, sex best achieves its internal goals within a permanent marriage of a man and woman ordered toward procreation and the rearing of children. Perfection in sex is then the complex of habits and attitudes that best contributes to that order of things. Which, fortunately, is the answer cultural conservatism gives us. Because if cultural conservatism were radically wrong on something as basic to human life as sex, why bother with it?
Mr. X also asked:
Has anyone on this listserv had to cope with a gay child or other close relative? How have you dealt with it…or would you deal with it? Disownment? Banishment from the bourgeois hearth? Or just a lot of name-calling?
I responded in part:
The alternatives Mr. [X] offers suggest a thoroughly manipulative attitude toward life and human relations … The suggestion that those are the possibilities available to someone with a traditional attitude toward homosexuality reflects the view that sex is just a matter of taste. If it's just a matter of taste then if what Junior does is not to Mom and Dad's taste their choices are to accept it or try to get him to stop through means that reflect no concern for his well-being or human dignity and are thus manipulative.
In addition, if something as central to human life as sex is just a matter of taste then there can be very little in human life that isn't just a matter of taste. If that's so then all our dealings with others become pervaded with manipulation because we are constantly trying to influence people in some way.
How things work: the well-known group that calls itself Human Rights Watch doesn't like conservative sexual attitudes. One result of those attitudes in the Philippines is a low HIV rate (in a nation of 80,000,000 people, a total of 2,000 known and an additional 4,000 estimated infections). Another is that the Filipino government accommodates cultural and Catholic sensibilities by abstaining from a wholly technological and therefore libertine attitude toward sex, and focuses its prevention efforts on high-risk groups like prostitutes and homosexuals.
So what does HRW do? It issues a report accusing the Filipino government of "pandering" to the Catholic Church. The report complains that failure to promote condoms is a human rights violation, because it's unhealthy, and health is a human right. There's not much AIDS in the Philippines now, but maybe there will be more in the future unless everyone has condoms.
The complaint is an odd one. On similar grounds any policy with which one disagrees would be a human rights violation, since any policy that doesn't promote the common good violates the human right to a government that works for the common good. Be that as it may, it's extremely obscure why viewing sex as basically a matter of technology would make it better, from a health or any other point of view. Aren't things really more complicated than that? Nonetheless, it's an attitude toward which our governing elites are uniformly committed. Perhaps by chance, it's also one that helps well-placed people get their own way, in sexual as in other matters, and indeed strengthens their position generally by disordering the family, local cultural standards, and other informal and traditional authorities that simply by existing compete with formal institutions and limit their power..
Meanwhile, on other fronts having to do with sex, the San Francisco Chronicle is in a snit because the founder of Curves (the chain of ordinary-user-friendly women's exercise clubs) has been giving money to pregnancy crisis centers that a somewhat radical pro-life group says it likes, the chief of Selective Service wants to draft women, and my college alumni mag concluded its most recent issue with a heartwarming human-interest interview with an alumnus who's in the pornographic video biz out in LA.
After public complaints, the German government has finally pulled a sex-ed booklet that promoted conduct that came close to incestuous pedophilia. Since this is a G-rated weblog, you'll have to click on the links to get the details, which were startling enough to make me go and find the booklet itself. Not surprisingly, the German text (pp. 26-27) is more diffuse than the English translation, but I don't think the translation is inaccurate.
In general, the booklet struck me as more an example of modern (and maybe Teutonic) literal-mindedness and addiction to rule-following than perversion. Someone said that the problem with the modern world is that stupidity has learned to think. That seems to be so. The idea is that nothing anyone has ever felt or thought about human life has any value, that everything has to be reconstructed from the beginning based on Modern Scientific Knowledge, and that Modern Scientific Knowledge makes human relations so simple it's not clear why knowledge is needed at all. All you have to remember is that that pain is bad, pleasure is good, and natural human impulses and qualities should be approved, especially in children, except when they immediately and obviously interfere with others or make the person himself unhappy. Follow those simple principles literally and you get the booklet among many other modern blessings.
Get government out of the bedroom! So went the rallying cry of the movement to abolish public standards of sexual morality. It didn't work out as planned. Like other traditional standards, customary sexual morality made it possible for people to live together and cooperate in stable productive ways without the intervention of public authority. If you do away with customary standards government is what's left. So "getting out of the bedroom" has turned out to mean sex education for grade schoolers, AIDS prevention clinics in junior high school, and sexual harassment rules for everyone.
Not to mention legislation regarding the ever-expanding crime of rape. If you abolish standards that civilize sex and keep it in a human setting then -- surprise! -- force and fraud creep in, and irate or insecure women demand action. The House of Lords, for example, is considering a "date rape" bill that (says a hard-news story in a major paper) is intended to "tackle a macho 'No does not always mean no' culture" that features 'attackers evading justice' and women who are treated as "'fair game'."
It sounds like an issue people aren't likely to deal with sensibly. And in fact the Lords are bogged down with the bill, with no solution in sight. The basic problem is that once force and fraud have become the only standards governing sexual behavior there's no good way to deal with the issues. Did the woman object? Did she consent? Was she capable of consent? Does the man have to go through a procedure to resolve doubts? Were there circumstances that should create a presumption either way? If so, how much do you go into the details in court? Whose reasonableness applies -- A reasonable woman's? A reasonable man's? The particular man, who might be from Borneo where they do it differently? And finally, how do you prove any of this, or even get the jury to understand the standards?
The "sexual revolution" was a collective decision that arm's-length standards should govern the most intimate and emotion-laden human connection. It was an amazingly stupid decision, and now the lawyers are trying to pick up the pieces. Not surprisingly, they are failing.
Get the State out of intimate personal relations -- so goes the slogan. The real point of social liberalism, however, is to abolish intimate personal relations, or at least denature them and make them incapable of interfering with anything serious. Hence the sex ed that trains children to think of sex as a consumer good, the redefinition of "family" as any constellation of human beings temporarily calling themselves such, and the constitutionally favored position granted by the Supreme Court, under the supposedly conservative leadership of the Chief Justice, to legislation designed to remove "the pervasive sex-role stereotype that caring for family members is women's work."
Out of respect for federalism, the Court has recently held state governments immune from various employment regulations. That principle goes by the board, though, when Congress uses its 14th Amendment power to enforce that amendment's guarantees of equal protection and due process -- which, according to our "right-wing" court, includes destruction of all cultural understandings of masculine and feminine responsibilities, no matter how deep-rooted, long-standing, or even universal. Among a free and self-governing people, the fact that something is a "pervasive stereotype" would be a reason for the government to respect it. In America today it is an overriding reason to suppress it. With conservatives like Chief Justice Rehnquist, who needs Leftists?
Andrea Dworkin helps clarify some issues. The Glasgow council has become the first local authority in the UK to state it would object to all licensing applications for lap-dancing clubs on the grounds that they demean and exploit women. Miss Dworkin responded with an opinion piece, which was published in a Glasgow paper. Since she's intelligent and a clear and vigorous writer the piece is worth looking at for the light it sheds on feminism and contemporary liberalism generally. (You don't have to read the whole thing.)
It appears that Miss Dworkin has noticed that men and women are sexually different in ways that put them in different positions, and that women's position involves a certain vulnerability. That is to her credit: in a literate, talkative and ideological age it takes superior powers to notice the obvious. Her problem is that she's a philosophical liberal who can only conceive of men and women as asocial agents pursuing whatever impulses and desires they happen to have. She can't understand them as constituted by complementary sexualities and existing within a common moral world, and so can't conceive of a sexual morality that regulates their interaction in accordance with their nature and the relevant goods.
She therefore writes about what Sade wrote about: the nature of sex in an asocial world defined by the total liberation of impulse, in particular the impulses of pleasure and power. He chooses the side of the torturers and she that of the victims, but their vision is the same. As such, it has more reality than the vision of the liberal idealist who treats human beings as fundamentally nonsexual. Nonetheless, Dworkin's writings (like Sade's) have a sort of science fiction quality. Although a self-consistent development of certain aspects of reality, they bear very little resemblance to actual life on this planet. The fact they can be taken seriously as a contribution of public discussion is a sign of the radical disconnection between current political thought and human reality.
Privacy, tolerance, and the "wall of separation" were supposed to keep the government out of our private affairs, and especially out of our churches and bedrooms. Things haven't worked out quite so smoothly, or at least that's most likely the view of the Christian mother who is appealing a judge's decision that prohibits her from teaching her daughter that homosexuality is wrong.
A woman living in a lesbian relationship adopted an infant daughter. Several years later she converted to Christianity, decided the relationship was wrong, and left it. Her former lover -- who had no legal relationship with the woman or her adopted daughter -- sued for joint custody and got it, with the added requirement that the mother had to "make sure that there is nothing in the religious upbringing or teaching that the minor child is exposed to that can be considered homophobic."
One could drawn a variety of conclusions from these events. It's clear, though, that they dramatize the absurdity of the claim that government should take no position on "difficult" social issues like religion and sexuality. Those things are fundamental to how people live. Modern government takes comprehensive responsibility for how people live. So how can government be neutral?
Even if the answer is for government to scale back its involvement in individual welfare, that will be possible only if there are non-governmental institutions (like the family, churches, and ordinary standards of moral responsibility) that make it possible for people to cooperate and rely on each other in solving their own problems. And government will have to have some sort of policy toward those institutions and the standards by which they exist. Without some view of such things cases like this one can't be dealt with at all. The pretense of neutrality is simply taking sides by indirection.
Libertarians find themselves in a moral quandary: should they vote for the pro-market party or the pro-sodomy party? Duncan Frissell points out the obvious, that if interference in sexual matters and private life is the test of libertarian rectitude, then Democrats lose on that score too -- witness comprehensive sex ed, initiatives to abolish the patriarchy and replace the family, and various regulatory schemes that take effect within the home or otherwise interfere with private acts among consenting adults. Put them all together and they constitute a much more extensive regime of interference than anything Republicans associate themselves with, or indeed anything anyone dreamed of until very recent times. If abolishing sex roles and doing away with moral judgments about sexual activity isn't interference with private life, what is?
All our deep thinkers are convinced that the sexually indiscriminate society is the free society: as long as we treat everything having to do with sex as a matter of private taste -- with all tastes treated equally -- we'll be able to stand on our own feet, run our own lives, and resist the overreaching of the powerful. Or so they say.
What possible reason is there to believe them though? If liberty and private life are the issues, I would think the first concern would be the strength and stability of small-scale institutions like the family that enable private life to go forward independently of the state. As a practical matter, I would think that concern would show itself as government acceptance and support for the attitudes and habits that have grown up to support, order and guard such institutions -- traditional sex roles and sexual morality, for example.
This story is absolutely routine, so the Irish Examiner doesn't bother with any discussion: EU tells Ireland to reform childcare and gender equality. The basic point is that in accordance with EU standards and initiatives the Irish government is to provide almost half a billion Irish pounds for childcare and place a renewed emphasis on "gender equality measures."
Ho-hum. Nonetheless, on occasion it's worthwhile pointing out the obvious:
The accepted view is that if you have a serious basic problem with any of this you're really weird. Personally though I don't think it's going to work. We shall see.
People argue about whether Lawrence v. Texas will lead to "gay marriage." How much does it matter if the existing legal treatment of marriage is accepted?
Traditionally, marriage drew its importance as a civil institution from the circumstance that it was the setting for legitimate sexual relations. Marriage therefore had to do with children -- sex naturally leads to them -- and was essentially permanent, since children need a stable environment in which to grow up. Another attribute of marriage was the obligation of support between spouses, a result of the permanence of marriage and the sexual division of labor within it.
