Symbolic of His Struggle Against Reality

How the White House's Promotion of Sexual Expressionism Hurts Women

Helen Alvaré argues in this new piece for Public Discourse that the White House's promotion of an ideology she calls sexualityism - an inelegant neologism to which I prefer the term she also uses, sexual expressionism - not only tramples on religious liberty.  It also - and this is the burden of the essay - is contrary to women's interests and contributes to their immiseration.  

The White House and Sexualityism

by Helen Alvaré

July 16, 2012

Against what social science tells us about human happiness, the government is promoting sexualityism—a commitment to uncommitted, unencumbered, inconsequential sex—as the answer.

Professor Gerry Bradley made a spot-on observation here at Public Discourse that one of the underlying forces driving the HHS abortion, contraception, and sterilization mandate is the current federal ideology of “equal sexual liberty,” embracing the notion that “women will and should have lots more sexual intercourse than they have interest in conceiving children. … [that] sexual license should never impede a woman’s lifestyle, at least no more than it does a man’s.” Elsewhere, I have identified such a position as “sexual expressionism” or “sexualityism” and have defined it to include also the suggestion that sex should not only be free of the slightest reflection on its link with procreation, but also free of commitment, or even the real possibility of a relationship between the man and the woman involved.

In this essay, I propose to examine this ideology, not only from a woman’s perspective, but also from the best scientific evidence we can currently lay our hands on. I will suggest that the insidious “twofer” the White House is currently proposing—trampling religious freedom in order to promote sexualityism—is even worse than doing the latter alone.  READ THE WHOLE ESSAY AT PUBLIC DISCOURSE

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 Women

Carolyn Moynihan | Friday, 30 March 2012

The legacy of the sexual revolution is more subversive than its champions admit.

The death of the American feminist poet Adrienne Rich (pictured) this week has brought many accolades on account of her literary gifts and contribution to the feminist movement over the past 50 years. In her transformation from conventionally married mother of three sons in the 1950s, to lesbian partner and apologist in the 1970s, she became not only the voice but a living example of the revolutionary character of second wave feminism.

The chief legacy of that movement has been brought into sharp focus in recent months by the battle royal between Catholic authorities (mainly) and the Obama administration over the latter’s mandate forcing employers to pay for birth control, including abortifacients and sterilisation.

Old-guard feminists -- including Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius -- are nervous and casting the conflict as a “war on women”, an attempt to wind back the “reproductive rights” won in the 1960s and 1970s with the arrival of the contraceptive pill and the Supreme Court decision decriminalising abortion.

On the other hand, those who regard such methods of birth control as objectionable or morally wrong -- including those who hold that view as a matter of religious faith -- are outraged that the principle of freedom of conscience could be trashed for the sake of a symbolic enshrining of contraception in the pantheon of free health services.

Yes, the mandate is both an overblown tribute to the value of contraception in women’s lives -- in particular for their “health” -- and an act of intolerance towards those who do not value it at all. But at least we can be grateful that it has stirred up a debate that really needs to happen - a debate about whether the sexual revolution that contraception and abortion let loose on society has been a good thing or a bad thing.

As Mary Eberstadt wrote in her contribution to a forum on the issue in the Wall Street Journal last weekend, the legacy of the sexual revolution has yet to be “settled in the Western mind” -- despite claims that “women” (minus, at the very least, the 25,000+ who have signed a letter objecting to it) are solidly behind the HHS mandate, and the sexual revolution to boot.

In her recently published collection of essays, Adam and Eve after the Pill, Eberstadt covers all kinds of fallout from the “sex without consequences” culture that has grown up over the past four decades, including the growing chorus of unhappiness from women writing on such mournful themes as “The Case for Settling” and “The End of Men”, complaining about men who won’t grow up and lamenting the general state of relations between the sexes. If the sexual revolution was such a boon, how come women are not happier? She asks.

Hanna Rosin, who also contributed to the WSJ’s sexual revolution forum, has an answer to that. She says happiness doesn't matter. Rosin argues that young women (those in their 20s and early 30s) are generally better off than young men. “They are better educated and earn more money on average,” she points out. In other words, they don’t need men -- except for “temporary, intimate relationships that don’t derail a career.” She is working on a book called -- guess what? -- “The End of Men”, due out in September.

Rosin does make some frank admissions. She concedes that there is a rumble of complaint from young women about men who won’t commit; that this is because the post-pill market has made sex “very cheap” and turned men into “free agents” who sleep with as many women as possible; which in turn causes women “a lot of frustrating little dating battles” and “heartache”. But that is a small price to pay, Rosin argues, for a woman’s future success in a career.

(Funny how arguments in favour of post-pill sexual culture always seem to hang on college educated women with careers, who generally do find a mate, rather than working class women who increasingly “settle” for the insecurity of serial cohabitation, and bringing up children, much of the time, on their own. But that is another story.)

