A brief addendum to what I just posted about the logic underlying the Vatican’s recent linking of clerical pedophilia and the “attempt” to “simulate” the ordination of a woman: it goes without saying that there’s a close parallel between the strategy of bald assertion employed by this document, and how church leaders handle the question of gay and lesbian Catholics and our place in the scheme of salvation.
In both cases—women’s ordination and the place of gay and lesbian people in the divine plan of salvation—the strategy is overwhelmingly to assert, in the face of compelling rational arguments to the contrary, that some actions can only be “attempted” or “simulated.” But these actions will never be morally permissible or blessed by the church, the magisterial “argument” attempts to declare, because they are by their nature impossible. Impermissible. Merely simulated. Not real.
This has, for some time now, been the strategy of Catholic leaders and their apologists when it comes to dealing with the fact that some human beings (and therefore some Catholics) are born gay or lesbian. There is no opening to dialogue—as there is not with the question of women’s ordination—because the very opening to discussion, the very entertaining of rational arguments that contradict the assertion of church authority figures, undermines what is most important of all to the pastoral leaders of the church at present.
This is their right to assert that they and they alone define and declare, that they alone make the rules and regulations governing these matters. They alone have in their hands the keys to the kingdom of God, and they intend to use those keys to let in whom they will: cardinals like Bernard Law, who sheltered one serial child rapist after another and evaded the law, but not Sr. Louise Akers, who supports women’s ordination. And not gay or lesbian Catholics who celebrate the gift of our sexual orientation as a God-given gift, something that, when accepted and understood aright, unites us with the energies of divine love, rather than separating us from God.
If one thinks even glancingly about the argument of those who defend the Catholic magisterial assertion that gay acts are intrinsically disordered (and point to the disorder of gay people), what is immediately apparent is this: the argument is not an argument at all. It’s a mere assertion.
And it’s an assertion absolutely parallel to the assertion that those who ordain a woman only “simulate” or “attempt” ordination.
The logic underlying the natural-law thinking of people like Robert P. George re: homosexuality goes something like this: gay people may well engage in same-sex acts. But those acts are not “real” acts of sexual love or sexual union, since they only simulate and attempt what heterosexual acts do, when heterosexual erotic acts are oriented to procreation.
At the heart of this natural-law argument is assertion and not argument: the assertion of those who engage in heterosexual sex and see it as normative of their right to define the meaning of the sexual acts of everyone else in the world. And this assertion is not even coherent on its own terms: the moment we admit that male-female couples who are incapable of procreating are engaging in valid sexual acts while we wish to continue maintaining that same-sex couples are merely simulating valid sexual acts, then we have deconstructed the sole—the only—prop on which our natural-law argument rests.
If we permit male-female sexual acts that are incapable of procreation while denying same-sex sexual acts because they are incapable of procreation, what we are ultimately arguing is that the male-female symbolism—and not procreative possibility—is our ultimate norm for judging the moral rightness of a sexual act. We are, in other words, admitting that our assertion of the normalcy of heterosexual acts and the abnormality of gay acts that merely “simulate” what heterosexuals do is crudely biologistic: it rests on the assertion that male parts are meant to fit into female parts, and that any other use of sexuality is a misuse that attempts the impossible.
This crudely biologistic way of thinking about the morality of human sexual behavior reduces moral thinking to an argument about tabs fitting into slots designed for those slots. It departs altogether from the basis it claims to be defending—namely, that only sexual acts open to procreation are morally licit—and rests on the bare assertion that people must engage in sex as nature and God intend with the self-evident biological design of male and female bodies.
With the biological design of male-female bodies self-evident to those making this argument about natural design and the intentionality inherent in this design . . . . At the end of any discussion of contemporary Catholic natural-law arguments combining male-female complementarity with the procreative norm to outlaw homosexual acts, we always end up coming full circle:
To the assertion of the magisterium and its apologists that only the magisterium has the right to declare what is real and what is simulated, what fits together and what does not fit together, what is natural and what is unnatural. And we remain, with this crude biologistic thinking based on bald assertion, in the moral universe of Aquinas, when he decided that masturbation is a graver sin than the rape of a woman by a man, because the latter act at least puts the right tab in the right slot and leaves open the possibility of procreation.
The problem the church has at present, as long as it continues to try to convince people of the validity of its thinking in these areas, is that hardly anyone in the developed nations of the world views sexual morality from such a standpoint, and imagines that rape is a less serious sin than masturbation.