None of those things apply any more. The Supreme Court says that sexual relations among unmarried people that have nothing to do with having children are fully legitimate and must be respected. The Court also says that it's a choice for sex to lead to children, and the choice has no fundamental connection to marriage (the Court has essentially abolished illegitimacy as a permissible legal category). In the meantime, the states have made marriage terminable at the will of a single party and established "palimony" for unmarried partners. And the sexual division of labor is now against public policy.
As a legal matter, then, marriage now has no special connection with sex, children, permanence, sex roles or mutual support. What we're left with is the name, which may not matter much, together with entitlement to various social, employment and insurance benefits that are steadily being extended to homosexual and unmarried couples as well -- at times with the approval of those who speak for the Church.
As they say, it's later than you think. It should be clear to all that the defense of marriage makes no sense apart from a much broader counterrattack having to do with sex in general, and beyond that to comprehensive questions of social organization. Thirty-five years after, it has become clear that Paul VI was right to recognize artificial contraception as something worth staking everything on. If sex is definitively separated from reproduction, the family falls because it no longer has an essential connection to any particular function, and if the family falls a humane civilization becomes impossible. The rock that all eminent thinkers stumbled over, Humanae Vitae, has turned out to be the keystone of the edifice. I would never have expected it.
I'm back from a couple of weeks away, and mostly recovered from a mild but annoying virus, so I'll be posting once again. To get things started, here are some comments I posted on Dawn Eden's weblog on why I think there's a problem with contraception.
As I see it now (my view hasn't always been the same), contraception changes the nature of sex quite fundamentally by turning it into a free-floating means of pleasure and expression rather than something with definite functions and implications that can be relied on because they are obviously basic to human life and so trump subjective feelings. If sex is free-floating, so each of us must define its meaning for himself, then it's hard to see how it can ground an enduring connection you can build on. People feel it must matter, but what it means remains unclear and in any event is always subject to reinterpretation and change. Nonetheless, sex continues to play a fundamental role in human relations and psychology, and it creates dependences and vulnerabilities that no longer have any definite status. It seems that such a state of affairs will mean -- has meant -- a bunch of bad things that range from distrust and instability to manipulation and abuse. Why is that a step forward?
The state of California recently held back millions of dollars from a local school district because three board members voted against the state's demand they adopt a policy designed to protect public display of sexual disorder in the district's elementary and middle schools.
The logic that's usually applied to such situations today goes as follows:
Somehow I think the line of thought leaves out some complications involving the role of sex in human life. Judging by a quick Google search I'm in the minority though -- even on the Internet, which is supposed to be the domain of crazed right-wingers. Read some of the commentary. Isn't it nice to see so many people who are opposed to mindlessness and hatred?
From the standpoint of the liberal public philosophy now generally accepted, the question of homosexuality has an obvious answer -- treat it on a par with any configuration of sexual habit and impulse, as something people say they find rewarding and in any case are very reluctant to give up.
The opinion to the contrary that has been all-but-universal elsewhere and in the past suggests rather strongly that in this connection, as in others, the accepted liberal philosophy is missing something important. In fact, those who favor "gay rights" know little and understand less of the arguments against their position. Recent judicial decisions that extend "gay rights" on the grounds that there is no legitimate reason not to do so demonstrate as much.
The following questions and answers, supplemented and explained by the other pages in this section, are put forward in hopes of making it more readily apparent what is at stake in the dispute over "gay rights."
Why assume I hate anyone? Is that the way you look at things?
Sure. People use the term "anti-gay" to refer to the view that there's something amiss with sexual relations between two men or two women. That's the view taken by the FAQ.
Nothing. I think that fathers, sons and brothers should love each other. So should friends. It's even good when teachers and students love each other. Ditto for other leaders, followers, comrades and fellow citizens.
Like a small boy who adores his hero through a romantic haze? I think romantic adoration from a distance is mostly a good thing in the young. It's rather Platonic and promotes lofty ideals. As the boy grows older or comes into contact with his hero he should of course come to a more sober -- I hope not cynical -- view.
Married love is more realistic than romantic. Marriage is an institution and enterprise, so function is primary and feelings consequent. Romantic trimmings are helpful, but there's no hazy distance and not a lot of idealization.
The same reason Civil War re-enactors aren't the same as Civil War veterans. The basic features of the situation are different. The physical union of man and woman creates new life by natural function. That means it characteristically ties the the parties to responsibilities that go beyond their intentions, interests and even lives. The same is not true of an attempted physical union between two men. Since the two situations don't work the same way, they can't be viewed the same way, and it's not at all likely they'll be felt the same way. People respond to realities.
Sure. And some Civil War veterans deserted, held staff positions or otherwise avoided combat, some re-enactors get injured or killed in fights, accidents or defense of others, and some orphanages try to take on all the functions of a family. That doesn't make it irrational to distinguish among such things. Human beings deal with things in accordance with what they think they are, and settled expectations as to armies, families, orphanages and groups of re-enactors depend on characteristic features and modes of functioning. That's part of what it means to say that armies, families, orphanages and re-enactor clubs are social institutions. If you try to change one into the other just by trying to think about it differently you're not going to succeed.
The traditional family isn't a self-contained artifact that becomes whatever the authorities intend it to become. It's able to carry on its functions because it's part of settled social understandings of what men are, what women are, and what sex is. If you give honor and support to arrangements radically at odds with that understanding you destroy the family as a routinely reliable institution. Feminism and other modern tendencies do just that, and the "gay rights" movement brings the tendency to perfection by making it impossible to conceive of the family as a definite institution with a necessary natural function. A social system that accepts such developments isn't going to last, since reliable human connections, the rearing of children, and transmission of culture depend on stable and reliable family ties. Those who see the issues and care about human well-being therefore reject them.
That, of course, is only a sketch of the position, and I know perfectly well what the objections are going to be. Those interested can find a fuller development and answers to objections in the appended pages. They can also consult the resources on homosexuality in the Sexual Morality FAQ.
Since homosexuality is a topic these days I thought I'd sketch some objections to it:
A couple of counterobjections and responses:
The back-and-forth can of course be continued indefinitely--I cover some of the possibilities in the FAQ.
The single most important question in the current debate over homosexuality is whether it's good for those sexually attracted to persons of the same sex to follow through on their inclinations. If it is, then it's a violation of their rights to stand in their way or act as if there's something wrong with what they do. If it isn't, it still might be advisable to leave them free to do what they want or protect them in various ways, but it puts the discussion on a very different footing.
One response to the question is that it shouldn't even be asked, because consensual sexual activity is solely the business of those immediately involved. That response makes no sense. If it were right then the concept of marital faithfulness and therefore of marriage would make no sense. Paternity suits, child support orders, crimes of passion, sex education and AIDS prevention programs would have no reason to exist. Love makes the world go 'round, and sex gives rise to the most fundamental human connections. For that reason the world at large has a rightful interest in the sexual conduct of individuals. Also, to think about our own situation we need the help of general principles that have implications for others. We can judge our own conduct to be good or bad, wise or foolish, only with the aid of principles that apply equally to others. That's what it is to be a social being.
So the question is unavoidable and should be asked. But how can it be answered? One simple answer is that homosexual activity is good, because it's good for people to do what they want unless it injures other people, and it's not immediately obvious how consensual homosexual acts injure those not directly involved. The obvious rejoinder is that sex is more complicated than a ham sandwich. It is intrinsically and intensely expressive. It communicates, places values, impels, and establishes and defines relationships. Since the human world is ordered (or disordered) by expressive acts that establish and define relationships, such acts affect others in ways that go far beyond their immediate direct effects. On this line of thought, the question as to the goodness of homosexual acts becomes the question of the goodness of what they express and establish -- to their meaning as human acts.
Sexual acts might mean a variety of things, but they can't be made to mean anything and everything. Their somewhat unbridled and unbalanced quality seems to require a definite setting that connects them firmly to something much larger that gives them a meaning adequate to our experience of them. Their possible meanings might include:
From the foregoing, it seems that sex can have stable positive meaning that coheres with the rest of life only in the form of acts that constitute and express marital union. In other settings it can not successfully express a love that transcends pleasure and personal interest, because it is too intense for its meaning to be imposed from outside. Sex aspires to transcendence, and one cannot bootstrap into the transcendent through arbitrary interpretation. Meanings cannot be forced, so if a setting leaves the interpretation of sex up to the participant high-flown claims take on an element of willful fantasy or meretriciousness. Sexual relations that depend for their justification on such interpretations become crippled, perverse or abusive. Hence the tendency, not just in the gay world but in modern sexual life generally, toward instability, role-playing, manipulation, betrayal, disillusion, and general abusiveness. Participation in activities that point toward such things may be a temptation, but not a good.
Back to homosexuality! Another possible dialogue:
Alter: So what's your problem with gays?
Ego: "Gay" covers a variety of situations.
I have something of a problem with someone habitually engaging in homosexual acts. I have more of a problem if he claims that engaging in homosexual acts is basic to what he is. And if he expects public acceptance of what he does I have a big problem.
Alter: But why should you care at all what someone does sexually?
Ego: We're social, so we care what other people are like. Sex is basic to our emotional life and our relationships to others. Someone's relation to sex affects his whole network of connections to people. Why shouldn't it affect how I feel about him? Suppose it were racism or pedophilia instead of homosexuality. Would you feel a little queasy if someone were a racist pedophile? If he thought that was central to what he is? If he proclaimed it openly and demanded that others accept it?
Alter: You can't be serious. Racism and pedophilia are sick, and they hurt people. Homosexuality is just an orientation, no sicker than any other, and it hurts no-one.
Ego: There are people who say the same about racism and pedophilia. They're just orientations, after all. Racism by itself doesn't affect anyone other than the racist. Someone might use the N word or be obsessed with Nazi memorabilia and never hurt anybody. There are reputable scholars who claim pedophilia can be good for you. And there was a recent play, The Vagina Monologues, that showed the statutory rape of a 13 year old girl as a good thing. Enlightened opinion thought it was great.
Alter: But racism and pedophilia typically hurt people and homosexuality doesn't.
Ego: Not so. Homosexuality is a radical rejection of the whole system of habit and feeling that defines what men and women are and what their relations should be. That system is necessary for life in society to be tolerable. It follows that to reject it is wrong, and we should respond to it as we respond to something wrong. Read my questions and answers on sexual morality if you want a more extended argument.
Alter: I think you're sick.
Ego: Fine, you feel about homophobia the way I feel about homosexuality. Who has the right attitude depends on who has a better grip on human life. Most people and most serious thinkers have agreed with me. If you respect other people you'll consider our arguments seriously. That's all I ask.
Stanley Kurtz has a generally sensible discussion at NRO of the practical function of sexual taboos, that by defining what is fitting within sexual relations they make it possible to rely on such relations to be something definite and so make family life possible as a social institution. He then says:
I would rather accept some disruption in family stability than go back to the days when homosexuality itself was deeply tabooed. The increase in freedom and fairness is worth it.
On its face, the comment makes no sense. After all, if homosexuality isn't destructive, there's no objection to it, and if it is, social acceptance would be unfair to those forced to live with the resulting destruction. Nor does the language express a balancing of the interest in doing what one wants with the general interest in family stability. Rather, it seems to express an opposition between rational standards of fairness on the one hand and socially necessary taboos on the other.
What Kurtz's comment and discussion as a whole seem to express, in fact, is what might be called the conservative liberal position. They also provide a good demonstration of the uselessness of that position. In effect, the conservative liberal position accepts the liberal view that values are essentially man-made, and what's rational is satisfying human goals "fairly" -- that is, giving everyone's goals equal weight. That is why accepting homosexuality is thought to advance freedom and fairness, and to that extent to be a good thing. The view then notes, however, that society can't be fully rationalized on such a basis, so some standards understood as transcending human goals ("taboos") are going to have to be accepted so that liberal goals of freedom, fairness and well-being can, within the limits of what's possible, actually be achieved. Such taboos might include, for example, conventions that burden homosexual relations in secondary ways, for example by denying "gay marriage."