The odd thing about Rosin’s theory is that it really describes “the end of women” rather than the end of men. The great gift of the sexual revolution to women is not that it has taken them out of men’s power but that it has made them over as the new men. They can pursue their careers just like men. They can have sex without getting pregnant and having to get married, just like men. They can ignore the emotional consequences of uncommitted sex (“And how bad are heartaches, anyway?” asks Rosin) as men tend to do.

When the ache for a baby gets too strong, today’s macho woman can go get herself impregnated with donor sperm at a fertility clinic. And since there’s really no difference between men and women any more she could just settle down with a lesbian partner and save herself any further trouble from the officially male of the species.

The truth is that, if men have become redundant, so have women. One makes no sense without the other. What we have instead is humanoids who come in a range of genders and can make use of their sexual endowment (or someone else’s) in a variety of ways. They can generate or acquire children as the case may be; they can saddle the kids with two “moms” or two “dads” or with other combinations of “parents” if it suits them. What that means for the children simply doesn’t matter. Nothing that comes from the sexual revolution can really be bad for anyone. Get used to it.

Isn’t this the insane world we see taking shape before our eyes? There may have been a lot wrong with marriage and the status of women in the America of young Mrs Adrienne Conrad (Rich’s married name), but cutting sex adrift from babies and marriage was patently not the solution. It has made nonsense of the body and made men and women strangers to themselves.

To refuse to become an active party to such madness is a right no just society should deny to any member.

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.

Reposted from MercatorNet, March 30, 2012

Sexual Revolution and Its Discontents

Paul Adams | Thursday, 22 March 2012

Adam and Eve after the Pill

The toll of casualties in the Sexual Revolution is still being tallied up.

Mary Eberstadt, Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution | Ignatius Press | 2012, 175 pages
ISBN: 1586176277

This book could hardly be more timely. The Obama Administration’s birth control mandate may be a matter of religious liberty and the First Amendment, but it has also opened up the questions about contraception and the sexual revolution that have hardly been discussed in sophisticated society--or even in Catholic parishes--in anything but celebratory terms.

The sexual revolution, which is unimaginable without the pill, has had a profound effect, still barely understood, on relations between the sexes, human happiness, and a host of intractable social problems. Yet it is so much taken for granted and assumed to be such a great good for women and for society that it has become impossible to discuss it seriously.

Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, offers a collection of essays, most of them originally published in First Things or Policy Review, that deploy a mass of empirical findings from the social sciences as well anecdotal and confessional testimony to examine the dark side of the sexual revolution.

If it was so liberating, she asks, why are its supposed 

beneficiaries, especially women, unhappier than before? Why did the very effects that Pope Paul VI predicted in his much despised but (in her eyes, prophetic) 1968 encyclical,Humanae Vitae, come to pass—an increase in infidelity and divorce, the objectification and degradation of women, abandonment of women and children, cohabitation, sexual promiscuity and increased abortion rates?

Eberstadt aims to connect the dots in order to show how the sexual revolution has harmed women and children, undermined marriage (especially for the lower social strata, so widening the class gap in poverty and education across generations), led to a massive increase in pornography, and left enormous numbers of children to grow up without one or both of their biological parents (with negative impacts in terms of poverty, health, mental health, school success, and other measures of child well-being).

There is an insightful discussion of “pedophilia chic,” of how children were being sexualized and sexual relations between men and boys were being normalized in smart circles -- until the priest scandal broke and the same people who had promoted or condoned this kind of sexual license became outraged by it. It was the one and only case where the “advances” of the sexual revolution have been reversed.

Equally interesting are the essays arguing that food has become the new sex--the locus of moral puritanism -- because sex between consenting adults has become a matter of moral indifference. Pornography has become the new tobacco, excused and defended with the same arguments used a few decades ago in favor of smoking.

One of the rotten fruits of the sexual revolution is the culture of Toxic U, the shadow college culture into which young women like Charlotte Simmons are recruited in their freshman and sophomore years. It is a time of binge drinking and hooking up (sex divorced not only from marriage and children, but from any kind of emotional commitment, sex on male terms leading to depression and other mental and physical health problems for young women).

Eberstadt links this toxic world to the pill and sexual revolution in the following way. Contraception enables a climate of apparently consequence-free sex. Marriage is delayed so young people do not invest in sexual partners as they did when having sex implied the man’s commitment to marriage if pregnancy resulted. Young men lost their traditional path to settling down and adult responsibility and became the child-men or slackers described by Kay Hymowitz. Shotgun weddings became a thing of the past. Abortion rates and single parenthood skyrocketed.

A major part of Eberstadt’s argument deals with the profound denial of the growing weight of evidence. But I wish that she had presented the evidence more clearly. She tends relegate this to the footnotes and focus on the blindness of academic and feminist elites. Her views would be more persuasive if a chapter on denial concluded the book. By then we would have been thoroughly convinced of the existence of a powerful ‘will to disbelieve’.

My other criticism relates to the difference between the sexes in matters of introspection and aptitude for the confessional mode of writing. The chapter on women is full of women’s own voices. The men, by contrast, are silent and tend to appear as perpetrators whose motivations lie unexamined. Kay Hymowitz does a better in her book Manning Up, although her men do not appear more admirable or, well, manly.

