Ruthless Misogyny: Exploiting and Erasing Women

LGBT activists have a range of strategies for discrediting women who question their goals. 

Rivka Edelman | 13 October 2014

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Janna Darnelle’s recent essay, “Breaking the Silence: Redefining Marriage Hurts Women Like Me—and Our Children,” reveals what is behind the heartwarming pictures of gay families from a mother’s point of view. As someone who was raised by a lesbian mother, I would like to weigh in. I will comment not only as a former child who was once all smiles in those pictures, but also as an academic, a woman, a mother, and a feminist.

Darnelle’s essay struck a nerve and went viral. It is not surprising that, within a few hours, LGBT activists had taken up arms against her. Keyboard warriors manned the ramparts. Soon, the usual thugs took up their clubs and pitchforks.

For those of you who avoid the subterranean landscape of online same-sex parenting debates, it is useful to be introduced to Scott “Rose” Rosenzweig, a virulently misogynistic LGBT activist. As soon as Darnelle’s essay was published, Rose went into action, darting from the blog Good As You to other sites in an effort to destroy her personally. (Rose’s obsessive internet commenting has attracted attention at other news outlets as well.) Darnelle’s ex-husband even weighed in. A helpful fellow, he left her personal information in the comments section of several activists’ blogs, including her full legal name.

Janna Darnelle wrote under a pen name in order to protect her family. Unfortunately, her ex-husband’s comments helped Scott Rose embark on a campaign of harassment and intimidation. As I will discuss below, Rose was not content to confine his character assassination to the internet; he has also contacted Darnelle’s employer in an attempt to get her fired.

Readers will recall that Darnelle’s essay discusses her divorce from her ex-husband and her struggles as a single mother to provide a sense of family. Although her conclusions are controversial, her story is well-written and articulate. Sadly, the hate-driven response from extremist LGBT activists and bloggers confirms what many women are beginning to realize. While these activists laud the ex-husband for “living his truth,” they hold women and children in such contempt that they refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Janna’s account of her difficult experiences as a mother. Although they purport to represent the disadvantaged, certain wings of the LGBT-rights movement function as all-white men’s rights groups. In our contemporary climate, these men are allowed to do great harm to women and children with impunity.

Erasing and Exploiting Women

On the most superficial level, what Darnelle described could have parallels in a heterosexual divorce. In most cases, a woman’s standard of living drops significantly after a divorce, while men’s goes up significantly. So, in that sense, there was nothing surprising in Janna’s story: the judge favored the husband, who had a steady high income.

The bloggers and activists who comment at Jeremy Hooper’s Good as You blog have used this judge’s decision to suggest that Darnelle was an unfit mother. Darnelle’s piece did not give details about the family’s custody arrangement, but I have confirmed that the mother has 60 percent custody of the children. This indicates that she has not been found to be “unfit” in any way.

The “unfit mother” trope is very important, because it helps justify taking women’s children, eggs, or the use of their uteri. Darnelle is right. Many families headed by gay male couples are built upon exploitation of women. Practically speaking, Scott Rose and his compatriots have formed a men’s rights group that seeks to use women as breeders. These egg donors and surrogate mothers supply infants for a bustling market full of same-sex couples, for whom reproduction is naturally and biologically impossible.

In the name of equality, groups such as GLAAD (which employs Jeremy Hooper as a consultant) have pushed through gender identity laws that have legally erased women. The term “woman” now legally can refer to the way that a man chooses to identify himself. Once women have been erased legally as a group and as individuals, it is not hard to erase “mothers.” This lends support to the practice of using one woman’s eggs and another woman’s womb to supply children for gay male couples, obscuring the concept of motherhood and making it seem dispensable.

A Guide to the Playbook of Extreme LGBT Activists

The publication of Janna Darnelle’s story led to a spate of blog posts full of vitriol, calling her “a pitiful creature,” accusing her of mental instability, and questioning her very existence.

With the help of her husband’s comments, Scott Rose set off to dig up and publicize as much personal information as possible about Darnelle, such as high school graduation and real estate records. Rose has harassed Darnelle with threatening messages. He has even contacted Darnelle’s employer, leaving this message on the company’s Facebook page:

This is a COMPLAINT against […], an executive assistant in […]. Under the nom de plume of “Janna Darnelle,” […] has published a horrifying, defamatory anti-gay screed on the website “Public Discourse.” The first problem would be that she is creating a climate of hostility for eventual gay elders and/or their visiting friends and relatives. The second problem would be that in the screed, she comes off as being unhinged. Her public expressions of gay-bashing bigotry are reflecting very poorly on LLC.

Sadly, all of this conforms to a predictable pattern of attack. If you study the routine that plays out whenever extreme activists like Scott Rose decide to take someone out, you will see seasoned patterns. Four steps comprise their usual character assassination.

First, they call the individual a liar and say the person’s existence cannot be verified without more data about him or her. Second, once they have such data, they write to the person’s employer to get him or her fired or professionally destroyed. Third, if they cannot get the person fired, they go after the family members. Fourth, if they cannot turn the person’s family against him or her, they blast endless broadsides against the person, trying to make him or her feel afraid or unsafe at all times.

They have a bag of rhetorical tricks as well. Learn these.

Soft derails: “What about straight divorces, adoptions, and blended families?” Such asides are meant to distract and create false equivalencies. The fact is, every single family headed by a gay male couple had to take another person’s child. In order to accept this, one must accept that men have the right to use women’s bodies and buy their children.

Shocking derails: “Look at all the bad parents that are heterosexual.” The existence of such parents, while tragic, does not give men the right to harvest eggs from women, to use them as breeders, or to take their babies and children.

Appeal to emotion: “We want children; what should we do?” This tries to make people feel guilty or shame them into handing over poor women to be used by rich men. My response: I have not asked you to solve my problems, have I? You can’t demand society legislate a special subclass of women to beused explicitly as breeders so you can feel happy.

Born this way biology: “Do not live a lie; be true to yourself.” This tactic becomes another erasure of women. In this scheme, we are asked to accept that men’s biology matters. A man who is attracted to other men could not possibly be asked to stay with his wife, because he is biologically fated to be attracted to other men’s bodies. Yet, simultaneously, we are told that women’s biology—especially their biological bonds with their children—are of no importance. Despite the scientific evidence of maternal and fetal bonding during pregnancy, and despite the long histories of women who have suffered lifelong grief because their babies were taken from them, we are expected to think of women as breed animals and to believe that men have the right to raise other people’s children.

You want to marry a man and you are a man? Society does not owe you women’s children, women’s eggs, or women’s bodies.

They Can’t Silence Us Forever

In writing this piece, I know that I risk being labeled a bigot. Like Janna Darnelle, I will probably have to endure a whole host of misogynistic terms. I’ll be called crazy, unhinged, laughable, bitter, fat, old, and ugly. In other words, I am just a woman who dares to say rich privileged white men do not have the right to women’s bodies and body parts.

