Wednesday, February 19, 2014

"Deconstruct Heterosexuality"? Say what?

This extremely poor post at First Things blog ought to require no response, just because it is so very, very wrongheaded. It ought to suffice to say that the author, one Michael Hannon, suggests (I hesitate to say "argues") that we should "deconstruct heterosexuality," that is to say, that we should cease to believe that being heterosexual, which most of us would call having normal attraction to the opposite sex, is a real part of individual human identity at all, much less that it is per se healthy and normative. His suggestions are festooned about with many silly statements about the history of mankind, apparently garnered from academic "queer theory." Shouldn't that brief synopsis (if you must read it, I think you will see that it is accurate) be enough to cause at least any Christian conservative to conclude that the article is completely confused and not worth his time? You would like to think. Unfortunately, one of my at least somewhat conservative Facebook friends linked to the piece with apparent approval while another on-line conservative friend sent the link to me by e-mail with explicit approval. Talk about "deceiving even the elect"! I would have ignored it after the first, but I was rather shocked by the second incident of approval. And hey, I wrote so much to the second person in e-mail that I figured it was a good opportunity to put up my criticisms here on my somewhat neglected personal blog. With additions. Because this article is so bad, so wrongheaded, that I keep thinking of more things to say.

Now, I've not really had a lot of respect for the First Things blog qua entity for a long time. They have a huge stable of writers who say all kinds of things and are all over the map--the good, the bad, and the ugly. They've become rather enamored lately of what is known as the "new homophile" movement, which would have been enough to lose my respect all by itself. Blogger Joshua Gonnerman is an example. The idea of that movement, speaking broadly, is that homosexual identity is somehow a good thing, a kind of gift, really, bestowing special insights and stuff on those who have it, as long as you are chaste and don't lust. And that people who so identify shouldn't be asked to give up their identity or think of it as "identifying themselves with their temptations to sin." Even though the "new homophiles" are mostly (all?) Roman Catholic, they get pretty uneasy when one uses the Catholic Church's designation of "intrinsically disordered" for their desires.

In that context, one might regard this piece by Hannon as a kind of counterweight. Hannon is explicit in rejecting homosexuality as an identity, and one of his reasons is that very reason--namely, that we shouldn't identify ourselves with our inclinations to sin. Hannon is also concerned about the fact that young people agonize (as they shouldn't have to) over what their sexual identity is, whether they might "be gay." He is bothered by the fact that homosexual identity is treated as innate and immutable and that young people are now nervous about developing close friendships with members of the same sex lest this mean that they "are gay." With all of these concerns I agree, and that's probably the last good thing you'll see me say here about Hannon's piece, because that's all that is good about it.

The concerns about exposing young people to the idea that they "might be gay" and the harm that this does to them, including to their friendships, have been explored far more eloquently by Anthony Esolen, here, for instance. Esolen has also trenchantly answered the "new homophiles" here without any trendy nonsense about deconstructing anything, and certainly not deconstructing heterosexuality, of all things!

Hannon, either because his head has been addled by reading queer theory or because he wants to be even-handed, or maybe both, is not willing to stop at saying that homosexuality should not be regarded as a part of personal identity. He must go on (as the title of his post attests) to say that neither should heterosexuality. In fact, he informs us quite seriously that the concept of heterosexuality was invented in the late 1800's. In the 1860's, to be exact. As an historical thesis, this has all the virtues that "things fall up" has as a scientific thesis. (Hannon apparently got the claim from Michel Foucault, that fount of accurate, unbiased historical information and model of intellectual rigor and clarity.) Let's not quibble about words. I make no etymological claims about when the word "heterosexuality" was invented, because I don't know. I'm pretty sure I'd never heard the word before my own adulthood, which was long after the 1860's. But the concept that it is normal and healthy for men to desire women and for women to desire men, that, indeed, these normal and healthy desires are part of the very cement of all human society, and that part of being a normal man or a normal woman is having an "orientation," a telic attraction, toward the opposite sex, making that orientation part of one's normal individual identity, is as old as mankind, as old as the day when the Lord God said, "It is not good that man should be alone. I will make him an helpmeet."

Or listen to St. Paul:
For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. (Romans 1:26-27)

See that part about "vile affections" and what is "against nature" as opposed to the "natural use of the woman"? That, my friends, is the "gay-straight divide" which Hannon tells us was an invention of the 1860's. The "natural use of the woman" is what a sexually healthy man desires. That which is "against nature" is what homosexuals desire. It's really very simple. And it wasn't invented in the 1860's.

St. Paul's identification of heterosexual intercourse as being natural looks like the sort of "heteronormativity" that Hannon wants us to reject. Perhaps Hannon should lecture St. Paul to the effect that such heteronormativity creates "pride" and "pathetically uncritical and unmerited self-assurance." But all such sophistical rhetoric does nothing to change the one paralyzing fact: Homosexual desires and acts are not only contrary to chastity, they are also contrary to nature. Normal heterosexual intercourse may well be (in specific instances) a sin against chastity but is not a sin against nature. No amount of talk-talk and worry about heterosexual "pride" can change the fact that there is a fundamental asymmetry between heterosexuality and homosexuality. The former is a gift, God's created engine for the perpetuation of the human race and for the generation of much love and beauty. The latter is a perverted and tragic disorder.

And what pernicious nonsense Hannon talks about pride and heterosexuality:
But heterosexuality, in its pretensions to act as the norm for assessing our sexual customs, is marked by something even worse: pride, which St. Thomas Aquinas classifies as the queen of all vices.
Please. So imagine a mother whose daughters have always, since childhood, noticed handsome and/or charming men. Imagine a father whose son has blushed over the beauty of women. Suppose that this mother and this father regard their children's inclinations as part of a beautiful, natural, God-given plan for the world. Suppose that they regard themselves as stewards whose job it is to guide these natural, powerful, God-given instincts in the right direction, their job to bestow, in fear and trembling and with God's help, wisdom and guidance upon these budding young women and young men. Is this pride? Is it pride for the children themselves to believe these things about the naturalness of their own feelings? Far from it.

Imagine that we were beset with a dirt-eating activist contingent in our society who tried to make out that eating dirt is normal. Would it be anything other than nonsense on stilts to chide those who say, "The desire to eat food is normal. The desire to eat dirt is deviant and disordered" for fostering pride by such declarations of obvious truth?

Now, someone might say, Hannon wants us to emphasize married sexuality rather than heterosexuality as the norm. What could be the problem with that? Since it is set expressly in opposition to the normalizing of heterosexual desire, lots and lots. First of all, if we ditch the very concept of heterosexuality as a natural, telic orientation in anyone who isn't married, how is anybody ever going to get married? Call me over-literalistic if you will, but it's important to remember as one reads heady talk like Hannon's about "deconstructing heterosexuality" and about how "heterosexuality blinds us to sin" that if unmarried people didn't have heterosexual desires they would never become married people! If churches and other organizations didn't regard heterosexuality as normal and natural, they would have no reason to provide, for example, opportunities for young people to get to know each other and hopefully meet mates and get married.