The problem, of course, is how it can be decided what violations of utilitarian liberal equality are going to be allowed in the society's morality, and once the decision is made how the allowable taboos can be put forward with a straight face as binding transcendent standards. After all, everyone with a brain will know that to the extent the standards or taboos deviate from equality they are allowed to continue only for the sake of liberal utilitarian goals, and that in fact they aren't "transcendent" at all but rather concessions to human irrationality that should be restricted as much as possible for the sake of "freedom and fairness." If that's so, though, how much force will they have and why should anyone burdened by them accept them?
A rather interesting comparison of priestly pederasts and treasonous Englishmen: James Hitchcock on Subversion through the Old Boy Network. One point he touches on, referring to C. S. Forster, is the tendency of homosexuality to dissolve social loyalties into personal relations. It's a persuasive point--the homosexual's most intense connections to others do not point beyond themselves in any way, and that must have consequences. Hitchcock also says that homosexuality is subversive because homosexuals are despised. It seems to me though that there is in it an intrinsic element of conscious make-believe and mockery of the natural that make it necessarily subversive.
One issue raised by the current sleaze involving New Jersey Governor McGreevey is the issue of homosexuals hiring homosexuals. I have some slight personal experience of the thing, since an Episcopal diocese to which I used to be connected is run by a gay mafia that looks out for its own. Others have noticed it as well, if the Google entries for "gay mafia", "homosexual mafia", "velvet mafia", "homintern" and whatnot are any indication. Many people, for example, find it very hard to understand the response of Catholic authorities to predatory clerical pederasts apart from the influence of homosexual cliques and networks.
Not many people other than the ever-venturesome John Derbyshire have written about the issue, partly because evidence is anecdotal and uncertain, and partly because people these days don't like conspiracy theories about particular groups. Still, what are blogs for if not thinking aloud? So here are some thoughts:
All of which shows once again that the superior rationality and virtue of what is called non-discrimination in employment is an illusion. Hiring based solely on particular individual job-related qualifications (i) leaves out concerns that all except the brainwashed should recognize as important, and (ii) in most cases doesn't exist -- since Grutter, not even in theory. If issues of special interest to homosexuals are relevant to a position, whether someone is homosexual is obviously relevant to hiring him. There's no excuse for attacks on the Boy Scouts for their reluctance to hand boys over to what would often turn out to be a homosexual clique with a special interest in teenaged boys, and if you're hiring someone to be a newpaper reporter it plainly matters what axes he might have to grind. And even if the position doesn't involve issues related to sexuality, the number of homosexuals, especially in influential positions, can legitimately concern an organization simply because it affects the nature of human connections within the organization.
I've argued that sex is right only when it helps constitute an enduring union between two persons that points beyond personal interest because of what the union is, and that can be so only in the case of sex within marriage that is open to new life. Someone who commented on my Sexual Morality FAQ asked why then "gay marriage" is so different from marriage between two 60-year olds, since both unions will be infertile. I replied that a union between two men is sterile by what it is -- by the identity of the parties -- while one between a 60-year-old man and woman is sterile by particular circumstances, their age and physical condition.
Any thoughts on the argument would be welcome. It seems to me it depends on three points: (1) persons and acts have an essential nature that's not the same as their factual effects, (2) one's sexual nature (as a man or woman) is essential to what one is, so that violating it violates oneself, and (3) the nature of sex includes a natural procreative aspect that is somewhat fuzzy, so it's lost when we intentionally do something that defeats it but not when it simply fails to go to completion because of failure to act (i.e., abstention) or because of circumstances (e.g., time of month or physical defect).
All comments are welcome. It's hard to think about these things abstractly, but it seems necessary now, when the modernist attempt to reduce reason to formal logic and means-end rationality has caused such practical problems in this and other connections.
The social construction of reality, chapter whatever: American Psychiatric Association issues statement endorsing right of gay and lesbian couples to adopt. According to the APA, "research over the past 30 years has consistently demonstrated that children raised by gay or lesbian parents exhibit the same level of emotional, cognitive, social and sexual functioning as children raised by heterosexual parents." That's demonstrated, not just "indicated," "suggested," or "been consistent with," and the demonstrations have been repetitive and unopposed over a 30-year period. So the experts say they know that homosexual "parents" are just as good, and that makes it an indisputable truth upon which rational public policy must be based. Which is exactly the point of the statement.
If you've ever looked into the actual social science evidence used to support policy positions, or the ways social scientists have dealt with sex, you'll be more than skeptical. All respectable authorities have been assuring us, for example, that the problem of predatory homosexual priests has nothing whatever to do with homosexual priests. Does that inspire confidence?
The problem isn't just homosexual activists or the readiness of professional organizations in an age without honor to sacrifice the well-being of children for the sake of media respectability. It's the social sciences as such. Social scientists are committed to rationalizing social life. They downplay, and if possible make irrelevant, the aspects that can't be measured, analyzed, and manipulated by professionals. The family is largely opaque to outsiders and resistant to manipulation. It follows that social scientists, by the nature of their calling and professional interests, stand in opposition to it, and to the traditions and moral commitments that support it. They would rather convert the family into a rationalized branch of the administrative state, and sex into a collection of personal impulses rather than the basis of something so recalcitrant. That is exactly the effect of the view of sexual morality they have been pushing for decades. Big surprise.
Every reasonable person who's curious about the world around him sometimes finds social science studies suggestive and illuminating. No sane person thinks they can be the basis of of human relations or the laws and institutions that regulate and codify them. Life is complex and subtle, and it's not set up to be easy for us, so we have to rely on sources of knowledge that don't make it in scientific demonstrations: Newman's "illative sense," Pascal's "intuitive mind" ("esprit de finesse"), and the accumulated experience and understandings crystallized in tradition.
Living is an art not a science. With that in mind, here's some random social science data points from the Sex Wars:
An oddity of the coverage of the current sex scandals in the Catholic Church is the persistent use of the term "pedophilia" for homosexual predation that involves adolescents and young men rather than children.
Another is the mantra that homosexuals are no more likely to be pedophiles than heterosexuals. If that's so why is there no North American Man-Girl Love Association? A footnoted study by the National Association for a Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) covers what I think are the basic points:
Gay advocates correctly state that most child molesters are heterosexual males. But this is a misleading statement. In proportion to their numbers (about 1 out of 36 men), homosexual males are more likely to engage in sex with minors: in fact, they appear to be three times more likely than straight men to engage in adult-child sexual relations (footnote). And this does not take into account the cases of homosexual child abuse which are unreported. NARTH's Executive Director Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, for example, says that about one-third of his 400 adult homosexual clients said they had experienced some form of homosexual abuse before the age of consent, but only two of those cases had been reported.
While no more than 2% of male adults are homosexual, some studies indicate that approximately 35% of pedophiles are homosexual (footnote). Further, since homosexual pedophiles victimize far more children than do heterosexual pedophiles (footnote), it is estimated that approximately 80% of pedophilic victims are boys who have been molested by adult males (footnote).
So it appears once again that media sympathies, pressure groups and political correctness are uniting to keep the obvious off the public stage, even in matters having to do with the elementary safety of children.
Here's yet another compilation of materials on the links between homosexuality and child molestation that notoriously don't exist.
The homosexual movement and its allies constantly use the phrase "sexual identity." The phrase seems to be taken for granted, and is rarely explained and justified. It seems, though, to refer to the notion that our sexual habits and inclinations are fundamental to what we are, more so than religion or even sex in the natural sense of whether one is male or female. It's religious "affiliation" or "preference," and "biological gender" (apparently nearly irrelevant to specifically human concerns), but sexual "identity" -- straight, gay, bi, transgendered or whatnot.
But why treat sexual inclinations as authoritative and untouchable? One possible reason is that active sexuality is thought to be an essential aspect of our most intimate and intense personal relationships. Since such relationships are what link us most effectively to others and thus constitute us as social beings, sexual acts with persons of the same sex might be thought essential to full realization of the humanity of those inclined to them. An attack on such acts would then be an attack on the humanity of such persons.
A problem with that line of reasoning is that it isn't adequate to the homosexual cause, which is a defense not primarily of "long-term committed relationships" but of a homosexual culture that includes an essential promiscuous and sensation-seeking element. The point of the homosexual movement is sexual liberation, the free expression of human sexuality, which is understood to be a fundamental aspect of human liberation. The legitimation of gay relationships is not intended to denigrate gay adventurousness. Otherwise there would be boycotts of bathhouses and NAMBLA would have been excommunicated by other homosexuals long ago. In the end, the homosexual movement stands or falls on the destruction of the given in human life in favor of the chosen, and perhaps on the value of transcendence through intense experience.
More moderate, sentimental and moralistic arguments, like the argument from intimate personal ties, nonetheless appeal to some people. The latter argument is an odd one. It implies that the connections that constitute us as social beings are simply a matter of the subjective attitudes of those involved, and thus that the essence of the social is the private and idiosyncratic. In order to claim that homosexual relationships have a moral status like that of marriage, the argument must turn marriage into "a relationship" -- a complex of feelings and commitments between two parties -- rather than an institution constituted in part by things as objective as the functioning of the human body and the reproduction of the species. It must turn the public aspects of marriage into mere recognition of the subjective dispositions of the parties.
Such a view deprives marriage of its point. The point of marriage is that it is not simply what is now called "a relationship" but an objective and enduring institution that is basic to human society, and therefore carries with it rights and obligations that the parties and others must respect regardless of how they feel. The attitudes and feelings proper to marriage spring from the relationship at least as much as the other way around. To the extent marriage becomes simply a "relationship," defined by the parties as they wish, it becomes unclear why other people should give it any special recognition or even know what it is in any particular case. The notion of "homosexual marriage," as well as the related notion of "sexual identity," thus suffers from an internal conflict. It tries to combine the modernist view that the essence of man is that he has no essence, that he creates what he is through his desires and choices, with a claim of authority that can be justified only by reference to objective standards like the dignity of mariage that precede and condition all choice.
Wittgenstein notoriously argued that a private language is impossible. The problem is that if I am the sole authority for the meaning of a word there is no way to distinguish a case in which I am using it correctly from one in which I am not. If that's so, though, the word can't be of any use to anyone.
Whatever the validity and scope of the argument, something like it seems to apply to the current notion of "sexual identity." That notion implies that what I feel (e.g., certain sorts of sexual desire) makes me what I am, so that saying there is something wrong with those feelings is the same as saying I am essentially bad.
I thus become the only real authority for what I am, because only I know how I feel. The consequence, though, is that "what I am" becomes meaningless. It becomes an assertion the grounds and significance of which can't be known by others, so it can't convey anything. And that indeed seems to be the consequence some are drawing with regard to sexual identity. People are losing the ability to apply the concept, even to themselves: Wesleyan establishes non-gendered dormitory for students who don't want to be categorized as one sex or another. (Also see the entry on The abolition of woman at Smith College.)
"Without God, man is nothing" is true in a quite exact sense: unless the world has meaning, a condition that seems to require something very like the existence of God, any statement that has meaning will falsify reality. In particular, a statement that we are anything that matters becomes groundless. Purely private meanings are nonsensical, and we can't bootstrap ourselves into any meaning that others must recognize simply by willing it. Meaning must precede our choices and desires if it is to mean anything. The claim that it is our desires that define what we are, a claim implicit in the notion of "sexual identity," is thus not only wrong, it's incomprehensible.
Over at MarriageDebate.com Maggie Gallagher has been dealing with one of the standard arguments for "gay marriage," that there can't be an essential connection between marriage and procreation because after all 70-year-old women are allowed to marry even though they can't have babies. Miss Gallagher handles the question very well, but there's a lurking point worth bringing out.