Male sexual pleasure has been a protected industry for both gay and heterosexual men for ages. By and large, the industry exploits women and children. Now we have a new industry: surrogacy, or the commercial-industrial uterus. How very progressive. And at the same time, how very old and predictable.

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Rivka Edelman is a visiting professor of literature and writing. She has published widely under a different name. She is also a feminist, a children’s rights activist, and an active member in the network of adult children raised in LBGT households. This essay was originally published at Public Discourse and has been republished with permission. 

You might also like to read:

The Nobel Peace Prize they’ll never give

Breaking the silence: redefining marriage hurts women like me - and our children

Incest and pornography: more similar than we think

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Blankenhorn Abandons Ship...and Principles

Michael Cook | Monday, 25 June 2012

A marriage champion changes sides

One of the leading figures in the fight against same-sex marriage has changed his mind. Why?

The year 1957 saw the publication of a key document in the history of the sexual revolution, the Wolfenden Report. A committee of distinguished figures in British public life headed by Sir John Wolfenden, who later became director of the British Museum, studied what the law's attitude towards homosexual acts should be. It concluded that "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence". In essence, the committee endorsed the view that private morality is no concern of the law.

In 1959, to rebut the conclusions of the Wolfenden Report – which was highly controversial at the time – Lord Devlin, one of the leading jurists in the UK, wrote what has since become a classic of jurisprudence, The Enforcement of Morals. The committee got it wrong, he contended. If, in the court of public opinion, certain acts, including homosexual acts, were regarded with horror and disgust, legalising them posed the threat of social disintegration. Society could not afford to decriminalise such acts.

Devlin’s position came as something of a surprise to his colleagues. He was a man of broadly liberal sympathies and had even declared in his own testimony to the Wolfenden Committee that laws on consensual homosexual activity should be relaxed.
What must have been an even greater surprise was his recantation a few years later. On the eve of the 1967 Parliamentary debate on the Wolfenden Report’s recommendations he joined several Anglican bishops and law lords in writing a letter to the London Times:

“Seven years ago a distinguished list of signatories wrote in your columns that the existing law clearly no longer represented either Christian or liberal opinion in this country, and that its continued enforcement would do more harm than good to the community as a whole.

“We hope that in response to the Motion calling attention to the Wolfenden Committee's recommendations… Her Majesty's Government will now recognise the necessity for this reform and will introduce legislation.”

Lord Devlin’s volte face sheds some light on last week’s startling news that David Blankenhorn, who not so long ago was the face of opposition to gay marriage in the American media, has changed his mind.

Blankenhorn is the founder of the Institute for American Values and the author ofThe Future of Marriage and Fatherless America. His credentials as a defender of traditional marriage seemed impeccable. But last Friday, to the dismay of his erstwhile allies, in a New York Times op-ed he ran up a white flag. He wrote: “as a marriage advocate, the time has come for me to accept gay marriage and emphasize the good that it can do.”

Blankenhorn has not abandoned his conviction that marriage between a man and a woman is the best place to raise a child. He has a great argument:

“Marriage is the planet’s only institution whose core purpose is to unite the biological, social and legal components of parenthood into one lasting bond. Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its children.”

But he is tired of being called a bigot and so the time has come to compromise. “You can bend a little bit because we have to live together. And the endless perpetration of a culture war over this is enervating,” he told New York Times reporter Mark Oppenheimer in a radio interview. Now he hopes that he will be able to build coalitions with gays and lesbians who believe in stable marriage. Together they will beaver away at improving the woeful statistics on married life in the US.

By what mental twists and turns did he travel to this Rubicon? After all, his support for marriage between a man and a woman was -- and is -- profound and sincere. He had even been the principal witness in support of California’s ban on same-sex marriage when it was appealed before Justice Vaughn Walker in 2010. That took courage and conviction.

Blankenhorn has given three reasons for his change of heart. Two are social: the need for “comity” and “respect for an emerging consensus”, especially among “most of our national elites, as well as most younger Americans”. The third is personal: “the equal dignity of homosexual love”.

Although Devlin and Blankenhorn are separated by more than 50 years, they are at one in arguing that consensus trumps principles. In 1959, Devlin thought that homosexuality was too disruptive; in 2012 Blankenhorn thinks that opposing it is. Go with the flow. Both men use their yearning for peaceful co-existence as a justification for turning their backs on their moral principles.

It is interesting to note that in The Enforcement of Morals, Lord Devlin says that whether a society adopts monogamy or polygamy is a matter of convention. “It got there because is Christian,” he wrote, “but it remains there because it is built into the house in which we live and could not be removed without bringing it down.” Were he alive today, there is no doubt that he would be a strong supporter of gay marriage. Would polygamy come next?

But Blankenhorn takes Lord Devlin’s argument one step further. The law lord had no sympathy whatsoever for homosexuality, which he described in his book as a “miserable way of life”. But Blankenhorn has always accepted that homosexual love is equal in dignity to heterosexual love. This was the fatal flaw in his stand against gay marriage, the leak in the dyke which allowed the waves of virulent criticism to break in and sweep him away.

If homosexual acts are equal in dignity to marital intercourse, then the law has no business criminalising them. If they are not criminally wrong, then they must (at least to the average Joe) be morally upright. If they are right, it is sheer bigotry and discrimination to hamper their expression in any way. The logic is overwhelming.

The Blankenhorn incident is a painful reminder of one of the main failings of our culture – its inability to set boundaries to sexual expression. Fundamentally this has happened because people have come to believe that they can define the purpose of sex for themselves. On Tuesday, it could be love; on Wednesday lust; on Saturday pleasure; or on Sunday simply curiosity. Sex’s link with children and the complementarity of male and female is something incidental, almost irrelevant, to the way we should live our sexuality.

There are two lessons here. First, unless opponents of gay marriage have firm views on the immorality of homosexual acts, it is almost inevitable that they will follow David Blankenhorn into a grudging acceptance of a new social paradigm. They must hold firm to the truth that homosexual love is not equal in dignity to married love. Second, those views need to be articulated in a way which does not humiliate or vilify homosexuals but gives a clear account of why homosexual acts are an inherently disordered use of sexuality. There is a lot of work to be done here.

And lest anyone else think that sharing marriage with gays will save it as a social institution, here are some bitter observations about Blankenhorn from Richard Kim, executive editor of the leading progressive magazine The Nation. He thinks that the new player on the gay marriage bench is just as “regressive, archaic and punitive” as he was when he opposed it. All that stuff about what kind of marriage produces the best results for children is irrelevant. “Blankenhorn sees an inner circle of honor and benefits that should be attached to marriage, and he’s now extended that circle to include gays and lesbians," Kim writes. "I want to scramble that circle.”

I wish David Blankenhorn the best of luck in building a coalition with the likes of Richard Kim.


Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet, where this article was first posted.

Sexual Revolution and the Marriage Crisis

Here Michael Cook of MercatorNet excerpts and comments on the republication by Sandro Magister of the blog Chiesa, of a 1995 introduction by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to a Vatican document about homosexuality.  