Girls need to be given a picture of themselves as girls and boys as boys during their whole lives, from long before they are actually married, and part of that picture is the understanding and expectation that, in due time, they will be attracted to members of the opposite sex and that this is perfectly natural. Nor is this sort of gradual heterosexual self-awareness appropriate solely in relation to the one and only one person they will actually marry. It need not be a case of lust for young women to notice men, including men they know they are never going to marry, and to recognize that they find those men attractive or unattractive, to evaluate and even analyze those instinctive attractions, to decide, for example, when they are wise or unwise. And the same mutatis mutandis for young men. To hold, as Hannon urges us to hold, that attraction to the opposite sex should not be considered an important part of one's normal and innate identity any more than same-sex attraction is is a psychologically dangerous thesis. Adopting it would be utterly disastrous for parenthood. For this reason alone it is to be hoped that Christian parents completely reject Hannon's misguided advice if they should happen to read it. The solution to the tragedy of children who agonize over their sexual identity is not the deconstruction of heterosexuality but rather a "heteronormativity" so absolute as to be beyond doubt or question, a "heteronormativity" that gives children a secure background against which to set themselves and in which to grow up.

Here is another point: In general the relations of the sexes are part of what makes the world beautiful and interesting. When a gentleman holds a door for a lady or even compliments her respectfully on her appearance or when a lady dresses nicely because there will be gentlemen present at some meeting, this is all entirely good and appropriate as far as it goes. The parties need not be married to one another at all. Certainly such recognition of the presence of members of the opposite sex and appreciation of them, even of their physical attractiveness, can descend into crudity and lust, but it need not do so. None of us should want to live in an androgynous world. Nor should we be reacting to our own pornified world by trying to turn all male-female interactions into androgynous interactions unless they are between people actually married to one another. So, no: Gender identity and even sexual identity cannot and should not be confined solely to "married identity," and heterosexual identity in these areas is normal whereas homosexual identity is not. That is one of the places where the "new homophiles" err. They want to create some space, for homosexuals, for a category such as I have just described for innocent heterosexual appreciation. There is no such space, however, precisely because homosexuality is intrinsically disordered.

A central fallacy of Hannon's post consists in the strenuous attempt to treat homosexual inclinations and heterosexual inclinations as on a par. In this Hannon actually agrees with the "new homophiles." They, like him, want to treat homosexual desires in a similar way (as much as possible) to the way one treats heterosexual desires. Their solution is to treat homosexual desires as, somehow, a positive thing, a gift, and part of one's identity. That puts them to some degree (except that they must not be acted upon) on a par with heterosexual desires. Hannon, too, wants to treat the two even-handedly, yet his solution is to say that neither is a normal part of identity and that any identification of oneself in connection with one's sexuality merely blinds one to sin. What neither group is willing to do is to recognize the absolutely fundamental asymmetry between heterosexual and homosexual desires. The reason that the former are a normal part of identity is because they are really part of nature, really part of God's design for the world. Masculinity and feminity are important aspects of reality, and our recognition and celebration of them is an important part of being human. The reason that homosexual desires are an unhealthy source of identity is because they are disordered. Identifying oneself as intrinsically "a homosexual" really is identifying oneself with one's inclinations to sin. This is not so for being heterosexual.

It may be replied to all of this that I am just out of touch with the world of 2014 and don't understand the extreme perversions of "heterosexuality" that many people are being exposed to and developing a horrible taste for--e.g., via pornography. This ain't the 1950's, so maybe we shouldn't celebrate heterosexual desire. No, dear reader, I assure you. Though I do indeed try to follow the injunction of Philippians 4:8 to think on whatsoever things are pure, lovely, and of good report, I am indeed aware that people can be inclined to genuine perversions which happen to be carried out with members of the opposite sex. Even without going into any lurid detail, one can see this merely by considering that a pedophile man may desire little girls.

What, then? Is the solution to this to reject or deny the beauty of natural attraction between the sexes and of the natural recognition of the attractiveness of the opposite sex? God forbid. If anything, we need more and more attempts to resurrect that old world and that old vision. Hence, my deliberately dated references above to relations between ladies and gentlemen in public situations.

Moreover, to go back to Hannon's post, how does the existence of sexual perversions involving males with females support Hannon's thesis that heterosexuality should be "deconstructed" and that its "deconstruction" is an "opportunity" for Christians? In short, it doesn't support it one smidgen. Since God did indeed make men and women and did indeed intend them for one another, since normal heterosexual desires are indeed natural, Hannon's denial of "heteronormativity" is just flat wrong. No amount of twisting or perversion of the sexual instinct on the part of (some of) those who are not homosexuals can possibly change the fact that he is wrong. It simply does not follow from the fact that there are unhealthy urges and acts involving members of the opposite sex that there are no healthy urges and acts. Indeed, the only healthy human sexual urges and acts are between two people who are members of opposite sexes. If Hannon thinks it is "prideful" to point that out and to recognize it in society, then he just has a war on with reality.

I would go so far as to say that for Christians, who have both general and special revelation at their disposal, to join in "deconstructing heterosexuality" as Hannon suggests is so badly confused and so wildly irresponsible as to be actually sinful. Such a "deconstruction" can only do harm, not good. Let us join in promoting "heteronormativity" in every venue where we can, and most of all in our homes.

57 comments:

A Sinner said...

I think the concepts behind Hannon's piece completely allude you. When Hannon says that "heterosexuality" is a post-1860s construct...he means that AS a construct. He's not saying there was no "heterosexuality" (or homosexuality) before that time, just that it was not constructed AS an orientation with all the particular baggage that particular paradigm carries.

Consider another social construct: Race. When we say that Race (of the White/Black model) was a construct of the transatlantic slaving era of the 16th-century and beyond...we are not saying that "black people didn't exist" before that. Surely, people of dark-skin and African origin existed before Race was invented as a construct, and when people of light-skin and Eurasian origin met them, they weren't ignorant of each others physiological and geographic differences.

But Race AS a construct, as a discourse and narrative attaching a particular socio-political narrative and cultural signifigance TO those differences...definitely DID emerge at a certain point in history.

The same is true of "sexual orientation." Homo or hetero, that discourse, that paradigm of categoriziation and identity, that framework for interpreting subjective experiences...is the product of a particular (largely psychoanalytic/Freudian) narrative of the world and human sexuality.

For example, it is often pointed out that, "In the middle ages, the idea was that ANYONE might be tempted to sodomy." And on the other hand, males engaged in "romantic friendships" that were entirely non controversial. Neither homo-love nor homo-lust were constructed as the exclusive province of a specific class of persons with a peculiar disposition.

Yet your comments make it clear (not explicitly, maybe, but in their very obvious tone) that you DO seek to conserve the "heterosexualized" model of sexual socialization that began in the mid-1800s and reached its peak in the 1950s. You apparently think that this lens for viewing the world is natural and eternal.

But not really. Undoubtedly, "heterosexuality" has always been around and always been hegemonic. Men have always been attracted to and coupled with women, there's no argument there. But the particular sociological understanding of the significance of these experiences and their place in constituting people's identities and modes of subjectivity...has varied enormously (just like experiences/understandings of race or ethnicity have varied widely).