She says,
For roughly 2000 years, pretty much no one [I have no idea why she limits it to 2000 years or to "pretty much no one"] ever thought of saying that because we let older women marry, and because some married couples don't have children, marriage is not really about childbearing, it is primarily about adult relationships.
It is only in the context of the SSM ["same-sex marriage"] debate that people (gay marriage advocates) began to argue, and judges began to rule, that because older women can legally marry, marriage is not about procreation.
It seems to me the argument presented by the "gay marriage" advocates isn't opportunistic, but faithfully reflects the technocratic point of view now commonly identified with rationality itself. On that view, to say marriage has to do with the continuation of the species is to say that the relationship between marriage and having babies is like the relationship between an auto shop and fixing cars. Of course it's not, so on that view no essential function can be found for marriage other than allowing people who feel connected to formalize their relationship. That's the only result marriage brings about in each and every case, so that (the argument goes) must be its rational purpose. Such a view also seems to avoid an inhuman "biological machine" theory of sex that people believe would otherwise follow.
The argument would make sense if we were fundamentally technological beings whose lives consisted in the adaptation of means to whatever ends we happen to choose. That's not so, though. What we understand ourselves to be has to do with qualities and relationships that are at once more subtle and complex and more stable and enduring than the technical requirements for choosing goals and bringing them about.
In fact, the fundamental social relationships that define who we are are based on not on technical rationality but on what might be called functional identities. One thing that defines me, for example, is nationality: I am American. The reason nationality matters is that it involves mutual promotion of the common good, and so has necessary functional aspects. Nationality means, among other things, that I should obey the laws, do my part to promote the common welfare, defend the country against its enemies, and so on. Nonetheless, I had the same nationality when I was a newborn and would have it if I were insane or on my deathbed. I would still be American if I became a traitor, and our allies during wartime do not become American even though they protect America from her enemies.
Nationality, then, doesn't depend on actual performance or ability to perform certain social functions even though it has to do with those functions. It defines me as someone who characteristically would do and would want to do such things -- conditions permitting -- because of what I am, not as someone who happens to be in a position to do them just now. The fact nationality has to do with the characteristics that define us rather than specific cause and effect is what makes it a motivator that can be relied on. It is because it has to do with essential qualities that it goes deeper than the particular accidents and circumstances of life.
Being a man or woman, and being married, are like having a particular nationality only much more so, since sex has been around much longer and touches us much more deeply than nationhood. Marriage is constituted by what the participants and their relationship are understood to be. Being a man or woman is basic to what one is. The sexual union of a man and woman touches them deeply and by natural design -- even if not in every case -- produces children. Those things are far too basic to the pattern of human life to ignore or treat as purely technical matters. Marriage thus recognizes, orders and supports natural functional identities that we can't help but feel and that can't help but guide our actions, and thereby makes possible an orderly and reliable system for the connection of human beings to the social order and the continuation of the species.
To say that marriage could just as easily involve two men or two women is as much as to say that being a man or woman is fundamentally irrelevant to what one is and that the importance of sex is irrelevant to its natural function. At bottom, that is the message of liberal cultural radicalism. What sane person believes it though? And if being a man or woman is irrelevant to what we are, and sex is simply what the parties make of it, how could marriage -- which would reduce to a private contract based on idiosyncratic purposes -- gain enough purchase on what we are to serve anything like the function it has traditionally had?
Some thoughts provoked by the imposition of "gay marriage" on the people of New Jersey by the state supreme court, on the grounds that no substantial government purpose is served by limiting marriage to man and woman:
A friend commented on the Massachusetts "gay marriage" business:
Gay "marriage" is a lost cause; on the scale of mortal sin, it ranks less than abortion (though its overall civilizational effect may be just as great), so the furor it arouses seems to be less; and no one seems able to articulate any persuasive argument against it in the public sphere.
My response:
I suppose part of the problem is that the abortion decision made judicial outrages in things having to do with sex and reproduction the norm, the failure of the anti-abortion movement made failure the norm, and the continued need for the anti-abortion movement probably means that most people who are traditionalist on these things are already maxed out in their efforts to "take back America."
I think the civilizational effect will be greater, though. What relation that has to the question of sin I don't know. "Gay marriage" radically changes what has to be honored in everyday life. Abortion isn't publicized, but "gay marriage" means that children have to be taught from their earliest years, in order to have a competent grasp of basic social institutions, that every configuration of sexual impulse and conduct has to be equally esteemed. The bit about NYC schoolgirls in the previous entry suggests some implications. Also, "gay marriage" is a greater denial of nature. Plenty of species eat their young under some conditions, but undoing a billion years of sexual differentiation seems a bit much. There have been highly civilized societies with infanticide, but no previous society of any sort with anything like this.
As to arguments in the public sphere, I think we folded decades ago with acceptance of contraception, no-fault divorce, and feminism -- the notions that sexual relations and marriage are a matter of personal expression, and sex distinctions have no legitimate social role. Nonetheless, we should continue to fight. "Gay marriage" is something that cannot be conceded if we are to continue to view ourselves as participants in American society.
Another possible dialogue:
Alter: You're invited to my daughter's wedding--she's marrying her partner Louise!
Ego: Don't think I can make it.
Alter [suspicious]: Why not?
Ego: It's not something I can celebrate.
Alter: Why not?
Ego: I don't think the sexual union of two women is a good thing.
Alter: What business is it of yours?
Ego: It's my business what I celebrate.
Alter: But it's not about you, it's about her happiness. She went through hell before she met Louise, and now she's finally getting her life in order and you won't celebrate that!
Ego: I can't celebrate someone putting her life in an order that I think is wrong. She may feel strongly about this but I feel strongly too.
Alter: What's wrong with someone trying for happiness and stability with someone she loves in the only way she's ever going to get it?
Ego: I can't know everything about her situation, but if I'm asked for support I have to make some sort of judgment. And it seems to me that homosexuality--especially public homosexuality that wants equal status with sexuality as it normally develops--is antisocial. It says there's nothing specially good about being a man or a woman or about expectations about how they're going to act toward each other. And as to happiness, I have my doubts. Sex can't be nailed down just by a ceremony. It needs a setting in which the ceremony makes sense. When sex develops normally it's connected in all sorts of ways to its natural function, which is childbearing. That makes its natural expression a long-term commitment between two people who are complementary to each other. In the case of homosexuality you don't have that. Why be optimistic enough to give it public support?
Discussion then either goes downhill beyond retrieval, or continues, drawing on previous discussions of "homophobia", homosexuality in general, and "gay marriage" in particular.
Too much inclusiveness is a bad thing, British homosexualists have discovered. The Lords have voted to open up "civil partnerships," designed by the Blair government as an exact replica of marriage for same-sex couples, to caregivers and others who live together in stable domestic arrangements. The move has transformed "gay rights" rhetoric in a radically conservative and indeed exclusionary direction. The institution of civil partnership, we are now told, is intended for "relationships [that] are clearly different" from non-traditional couples like a parent and a caregiving child. Expanding the institution to include such unintended people "could lead to questions about the nature of the family unit, blurring the integrity of laws prohibiting sexual relationships [of a kind traditionally considered perverse and unnatural]."
Would it be a good idea to step back and see how these new-found concerns apply to the discussion as a whole?
Additional thoughts on "gay marriage" provoked by a discussion I started, in connection with the Rauch piece, in the Atlantic discussion forum on Politics and Society:
Comments about "Judeo-Christian morality" are silly in this connection. The limitation of marriage to male/female unions is hardly peculiar to Judaism and Christianity. It was also the uniform practice in Greece and Rome as well as in Islamic countries, India, China, and no doubt everywhere else (if there were any society that routinely treated same-sex like male/female unions I'm sure we would have heard about it endlessly).
It's true that marriage has religious implications. So does "gay marriage." The traditional view proposes that the world--the physical world around us--is good, that man is essentially embodied, that the body and its natural functioning are morally relevant to human life. Advocates of "gay marriage" on the contrary dematerialize morality and make the body irrelevant to the person. They don't like the real world we actually live in.
In fact, marriage involves the whole man, and so is physical, natural, intentional, cultural, political, and spiritual. Rauch claims it will remain the same--it will still involve the whole man and have the same effect in ordering our impulses and lives--if the physical and natural aspects are cut out of it. That claim depends on the view that the physical and natural are irrelevant to human life, which is obviously wrong.
It's true that some married people don't have children. However, there is no special reason to support such marriages--if they were typical of marriage then marriage would just be a private arrangement getting and deserving to get no more recognition than any other private arrangement, membership in a club for example. It's not such people who make marriage the particular institution it is, one that's felt to promote loyalty and long term cooperation in a particularly forceful way. In fact, to the extent they get married intending not to have children such people undermine the institution and help make it just another mode of personal self-definition. Which isn't at all what Mr. Rauch wants, although it's all he will be able to get if he has his way.
There is public concern and support for marriage only because of the essential connection to procreation and children of the union of a man and a woman, the natural functioning of whose bodies together leads to procreation and children. If any old commitment is just as good why not treat my admiration for George Washington or an NRA member's attachment to his rifle as a marriage? Narrow-minded people might laugh, but there are those who find such things very important and worthy of at least as much respect as whatever it was that Ozzie and Harriet used to do.
What about intentionally childless couples? You can't make an institution as fundamental as marriage depend on arbitrary private purposes. The male and female bodies are designed for procreation in the same sense the eye is designed for seeing. Put them together and they most often end up procreating. So it's sensible to treat a union of man and woman entered into with all the necessary solemnity and involving the appropriate rights and obligation as a marriage even though private purpose may be at odds with the reason for giving marriage special support. All the objective features are there and it makes sense for the law to go off on that.
It's true two women could, if the law permits, adopt a child, hire a surrogate or use a turkey baster. IBM could do the first two, and even the third if an employee volunteered. So I don't see why the relationship between the two women has a better claim to be considered a marriage than the relationship among the stockholders, managers and employees of IBM. Neither can produce children by natural functioning, both can become custodians of an infant through some sort of artifice and feel responsible for raising it to maturity, and both can involve loyalty, mutual support and so on.
The president signs the Michal Judge Act, which has the effect of paying federal death benefits to "partners" of unmarried policemen and firemen, while New York City considers giving effect to homosexual unions registered in Vermont and California. It's "simply the right thing to do," says the City Council speaker.
The Judge Act can be distinguished from the NYC proposal, because all it does is make the benefit payable to beneficiaries the deceased had listed on his life insurance policy. In the case of the reputedly homosexual and certainly unmarried Fr. Judge, for example, it will go to his two sisters. Still, it's not clear the principle is different.
After all, why would Congress want to increase the size of someone's estate as a goal in itself, without reference to helping those who stand in some special relation to him?
The argument for many of the moves toward recognizing nonmarital domestic partnerships is fairness: two sisters could live together, pool their resources and support each other as much as a husband and wife do. Why not recognize the loss one incurs when the other dies? And if that's done, why not do the same if they aren't sisters but nonetheless view each other as life partners?
A difficulty of the argument is that if privileging certain stereotypical relationships is unfair it's hard to know where to begin and where to stop. After all, the original idea of family benefits is that the employee is a breadwinner and those at home rely on him for their economic well-being. That notion may still apply to children, but if the patriarchal family is a bad thing it's not clear why it should go beyond that. After all, if a single mom gets married why should her employer have to put out more money on her behalf, as it will have to do when she adds her new husband to the health plan? And if a man wants to provide employee benefits to the woman he's sleeping with and who cooks his meals and looks after his children, why shouldn't he have to pay for them? Why do they have to come--in effect--out of the pocket of employees who live alone and so can't use that part of the compensation package?