Mary Eberstadt, in Adam and Eve After the Pill, defines the sexual revolution of the 1960s-1970s "as the ongoing destigmatization of all varieties of non marital sexual activity, accompanied by a sharp rise in such sexual activity, in diverse societies around the world (most notably in the most advanced)." Her book's main focus is on the rise of the pill, along with universal legal access to abortion, which enabled the sexual revolution with all its consequences for marriage and families, children and women that she chronicles.

The HHS mandate that requires employers to pay for contraceptive and abortion drugs as if they were part of health care and regardless of the employer's religious or conscientious objections, points to two distinct but related issues, as I argued below.  One has to do with the ever-expanding power of the state and its suppression of religious freedom as it defines what is morally acceptable and what is not, what counts as a religious organization or employee, and so on.  The other is the substantive issue of contraception (not to mention abortion) itself, both in terms of its social consequences and its relation to human sexuality and the nature of the human person.

A similar distinction arises in the case of homosexuality and same-sex marriage.  The latter fundamentally transforms the nature of marriage itself, as understood universally for millennia since the earliest surviving legal codes.  Like contraception and the sexual revolution in general, it separates sex from conjugal marriage (which depends on the only kind of sexual activity capable of generating new life) and both from children. So the question, "What is marriage?" is fundamental to any serious discussion of "same-sex marriage" where the sexual relations involve directly and necessarily contradict the nature of marriage as understood until a few years.  If marriage is separated in principle (per se as opposed to per accidens) from the bearing and raising of children that result from the sexual activity of the two parents who made them, it becomes something else entirely, something in which the desires of adults - never before a criterion for inclusion in or exclusion from marriage - replace the needs and interests of children as primary matters for concern by society and state.

As we have seen in a growing number of court decisions, government regulations and legislation in Canada, the UK, California and Massachusetts, once marriage is redefined in this way, the state becomes involved in redefining sexual morality and in telling schools, parents, and even churches what they may teach to children about at least some of the sexual practices and relationships newly destigmatized by the sexual revolution.

Since this new intrusiveness of the state and its promulgation of a new orthodoxy in matters of sexual morality contradicts the millennia-old religious teaching of the world's major religions, there is inevitably a Clash of Orthodoxies in which the state's secularist orthodoxy is imposed ever more coercively in every area of life.  Douglas Farrow has explored this phenomenon - the dependence of the sexual revolution, and particularly same-sex marriage, on a Leviathan state - in relation to Canada, where the Church's traditional teachings on sexual morality have effectively been criminalized.  As he shows, the redefinition of marriage spells the end of marriage as a social institution - our most child-friendly institution - and this in turn requires the hypertrophy of the state and the suppression of religious liberty and the rights of parents.  As another Canadian writer, Michael Coren, put it, Canadian legislators may pass a law declaring that 2+2=5 and criminalize the teaching of anything to the contrary, but such a measure can only be imposed by strong and pervasive state power that intrudes into every area of civil society, destroying religious freedom in the process and setting up a state secularist religion as the new and exclusive orthodoxy.

As in the case of the contraceptive mandate, there is another aspect of the argument.  The traditional understanding of homosexuality (and other "disordered" sexual desires and activities) does not rest on biblical revelation alone - as an unfathomable command of God that requires our obedient but unreasoning assent - but on an understanding of the nature of the human person and of human sexuality.  It rests on a metaphysical, not simply a physical understanding of nature, on reason informed but not replaced by revelation.  As in the case of contraception, the substantive argument cannot be ducked indefinitely.  No amount of emphasis on the Church's oft-repeated and demonstrated love and compassion for homosexuals, her opposition to violence and unjust discrimination against them, will in any case placate those activists who insist on building a "wall of hate" to stigmatize those who argue on any grounds whatever for traditional marriage.  In their view, to avoid being called a hate-filled bigot and worse, you must assent to the end of marriage as it has been understood across time and cultures throughout the world until they launched their campaign.

The philosophical origins of the marriage crisis, according to Joseph Ratzinger

Michael Cook | 18 May 2012 | 

Joseph Ratzinger has one of the clearest and most insightful minds on the planet. Nowadays his day job is being Pope, which involves numerous duties apart from writing academic treatises. However, back in 1995, he penned an introduction to a Vatican document about homosexuality which seems prophetic, although perhaps it's just logical. The paragraphs below have been reprinted from the blog Chiesa, written by the "Vaticanologist" of the Italian newspaper L'espresso, Sandro Magister.

It is no coincidence that the spread and growing social acceptance of homosexuality should be accompanied by a serious crisis in the area of marriage and the family, by a widespread mentality hostile toward life as also by a frightening sexual freedom.

Without wanting to contest the plurality of causes of this phenomenon, it can be said that at its root is a "new" and completely transformed understanding of human sexuality.

The "sexual revolution" unleashed in the 1960s was intended to "free" human sexuality from the straightjacket of traditional morality. It began to sing the praises of sexuality as a simple consumer good and means for obtaining pleasure. The satisfaction of the sexual impulse was propagandized as the way to happiness and to the true development of the personality. Values like self-control and chastity were accepted less and less. Many maintained that sexual continence was unnatural and unlivable. Others in turn sought to transfer human sexuality completely into the realm of the "private" and the "subjective": if two persons love each other and want to express this in the language of love, why should they be prevented from doing so?

Subsequently the exercise of sexuality was detached more and more from marriage, and above all with the global spread of contraception, from procreation. It was asserted that the "old" understanding of sexuality corresponded to another culture, which in the meantime had been transformed.

Even the biblical affirmations had to be considered in the context of the time and situation back then, and could not be understood as "atemporal" moral truths. This applied in particular to the passages in which the Bible speaks of homosexual practices.

The traditional argument, according to which sexual behavior is immoral if it contradicts the "nature" of man, was abandoned. What is "natural" or "unnatural" would also always depend on the respective culture and subjective sensibility of a people. And moreover, homosexuality could also be found in nature. Many designated the different abnormal forms of sexuality, including homosexuality, as simple "variations" of nature, which should be accepted and approved: just as there are persons with black, white, or red skin, just as some use their right hands and others their left, so also many would have a disposition to heterosexual love, others to homosexual love.

Behind these and similar ideas is concealed a central problem of morality: what is the nature of human sexuality? Or more in general: what is the nature of man? And when does an act correspond to this nature?

If the concept of nature, as in the approaches mentioned above, is understood only in a physical-empirical way, in fact it is not possible to reach a univocal judgment on the moral value of an act that would transcend the different cultures.

The concept of nature, which underlies the whole of tradition and also the magisterial pronouncements of the [Catholic] Church (cf. "Veritatis Splendor," nos. 46-53), is nevertheless not of a physical character, but metaphysical: an act has been and is considered as natural when it is in harmony with the essence of man, with his being as intended by God. On the basis of this being, which shines in the order of creation – and is reinforced by revelation – reason can deduce the imperative of duty, above all if it is illuminated by faith. In nature, or rather in creation, man can recognize a "logos," a meaning and purpose, which leads him to true self-realization and to his happiness, and which ultimately is founded in the will of God.