"the concept that it is normal and healthy for men to desire women and for women to desire men, that, indeed, these normal and healthy desires are part of the very cement of all human society, and that part of being a normal man or a normal woman is having an 'orientation,' a telic attraction, toward the opposite sex, making that orientation part of one's normal individual identity, is as old as mankind"

Now here you start to get off track. The idea that men and women mate and get married (in some order) is as old as mankind, perhaps. The idea of constructing these acts in a particular internal framework of "desire" and "telic orientations" and "part of individual identity" is not at all. For one, because ideas of "telos" haven't always been around, and certainly not "individual identity" which is also a rather modern framework of subjectivity. Likewise talk of "normal" and "healthy" (which are conceptual paradigms you will most certainly not find in the writings of the Saints whose paradigm is "moral/immoral" or "sinful/holy"; normal is a demographic/sociological concept, and healthy is a medicalized/psychiatric one).

A Sinner said...

"St. Paul's identification of heterosexual intercourse as being natural looks like the sort of 'heteronormativity' that Hannon wants us to reject."

Not at all. Heteronormativity is about orientation, gender scripts, and personal identity and subjectivity. When you talk about heterosexual intercourse, you're talking about acts. But orientation isn't about objective behavior, it's about subjectivities.

"The former is a gift, God's created engine for the perpetuation of the human race and for the generation of much love and beauty."

Nonsense. Marital love and its one-flesh union between a male and a female is God's engine for the perpetuation of the human race. "Heterosexuality" is one particular (and, increasingly it is being shown, perverted) psychological model that, while originally designed to encourage the same basic outcome, has gradually diverged to the point that heterosexuality and homosexuality as concepts are symmetrical inasmuch as they now amount to essentially having a fetish for the same or the opposite sex.

It is arguable that even John Paul II, in Theology of the Body, warned against "heterosexuality":

"The sexual urge in man and woman is not fully defined as an orientation towards the psychological and physiological attributes of the other sex as such. These do not and cannot exist in the abstract, but only in a concrete human being, a concrete man or woman … If it is directed towards the sexual attributes as such this must be recognized as an impoverishment or even a perversion of the urge … The natural direction of the sexual urge is towards a human being of the other sex and not merely towards ‘the other sex’ as such. It is just because it is directed towards a particular human being that the sexual urge can provide the framework within which, and the basis on which, the possibility of love arises."

Inasmuch as "heterosexuality" means a generalized "attraction to the opposite sex" as such, it is a problem. A "perversion" and "impoverishment" as John Paul II says.

Rather, we should be attracted to human beings. Some of these human beings will be, for some people (for many people) of the opposite sex and so considerable as potential partners for marriage. But if the primary paradigm is an attraction to "males" or "females" in the abstract rather than to individual human beings who may happen to sometimes be the proper sex for marrying...this is an impoverishment and perversion, as John Paul says in TOTB.

A Sinner said...

"So imagine a mother whose daughters have always, since childhood, noticed handsome and/or charming men. Imagine a father whose son has blushed over the beauty of women [...] Imagine that we were beset with a dirt-eating activist contingent in our society who tried to make out that eating dirt is normal."

It's so odd how conservatives have this double standard. When comparing heterosexuality to what is presumably an analogy for homosexuality...you go from speaking of "noticing" and "blushing" to "eating dirt" (presumably analogous to sodomy or something like that). Apples and oranges. If you want to make a fair comparison, just as boys who grow up to be straight "blush at" girls long before they even know what sex is, boys who grow up to be gay "blush at" guys.

If you want to bring acts into it, then the comparison on the straight side would be "a father who notices his son looking at heterosexual pornography and fantasizing about ****ing his classmate." It's simply unfair and intellectually dishonest to compare a non-lustful expression of heterosexual attraction to a lustful expression of homosexual attraction, as if they are parallel or comparable.

"First of all, if we ditch the very concept of heterosexuality as a natural, telic orientation in anyone who isn't married, how is anybody ever going to get married?"

Well, because it's "better to marry than to burn" I assume. Or because it is socially expected. Or because they want to have children and a well-ordered family life. Or because they want a help-mate and companion. If you think that the only thing driving men and women to marry is a fetish for each others physical sex characteristics and a heterosexualized gender-politics that coaxes people into marriage...that sounds to me like a ridiculously flimsy foundation for a social institution so important.

"It need not be a case of lust for young women to notice men, including men they know they are never going to marry, and to recognize that they find those men attractive or unattractive, to evaluate and even analyze those instinctive attractions, to decide, for example, when they are wise or unwise. And the same mutatis mutandis for young men. To hold, as Hannon urges us to hold, that attraction to the opposite sex should not be considered an important part of one's normal and innate identity any more than same-sex attraction is is a psychologically dangerous thesis."

You seem to understand here that opposite-sex attractions are not all lust, are not all directly ordered towards consummation, etc.

It seems odd then that you refuse to recognize the same for same-sex attractions (whether in those who identify as gay or, indeed, in those forced to repress them because of how the "straight" construct works).

People have married throughout history successfully. It has NOT always come through the sort of subjectivity you describe of budding remote evaluation for eventual courtship. That is an INCREDIBLY modern paradigm. Didn't mean feelings and attractions and desire and passion didn't exist in all their messiness. But it meant that they were not interpreted or "conceptually organized" according to the narrative you are laying out here which is really only a few generations old. "Nothing is invented as fast as a tradition when you need one!"

A Sinner said...

"Certainly such recognition of the presence of members of the opposite sex and appreciation of them, even of their physical attractiveness, can descend into crudity and lust, but it need not do so. None of us should want to live in an androgynous world."

Neither does the appreciation of the same sex, even of their physical attractiveness, need to descend into crudity and lust. Nor does it make the world androgynous (a sort of pan-bisexuality might be accused of doing that, but not homosexuality certainly). Yes, the relations between men and women are a large part of what makes the world beautiful and interesting. Throwing some minority experiences into the mix (they will always be pretty rare) arguably makes things more complex and nuanced, not less.

"heterosexual identity in these areas is normal whereas homosexual identity is not"

Ah, here you are invoking "normal" again, a statistical paradigm from the age of psychodynamics.

You can't exactly find a traditional moral category for condemning non-genital homosexuality comparable to non-marital heterosexuality (the only clear moral line, sex acts themselves, are reserved for the married across the board)...so you grasp for a reason to distinguish homo and hetero here and settle upon a paradigm of "normality" or normativity. Fascinating.

"That is one of the places where the 'new homophiles' err. They want to create some space, for homosexuals, for a category such as I have just described for innocent heterosexual appreciation. There is no such space, however, precisely because homosexuality is intrinsically disordered."

And now a circular non sequitur! I say "circular" because you are clearly begging the question here.

The Catechism calls "homosexual inclinations" by the term "objectively disordered" (the term "intrinsically" is reserved for the acts). One of the contentions of some of the new homophiles (one which is quite sensible) is that "homosexual inclinations" describes ONLY the inclination to the object of homosexual acts specifically.

That seems rather straightforward: if same-sex sex acts are intrinsically disordered, then an inclination taking those acts as their object...would be "objectively" disordered. Fair enough.