Benefits for families of employees are inextricably connected to the notion of honoring and supporting family life. In the case of the Michal Judge Act to say it's unfair to pay the death benefit only to parents, children and spouses, and not just give it to anyone the deceased happens to have listed as beneficiary on his life insurance policy, is ridiculous. And to say it's unfair not to pay it to live-in girlfriends or homosexual partners is to say that such relationships should be honored and supported equally with the relation of husband to wife or parent to child. And that, for different reasons, is also ridiculous.
A standard jibe from proponents of "gay marriage" is that marriages don't eat each other up, so John and Mary's can't be affected by Ron and Barry's. As one blogger puts it, "I can't help but feel sorry for people whose families are so fragile as to be destroyed by someone else's decision to make a long-term commitment to another person."
The jibe fits very nicely with current understandings of human conduct, which tell us that we are (and should be) independent individuals making up our own minds how we will act based on personal goals and the incentives and disincentives our environment offers. On that understanding, which people consider a matter of simple rationality, the jibe seems unanswerable.
The response, though, is that man acts by reference to what things are as well as rewards and punishments. His rationality is conceptual as well as utilitarian. Sometimes we avoid lying or give something to charity not because it's advantageous but because it seems the right thing to do. If someone offers me a million dollars for American state secrets in my possession, and I'm confident there will be no bad consequences to me if I accept, it will matter whether I am American and how I came by the secrets. Results aren't everything: who I am (French, American, or North Korean) and what the action is (whether it would be a breach of loyalty or trust) will make a big difference no matter what the practical consequences are for my personal goals in life.
In the case of marriage, then, it matters what marriage is, and for that matter what men and women are and what sexual connections are. To believe in gay marriage is to believe that marriage is nothing in particular. It is an arbitrary name for a collection of relationships thought worth formalizing for one reason or another, so multiplying the types of relationship that can be formalized under that name can have little effect on the relationships themselves, except that the increased availability of formalization may be helpful to some.
The contrary view, of course, is that marriage is not a name but a basic institution, and as such has a definite nature and functions that carry with them duties and rights comprehensive enough to transform one's situation and even affect who one is. Such a view makes sense with regard to marriage as traditionally conceived, since if it is understood as the legitimate enduring sexual union of man and woman it has an essential connection to the continuation of the race and basic constitution of society, and so to the most basic natural and social functions.
Expand marriage to include "gay marriage" though and it no longer has such a connection. As such, it can no longer support the same network of expectations, obligations and rights. The abolition of the United States of America as an institution, and its conversion into a sentimental connection among people who wish to recognize the connection, would have effects, even though one could say that it's a poor patriot who needs the force of law to enforce his patriotism. Why shouldn't the abolition of marriage as an institution also have effects?
(Here are some earlier Thoughts on "gay marriage".)
The modern technological outlook can't deal with issues of identity, because it abolishes essences--understandings of what things "really are"--in favor of measurable properties that fit the thing for particular chosen ends. That's why it's thought ignorant, irrational and abusive to treat someone differently because he's a man or a gypsy, but not because he has a particular educational certification or bureaucratic position.
Still, people need to place and orient themselves in the world, so they need to be able to say who they are. Liberalism attempts to solve the problem by saying that people can define themselves however they choose: sex becomes "gender," which you can define for yourself, so that if you define yourself as femme or gender-queer you should get your own bathroom, and scientific publications think it normal to report on the strange difficulties "transgendered" men have in exotic and backward locales getting re-registered as female. Parenthood itself becomes treated as socially constructed, and academics wonder about the extent to which "we" should continue to accept bionormativity in that connection.
A problem with the liberal approach to identity is that it obviously makes no sense. If identity is self-defined it has no public content, and it can't serve its basic function of placing and orienting us in the world. If "marriage" is whatever people call marriage in their own case, then it can't say anything about the people or their relations or what anybody should expect of them or they should expect from each other. If it's whatever you make it, it can't be anything that matters. Why bother with it?
The liberal approach to identity is simply part of the technological abolition of a humanly comprehensible world. It's got lots of consequences, almost all bad. It means that your career or where you went to school become hyper-important, because those are the only things that legitimately make you what you are. It means that the people Theodore Dalrymple writes about become brutish to the point of losing the ability to function socially, because they lack understandings that let them connect who they are to anything higher than impulse and resentment. And it means any number of people develop extremely fragile identities that lead them into genuinely irrational and hateful actions, like the "transsexuals" who felt their self-identification as women called in question by a scholarly book and responded by trying to destroy the author. (A longer account of the Bailey case can be found here.)
Will it ever be possible to force gays back into the closet? That rhetorical question is considered a crushing rejoinder when someone objects to the attempt to normalize homosexuality. Whoever is making the objection, it implies, is a typical reactionary--either he hasn't thought things through, and is living in the past, or else he's planning something really brutal and oppressive.
The answer, of course, is that it's not a matter of force but of accepted public principle. On liberal principles the closeting of homosexuality is oppressive because it doesn't belong in the closet--it's as respectable as any other form of sexual expression. On traditional principles that make the sexual affiliation of men and women fundamental to social order, however, homosexuality is at odds with the kinds of connections that ought to exist among people. It's treason against the social constitution. From that point of view it's as bad as liberals think racism is. So if traditional views of sex come once again to prevail the closeting of homosexuality will be as natural as the closeting of hard core racism is today. Force, on the whole, will be aside the point.
Welcome to the Anti-Feminist Page!
"Women's issues" are so contentious and so difficult to discuss today in a way that takes actual belief and experience into account that it often seems easier to avoid them. Nonetheless, they are basic to the lives of all of us, so open discussion is necessary and we hope this page contributes to that. To begin exploring the issues feminism raises we include a short essay as well as a list of resources. We also have a spoken introduction (requiring RealPlayer).
The issues presented here can be discussed in our forum, and your participation is welcome. You can also email the author, Jim Kalb.
"Feminism" means so many different things that it appears to mean very little. Its theoretical advocates constantly contradict each other and themselves. In casting off feminine reserve and modesty they seem to have learned intellectual shamelessness as well. Rather than damaging feminism, its incoherence offers an easy defense against all criticism: whatever the complaint, the response is that it misses the mark because feminism is really something else.
It appears, however, that nothing can be called feminism that is not radically antitraditional and antinatural. What feminists call "gender"--the system of attitudes, expectations and customs that distinguishes men from women--has always and everywhere been basic to human life. To speak of "deeply rooted social stereotypes" is to speak of the centrality of masculinity and femininity to how we understand the world. Grammatical gender is one sign among many of that centrality. Although the detailed content of sexual distinctions has varied somewhat their general outlines have been stable. The men and women in ancient and non-Western literatures are immediately recognizable to us today as men and women like ourselves. Yang strikes us as masculine, Yin as feminine, just as they did the ancient Chinese.
The practical aspects of gender are no less universal than the symbolic. The ties among a man, a woman, and their children have always been fundamental, and dependent for reliable functioning on a generally settled division of responsibility among the parties and therefore between the sexes. More specifically, all societies have been patriarchal, at least in the very broad meaning of that term now accepted, with men mainly responsible for public concerns and women for domestic matters and the care of small children. Always and everywhere men, while exercising no general right of domination, have predominated in positions of formal authority.
The universality of these differences shows them to be rooted in biology and other permanent conditions of human life. It is hard to think of anything very different that would work, given the difficulty of building something that ignores universal human tendencies, and the need for stable and functional families and therefore role distinctions settled enough to stand up to the stresses and changes of life. A system as complex and subtle as human life cannot be reconfigured in fundamental ways merely at will. Nonetheless, opposition to gender as a principle of social order--to what is called "sexism"--is what unifies the things called "feminism." Since the opposition is absolute and categorical, feminism is in no way reformist. It treats a fundamental and evidently necessary principle of all human societies, sex-role differentiation, as an oppressive arrangement that must be abolished at whatever cost.
The aim of feminism, therefore, is to create a new kind of human being in a new form of society in which age-old ties among men, women and children are to be dissolved and new ones constituted in accordance with abstract ideological demands. In place of family ties based on what seems natural and customary and supported by upbringing and social expectation, feminism would permit only ties based on contract and idiosyncratic sentiment, with government stepping in when those prove too shaky for serious reliance. There is no reason to suppose the substitution can be made to work, let alone work well, and every reason to expect the contrary. Feminism does not care about reason, however, or even about experience of the effects of weakened family life. It is in fact ideological and radical to the core. There can be no commonsense feminism, because doing what comes naturally gets a feminist nowhere.
The objections to anarchist and communist theory apply with yet more force to feminism, because what the latter seeks to eliminate touches us far more deeply than private property or the state. Like the other two theories, feminism can be presented as a lofty and necessary ideal set up in opposition to a long history of dreadful injustice. After all, things like gender that are implicated in all social life are necessarily implicated in all social injustice. Nonetheless, the practical implementation of feminism, especially by force of law, can only lead to catastrophe. Like anarchism it calls for categorical opposition to distinctions and patterns of authority people find natural, and like communism for ceaseless radical reconstruction of all aspects of life, and consequently for absolute bureaucratic control of everything. Both tendencies are thoroughly destructive, and their mutual opposition does not render them harmless.
The result of the victory of feminism has been a combination of disorder and state tyranny cascading from America throughout the world, from the most immediate personal relationships to high culture and international politics. Feminism has meant suspicion and hostility where mutual reliance is an absolute necessity. It has meant growing deceit, heartlessness and brutality in daily life, resulting in particular suffering for the weak. It has meant confusion and misery for the young, who have been deprived of stable family life and concrete ideals of adulthood. It has meant the destruction of local and popular institutions by ever more powerful and irresponsible state bureaucracies. It has set women free mainly to be low level employees and unattached sexual commodities. It must therefore be opposed as a destructive fanaticism based on a gross and wilful misapprehension of human life.
It is not surprising that feminists, who misconstrue so much, misconstrue the nature of the opposition to them. Since their position requires a comprehensive and minute system of ideological regimentation they assume antifeminists must also be aspiring tyrants. They thus recreate their opponents in their own image.
In fact, to be antifeminist is simply to accept that men and women differ and rely on each other to be different, and to view the differences as among the things constituting human life that should be reflected where appropriate in social attitudes and institutions. By feminist standards all societies have been thoroughly sexist. It follows that to be antifeminist is only to abandon the bigotry of a present-day ideology that sees traditional relations between the sexes as simply a matter of domination and submission, and to accept the validity of the ways in which human beings have actually dealt with sex, children, family life and so on. Antifeminism is thus nothing more than the rejection of one of the narrow and destructive fantasies of an age in which such things have been responsible for destruction and murder on an unprecedented scale. It is opening oneself to the reality of things.
Acceptance of the legitimacy and usefulness of sex roles is an exercise of ordinary good sense. Stable and functional families are necessary for a tolerable way of life, and they will not exist unless men and women each have something specific to offer that the other is entitled to rely on. Further, the natural tendencies of the sexes are different, and life is happier when social institutions somehow reflect natural human tendencies. Nonetheless, what is in itself good sense may be quite radical from the point of view that is conventional in public at a particular time and place. Such is the state of antifeminism today. To reject feminist claims is to put oneself outside what is said to be the mainstream.
The success of feminism has owed a great deal to the astonishing absence of open opposition to it. That absence has had a variety of causes, including masculine cowardice and the difficulty of communication between the sexes. Other causes include the extreme centralization of public life today, the absolute triumph of liberal ideology in our public and intellectual life, and the difficulty that ideology has dealing with issues relating to family life because of its tendency to base all human relations on arm's-length bargaining or force.