In the loss of this metaphysical conception of nature, which is accompanied by an almost total abandonment of the theology of creation, is to be sought one of the main causes of the moral crisis of our days.

If human duty, in fact, is no longer seen as anchored in the being and therefore in the wisdom of the creator, there remains only the alternative that is derived from human wisdom. But then it is the work of man, subjected to the change of time, able to be reshaped and manipulated. Good and evil, then, would ultimately be decided by the majority. Then "pressure groups," which are able to guide mass opinion, have great prospects of success...

In the years after the publication of this letter [in 1986], the influence of the currents mentioned above has not diminished. In public opinion, homosexual behavior seems to be substantially accepted already. The pressure of some groups, which are asking for legal equivalence for the forms of homosexual life with the traditional form of marriage, is becoming ever larger in various states, above all in the United States of America and in Europe. Such attempts demonstrate the relevance of the letter.


(Excerpted from the introduction to: Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ""Lettera sulla cura pastorale delle persone omosessuali, 1 ottobre 1986. Testo e commenti," Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Vatican City, 1995/2012)

The End of Relativism?

The Catholic Thing has followed up Father James Schall's gloomy prognostication of a week ago about how Catholics were being driven to the margins of public life by legal persecution, with an essay by jurisprudence professor Hadley Arkes. Discussing the California law SB48, which directs schools in the state to give only favorable accounts of certain groups. To the protected groups already in the Education Code, SB48 adds "Pacific Islanders, European Americans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans."  Moreover, teachers and administrators were enjoined not to offer any instruction or “sponsor any activity that reflects adversely upon persons on the basis of race or ethnicity, gender, religion, disability, nationality, sexual orientation.”

In other words, SB48 outlaws teaching anything like the traditional view of homosexual behavior, substituting by legal mandate a view only recently adopted on a significant scale about the moral equivalence of all kinds of noncoercive sexual behavior among consenting adults.

As Arkes argues, the issue is not one of tolerating the expression of diverse views, but precisely their suppression. Children in California are to be taught, and taught only, the view of sexual morality endorsed by the state.

Virtue ethicists such as Michael Sandel have long taken issue with the modern liberal view of morality according to which the state should remain neutral in such matters, leaving such matters to individual conscience. Courts have attempted to take this line of moral neutrality, as he points out in the case of the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage (which Sandel supports)but have come off the fence, celebrating in that case same-sex marriage as a public good. Sandel's argument is not so much that the supposed neutrality of this kind of liberalism is wrong, as that it is impossible.

The relativist argument, according to which states should avoid such judgments and leave them to individuals, is not sustainable. As opponents of abortion rights (and Sandel) argue, the question of whether abortion involves the intentional killing of an innocent human being cannot be a matter simply of individual judgment. In the slavery, if it is the wrongful coercion of another human being cannot be a matter of individual choice. To adapt a pro-'choice' bumper sticker, if you don't like abortion/slavery, don't have an abortion or own a slave.

So the relativist argument for tolerance of divergent views is best seen as an entering wedge. It may gain toleration in law and society for a behavior that has been condemned. But the aim is not tolerance or a relativist neutrality about moral judgments, but the reverse. The ground of state neutrality, as Lincoln argues with respect to slavery, is not coherent or tenable.

Similarly, as the tenor and tone of SB48 make clear, the rights of parents or of private schools will offer no haven from those who wish to impose the state's new morality on children. I am not a lawyer and I do not know how well the First Amendment's protection of religious liberty will hold against the state's bar on what it regards as “any sectarian or denominational doctrine or propaganda contrary to law.” Besides, should only people of faith have the right to dissent from the state's moral teaching? As Arkes concludes below, "The question finally is whether there will be freedom to hold back from the moral teaching being planted in the law: Will it still be legitimate in this country to call into moral question the homosexual life?"

The question, too, is not one of whether it is correct to call homosexual behavior into question on moral grounds - a question for moral theologians to debate, as well as moral philosophers or anyone else. It is whether it shall be legal to expose school students to the evident fact that teachings on the topic contrary to the state's recent ethical innovations are not so easily to be dismissed as "sectarian or denominational doctrine or propaganda;" They have been maintained by the great traditions of faith and philosophy over millennia - traditions from which California seeks to "protect" its students.

Here is Professor Arkes's essay:




From California: Another Front in the Culture Wars
By Hadley Arkes
Tuesday, September 27, 2011

From California again we get a glimpse of the future – or the future that a political class is consciously seeking to prepare for us in reshaping the culture. During the summer the legislature enacted, and Governor Jerry Brown signed into law, SB48, as an amendment to “the Education Code, relating to instruction.” That Code had already made ample provision to instruct the children of California in the contributions made by all racial and ethnic groups supplying votes for politicians. But there was an appreciation also for the contributors who were “entrepreneurs” and labor unions, and whose stories deserved to be told. With SB48 the legislature took a further step by adding: “Pacific Islanders, European Americans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans.”

The schools were directed to give only favorable accounts of these groups in telling the story. But on the other side, teachers and administrators were enjoined not to offer any instruction or “sponsor any activity that reflects adversely upon persons on the basis of race or ethnicity, gender, religion, disability, nationality, sexual orientation.” There is not the least doubt about the intention to enforce this law. Nor is there much doubt about the main target of the law. SB48 bars “any sectarian or denominational doctrine or propaganda contrary to law.”

For religious teaching, read: any teaching offering a claim to truth rivaling the moral teaching in the law. That alternative moral teaching will be regarded as merely beliefs of a “denominational” character or a version of “propaganda.”

Make no mistake, Fr. Schall was quite right in his recent column: We are in the midst of a culture war. And a chief purpose of that war is to make it untenable to teach Catholic doctrine in public settings, or for Catholic institutions, in their work, to respect that teaching. But we would fall into a gentle mistake if we assumed that we are facing mainly the force of “relativism,” or that the appeal now is to the rights of parents to provide for the moral shaping of their children.

Yes, in part, to both. The force of relativism was felt first in teaching the wrongness of casting moral judgments, including judgments on the “styles” of sexuality. But there is nothing relativistic about the law in California. There is no willingness to tolerate the views of those who bear moral reservations about the homosexual life. The people who brought forth this law would draw on the “logic of morals” as Aquinas had it, and as it will ever be: they would commend and even require what is “right,” and they would condemn and forbid what they regard as “wrong.
”
Lincoln had all of this long ago: “If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away.” He could conceivably grant then the authority to bar the abolitionist literature from the mails – if slavery were right. And if it were wrong to cast adverse moral judgments on the homosexual life, the understandings supporting those judgments could indeed be driven out of the schools.

The classic cases on the rights of parents and education were Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925). In Meyer, the Supreme Court struck down a statute that forbade the teaching of any language but English to students in grammar school. In Pierce, a statute in Oregon barred students from attending private schools between the ages of eight and sixteen. Justice McReynolds insisted that there was no “power in the state to standardize” children in this way, and that “the child is not the mere creature of the state.”