You seemingly want to argue that the "objective disorder" applies to homosexual orientation AS A WHOLE, which is actually a concept the Catechism doesn't even address. It talks about sex acts and the lustful inclination for those acts. It no where even begins to discuss innocent appreciation, "blushing, "noticing," etc, homo or hetero.

You then come and make the question-begging argument that these things are also bad because "homosexuality is intrinsically disordered," even though the very question is whether the "objective disorder" includes these things, whether it describes an inclination towards certain disordered acts, or rather the "orientation as a whole." Well, you can't answer that question through an assertion that assumes already YOUR preferred answer to it!

A Sinner said...


"The reason that the former are a normal part of identity is because they are really part of nature, really part of God's design for the world."

No. Male and female reproductive biology is part of God's design for the world. Marriage is part of God's design for the world. A particular social and psychological script SURROUNDING those realities or for culturally constructing or enabling those realities...is not. The romantic narrative you are imagining to be eternal and universal started with the adulterous "courtly love" tradition of the medieval troubadors, and gradually evolved into Jane Austen, Freud, and the heteroromantic Disneyfied coupling narratives of the 20th-century.

"Identifying oneself as intrinsically 'a homosexual' really is identifying oneself with one's inclinations to sin. This is not so for being heterosexual."

This doesn't follow at all. Heterosexuality and homosexuality both have lustful and non-lustful expressions/manifestations. Heterosexuality, indeed, allows eventually for a moral genital expression in marriage in a way that homosexuality does not. But that's the really the only/main asymmetry. Non-marital heterosexuality and non-marital homosexuality are absolutely parallel (as, indeed, the constructs were constructed AS parallel. If you don't like that symmetry, then you'd have to toss the constructs, which is exactly what Hannon is arguing!)

"Even without going into any lurid detail, one can see this merely by considering that a pedophile man may desire little girls."

Well consider this for a mind-twist: a straight man viewing LESBIAN pornography...this is also an expression of "heterosexuality" inasmuch as heterosexuality is constructed as an attraction to the opposite sex and not to any particular relational arrangement with them. So to the "third party" straight viewer, even homosexual sex acts may become an object of "heterosexual" fantasy. Do you really want to support a construct that admits of THAT sort of absurd implication?? Is a logic that can lead there really the sort of paradigm you want to support?

William Luse said...

I'll try to comment more later, when I've had time to read your post carefully. For now, I'll just note that I can't read FT anymore because of just these sort of offerings. Beneath the crushing weight of the homosexual "rights" movement, the skulls of many reputedly orthodox Christians and political conservatives seem to be collapsing. We're watching the gradual debauching of Christian moral theology in the vain hope that it will solve some problem while in reality becoming a part of it.

Lydia McGrew said...

I don't have time to respond to all of A.S.'s comments, though I have decided to publish them all. Here are a few responses. First, Hannon's concepts do not elude me except insofar as they are postmodern and hence either vague or incoherent. The attempt to make a great gulf between a concept such as Paul's "the use of nature," and the desire thereto and a concept like "healthy" or "normal" is simply unconvincing. One need never have heard of Freud to use concepts like healthy and normal. Indeed, we do so all the time.

In fact, it is central to natural law (which, bizarrely, Hannon claims to be interested in) that there is such a thing as normalcy for human beings, a telos to sexuality, and that the reason homosexual intercourse is wrong is because it is contrary to that telos. In this sense it is _obvious_ that homosexual acts and the desires thereto are _precisely_ unhealthy and abnormal according to natural law thinking. There is no vast gulf between "unnatural" and "abnormal." Indeed, they are just two closely related, for some people's use of the terms identical, ways of looking at the same thing.

In fact, it is precisely the "it's just wrong because God said it's wrong" view that _rejects_ natural law thinking and turns the wrongness of unnatural acts into a mere divine command. Natural law thinking grounds this wrongness in the telos of the human being as male and female. That this telos would have an expression in the desires of the vast majority of human beings, even after the Fall of man, is only to be expected. The Christian believes that heterosexual desires are created by God as a way of motivating God's plan for the perpetuation of the race. To attempt to deny this is, of course, convenient for the non-Christian but is really not optional for the Christian.

I note that A.S. appears to be much more sympathetic to the "new homophiles" than Hannon, thus confirming my point that the two really do have more in common than might at first meet the eye. For example, A.S. does a little dance when it comes to regarding homosexual desire and a specifically romantic appreciation of one man for another man as disordered. He doesn't like that phraseology. He insists on treating such languishing, romantic feeling, so long as it isn't lustful per se, as a good and lovely thing in *perfect parallel* to one's treatment of a young man's attraction to a girl or a girl's romantic feelings for a man. This attempt at parallel, again, is unconvincing, and it is telling that it comes in a comment defending Hannon even though Hannon is allegedly rejecting the "gift of homosexual orientation" thinking that usually lies behind such equivalencies and attempted excuses for homosexual crushes.

Lydia McGrew said...

Now, it simply is not true that "anyone might be tempted to sodomy" except in the narrow and trivial logical sense. Not empirically. There is a reason why the Old Testament specifically says that one should not lie with a man as with a woman. The assumption is not that those who desire women are at least as likely to use them contrary to nature as in the natural way. On the contrary, the idea is that forbidding of sodomy is specifically needed for those who wish to lie *with men as with women*. St. Paul's words in Romans show the same pattern. He doesn't say that men left the natural use of the woman so as to engage in unnatural acts with women but that men left the natural use of the woman so as to engage in unnatural acts with men.

That acts of sodomy *can* be carried out between men and women doesn't mean that they are just as *likely* to be, nor that our wildly pornified culture has not skewed these probabilities as well from what they would otherwise be in a society in which such acts were not sold to young boys via an addictive medium.

As an empirical matter, it is laughably false to treat some sort of grim duty and a desire to procreate, without any attraction to the opposite sex, as just as probable or common a motivator to marriage as heterosexual desire. Moreover, this kind of stripping away of the goodness of heterosexual desire is, again, a disastrous approach to the sexuality of normal young people. Now we are not to affirm our heterosexual young people's developing feelings for the opposite sex and try to channel it into the right course. Rather we are simply to tell them to get married as a sort of duty so as to have babies. If to satisfy their sexual desires at all, not because those sexual desires are at all part of the way God made them. No, no, that would be to encourage them in pride and in a "fetish" (for crying out loud) for the opposite sex.

Then, too, I see in A.S. the extremely poor argument which I *already answered* in the main post. Because it is possible for heterosexual people to have unnatural desires and engage in unnatural acts, this is _somehow_ taken to undermine the normativity and healthiness of _natural_ desires for _natural_ acts. How exactly that argument works is left vague, as befits those influenced by postmodernism. Despite the fact that I made it quite clear that I was not celebrating unnatural desires that happen to involve the opposite sex, the fact that such desires and acts exist is still taken as an argument against my natural-law position. How? Who knows? No logical progression has been shown from, "It is natural for a man to desire sex with a woman in the way that God originally set up" to "It is a natural and positive thing for a man to desire to use a woman in some radically different way or to desire to watch women engaging in unnatural acts." Yet _somehow_ "heteronormativity" is thought to be refuted by such a gratuitous connection.