Finally, the book suffers from being a collection, albeit brilliant, of essays. I wish that Eberstadt had integrated them better. Notwithstanding these criticisms,Adam and Eve after the Pill offers a compelling argument and is a much needed contribution to a shamefully neglected topic.

Paul Adams is a recently retired professor of social policy. He now lives in Ave Maria, Florida and blogs at Ethics, Culture, and Policy.

First published March 22, 2012 in MercatorNet,

Culture and the Sexual Revolution

A Tale of Two Concerts By Anthony Esolen    WEDNESDAY, 15 FEBRUARY 2012 Last summer, at the insistence of a good Catholic friend, my daughter and I drove to a small village in Cape Breton, to attend a Celtic music festival.          Don’t imagine glitter. The festival was held in a big green field behind a Catholic church. There were benches, but most people had brought lawn chairs or towels, or were standing, about 4,000 in all, quite a crowd for a place far in the countryside. All kinds of people were there, old and young, men and women, kids running around, carpenters, fishermen, farmers, local musicians and step-dancers, and at least one professor – me. Everyone eagerly waited for the star performers. They had arrived overnight, driving 800 miles from a previous engagement in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in a van big enough to transport the band, equipment, and four children.

The stars were Natalie MacMaster, who some believe to be the finest Celtic fiddler in the world, and her husband Donnell Leahy, also a phenomenal musician, with their accompanists and their children – and their faith, their traditions, and their devotion to the land where they were born.  For it was a homecoming. When they greeted the crowd, they remembered with love the good priest who married them in that same church, whose body now lay in the cemetery beside the field. I sat beside Natalie’s brother, Kevin, who regaled me with family lore, of MacMasters and Leahys, most of whom do other things besides playing music to put bread on the table, but who get together as families on an evening to play Celtic music, long into the night. It seems that the children take up one instrument or another. There were children – the sweetest thing of all. After Natalie and Donnell made the hills sing with music, they retreated, and, one after another, their children and their cousins came out, step dancing. They would call out a name, and a child would appear – first three teenage girls, almost young women, then five boys in a row, then a scattering of boys and girls down to the youngest, a little girl who had to be held by both hands as she toddled on stage and did a step or two.  Each child danced a little differently, one or two of the boys making the crowd laugh with boy-antics, and as each came forth, from tallest to smallest, the people applauded and whistled, louder and louder, until with that last baby girl there was nothing but delight and merriment. The girls wore skirts, the boys wore white shirts and black ties; and they all looked like cousins. They shared the same blood, the same home, the same history, the same faith. Every element in the scene was in its place. There was the land, to which Natalie and Donnell are still devoted. There were the neighbors, the other families whose histories accompanied their own family history for generations.  There was the church, to whom everyone belonged – or should have belonged; and the memories of people no longer with them, memories ready to be stirred by a glance towards the churchyard near. There was the warm faith of the great musicians, and the vault of the sky above, deepening into a sapphire blue in the twilight of a northern summer evening.          Donnell Leahy and Natalie MacMaster  What I beheld that night was culture, in its full and true sense. I don’t know how long it will last, even in that backwoods village in Nova Scotia. Even there, the agents of anticulture have been doing their work – television penetrates, and schools operate under government-mandated curricula.  Even there, men and women are forgetting to marry, and are raising such few children as are born, outside of the haven of wedded love. People in charge of tourism in Cape Breton have touted the old Celtic music, and there’s a school or two where you can learn it, and even some of the old language. I’m told that there are more speakers of Gaelic in that part of the world than there are in Scotland itself.  And yet, a school here and a program there do not a culture make. Everything at that concert, those things and they alone make for a culture. And only in a field of faith, where even hearty merriment is duly ordered to our worship of God, and giving Him thanks. And everything present there, as I considered the matter later, the sexual revolution would destroy: family, community, traditions, faith. For it would drive men and women apart. It would kill children in the womb. It would take away most of the cousins.  It would sow transience and infidelity at the heart of the nearest human relations and found marriage upon the sands of appetite. It would first turn the human heart away from God, and toward the flesh; and then it would harden the heart against even the goodness and holiness of the human body. What would it put in that concert’s place? The halftime show at the Super Bowl perhaps. It is almost absurd to complain when the show features a moment of shocking vulgarity. For years, the show has been vulgar from start to finish.   It is vulgar in its noise, garish lights, prinked up entertainers, and massive celebration of egotism. There is nothing sweet, nothing meek, nothing gentle, nothing to move the heart, nothing to open the mind; no quiet show of talent, no spirit of giving, no humility, no memory, no honor, no devotion, no kindness – not even the merry earthiness of a bawdy joke. It is all crass, harsh, and bitter.  That is where we have come. The decadent inhabitants of the great city of Rome became people who enjoyed the blood of gladiatorial combats. We have become the sorts of people who enjoy, if that’s the right word, the incessant howl of selfishness. How can it be otherwise, when we have degraded love itself, in the most intimate embrace of man and woman? Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. His latest book is Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. He teaches at Providence College.  © 2012 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 February 15, 2012 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/