But people tend to forget that McReynolds insisted at the same time that the State had a legitimate authority to regulate all schools, public and private, to insure, for example, that teachers are of “good moral character and patriotic disposition,” and that “certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship must be taught.” And so, the people governing the schools of Massachusetts point out that same-sex marriage is now part of the law: Students should come then to understand and absorb the moral understandings contained in the law.

The state has, after all, the rightful authority to insure that any firm or association under the laws is formed on legitimate terms for legitimate ends. It will not give a license to Fagin’s school for pickpockets, and it will not even license certain marriages. Anyone who takes education seriously will have to be attentive to moral education, including the moral ends of a “technical” education. (“For what purpose are you designing those trains: to speed people to their legitimate work – or to gas chambers?”)

This question will not be solved then simply by unfurling the banner of the “rights of parents” and private schools. The legislature of California has already noted that the new law would apply to “any aspect of the operation of alternative and charter schools.” If Catholic schools continue to teach doctrines now regarded as subversive, parents will not find a path of escape by moving into the enclave of Catholic schools.

The question then is not mainly about the rights of parents and schools. The question finally is whether there will be freedom to hold back from the moral teaching being planted in the law: Will it still be legitimate in this country to call into moral question the homosexual life?


Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College. His most recent book is Constitutional Illusions & Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law.

© 2011 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org
Retrieved September 27, 2011 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/

Legal Persecution

A gloomy prognosis of the growing legal persecution of the Church in the U.S. by one of our leading intellectuals.

THURSDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER 2011
Legal Persecution

By James V. Schall, S. J.

Catholics have little legal future in this country except as a narrow, strictly defined sect. Catholic law schools, lawyers, and politicians have proved mostly ineffective or indeed abettors in the process by which “human rights” are used, step by seemingly logical step, to eliminate Catholics from the public order. Much has already occurred. The “Catholics” who are the prime target are those who hold and live the central teachings of reason and faith. Those who do not, matter little.

Addressing a new Health and Human Services mandate concerning availability of abortions, contraceptives, and other such items, the Auxiliary Bishop of Washington, Barry Knestout, wrote:
In implementing the new health care reform law, HHS issued a rule that would require private health care plans nationwide to cover contraception and sterilization as “preventive services” for women. The mandate includes abortifacients, which have the capacity to terminate a pregnancy in early weeks. Never before has the federal government required private health plans to include such coverage.

The District of Columbia Human Rights Commission has interfered in the Catholic University of America’s policy of same-sex dorms for college students. This policy is “sex discrimination,” not permitted in the District. These and other governmental initiatives are only the beginning.
Almost everything is now in place for a full-scale legal persecution of the Church, all concocted under the aegis of government protection of “human rights.” The meaning of “rights” the government itself defines in the name of “freedom” and “equality.” It is noble-sounding, but as Plato said: “Entreaties of sovereigns are mixed with compulsion.” This admonition includes democratic sovereigns.

World News Daily (September 17) reports that PayPal investigates Christian Internet sources said to be involved in “hate language” because of their criticism of certain gay activities. Addressing this issue is not affirmation of a “right to speak,” but a subject of state investigation. Certain central teachings of Christianity will be legally prohibited as threats to “human rights.”

A situation analogous to that in China can be foreseen: an “official” break-away church that follows government decrees and an underground church that still maintains the central truths of reason and faith. One suspects that the degree of hatred for the Church is more widespread and deeper than we like to admit. The situation, however, is not so different from what Scripture would have us expect.

Things change almost too rapidly for us to appreciate their scope. With legalized same-sex “marriages,” as they are equivocally called, in which children are adopted, we will have mandates to educate them in Catholic schools as if no problem exists. The children, legally deprived of a mother or a father, will be presented as from “normal” families. Several writers have suggested that parents teaching children that problems exist with homosexual life or adoption will be investigated for “child abuse.”

The child-abuse cases themselves have shown how to undermine the financial stability of the Church. In addition to properly investigating malefactors, legal procedures have permitted lawyers to make enormous wealth from Church funds. Ironically, since most of these abuses were rooted in homosexuality, not pedophilia, the corporate Church on the one side is required to pay for the abuses and on the other is forbidden to say that anything is wrong with this form of life.

The legal undermining of the family as a favored, natural union of wife and husband is far advanced. Abortion is an established “right.” Few really care about the millions of human infants slaughtered. Opposition to this system is considered “inhuman” and, again ironically, “against women.” What is defined as “human” is now solely a matter of civil law. Relativism is the established religion of the realm, backed by force.

Unlike other churches, which have made their obeisance to the state on these questions, the Catholic Church is mostly isolated. It has been a “brilliant” display in making it so. This undermining man’s normal being has been carried out in the name of “human rights,” in the very language the Church has insisted on using in order to protect human life and family.

Bishop Knestout recommended sending e-mails to HHS to protest the imposition of these standards on Catholics by the federal government. The issue is really more massive. One wonders if the bishops should not be preparing people for much more positive and aggressive persecution of which the legal step is but the first.

Constitutional assurances of free speech, free exercise of religion, and limited government no longer carry much weight against entrenched “democratic” ideologies, something both John Paul II and Benedict XVI foresaw. Few of us like to think this way about America, no doubt. We recall the Polish bishops before 1939. But our “invasion” does not come from the outside. It comes from within our souls, as all disorders of polity do.


James V. Schall, S.J., a professor at Georgetown University, is one of the most prolific Catholic writers in America. His most recent book is The Mind That Is Catholic.

© 2011 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org

The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.
Retrieved September 22, 2011 from http://ht.ly/1eMJd4

Of a Letter and a Report

I am trying to retire from my position at the University of Hawaii and move to Ave Maria, FL. Easier said than done, given the state of the housing market and other complications.

It all makes it hard to give other matters that are normally up my alley the attention they deserve. Fortunately, there are many critiques of the rude and patronizing open letter addressed to Speaker John Boehner, in which liberal Catholic academics recommend that Boehner consult Catholic social teaching and change his views and votes on social policy to bring them into line with it. (And see today's Washington Post op-ed by Ed Gillespie at http://wapo.st/lhcISE.)

As others have pointed out, the Church proposes general principles, like solidarity, subsidiarity, and the "preference for the poor," but does not take positions on matters of prudential judgment as to how best to translate those principles into policy. That is the laity's responsibility. But many liberal Catholics cannot conceive of a preference for the poor meaning anything other, in practice, than support for the social program of the Democratic Party.

In the same way, adherence to the Catholic principle of 'social justice' is taken to mean support for the social-democratic welfare state. As Gillespie says, "To some liberal Catholics, social justice is measured almost solely in terms of federal spending. Their formula is simple — those who advocate higher taxes and more spending are for more social justice than those who advocate lower taxes and less spending." Contrast the way Catholic theologian Michael Novak defines social justice as a virtue indispensable for the preservation of liberty, as the virtue by which "citizens join together to do for themselves what in earlier systems they had to turn to the state to do" (The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p.86.)