Lydia McGrew said...

Again, lest my words be twisted: When I speak of "attraction to the opposite sex," of course I am speaking of the way this is manifested in attraction to individual members of the opposite sex. And I am affirming that this is part of God's design for the world. Moreover, such attraction need not be either wrong _nor_ directed to marriage. Perhaps the lady to whom the gentleman raises his hat and whose beauty he appreciates *as* a man is someone else's wife. He can nonetheless do it respectfully.

Again, the "new homophiles" want to make a similar category for homosexual appreciation, in which a man appreciates the "beauty" of another man _as_ a man (which is to say, as a homosexual man), but why should we accept that they are right about that, except in the name of an unjustified desire not to treat their feelings any differently from those of heterosexuals?

But, again, all of this is inconsistent with Hannon in any event, because Hannon wants us to reject the _categories_ of homosexuality and heterosexuality. Hence, there is no room in the view Hannon urges for the blushes of girls before boys to be a manifestation of heterosexuality and to be affirmed as such, any more than there is room for the blushes of (sexually confused) boys in relation to other boys to be a manifestation of homosexuality and to be a cause of concern (or, for the new homophiles, celebration) as such. We are supposed to reject those constructs altogether, according to him.

Lydia McGrew said...

By the way, A.S.'s assertion that non-marital homosexuality and heterosexuality are absolutely parallel is just that: An assertion. I say that it is obviously a false assertion and that Christians, in particular, who believe that God designed mankind, should reject it as perniciously false.

Moreover, while A.S. tries to say that, instead of getting the idea that non-married heterosxual inclinations are healthy from observation and common sense, I have apparently gotten that idea unbeknownst to myself from 19th century and 20th century psychologists (!!), he is just wrong about that. Furthermore, if the _main_ point we attribute to such psychologists is that heterosexuality is healthy while homosexuality is unhealthy, then A.S. is just wrong to say that these inclinations as constructed were constructed to be parallel. Indeed, Hannon's whole point is that one was said to be unhealthy while the other was said to be healthy!

Lydia McGrew said...

Anyone who pretends to be using natural law thinking but who rejects the categories of healthy-unhealthy and normal-abnormal as mere Freudian constructs is badly confused!

That homosexual acts are not merely _wrong_ by God's bare decree but _unhealthy_ is one of those politically incorrect inconvenient truth. Doctors, indeed, could tell details that I will not go into of the harm done to the human body by the unnatural uses of homosexual acts. To see that *just is* to access the natural light and at least part of the natural law on this subject.

Nor is sexuality the only area where natural law thinking and the concepts of health and normalcy are joined at the hip. For example, in our insane world there are now people who want to have their healthy limbs cut off because they have an "image" of themselves as amputees! It is necessary for good medicine to understand that these are _healthy_ limbs and that cutting them off is _unnatural_, that the desire to have them cut off is psychologically _abnormal_. Similarly, I use reasoning concerning what is healthy when arguing the pro-life case. I introduce the notion of a being to which it is _proper_ to be able to think but which is suffering privation by talking about the fact that a person who has had brain damage is in an unhealthy physical state from which we would like to be able to cure him, but that this concept of privation of good health obviously does not apply to a worm, to which it is not proper to have the ability to think anyway.

Again and again we see not a gulf or a separation between the ideas of health and normalcy and the natural law, but rather a consonance between them, so much so that right ideas about human health should simply be understood to be _part of_ human access to the natural law. To attempt to drive a wedge between these areas in regard to sexuality is badly misguided and misleading.

A Sinner said...

Unnatural/immoral and "abnormal" or "psychologically unhealthy" are only equivalent in the most general sense of both meaning "bad" according to their particular framework of evaluation. But that's just the thing: by invoking the psychological "normativity" framework as an argument in favor of "heterosexuality," you are implicitly accepting the whole discourse that it's a part of, with concepts like neurosis, the subconscious, and a origin of evaluation not based on God but on functional compliance with social norms. The problem is that this comes back to bite you inasmuch as by those same standards, on account of changing social norms, homosexuality really isn't considered dysfunctional anymore.

Consider this: an animal rights activist, a Jew, and a Buddhist all might think eating pork is bad. But for the animal rights guy this evaluation is made in a framework of Enlightenment-style rights, for the Jew it's a framework of clean vs unclean and ritual purity, and for the Buddhist it's about karma and the transmigration of souls. And it further unclear that any of these ideas maps onto to Christian paradigm of sin/virtue with any sort of exact equivalence.

Normativity as a standard of evaluation has nothing to do with natural law. Natural law is as you say based on telos. Normativity was invented to retain social conformity while rejecting teleology.

A Sinner said...

Your second comment seems to betray an odd way of thinking about what heterosexuality even is.

You say that the fact that heterosexuals couples can engage in unnatural acts is no argument against hetero normativity because their desire for natural acts is still good.

But that's the whole point: the "heterosexuality" of a desire is not morally determinative. There is nothing morally valuable in itself of an act or desire being "heterosexual."

There is a worth in a desire being natural and moral. And, yes, the marital act is by definition between a man and a woman. But heterosexuality is morally accidental in the sense that lots of acts are heterosexual, good and bad. Heterosexuality is not the morally determinative criterion, as all the heterosexual immorality proves.

For much of Christian history, it would have been foreign to look at a man committing buggery with a woman and a man committing buggery with another man and think of this as indicative of "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" conceived as distinct psychosexual constitutions. Likely, they would have both been thought of as sodomites and that would be that.

Lydia McGrew said...

"by invoking the psychological "normativity" framework as an argument in favor of "heterosexuality," you are implicitly accepting the whole discourse that it's a part of, with concepts like neurosis, the subconscious, and a origin of evaluation not based on God but on functional compliance with social norms."

This is a completely false statement. What? Are we literally now saying that there is _no_ legitimate category of healthiness that is not bound up with psychoanalysis? Or perhaps that there is _no_ such category in relation to sex?? That could not be more false. Why in the world should we allow the Freudians to co-opt the entire category of health and normalcy? No reason whatsoever. On the contrary. The Freudians are merely subverting categories that arise spontaneously and loading them down with all of their freight and baggage. But the idea that some things are healthful and others are not predates Freudianism by a long, long chalk. Indeed, as I have already pointed out, the concepts of health and real human normalcy have a wide range of applications, not merely sexual, that are essential for all the healing arts and for much human thought.

I also note, A.S., that now you are in favor of teleological thinking whereas in your first comment you appeared to dismiss my reference to it. You didn't like my use of the phrase "telic orientation," so there, you said: "For one, because ideas of "telos" haven't always been around." If we hold that the natural law has always been available to man and that the natural law is bound up with teleology, this is a false statement. Even if implicitly, the idea of "telos" has indeed always been around.

But now, in any event, you suddenly want to endorse teleology, so you conveniently forget that you just dismissed it upthread (presumably because I used it in a phrase with "orientation") as some sort of more recent "construct." You postmoderns apparently have trouble keeping your story straight.

Lydia McGrew said...

"heterosexuality is morally accidental..."