The power of feminism despite its evident irrationality shows the strength and pervasiveness of the institutions, interests and ways of thinking that support it. Its triumph has been part of the triumph of state and market over all other social powers, the culmination of a trend that has been sweeping all before it for centuries and become horrendously destructive. Government and business are now uniformly feminist, ultimately because family life hems them in by establishing a principle of social order not reducible to money and state regulation. The media, the educational system, and even organized scholarship take their lead from government and business and are therefore feminist as well. No significant social authority takes an opposing view. Without exception the articulate and powerful benefit from absorption of the functions of the family by formal public institutions.
Circumstances thus favor feminism, and a restored system of sex roles will not be brought back by fiat. A system of sexual cooperation must be generally acceptable to both men and women, and reflect current conditions as well as human nature. What must be done now is to eliminate arbitrary ideological demands and open up discussion so that considerations fundamental to normal human life but at odds with today's predominant institutional interests can once again find expression and play their necessary role in public and private life. Extensive discussion and experimentation will be necessary to that end, things now impossible because of feminist laws and censorship. Almost alone, the Internet retains its independence and holds out hope that resistance and free discussion may still be possible.
In the end feminism cannot win because it radically undermines any stable and productive ordering of private life. By disordering reproduction and childrearing and the most basic human connections it puts long-term social survival in question. It has done a great deal of damage, however, and will do much more before it destroys itself. The more explicit, articulate and successful its opponents the more damage can be prevented. Hence this page.
Here are resources on the web relating to antifeminism:
They come and go, but a few must be mentioned. Find more from the blogrolls.
Antifeminist and related issues may be discussed on:
A quick review of Genevieve Kineke, The Authentic Catholic Woman (Servant Books, 2006):
What is woman? The question has long been asked, in one form or another, but the answer has remained as obscure as the solution to other interesting issues. The modern age doesn't like questions it can't answer, so we're given stupid answers: woman is a social construction, an economic and sexual commodity, exactly the same as man only different and better, whatever. Most of us bump along somehow, doing our best to act reasonably and mostly ignoring the official answers in practice because they obviously make no sense.
Still, it must be possible to do better. Women are half the world, so it must be possible to say something intelligent about them. One suggestive finding that might serve as a point of departure comes from a study correlating intelligence with brain tissue. It's been known for a while that men and women use different parts of the brain to deal with the same problems. What the study shows is that the parts of the brain correlated with intelligence are not only different in men and women, but composed of different sorts of tissue.
Specifically, men have 6.5 times the amount of gray matter in the tissue most related to general intelligence, women 10 times the white matter. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, white matter the networking among processing centers. So while it's not quite true that men and women think with different bodily organs, it appears that they use their brains very, very differently.
The physical difference suggests that men's intelligence is more a matter of solving particular problems and making particular decisions, women's of connecting things. That would explain a lot. Women are notoriously concerned with relationships, men with solving problems. Women complain that men are simple-minded and have one-track minds, men that women mix everything with everything else and never come to a conclusion that sticks because something somewhere always seems different at some point and that makes everything else change.
Naturally, the difference means that the sexes normally need and attract as well as complain about each other. It also means though that the sexes are subject to different difficulties and weaknesses. In particular, they mean that especially today it is difficult to define just what a woman is. After all, if everything depends on everything else, and there are no settled standards so the world seems very complicated and hard to interpret (which is especially true in modern times), then the identity of someone who defines things--including herself--relationally will become elusive-to-nonexistent.
The consequences are familiar. Since there are no settled standards women feel guilty about everything and responsible for nothing. They define themselves by others, so they're easy to prey on and abuse. They see things as fluid, and are vividly conscious of what they want, so they become manipulative and abusive themselves. They're objects of desire, so they see and present themselves as such, and use the resulting persona aggressively because they're in a world that mistakes self-assertion for self-realization. Such, at least, are tendencies that are common enough to be noticeable.
So what's a woman to do? Where can she find stability and dignity in the world today? If you're a mom what do you want to point your children toward? And what is going to give you a good relationship with your husband? Enter Genevieve Kineke, Catholic wife, mother of 5, and author of The Authentic Catholic Woman. Plato investigated the just man by drawing up plans for the perfect society and saying the just man would be like the perfect society. Mrs. Kineke follows much the same procedure, but as a Catholic convert she has available a well-developed theory of the perfect society, the Church, and the further advantage that Catholic tradition explicitly represents the Church as Bride and Mother, and thus a natural model for women.
So for the author the authentic Catholic woman, and thus the true woman (since she accepts authentic Catholicism as true), is an image of the Church. She picks up that ball and runs with it, or whatever the feminine equivalent of that operation may be. She actually does so quite successfully. The comparison of the Church with a woman is not just a conceit, but an analogy that has been found fruitful and illuminating throughout Christian history and before that among the Jews, with the Song of Songs and the personification of Jerusalem as a woman leading the way.
So she's got a lot to draw on. She uses her materials to treat the ordinary tasks women take on, from scrubbing floors to feeding children to making nice with difficult people, as a type of the actions of the Church, and so raises them to a dignity denied by the hedonistic rationalism dominant today. Going beyond that she points to a grand role for woman as woman in the scheme of things: woman as sustainer, reconciler, teacher, source of culture and civilizational rebirth.
She goes through the issues in some detail, with good sense as well as piety. Most men are somewhat alarmed by inspirational books with pink flowers on the cover written by women for women. They expect something soppy. She rises above that and has written a book that actually seems quite thoughtful and practical. Whether it actually works for women they'll have to decide themselves. She's perfectly aware of the pitfalls of feminine attempts at selfless love--the fears, the hidden motives, the lapses, the likelihood of burnout, ingratitude and resentment--but argues that identifying what one does with something much larger and more authoritative changes the situation so that actions becomes less a personal assertion and so are less troubled by such issues.
In general, I'd describe her as an intelligent and practically-grounded JP II Catholic. She cites the late Pope's theology of the body a great deal, and doesn't much draw much on pre-Vatican II materials except the Bible and a couple of saints like Edith Stein. It's worth noting that she has no objection to male authority--if what women do has great intrinsic dignity it becomes less of a threat--and thereby deviates somewhat from the emphasis of most Church pronouncements in recent years.
The book's a good effort. People don't create themselves, so there has to be something that tells women (like men) what they are. It would be nice if that thing justified and gave dignity to the things women do, like looking after babies, that don't tie in to the life of economic production and consumption. Mrs. Kineke's discussion does so in a way that makes sense at least for Catholics. (Whether Catholicism makes sense is of course another discussion. I think it does.) It's hard to think of anything that would work better. A theory of Woman should have enough specificity to offer guidance but enough depth and diversity to avoid oppressiveness and remain applicable to women in very different situations. Reasoning by analogy to something large, public, long-lasting, diverse and nonetheless authoritative seems a better way to go than most. And by good fortune something like that is available to the author: the Church.
Many people of course won't approve for one reason or another. To liberals who find the whole project sexist and obscurantist I'd say to come back when they come up with a way of life that people will actually find rewarding in the long run. To captious anti-Vatican II trads, I'd say that she may cite Lumen Gentium and George Weigel, but it's what you do with your materials that counts, and I think she does very well indeed.
The basic contention of this article on male and female brains is that women pay attention to personal relationships and feelings, men to impersonal systems and functions -- not much of a surprise. The author doesn't do much with the claim except observe that women are sensitive, caring and empathetic, while men are clueless and incipiently autistic. The principle has other implications, however, some of which are not quite as PC.
For example, public life has to do with our dealings with people most of whom we don't know well or at all. As a result, it is mostly a matter of the orderly functioning of impersonal and necessarily somewhat blind systems, like law, government and markets. If personal connections and concerns eclipse functional aspects the consequence is gross inefficiency and inequity brought on by an emphasis on special favors, manipulativeness on behalf of oneself and one's friends, and general lack of concern for the public interest and overall justice. To the extent concerns rise above selfishness, what results is an attempt to extend the principle of special favors and immediate personal concern to everyone everywhere (i.e., to construct a universal nanny state).
Nanny states don't work though, certainly not in the long run. While mothering is a very good thing, the Post Office and similar institutions are just not close enough to us to mother us. The Chinese have traditionally believed in the balance of yang and yin, the male and female principle, but also that feminine involvement in politics is a sign of the degeneration and approaching end of a dynasty. What this article suggests is that they may have been right.
Lawrence Auster asks why so often it is women, more than men, who are unintimidated by liberals. His example is Jeane Kirkpatrick. Here are a couple more, one woman (Kathy Shaidle) quoting another ("andrea"): "Barack Obama? Look -- Urkel's running for president!"
"Yeah, I know I'm going to hell. Don't care. I've never met a person of African-Americanness who didn't have the self-esteem of Taras Bulba and a cast-iron sense of entitlement as well. This, as much as anything, may keep the presidency white as snow for a few more generations."
Maybe the reason is that with women politics is taken as more of a personal or fashion statement. It doesn't seem as important to them to be consistent, or even justifiable or right in an objective sense. They're less conceptual in their way of thinking. That makes them a bit harder to squash on ideological grounds. That's good -- it's one of the ways a little truth can get out.
Here are some quotations from well-known feminists that would be startling if we weren't so used to the same sort of thing:
It is important to remember just how barbarous and cruel the Taliban were. Yet it is also important not to use their example to obscure or deny the common thread of misogyny that connects them with Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition...
In Bangladesh, Muslim fanatics throw acid in the faces of unveiled women; in Nigeria, newly established shariah courts condemn women to death by stoning for having sex outside of wedlock... In the United States, Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists have forged a powerful right-wing political movement focused on banning abortion, stigmatizing homosexuality and limiting young people's access to accurate information about sex.
We all have different forms of enforced burqas. Every culture has it. Whether it's an idea or a fascist tyranny of what women are supposed to look like--so that women go to the extremes of liposuction, anorexia and bulimia to achieve it--or whether it's being covered in a burqa, we all have deep, profound, ongoing daily forms of oppression.
I think that the oppression of women is universal. I think we are bonded in every single place of the world. I think the conditions are exactly the same [her emphasis]. I think the nature of the oppression--whether it's acid burning in one country, or female genital mutilation in another, or gang rapes in the parking lots in high schools of the suburbs--it's the same idea... The systematic global oppression of women is completely across the globe.
I went from Beverly Hills where women were getting vaginal laser rejuvenation surgery--paying four thousand dollars to get their labias trimmed to make them symmetrical because they didn't like the imbalance. And I flew to Kenya where [women were working to stop] the practice of female genital mutilation. And I said to myself, "What is wrong with this picture?"
[The last two quotations are from a lecture in 2003 she gave at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, then run by the woman recently chosen president of Harvard in part because of her bureaucratic feminist activism.]
Why do they say these things? I suppose one answer is that they're leftists with unbreakable self-righteousness. Another is that public figures and activists say things they don't really mean because public figures want to figure publicly and activists want to make a splash and have an effect. Still another is that women are specially inclined to speak expressively, and for feminist activists politics is definitely personal. As Christina Hoff Sommers notes in the article from which the quotations were taken,
NOW has just launched a 2007 "Love Your Body" calendar as part of its ongoing initiative of the same name. The body calendar warns of an increase in eating disorders and includes a photograph celebrating the shape of pears. There is also an image of the Statue of Liberty with the caption, "Give me your curves, your wrinkles, your natural beauty yearning to breathe free." The calendar bears these inspiring words: "None of us is free until we are all free."
To breathe free, college women are encouraged to organize "Love Your Body" evenings. NOW suggests they host "Indulgence" parties: "Invite friends over and encourage them to wear whatever makes them feel good--sweat suits, flip flops, pajamas--and serve delicious, decadent foods or silly snacks without the guilt. Urge everyone to come prepared to talk about their feelings and experiences."