Or consider the way the U.K.’s Centre for Social Justice exercises its preferential option for the poor. It “highlights the work of profoundly differing and unique small voluntary organisations and charities” and takes the view that “The war on poverty can be won if government gets off the back of the armies of compassion and helps them to succeed” (http://bit.ly/iZnjuG).

In this respect, it is interesting, if unsurprising to note not only how much more coverage the media (including the Washington Post) gave to the letter compared with the standing ovation Boehner received from the 2,000 graduating students at the Commencement ceremony, but also the ignoring of the reasons that catholic University of America invited Boehner to address the students and their families in the first place. As Gillespie explains, "One of the reasons CUA honored Boehner is his tireless commitment to the Consortium of Catholic Academies in Washington, which keeps inner-city Catholic schools in the District operating. Over the past decade, he’s raised millions of dollars to provide children from poor families, regardless of religion, a chance to attend better schools. He also co-authored the bill to save the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program (enacted as part of the budget continuing resolution) to help meet 'the desperate needs of the poor' for quality education."

The letter was meant, of course, as a counter to the criticisms from bishops and faithful Catholics of those 'Catholic' politicians who support abortion. A kind of equivalence is suggested here between the pro-life position of those who oppose abortion and the 'pro-life' position of those who want to increase or maintain Federal programs intended to help the poor. It is sometimes expressed in the charge that the Church only cares about children until they are born. The charge is of course absurd, since the Catholic Church is second to none in her charitable efforts on behalf of poor women and their children. But the more pernicious suggestion is that policies that maintain the legal right of women to kill their unborn children are morally on a par with policies that opponents claim are antithetical to the needs of the poor.

Abortion is, as the Church and reason teach, a grave evil in all circumstances, violating as it does the exceptionless norm against the intentional killing of the innocent. On the other hand, what helps the poor as opposed to reinforcing dependency, what supports the capacity of families and communities to care for their own members as opposed to disempowering them by substituting state provision, and so forth, are not matters of principle like the norm against killing the innocent. They are matters on which people of good faith, and of the Catholic faith, can and do disagree. In short, abortion is always and as a matter of principle morally wrong. What actually helps the poor as opposed to claiming to is a matter of judgment. The two are not equivalent.

The other issue on which I would have commented more fully is the report to the bishops from John Jay College about clerical sexual abuse. Here I disagree with those who say that the report cost a lot of money but came up with nothing of interest. It did help to refute widespread misconceptions on the issue, especially those of the people who want to use it to push the Church in the direction of reforms that they favor for other reasons (and not to prevent future abuse). The report stresses the need to explain why abuse, always a behavior of a tiny minority of priests, increased dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s and then declined equally dramatically from the mid-1980s to a very low level today. Clearly the standard liberal explanations have nothing to offer in this regard. Celibacy has been around for a millennium and an all-male priesthood from before the beginnings of the Christian tradition - neither can explain this Sixties phenomenon.

For that matter, it seems especially absurd to blame the spike in abuse on the power differential between the exalted position of priests and the disempowered laity - such clericalist tendencies were anything but hallmarks of the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, precisely a time when when they came in for intense criticism. Also, though the report does not spell this out, sexual abuse occurs in every area of social life where children and adolescents are under the authority of other people than their parents, and at much higher rates than in the Catholic Church - like public schools, Protestant communions, Jewish congregations, Boy Scouts, and step-families. The focus on the Catholic Church seems to be driven by those with another agenda than real concern for victims - like accessing the Church's perceived deep pockets (as compared with the thousands of different Protestant denominations), or desire to bring the Church down by any means necessary. Indeed children and adolescents are probably safer from sexual abuse in the organizations of the Catholic Church than anywhere else in society, including their own families.

The other issue is the one of homosexuality. Here the report is problematic in the way it accepts a radical separation of homosexual activity from homosexual self-identity or orientation. Even though the vast majority of sexual abuse was of a homosexual kind, the report claims, it has nothing to do with homosexuality. Some 80% of clerical abuse in these years was of a homosexual nature, but those who committed it, we are to believe, were not for the most part homosexuals. The analogy with prisons, where sexual activity is of necessity (and opportunity) homosexual in nature is used here to make the point that engaging in homosexual activity does not make you a homosexual in the way that committing adultery or murder makes you an adulterer or a murderer, even if you only do it once.

One thing that makes this perspective problematic is that sexual 'orientation' or habitual desires are not sinful, in Catholic teaching, but only sexual acts of whatever kind that take place outside marriage and/or are in principle (and not just contingently) inept for generation. Being homosexual, in the sense of having persistent sexual attraction toward those of one's own sex, may or may not be a matter of choice. Human beings are polymorphously perverse in their sexuality, according to Freud. But to make your sexual desires central to your identity and, even more, to act on them is a matter of choice.

In this sense, there seems to be something odd about asking a man who has sex with male adolescents whether he considers himself to be gay. Clearly one can be homosexual and not engage in abuse of pubescent boys and adolescents - most homosexuals, including homosexual priests, fall into this category. But can you engage in homosexual activity of this kind and claim not to be homosexual because you do not identify yourself this way? Can one engage in sexual activities with children and claim not to be a pedophile on the grounds that you do not consider yourself one, but simply take sex where you find it?

It seems that the report is correct to point to the convergence of factors in the Sixties that loosened the constraints on sexual behavior throughout society. In this case, the 'sexual revolution' combined with the abandonment of pious practices and disciplines in seminaries and among priests, with the sense that everything was up for grabs in matters of faith and morals in the post-Vatican II Catholic world. (Here it is necessary to say that the catastrophes that struck the Church in this period - the liturgical abuses, the musical and architectural horrors, the collapse of older religious orders, especially of women, into permanent opposition to the Church and ever diminishing numbers, the development of academic theologians into a self-proclaimed alternative magisterium - were not inevitable outcomes of Vatican II itself and none finds warrant in the actual documents of the Council.)

It is a persisting irony that the very dissident liberals who most warmly embraced these tendencies that were part of the cultural and social context of the sex abuse scandal are the same people who make most noise about the abuse they (albeit indirectly and unintentionally) helped facilitate. They are the ones who seek to use the scandal to further their own destructive agenda. (See any issue of Catholic National Reporter.)

Sexuality and Marriage

The argument about same-sex marriage often seems to turn on such questions as whether homosexuality is a choice or is innate; whether it is changeable or fixed; and whether it necessarily defines one's identity or whether that is itself a choice, independently of the other questions.

The literature, scientific and autobiographical, is divided on all these questions. But in any case, how are these issues relevant to the question of how, as a matter of law and policy, we should understand marriage today?

Throughout history many people who experienced same-sex attraction have been married--in the traditional sense of marriage as a one-flesh union of a woman and a man such that any children resulting from that union are, and are understood to belong to and to be the responsibility of the two parents who made them--legally, socially, emotionally. Marriage in its traditional sense never excluded or included people on the basis of their particular sexual desires, which might be more or less fluid and could change from one period of one's life to another. Marriage in this sense was consistent with Freud's description of us humans as "polymorphously perverse."