Since you have just acknowledged that the *only* moral sexual act(s) are between one man and one woman, this is a ludicrous statement. Of course heterosexuality is not morally accidental! It is a _necessary condition_ for moral and natural (in St. Paul's phrase "the natural use of the woman") sexuality. Moreover, the vast majority of people who have sexual urges toward the opposite sex have an inclination toward the natural act. That is how God, the designer, set it up. That is why so many young people today, despite being taught all manner of unnatural acts in school, continue to conceive many babies out of wedlock! The urge to _that act_ is built into mankind.

The fact of the matter is that women have a distinctive female anatomy that men are drawn towards, and vice versa. And that this is related to the way God made those parts of human anatomy to go together.

I get tired of repeating that I am not endorsing the goodness of sodomite acts between men and women merely because they are between men and women. I've said that now more times than I can count. And if indeed some man _only_ wants to engage in sodomite acts with women, then his desires are also objectively disordered. My guess, rather, is that even many men harmed by our pornographic culture are not that far gone but yet retain normal heterosexual desires along with abnormal and wrong ones.

In any event, as I have said before, there is *no* argument (nor have you succeeded in making one) from the fact that unnatural desires for the opposite sex exist to the conclusion that there is "no such thing" as natural heterosexual orientation or that it is not a good thing or that heterosexual identity should be deconstructed. You keep trying, but there is no argument there, so you can't succeed in making one.

A Sinner said...

As for non-genital non-marital expressions of sexuality, hetero or homo: you ask "why should we accept homosexual appreciation here?" but the burden of proof is on you. The question is why shouldn't it be accepted. The arguments of the "conservative" side here become flimsy.

Traditional Catholic morality draws its "thick red line" at marriage and sex acts specifically. Sex acts and deliberate entertainment of sexual arousal are permitted for married people, for anyone else it is lust. That's the traditional moral dividing line. You seem to want to create a new moral category of "pre/non marital limited 'heterosexuality'" that simply doesn't exist in the tradition or the deposit of faith. The traditional sin of sexuality was lust. If certain things (noticing, blushing, appreciating, tipping hats) are not lust for unmarried heterosexuals, they are not problematic period, because the traditional dividing line was marriage.

The traditional evaluation went something like this: step 1, "Is this genital arousal/stimulation?" If no, then there was nothing to evaluate. If yes, then step 2, "Is it taking place as part of an open-to-life marriage act?" If yes, then no issue. If no, then it was a sin of lust.

You seem to want to be inventing a new species of sin (or often, it seems, won't even say "sin" so much as invoking a new paradigm of condemnation ala "abnormal" or "disordered") that, even when the answer to step 1 is "no," goes on to ask "ok, so is this non-genital feeling heterosexual or homosexual?" creating a moral category of pre/non marital sexuality whose criterion is "as long as it's straight." But no such concept exists anywhere in the tradition.

I don't think Hannon is trying to get rid of blushing and appreciation of either sex by either sex. What he is trying to accomplish, it seems, is the elimination of evaluating these experiences in terms of "sexual orientation," in terms of some view that non-arousing "appreciation" of the opposite sex has some sort of moral superiority merely because the marital act also happens to be opposite sex (though so are many other bad acts!) In turn, though, there is indeed a hidden affinity with the new homophiles here inasmuch as such a deconstruction would also exculpate similar experiences towards the same sex from being "guilty by association" with sodomy merely on account of the fact that they're both same sex.

Lydia McGrew said...

" Heterosexuality is not the morally determinative criterion, as all the heterosexual immorality proves."

This sentence, once more, blurs the distinction between "immoral" and "unnatural." Every act that is contrary to nature (in the sense in which St. Paul would have used such a locution) is immoral. Not every act that is immoral is, in that sense, contrary to nature. This is, again, a basic asymmetry which those like Hannon, AS, and also the new homophiles wish to elide. But it remains stubbornly there. Heterosexual immorality is wrong, even evil. It causes harm, sorrow, and death. It is arguable that the acceptance of heterosexual immorality, especially in the form of promiscuity, has led to the acceptance of homosexuality. But the fact remains that a young man who falls into sin with his girlfriend (and may even subsequently marry her) is in that act doing something that is not contrary to nature. He has been led into sin by *natural* desires. His sin lies in the fact that he has acted upon without or before setting up the true context of full commitment necessary to make those actions moral. Nonetheless, the *thing he does* with the woman before marrying her and the *thing he does* after marrying her are the same *type* of act. We are not nominalists. Types of acts matter. That is, in fact, why he may conceive a child with her before marrying her.

So generalized references to "heterosexual immorality" are merely darkening counsel when we are discussing the subject at issue here. The Bible recognizes naturalness and unnaturalness as *additional* categories to morality and immorality. Common sense recognizes this as well. We should not try to deny these categories.

A Sinner said...

"But the idea that some things are healthful and others are not predates Freudianism by a long, long chalk."

Physically healthy and spiritually healthy, sure. "Psychologically" healthy apart from physical or spiritual health...not so much as that requires the whole discipline of psychology.

Now when it comes to "homosexual orientation" any arguments about physical health are limited to concrete physical acts obviously. Spiritual might give you more wiggle room to make your argument, except that spiritual health is equivalent to virtue, and there's nothing intrinsically incompatible with virtue about being gay as long as you're chaste.

So you're left with the nebulous (and, yes, mid-19th-century) concept of trying to condemn a homosexual emotional make-up as disordered, dysfunctional, neurotic, not well adjusted, perverted, or messed up. But there is a dual failure of your argument here: a) this standard of evaluation of health isn't Christian (the standard there is virtue), and b) even the discipline of psychology itself has changed its collective mind on how homosexuality fits into that discipline's particular vision of health.

Of course you're free to posit a school of psychology with its own quixotic standards according to which being gay is still messed up or mentally ill, but don't claim this is required by Christian moral logic, where the question God cares about is "are you holy or unholy?"

"If hold that the natural law has always been available to man and that the natural law is bound up with teleology, this is a false statement. Even if implicitly, the idea of "telos" has indeed always been around."

But implicit is just the thing. There are no frameworks for ideas that are merely implicit. Teleology became explicit with the Greeks basically. Before that, primitive societies would tell you "men mate with women, duh" but they would have no particular philosophical framework in the abstract about Reason, the ends of human life, the definition of fulfillment, etc etc.

Just as with dogma, you must be careful to distinguish between the concept and it's formulation. The reality we call transubtantiation has been around since Christ. It's construction/framing/formulation AS "transubstantiation" (with all the associated Aristotelian context in which that term is to be understood) is from the 12th century.

A Sinner said...

Finally, as for the "natural/unnatural vs moral/immoral" idea, I'll say this:

1) the scholastics would say that fornication breaks the natural law too in one sense and might in this sense be called unnatural

2) even admitting the phrasing that "unnaturality" in the sense of non-open-to-life "adds" gravity to sexual sin, the division is still natural/unnatural or procreative/nonprocreative NOT hetero/homo.

You seem to want to make a leap from the fact that one particular heterosexual sex act can be moral and natural (whereas no gay attempts at sexual expression are)...to some notion that even when were not talking about sex acts at all, the vague and generic heterosexual disposition allows for things that the equivalent homosexual does not, because one is natural as one isn't.