Still, they seem to mean what they say quite literally, and besides, saying "Oh, that's just them!" doesn't account for specifics. Pollitt, Ensler and others evidently find any sort of limitation related to women's bodies or sexuality horrendously oppressive. For them the desire to protect unborn children, social attitudes and practices that give sex a meaning and function and promote restraint, and the obsessions of Hollywood women (supposedly forced on them) are all examples of the same sort of thing as throwing acid in Bangladesh. Even the real or imagined responses of others, for example to women's beauty, are outrageously oppressive, since they tend to pressure women to do this or be that. Nothing short of absolute physical and expressive freedom, including freedom from negative responses, seems acceptable. The only permissible response to women's bodies and their use of them, even when (as in the case of sex) that use is intended to have an effect on others or even leads to the creation of new life, is universal acceptance and approbation.
That of course is not the view of a sane grown-up. So why are these honored writers and respected organizations attracted by it? Why does anybody pay any attention to them? In part, it's simply an expression of the modern tendency to make subjective likes and dislikes the standard for good and evil. The logical conclusion of that tendency is that my will should be law and it's an outrage if anyone finds fault with it, so these women are perhaps showing themselves, at least in this case, as ruthlessly logical as any man. Still, there's something specifically feminine about the situation. Women define themselves more than men by feelings and relations to others. That makes their bodies, and feelings and connections that have to do with their bodies, a sensitive point for them. Traditionally the problem has be dealt with by standards of modesty and restraint that told the world that women's bodies were not up for grabs. Today, of course, such things have been done away with, and the natural result has been that women and their bodies have been put out in the marketplace and become commodities, sometimes in demand and sometimes not. Both situations have their drawbacks.
The need for protection therefore remains. Since the personal has decisively become political, and it is now thought that every solution to everything has to be absolutely clear and universal, the only option is to turn the whole world into the same kind of sanctuary for women's feelings that the home might once have been, only without offering the world benefits like those women once offered the home. That doesn't seem likely to work. Still, "not working" only leads to redoubled efforts along the same lines unless something decisively different seems available, and modernity means that nothing else is available. As long as the view prevails that pleasure, power and untrammeled choice are the supreme goods, women will be taught to want those things for themselves while demanding protection from them in the hands of others and treating any assertion of other goods as oppressive. Pollitt, Ensler and the functionaries at NOW will thus remain exemplary women.
Are the strongest objections to women soldiers the pragmatic ones? Not really. Certainly the pragmatic objections are more than sufficient, but--as feminists would agree--apparent practicality shouldn't overshadow fundamental principle.
The fundamental principle is that man is symbolic as well as practical. What the world is for us matters more than our projects within the world, and how things are in general is a matter of symbolism. It is loyalty that holds life together, for example, but we are not loyal for a purpose--we are loyal because the object of our loyalty is part of what makes us what we are. And it is symbolism that defines the connections that define us. A flag or wedding ring may seem a small thing, but it is such things that carry the weight of human society.
So what does this have to do with women soldiers? An army is at once the most necessary and most symbolic of things. Dying in combat isn't practically advantageous to a soldier. If justified at all it's justified by by how he views himself in connection with the grand scheme of things. And for soldiers like everyone else that scheme is pervaded by sex and gender. Sex has to do with the closest human connections and with new life, gender with making those connections satisfying and durable so that new life can grow and florish. Those functions, however, are inextricably connected to the symbolism of male and female.
The family is therefore the human association with the firmest hold on what we are, the one that joins us with our own flesh and blood. In combat a soldier is called upon to put his own body--quite literally, his own flesh and blood--on the line. For that to be acceptable what he is defending must be at least the equivalent of what he is sacrificing. Soldiers, therefore, must fight for their families. Ideology is unstable and mercenaries untrustworthy. An army that can be relied on is one that fights quite literally for its homeland.
So the question with women soldiers is simply the question of feminism in general: can there be abiding loyalty to home and family if the symbolism of male and female is destroyed, if home and family are voluntary sentimental or practical associations among strictly equal parties? Will someone die for a business partnership or chance companionship? Can our family be flesh and blood to us if male and female are irrelevant to it? If not, then bringing in women soldiers destroys the army by destroying the very understanding of things that makes it possible for it to be what must be. It makes it a bureaucratic organization like any other. And bureaucracies do not win wars.
The social sciences obstinately insist on Pascal's mathematical mind, while women are more likely to give play to his intuitive mind, so it seems the two aren't a good match. Still, all's grist for the mill, so here are a couple of (at least purportedly) scientific findings regarding women I thought of interest:
The first article can speak for itself, although one point worth noting is the determination of the feminist researcher to spin her findings as evidence of masculine deficiencies. Why be so unpleasant? I would have thought that accepting the differences between the sexes is part of willing membership in the human race.
The second I actually found more interesting. It's hard for most men to understand how women experience fashion. Women often speak of other women's fashion choices, their choice of colors and patterns or whatever, as if they were major character flaws. In what may be the greatest literary work ever written by a woman, The Tale of Genji, people are mostly characterized by the aesthetic qualities of the notes they write to each other. Why are such things such a big deal?
Here are some random examples of the importance of fashion I noted just yesterday in the right-wing feminine blogosphere:
Part of it may be that sensual immediacy plays a larger role in women's experience. Taste, smell, color and texture all seem more vividly present to them. Also, they're more observant in some ways than men. Show them clutter and they're much more likely to be able to find things and to remember afterwards what was there. Put those qualities together with women's attentiveness to social cues, their tendency to understand things relationally and make their points somewhat indirectly, and the sexual and therefore social importance of physical appearance for them, and it becomes understandable that visual self-presentation to others might take on much greater importance than it does among men.
Dunno, though. Any thoughts?
On the face of it, the expected decision of the New York City Board of Health to let people decide what sex they are and to have the decision reflected on their birth certificates seems a reductio ad absurdum of the "gender perspective," in effect the view that sexual distinctions should be treated as pure social constructions to the extent physically possible.
The absurdity applies at many levels. Man is an animal, among other things, and sex, which has been around a billion years, probably has some importance in human life. If that's so, it's hard to see how it can be divorced from "gender" any more than say "nourishment" can be divorced from "food." You can't reasonably decide for yourself what food is. Similarly, it would seem, you can't decide what gender you are, even though social views may play some part in specific understandings of what it all means.
In any event, if "gender" is a social construction it can't equally be a personal decision. The two things aren't the same. If it's simply a personal decision, what is someone asserting when he says he's "transgender"? That he has a right to be placed in one self-defined category rather than another? Why is that a right that matters? It's true you will have to get a doctor's note to get your birth certificate changed, so someone could claim the new rule won't make gender a purely personal matter, but that can't be much of a restriction. And in any case, it's hard to see the public health reason to put sex on the birth certificate if it's an "arbitrary distinction" that denies the "diversity of nature" and can be reshuffled as a matter of personal choice.
Although absurd, the situation isn't funny because it isn't felt as such. Authoritative and principled absurdity dealing with basic features of human life is never funny, because too many things can go wrong when the men with guns who constitute the government insist on turning off their brains and forcing everybody else (through anti-discrimination laws) to do the same. Those guys have our children, they define disagreement with their projects as "harassment," and they believe in invading other countries to bring them the benefits of gender equity. If that's so, it is better for them to think about things in a way that makes sense.
So why do such things happen? Part of the problem is that one fraud requires another. If you insist there are no objective differences between the sexes, but still let people call themselves "men" and "women," you're letting distinctions that you've declared purely arbitrary and subjective play a role in society. If that's really what you're doing, it's more fair to let people decide for themselves how the classifications should be applied. The article also emphasizes the expertise of those involved in the decision, and we are all trained to accept whatever experts say however much it contradicts the obvious.
Such explanations are right as far as they go, but they don't say why the fraud and misuse of expert authority go one direction rather than another. For that one must ask who is benefited by the abolition of "gender" as a principle of social organization -- more generally, by the abolition of human connections and distinctions other than bureaucratic and financial ones -- and why that abolition seems transparently rational to so many. The answer to the latter question, I think, is basically scientism. The answer to former should be obvious. If money and bureaucracy are the only principles of social order, then bureaucrats and those who control wealth will have all the power. What's so hard to understand about that?
It's hard to imagine how sex could be put into some kind of order without any reference at all to traditional taboos. How could you conceivably rationalize something so basic and powerful and hard to get a grip on and make it a matter of simple free choice? With that in mind, it seems obvious that sexual enlightenment will turn out in fact to be sexual obsession and insanity. That seems to be happening, or at any rate people's ability to think about this stuff seems to be going downhill:
More news from the Sex Front that for some reason I've been covering a lot lately:
"Of course, if at least one of the two has a spouse at home, the situation may be more complex ... in such a case, if you confront your colleagues directly, it is important not to meddle or to judge them. The relationship between these people and their husbands or wives is none of your business ... All you should worry about is the flirting and how that makes you feel."
So it's OK to be offended by romance, as long as you have no objection to adultery. Just thought you should know.
I commented very briefly on Kay Hymowitz's not-so-pleasing account of the "new girl order"--the Way Young Women Are Now. Now she's come out with an even less flattering account of today's single young men. Guys will be guyz it seems. The positive part of the KH essay is that "How to make your girlfriend think her cat died naturally" actually is a good title for a slightly shocking fake-advice-mag humor piece. The less positive part is that you can't base your life on an endless diet of that kind of thing. And you certainly can't base it on an hours-a-day videogame habit or calling female insecurity "the gift that keeps on giving."
So what's happened? And how real are the pop culture depictions on which Hymowitz bases much of her piece? Life goes on, and image isn't reality, but trends even in magazine sales must relate to something that exists to some extent. Also, she does refer to a few statistics on what young men actually do. My basic impression is that the official abolition of sex roles has had samewhat the same effect the abolition of legal order would have. Everything's up for grabs, which means nothing can be relied on, so you avoid entanglements, follow impulse, go for what you can get, give as little as possible, and engage in a lot of mindless assertiveness. You also reject with contempt the attempt of those who have abolished traditional standards in favor of equal freedom to limit your freedom to do what you feel like doing in favor of their own preferred scale of values. Or such is the tendency.
Boldly venturing into the belly of the beast, I went to Canada last week and gave a talk on "sexism" at a conference on Breaking the Shackles: The Global Burden of Oppression at Upper Canada College in Toronto ("college" means "high school" in this case). In the event the visit turned out perfectly pleasant. The lefties seemed to skip over points that if noted would create actual issues, but I found them more ideologically self-satisfied than ill-tempered. Also, Michael Levin was there, on another panel, and that gave me some moral support and steeled me to present my own thoughts and then face the talk my fellow-speaker gave on Little Red Riding Hood.
Anyway, here's a somewhat expanded version of the notes for my talk:
Today we're supposed to talk about sexism and breaking shackles. So we're supposed to talk about the relationship between the sexes from the point of view of what shackles the relationship and what sets it free to be what it somehow wants to be.
I'm going to argue that
- Sex differences are real.
- They matter and they should matter.
- If you look at traditional views of sex differences and the new view, the new view is much more rigid than the old. It's oppressive and at odds with human life, and it doesn't help women.
I won't discuss those points in order, since when you're talking about something strict logical sequence usually isn't helpful, but whatever I say those points will be behind it.
The first problem dealing with these issues is that it's not so easy to tell what's a shackle and what's liberation. The keynote speaker put a rather cynical spin on that, and cynicism is sometimes called for, but it's not really a matter of who's doing what to whom.
The basic problem is that we are social beings, so our goals depend on what other people want and do. Liberation is never simply a matter of letting people do what they want. If I want to be free to address this group the organizers have to let me do it and you have to sit there and listen to me.
If you want freedom from compulsion then the obvious thing is to do away with government and become an anarchist. That's got some appeal. Governments do horrible things, and by definition they're arrangements in which the powerful make a bunch of rules that the rest of us are forced to follow at gunpoint. What could be worse?