Marriage has thus been understood as resting on the conjugal or marital act, the only kind of sexual intercourse that has the capacity to generate new life. It is about sex of a particular kind and the children that may result from it. If one partner refused to or was physically incapable of performing the act, the marriage was not "consummated" and was null and void.

In this understanding of marriage, it makes no sense to ask whether it is acceptable to exclude same-sex partners from the institution of marriage. It would be like asking if death were OK. It is just a fact of life and human biology that we all will die whether we like the fact or not. Similarly, the kind of conjugal act from which children may result is simply impossible for couples of the same sex. This does not mean that the partners in a traditional marriage must, or were ever required to be fertile. The point was that all children were generated by the particular sex act on which marriage was founded, not that all married adults produced children (a point that seems impenetrable to Judge Vaughan in California and to the state Supreme Court in Massachusetts).

How one comes to be homosexual, whether it is a choice or not, whether it is a fluid or fixed aspect of one's sexuality, whether one chooses (or cannot but) make one's sexual preferences central to one's identity, all this is secondary to the question of whether the state should change the millennia-old understanding of marriage to make sexual desire a criterion for inclusion or exclusion.

The questions are nevertheless ones of great interest, not least to those for whom they are pressing and personal matters. In this context, Melinda Selmys has posted on the excellent MercatorNet site a thoughtful, nuanced essay drawing on her own experience. To a field that generates more heat than light, and where reason and evidence typically are replaced by personal abuse and intemperate attribution of base motives, she has contributed a piece worthy of serious discussion. Here it is:

Melinda Selmys | Wednesday, 24 November 2010

Reorienting sexuality
The idea that sexual orientation is fixed is based on an impoverished view of the human person, says a former lesbian.


If you have undergone modern sexual education, followed the gay-marriage debates on television, or simply unconsciously imbibed the sexual ethos of this culture, you are probably familiar with the idea of sexual orientation. This is the theory that every human being has an innate, fixed set of sexual attractions either for the opposite sex, for their own sex, or for both.
This is the Western understanding of homosexuality that has developed over the course of the past couple of hundred years. It was first formulated around the time of the French Revolution, and gained currency with the rise of the psychological sciences during the twentieth century. For about a hundred years now the fundamental point of disagreement has centered around the question of whether same-sex attraction is a biological trait, or a psychological disorder. At the moment, most gay-rights rhetoric assumes the former (though this is by no means universally believed within the gay community) while most conservative organizations assume the latter.

What remains unexamined is the assumption that this is an accurate way of envisioning human sexuality in the first place. There has been some work by feminist and lesbian scholars suggesting that female sexuality, at least, is more fluid than “biology” suggests. The terms “LUG” (Lesbian Until Graduation) and “hasbian” both bear tribute to the fact that some women experience same-sex attractions at a particular point in their lives, and then transition into a heterosexual identity without suffering any psychological upheaval. Other women may comfortably embrace a heterosexual identity and lifestyle for years, only to have same-sex attractions arise late in life.

"I was certain that I was a lesbian"

I fell into the former category: earlier in my life, I was certain that I was a lesbian. I was secretly involved in a lesbian relationship for years, and my attempts to date boys on the side ranged from dismal to disastrous. I found physical intimacy with men uncomfortable at best. When I became a Catholic, I still believed that homosexuality was immutable, and I did not believe in “praying away the gay”. It came as something of a surprise, therefore, when I found myself falling in love, and being physically attracted towards a man.

Bisexuality would not seem to account for the change. I have not experienced on-going, relatively equal attraction for both sexes. There has been a substantial, noticeable, and decisive swing in the attractions themselves. I would now find the prospect of sexual involvement with a woman just as uncomfortable and sexually unappealing as I once found the idea of intimacy with men.

There is some acknowledgment of this sort of thing in the scientific literature, but almost never discussed in the public forum. The dogmatic assertion that if you are gay once, you will always be gay, overshadows the real experience of women who have undergone a change in their sexual attractions.

Although this experience is more common among women, there is evidence that some men have similar experiences. David Morrison, in Beyond Gay, describes a change in his attractions following a religious conversion. Other writers, usually evangelical Christians, have reported a similar experience. On the other side of the fence there are men like Jack Malebranche, whose book Androphilia describes his homosexuality in terms of preference and choice. It was something that he tried because he was “a kid who wanted to try everything that everyone else was afraid of”, and found that he liked it.

The grace of God and electroshock therapy

The primary problem with the idea of innate gayness is that it undermines the integration of sexuality into a complete human identity. Those who place homosexuality at the center of their identity do so by choice, not by necessity: they choose to prioritize sexuality above other aspects of the self, and to build up an identity from that foundation. Other people may place different concerns – ideology, religion, culture, family – on a more important footing.

Unfortunately, the current models of homosexuality deny the legitimacy of such choices. Literature on the subject routinely claims that if someone experiences homosexual desire, it is deeply injurious not to pursue that desire. Other considerations are to be modified or cast aside in order to develop a gay or lesbian identity.

Most of the literature that takes this line justifies it by pointing to “cures” that have proved ineffective and damaging. The twentieth century produced some truly macabre methods to change same-sex attraction: testicular transplants, electroshock therapies, Clockwork Orange style brainwashing experiments, and various forms of psychosocial humiliation have all been tried, with predictably bad results.

From this arises the assumption that anyone who changes their sexuality must be doing something equally self-deforming and bizarre. I was put into this pigeonhole once when I was portrayed in a made-for-TV movie; the character loosely based on myself had suffered electroshock therapy and was married to a man who looked more like a woman than she did. In reality, I’ve had no contact with shrinks, or with ex-gay self-help groups, or with straight-boot-camp, and I’m married to a man who resembles a Byzantine icon of an Old Testament patriarch.

For me, as for others, it was a matter of other things being more important than sexuality. My ideological and philosophical identity was always the most fundamental aspect of my self; when my ideology shifted, my sexuality followed it quite naturally, without any need for bizarre or damaging outside interventions.

Obviously this is not the case for everyone, but it is common enough to seriously undermine the idea of a fixed sexual orientation.

Shifting attractions

Sexual orientation cannot be reduced either to biology or to psychology, because sexual attraction cannot be so reduced. Attraction is a complicated matter. People are attracted to others who share a similar sense of aesthetics, to people with similar ideological convictions, to those who resemble characters from movies or books that are personally appealing, to those with whom they have close emotional relationships, and so forth. We are not like animals whose attractions are based solely on the length of the dominant male’s eye-stalks, or the color of his plumage.

Everyone has had the experience of being sexually attracted to someone, and then having the fires doused upon learning that the object of their affections has odious habits or holds an offensive set of beliefs. Most people have also had the experience of finding someone physically unappealing at first, and of coming to feel differently as an emotional relationship develops.