But that's not true. Vaginal sex is natural, any other sex acts are not. Fine. But "heterosexuality" as a concept is not organized by the idea of vaginal sex and neither is homosexual orientation conceptually organized with reference to gay sex.

What you're proposing is almost like saying that because a doctor cutting someone open can be morally legitimate (in surgery) but a non-doctor doing so never is...that any non-surgical acts are murderous even when they don't involve any bodily intervention at all.

But that would be crazy. You can say heterosexuality is good because it has one natural expression (alongside many bad and neutral expressions) but then turn around and say homosexual orientation is bad on account of one bad expression (in spite of the fact that it might have many good or at least neutral expressions).

You can't take the "best case scenario" (the marriage act) of heterosexuality and say it renders "morally neutral" heterosexual experiences (blushing, hat tipping, etc) good...but then take the WORST case scenario of homosexuality (unnatural sex acts) and conclude that they render morally neutral experiences of homosexuality bad.

A Sinner (edited) said...

"Since you have just acknowledged that the *only* moral sexual act(s) are between one man and one woman, this is a ludicrous statement. Of course heterosexuality is not morally accidental!"

You're equivocating on "heterosexuality" here.

Obviously the fact of something being of opposite-sex make-up is relevant in at least one case: the marital act.

The question is whether this leads to exalting the whole conceptual field of "opposite sex" things and denigrating the whole field of "same sex" things.

Look: the only valid matter for the Eucharist is wheat bread and grape wine. Great. This doesn't mean that enjoying beer in moderation (even preferring it to wine!) is morally degenerate or that getting drunk on wine is somehow better as if we evaluate non-sacramental uses of these things by the standard of the sacrament.

The moral standard is "drunk or sober." Temperance. There is no standard "beer-preferring or wine-preferring" just so long as you aren't a drunkard and, when Mass is celebrated, you use wine.

"The urge to _that act_ is built into mankind."

But "an urge to that act" is not how heterosexuality is defined. That's why Hannon finds it problematic. It's an amorphous concept that lumps together everything opposite-sex with no distinction. Vaginal sex in marriage is just as "heterosexual" as [insert an explicit list of unnatural sexual acts and uses of pornography, edited out as to detail, LM]

According to the "sexual orientation" construct, whatever other distinctions you might make, these things are all equally expressions of "heterosexuality."

But then, in turn, selfless acts for a beloved of the same sex, and gay sodomy, are likewise equally "homosexual"

Should a Christian care? The Catechism says the passions are morally neutral: "Passions are morally good when they contribute to a good action, evil in the opposite case."

I think and Hannon seems to think that we should focus on whether emotions/feelings/passions are contributing to good or bad actions, and not try to categorize based on having the right or wrong, normal or abnormal, psychoemotional constitutions. "Heterosexual" feelings (whether part of a predominant pattern, or as an isolated fluke) are good when they contribute to good actions, bad when they contribute to bad. As the EXACT same thing is true of homosexual. It's not "which sex is this feeling associated with" that matters, it's how that feeling is interpreted and expresses itself in a good or bad act.

"The fact of the matter is that women have a distinctive female anatomy that men are drawn towards, and vice versa. And that this is related to the way God made those parts of human anatomy to go together."

Except "heterosexuality" is just as present in [detailed list of sex acts, edited]

No, passions are neutral. "Sexual orientation" is a socially useful but arbitrary and morally irrelevant division of passions by what sex they're associated with. But what really matters morally is what sort of act passions contribute to in a specific case.

Lydia McGrew said...

AS, let me be blunt: You are being incredibly, almost willfully dense. You are suggesting that I am "creating" categories which have been with mankind for centuries if not millenia (e.g., male chivalry as an expression of heterosexuality, romantic feelings between boys and girls as associated with heterosexual telos). You are taking up a lot of my time with these wildly dense statements denying the obvious.

Because I am trying, for once in life, to appear open-minded, I'm taking the time to publish and respond to you. But this isn't going to go on indefinitely.

In this context, let me clarify that one of your comments thus far has been overly graphic for the line I draw on this blog. I have no editing feature in the software on this blog. It's publish/don't publish. I therefore took extra time to copy the comment, edit out the overly graphic material, paste it in under your name, and publish it. Please note the line drawn accordingly for later reference. Thanks.

Lydia McGrew said...

Now, as to psychological health being a "construct" of the 19th century. That is also baloney. The word "psychology" comes from the word for the soul. Of course psychological abnormality was recognized prior to the 19th century, though not perhaps obsessed over nor categorized to death as it is then and since then. That homosexuality represents a generalized disorder of the soul, a drawing in the wrong direction, is not only obvious but also is entirely consonant with the natural law tradition and need not be distinctly Freudian at all.

I am, in fact, not Catholic, but it is you and the new homophiles who are trying to split the atom by parsing the notion of "disordered" to narrowly that romantic feelings towards members of the same sex aren't disordered so long as they aren't lustful! That this is rank sophistry ought to be obvious by the lights of the teaching of your own church, but you apparently have a motivation to try to split that difference, so that a man romantically languishing over the "beauty" of another man, as long as it doesn't proceed to actual sexual fantasizing, is just fine, just fine, move along, folks, nothing to evaluate here! Nothing to see as problematic or abnormal.

Your analogies all show that you _literally_ do not get it when it comes to growing up as a normal heterosexual person. You literally do not see any connection between blushing, crushes, hat-tipping, dancing, and, ultimately, the unitive act of marriage. You therefore think that everything but actual sexual lust can, in a homosexual context, be separated and be just fine even if it is romantic! This makes me think that you don't really know what "romantic" means. Perhaps that is true. Perhaps you really don't understand the difference between utterly non-sexual friendship, including deep love for the friend, philia, and the partially erotic emotion (even if not involving lustful thoughts) that is romance.

If you don't, then there is no point in talking to you.

But, yes, I own the soft impeachment: I do indeed support a world in which the entirety of the heterosexual developmental experience is a part of God's good creation if rightly directed, in which this includes chivalry, appreciation of a woman's beauty *as* a man and of a man *as* a woman, a girl's or boy's gradual and innocent development of combined emotional and physical attraction, and ultimately marital sex. These things are good in much the same sense that bread is good, or flowers. The category of moral goodness applies to them only insofar as the will is involved, directing them rightly, restraining when necessary, and so forth. But the category of natural goodness, as the creation is naturally good, can apply even when the will is not involved. You deny this. That is a fundamental part of our disagreement, and I say again that it would be disastrous for Christian parents or any, especially, who guide the young, to adopt your perspective.

Lydia McGrew said...

As for your repeated attempts to bring obviously and uncontroversially unnatural acts between men and women into the discussion, they remain argumentatively unsuccessful. You continue to insist, falsely, that anyone who believes in such a thing as heterosexual orientation must be *somehow* or to *some extent* endorsing sodomy between a man and a woman, but this is not true.