Nonetheless, it's nice and even liberating to be able to walk down the street without getting robbed or murdered. So it seems that in spite of all the abuses and objections some sort of government and restraint is needed for liberty.
The same sort of thing applies to private property. People have always complained about it -- the distribution of wealth is always unfair, the rich have too much and the poor too little, if a poor person tries to put the situation right he gets thrown in the slammer. Still, in the last century there was a big effort to do away with private property and the results were far more oppressive and murderous than what we started with.
It turns out that even though government and private property get abused, and they can seem oppressive, they're necessary for people to be able to deal with each other and work out individual and common projects. Try to get rid of them and things go haywire.
So it seems that shackles and liberation come down to how people live together, and what makes things work so that our lives together can be rewarding and productive. What you think about that depends on how you see life in general.
The issue of "sexism" comes out of a conflict between a very widespread and even universal traditional view, that men and women are different and the differences should count for something in our lives together, and a very recent Western and increasingly globalized view that the traditional view is all wrong, there shouldn't be any differences, and wherever there are differences they have to be eradicated. That view shows up in antidiscrimination laws and inclusiveness programs, originally just in the West but now in international human rights treaties that say that any view in any society anywhere in the world that the differences between men and women matter has to be rooted out by force of law. Just read CEDAW.
More specifically, the traditional view is that men are basically more interested in systems that carry out specific impersonal functions, women in personal relationships and in immediate experience -- how things look, taste, feel and so on. That general principle has been followed up in a lot of different ways in different times and places depending on history, practicalities, technical level, and what not else. When you look back at them some seem good, some seem bad, some seem outrageous. The same applies to how government and private property have been set up.
Current examples:
- Sports: the systematic attempt to achieve a goal fascinates men even if the goal itself means nothing.
- Men's and women's magazines: computers, sports and business versus relationships, beauty, cooking and home decoration.
- Housing: men build the foundation, roof and walls and install a furnace, then women take over and decide whether we'll sit on boxes and eat out of tin cans or make things nicer.
The new view is that it's an outrage these differences exist and get noticed, so they all have to be done away with by force. The key point is that the new view is extreme and tries to do away totally with something basic to all known societies. Is that sensible? Is it going to work? Is it really liberating, or is it a shackle?
Deciding the point means looking at both the facts and what to do about the facts.
The fact is that men and women really do differ. That's personal experience and common sense. It's uniform tradition -- could everyone have always been wrong about something so basic? It's also modern science:
- An anatomist can distinguish a male and female brain by looking at it.
- Different areas of the brain become active in connection with the same function -- navigating in space, for example.
- Even the areas associated with general intelligence are different and have radically different composition. Men have 6.5 times the gray matter in intelligence-related areas, women have 10 times the white matter. It seems clear something different is going on.
There are thousands of facts, and different interpretations are always possible. Larry Summers found that sex differences are a very sensitive issue, which means lots of spin. So try to stand back and look at the weight and direction of your experience and whatever it is that research turns up. Use your own mind.
So what?
You'd expect men and women to be good at different things. All indications say that's so. They're certainly interested in different things. So why expect equal representation everywhere? But then it's not clear what's just about "affirmative action" or "inclusiveness" schemes intended to equalize representation.
It's not just affirmative action that has problems once you admit there are real sex differences. Antidiscrimination rules can't be enforced once you admit there are real differences because an outside enforcer can't tell the real reasons for decisions by (say) an employer. Results are all an enforcer has to go on, so if he doesn't know what the results should be then in general he can't tell whether there was a problem with how the decision was made.
But if there are real differences, why are stereotypes so bad? Why shouldn't whether someone is a man or a woman be a consideration if men and women are usually different? Stereotypes are the way we think. If on average there's a difference people expect it. If it looks like the particular case is different from the average then it's experience -- summarized in stereotypes -- that tells us how to interpret that as well. Does it make sense to root out the only way we have to think about anything? People have to be able to think with their own minds or they won't be able to think at all. Is it liberating to say they can't understand anything and subject them to the unlimited rule of experts who supposedly know better?
People are worried about oppression. Did your grandfather spend his whole life oppressing your grandmother? When you read old books -- Jane Austin or whatever -- does it strike you that the men are always abusing the women? History is presented as one long story of oppression. Everyone who gets a chance becomes an oppressor. If that's so, why think things will get better once we tell equality commissions to run everything?
Wouldn't most men and women prefer to keep on being men and women? If stereotype are just arbitrary inventions, why can we read the the Icelandic sagas or the Old Testament or the Iliad or the Tale of Genji and in each case recognize the men and women, in spite of all differences, as men and women?
And above all: if men and women are different, and they want to be able to rely on each other, shouldn't the understanding of what they're entitled to rely on reflect the differences? How else are we going to get through life?
In fact, it's the new view that's oppressive Why did all powerful institutions adopt it so quickly? It wasn't a rebellion from beneath. It was an imposition from above that the powerful adopted almost immediately after it was proposed by a small minority of activists, theoreticians and whatnot. Now it's supposed to be imposed on everyone everywhere, if Belarus has Mother's Day that has to be done away with, even though most ordinary people don't think it makes much sense.
We live in an age of globalization and big organizations -- bureaucracies and world markets -- that like to arrange everything from the standpoint that makes sense to them. The people who run things today want them to be like industrial processes run for efficiency and flexibility. Maximizing wealth and power are the highest goods. So men and women have to be a uniform mass of production and consumer units that are graded in simple, lagical and uniform ways that make an administrator's or employer's job easy. They don't want confusing differences or complicated connections.
The new view means that the only institutions allowed to have authority and matter are government and markets. Not the family, not neighborhood, not churches, not the customs and habits of the people. What's liberating about that? Why does that work out toward the benefit of the people?
There are lots of results, mostly bad:
- Women's position is weakened. They have an advantage in personal relations and domestic life. The new view makes those things lose importance. The only thing that matters are large formal public hierarchies -- careers, politics, social programs, financial hierarchies and whatnot. Men always dominate those, so too bad for women.
- The position of women with children is especially weakened. The new view says choice is the standard and it makes children the woman's choice. So if a woman has a baby that's her business and she can deal with it. Too bad for mother and child. Let them try to wheedle money out of the government.
- The new view makes women sexual commodities. Again, choice becomes the standard. Everything's supposed to be free and equal There are no strings or social expectations attached to sex. So what happens? If there's something a lot of people want, there are millions of people who can supply it, it's easily given to others, and it has no definite ties to anything else, then that's the situation in which a market springs up and the thing becomes a commodity.
So what do we do about all this?
It's hard to be dogmatic. The basic differences between the sexes are clear but they work out differently in different situations. People have to work out for themselves what's good for today.
The normal way to deal with impossibly complicated situations is through experience and the development of social customs reflecting social aspirations and experience. So my proposal is to do away with the universal demand enforced by law that men and women be the same -- to abolish the whole structure of law based on "antisexist" demands -- and see what ordinary men and women work out for themselves based on their dealings with each other. Let men be men and women be women, if that's what happens. Whatever comes out will have to be something both sexes on the whole agree to because each sex has to rely on the voluntary cooperation of the other. Why not just let that work? Why insist on a huge scheme of compulsory re-education and supervision by experts?
It's hard to tell just what the audience thought, but they seemed attentive. The questions reflected what they had been told all their lives but also seemed to reflect a real interest in finding out exactly what I was saying and how I would deal with the usual objections. On the whole, the students seemed less dogmatic than they might have been 10 or 15 years ago.
Another poll that looks into the red state/blue state divide in American politics that we've discussed before: Americans deeply split over politics. The main conclusion is that
"married and single voters live not on different planets, but different solar systems, when it comes to their politics and values … Republicans have a problem with single voters, especially single women. The Democrats' problem is with married people, especially married women."
All of which makes sense. Liberals want to get rid of traditional institutions like the family, and connections to particular people generally, as the basis for social order. They want to substitute abstract universal institutions like the world market and the bureaucratic PC welfare state. So it's not surprising that those who marry and so accept particular connections and traditional institutions as the basis for who they are should reject liberalism, while those who don't marry accept the views all current public authorities tell them to accept. (It's interesting, by the way, to see the company that American Catholics have fallen into.)
So far as I can tell, the Catholic Church has always said officially that if you're what's called "gay" you shouldn't become a priest. Also, at the highest levels the Church has always been independent enough to say, perhaps after hemming and hawing and various delays, what they think is so on important issues. That's why you have a pope and he gets his own little country. So the bottom-line position in the recent Doomsday Document on same-sex inclined seminarians isn't particularly surprising. For me, an aspect that's more interesting, at least from the standpoint of theory, is the justification offered, that
The candidate to the ordained ministry ... must reach affective maturity. Such maturity will allow him to relate correctly to both men and women, developing in him a true sense of spiritual fatherhood towards the Church community that will be entrusted to him ... those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called "gay culture" ... find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women.
So the basic point is that homosexuality undermines the sex-role and familial stereotypes that are part of what constitute the Church and good human relations within it, as demonstrated by the rule that only men can be ordained to the priesthood. For my own part, I favor those stereotypes, I think they're part of what constitute every normal human being and every possible society. Still, all respectable people and mainstream authorities insist that the opposite position is part of basic rationality and human decency. I wonder how this aspect of the Instruction will play out?
So far as I can tell, people aren't paying attention to it. The Left is mostly abusing the Church and Pope for being homophobic, while (neo)conservative Catholics are mostly paying attention to prudential aspects, what to do about gay mafias, rejection of Catholic teachings on sex and the incidence of predatory homosexuality, while perhaps worrying a bit about the plight of seminarians who are sexually attracted to other men but love Jesus and the Church and accept Catholic teachings.
The latter things are important, but they're not the whole point. If gay mafias and predatory pederasts are the problem, and loyalty, piety and devotion are what's needed to make a good priest, then an all-female priesthood would likely be a step forward. To sharpen the point a bit, to me it seems that:
I suppose my basic objection to the way the issue is discussed is the apparent assumption that rationality is a matter of finding the resources and organizational structures needed to achieve some state of affairs defined as good, so that roles should be understood in the way rationally organized bureaucracies understand them, as a matter of finding motivated and technically qualified operatives to carry out defined functions in a campaign. In fact, life and human society can't be understood that way, and in particular the Church can't be understood that way.
No big surprise: sexist homophobic fundies who leave the household chores for the little lady make better husbands and fathers. It's an interesting result, because it contradicts any number of current views:
According to a recent report, unmarried women have become the most important leftist demographic. The marriage gap for women (their greater tendency to vote Democratic when unmarried) is now 36 percentage points, and unmarried women have become the biggest part of the Democratic base -- more than blacks and Hispanics combined.
All of which makes sense. The left stands for general administrative control of social relations. It therefore appeals to aspiring controllers and their paid advisers and facilitators (government employees, academics, experts, educators, media people, elite lawyers). It also appeals to those who want a secure situation within which they can settle and make a home (women), at least when they have no one but the government to look to as a provider (unmarried women).
All that's important. The numbers of the unmarried are rising, as the report makes clear, and when added to others who don't feel they have reliable connections to American society and its traditional institutions (e.g., immigrants) are likely to have ever increasing political influence. The only bright spot in the picture is that unmarried people are less politically active, but the report, prepared by progressives, talks of various ways of changing that.
For one side (the yuppie side) of the Rise of the Unmarried Woman, see Kay Hymowitz's The New Girl Order. I suppose the consumers' guide to unmarried professional women we've been discussing elsewhere presents a flip side of the yuppie side. And for the non-yuppie side (if that's not one side too far) Theodore Dalrymple's accounts of life among British proles provide relevant info. The latter two items suggest that the farther the trend goes the more threatening general social conditions will seem to single women, so the more leftist they'll become.