To a certain degree this is the result of natural change, but it is also influenced by one’s choices. Emotional relationships develop because of the choice to spend time with another. Ideological positions are a collaboration between the intellect and the will. Aesthetics can change as a result of deliberately seeking or eschewing certain types of beauty. Human personality is not fixed; it is malleable. It may not be possible to make radical changes all at once, but the will is much more powerful than the rhetoric of biological determinism gives it credit for.

This is just as true on the level of classes of people as it is on the level of individuals. A man who is originally repulsed by people of different races can teach himself to see the beauty in those who do not resemble him. A woman who finds men frightening or off-putting can develop an increased understanding of, and respect for masculinity. These changes are not only possible, they happen all the time – and they can happen to people who think that they are incapable of having a sexual relationship either with women or with men.

Which is why I do not believe in sexual orientation as a fixed variable in human personality. Human identity is too rich, too multifaceted, too unpredictable and varied for such a simplistic notion to encompass or explain it.

Melinda Selmys is the author of Sexual Authenticity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism (Our Sunday Visitor, 2009). She is a regular columnist with the National Catholic Register, and the fiction editor for www.vulgatamagazine.org

Retrieved November 25, 2010 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/reorienting_sexuality/

As one response to an earlier comment points out, people also choose to shift their sexuality from heterosexual to homosexual, for ideological as well as personal reasons. He quotes Prof. Sue Wilkinson:

I was never unsure about my sexuality throughout my teens or 20s. I was a happy heterosexual and had no doubts. Then I changed, through political activity and feminism, spending time with women’s organisations. It opened my mind to the possibility of a lesbian identity.

The quote is from Prof Sue Wilkinson published in The Times (UK) (see some of her other comments in the same article): "'My feminism led to lesbianism'" by Nicola Woolcock (go to http://women.timesonline.co.uk and there search for Sue Wilkinson. Subscription required.)

Judge Walker, the Language of Law, and the Dictatorship of Relativism

In this essay, Hadley Arkes, a distinguished professor of jurisprudence and philosopher of natural rights and natural law, shows how Judge Walker’s apparently bizarre and eccentric claim that “Relative gender composition aside, same-sex couples are situated identically to opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to perform the rights and obligations of marriage under California law,” is an expression of

a trend long in the making, a radical recasting of the language and logic of a “moral” judgment. In the relentless march of “relativism,” good and bad, right and wrong, were translated to mean merely the things we “like” or “dislike,” a matter of personal taste

.

Walker, in this view, is not just a biased judge who ignores precedent, evidence, and common sense, as Meese argues in the previous post. Judge Walker expresses a subjectivist and relativist view of morality that itself draws on earlier judicial thinking with a large influence in the courts and the academy. “‘Moral judgments’ come down in the end to irrational beliefs; and they could supply then no justification for the law.” Hence Judge Walker’s decision.

TUESDAY, 17 AUGUST 2010
Judge Walker and the Language of the Law

By Hadley Arkes
Archeologists of the law may one day come upon these words: “Relative gender composition aside, same-sex couples are situated identically to opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to perform the rights and obligations of marriage under California law.” Now imagine recasting the sentence in this way: “Relative gender composition aside, same-sex couples are situated identically to opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to beget children.” The first line was written by federal Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco as he struck down the constitutional amendment passed by the voters of California, a move to restore the traditional understanding of marriage as a legal relation of a man and a woman. Judge Walker’s argument made sense only if the notion of begetting was conspicuously removed from the very meaning and purpose of marriage. Surely, marriage is not necessary for love: There is genuine love between grandparents and grandchildren, brothers and sisters, and in the nature of things they cannot be lesser loves because they are not attended by penetration and expressed in marriage.

Marriage is not necessary for love, but the law of marriage finds its deep justification as a framework for the begetting and nurturing of children. A commitment confirmed in law is a commitment in the truest sense: it marks the fact that the parents have foregone the freedom to quit their relation to each other and their children as it suits their convenience. And if the purpose is begetting children . . . well, that is the very reason that there are, in nature, men and women. That is thetelos or very purpose contained in the fact that we were made, each of us, as a man or a woman.

That opening line from Judge Walker is one of only a few score that have been zinging around the Internet, soaring well beyond the tethers of reason and propositional logic. Walker’s opinion may not hold up on appeal, but his lines could lighten up our lives for years to come as they make their way into fortune cookies.

There was never actually much doubt about the outcome in Perry v. Schwarzenegger. Judge Walker’s handling of the case revealed a leaning flamboyantly out of the closet. There has been much complaining about the so-called “facts” that Walker was willing to proclaim on the basis merely of opinions offered by so-called “experts.” But the outcome of the case on appeal will not turn on any facts gleaned from the social sciences. That is a long story, best left to another time. What is more striking here is that the resolution of the case was virtually determined by the premise planted in the law by Justice Anthony Kennedy in Romer v. Evans in 1996: The willingness to cast an adverse judgment on the homosexual life can be explained only by an “animus [lacking] a rational relationship to legitimate state interests.” Generations of reflection, running back to the ancients, could be dismissed as one long, thoughtless spasm of irrational “animus.”

With that premise planted, the arguments over Due Process or Equal Protection could be churned out in an instant. Due Process? People were suffering a harm, they were denied a benefit, their liberty to marry was being denied, on grounds that were irrational, and therefore arbitrary. Hence, the denial was unjustified, wrong. Equal Protection? Couples of the same sex were not accorded the same rights to marry as couples composed of men and women. Even if “domestic partners” were given many of the same benefits of marriage, they were treated as morally inferior, not worthy of marriage. They suffered a harm or wounding because they were treated unequally and for no rational reason. Hence, the unequal treatment was unjustified, wrong.

But behind all of this was a trend long in the making, a radical recasting of the language and logic of a “moral” judgment. In the relentless march of “relativism,” good and bad, right and wrong, were translated to mean merely the things we “like” or “dislike,” a matter of personal taste. Justice Hugo Black would famously deride appeals to natural law and moral reasoning by reducing them to subjective beliefs. An argument with strenuous reasoning would be translated to mean that the advocate simply “liked” or “disliked” the policy.

And curiously enough that same translation has come even from conservative and Catholic jurists in our own day who have been suspicious of natural law and the judges who invoke it. With Judge Walker the conversion of terms took this form: “the state cannot have an interest in disadvantaging an unpopular minority group simply because the group is unpopular.” Walker simply rules out the notion that there may have been reasons for turning away from the homosexual life. Homosexuals were simply “disliked,” an aversion without reason. “Moral judgments” come down in the end to irrational beliefs; and they could supply then no justification for the law.

In this way, the wave of relativism inverts language and dissolves any moral ground for the law. What is left then is the bald power of a judge to strike down whatever is enacted. Justice Holmes hoped that “every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether,” and Judge Walker stands in the line of his heirs. The result, in this case, is to deprive the people of California of the freedom to deliberate and vote on a matter of moral significance that stands at the very matrix of the laws.

Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College. His most recent book is Constitutional Illusions & Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law.

Retrieved August 18, 2010 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/judge-walker-and-the-language-of-the-law.html