Indeed, you will notice that in my main post and throughout what I have said is a good, normal, and natural orientation is the orientation towards _normal_ heterosexual sex. I have also pointed out (but you prefer to ignore) how widespread this orientation is and the tenacity with which it persists even among young people taught to do all manner of unnatural acts. I have pointed out that these young people continue to conceive children together, for instance. You can say until you are blue in the face that sodomite acts between men and women ought to be endorsed (in some degree) by me as "heterosexual," but that doesn't make it so, nor have you shown any logical progression that forces it. So you would save us both time by ceasing to bring up such acts.

Yes _of course_ we take the "best case scenario" in heterosexuality (which is to say, the *type* of sex act between a man and a woman by which a child can be generated if other conditions are right), because that is the design of the world. That is indeed what is natural. That is, to put it no higher, what most of us are talking about when we talk about heterosexuality!

Quite frankly, I do not consider myself to have any responsibility whatsoever even to *try* to place heterosexuality on a par with homosexuality. The burden of proof is on me? Not in the slightest. It is the one advocating the strange idea that romantic feelings between two men are entirely innocent, unproblematic, and "nothing to evaluate," and that romantic feelings between a boy and a girl are nothing particularly natural who has the burden of proof! Not to mention someone endorsing the thesis (which honesty should force you to admit is deliberately provocative) that we should "deconstruct heterosxuality" who bears the burden of proof. To say that you and Hannon have failed to show any such things is putting it mildly.

Jeffrey S. said...

I just have to jump in. After reading Hannon's piece, "A Sinner's" comments and your careful response to all this nonsense, I can only marvel at your patience.

Here's is what I want to know from the so-called "queer history" experts -- if we had to invent the terms homosexuality and heterosexuality in the 19th Century, then what the heck was going on before then? If these weren't issues, where were the (unfortunate) men and women with same-sex attractions? In the closet as we might say today? And if that is so, then shouldn't we want to return to a culture where we never even talk about such matters because men and women are just expected to be attracted to one another and get married (or remain chaste)? Seems like that culture (while probably unrealistic for today) would be a lot better for society than the "let it all hang out, let's talk about our same-sex attractions" culture of today.

Lydia McGrew said...

In all fairness, I can only guess where Michael Hannon would come down on the question of talking about one's homosexual temptations. Perhaps that would be one place where he and "A Sinner" would disagree, especially since "A Sinner" appears to think that male romantic affection for another male is not a bad thing per se. In that respect A.S. appears to have a little more in common than Hannon does with the "new homophiles." But perhaps here I am merely trying too hard to be charitable to Hannon.

What I think we can say is that Hannon and A.S. both join in trying to squelch any joy in or positive portrayal of heterosexual sexuality itself. They present us with a kind of joyless approach. There is no normal or abnormal, no healthy or unhealthy, no celebration of God's design of woman for man and man for woman. There is no justifiable fond happiness mingled with anxiety of a parent as he sees his little girl grow into a woman with all that this entails concerning femininity and the attraction to boys or similar parental emotions vis a vis a boy growing into manhood. Indeed, there is no robust notion of manhood and womanhood at all, much less a willingness to applaud the awe and mystery of God's making man in two sexes and designing them for one another, with all the myriad interesting and positive ramifications this has for the interactions of the sexes in this world. Their vision instead is an almost androgynous and depressing one of divine command, without reference to the beauty of divinely designed sexual human nature: Don't do this because it's wrong. Do this because it's right and to procreate. All that might _lead up to_ the marital act, for example, what the book of Proverbs calls "the way of a man with a maid" and lists as one of the amazing things of nature, is not something we should celebrate, because to do so would involve an affirmation of heterosexual identity and orientation. And that is what they say we must not do.

Few views that have any pretense to call themselves "Christian" could be further from an understanding of the natural law and of the created, embodied human order. Such a view would do credit to the most rigid and joyless of Puritan fundamentalists but is rather surprising from Catholics, who helped to articulate so eloquently to the world the biblical insight that "God's commands are not grievous," that God commands what He commands because it is truly consonant with our nature as He has made it to be.

Lydia McGrew said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lydia McGrew said...

A.S.'s austere implication that God cares not one whit about what is "psychologically messed up" or healthy, what is normal or abnormal, but only about what is holy or unholy, moral or immoral, is also completely wrong.

To be sure, God does not _condemn as sin_ a psychological disability or twisted inclination per se. But that is a far cry from saying that He does not care about it. Far from it! Jesus Christ came to earth and gave sight to the blind, made the lame walk, healed the sick, and raised the dead. No one said that Lazarus was morally evil for dying (!!), but Jesus wept over his grave. Of course God cares about sick/healthy as well as holy/unholy, and there is no reason to exclude from His love and concern those who are sick in mind as well as in body.

When we receive the blessed Sacrament in the Anglican church, the liturgy has the priest say, "The body of Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul into everlasting life." God intends in the end to heal us of all the sad effects of the Fall upon our bodies and our souls, which certainly does include our psyches.

Can God _use_ sickness of mind or body as an opportunity for growth? Certainly. But in another sense all twistings, perversions, and absence of health are contrary to God's plan for man as designed before the Fall.

Far more accurate a view than that God cares only about holy/unholy and that normal/abnormal ought to be an irrelevant category to Christians is the view expressed by the hymn writer:

"Just as I am, poor, wretched, blind,/Sight, riches, healing of the mind,/Yea, all I need, in Thee to find,/O Lamb of God, I come, I come."

Jeffrey S. said...

Lydia,

I think I found a Protestant ally for you (and an interesting piece in its own right as the writer echoes many of your themes):

http://www.canonandculture.com/is-homosexual-orientation-sinful/

A Sinner said...

"You are suggesting that I am 'creating' categories which have been with mankind for centuries if not millenia (e.g., male chivalry as an expression of heterosexuality, romantic feelings between boys and girls as associated with heterosexual telos)."

No one denies that men, for example, have been "chivalrous" (since the Middle Ages at least) towards women on account of attraction to them. That doesn't mean it was constructed as an expression of anything called "heterosexuality." It was an expression of feelings for that women, it was not necessarily taken as expressing a constitutional disposition of feelings towards Woman in the abstract in general. Such a disposition may have existed, but it wasn't constructed as "sexual orientation." Indeed, if you read the literature of the past, the character trait considered salient was more like to be something like how "amorous" a person was, not how "heterosexual" they were. A man elaborately courting a woman would have been seen as an expression of his amorous character, not his "heterosexuality."

"Of course psychological abnormality was recognized prior to the 19th century"

I'm not sure. Not in the sense of the sort of disorder homosexuality would allegedly be. Yes you had the extreme cases of insanity and imbecility. But beyond that I'm pretty sure the more subtle things we would now construct as "psychological disorder" were constructed as character flaws, as spiritual vice, not "mental illness." That or demons.

"That homosexuality represents a generalized disorder of the soul"

But it's only the construct of "sexual orientation" that makes "homosexuality" a "generalized" anything. In the past, it's not clear that a connection would have been drawn between a habit of sodomy and "preferring the company of men." It's the construct which seeks to "group" emotions according to the sex they're associated with.

"it is you and the new homophiles who are trying to split the atom by parsing the notion of 'disordered' to narrowly that romantic feelings towards members of the same sex aren't disordered so long as they aren't lustful!"

Well but if the disorder in question is nothing other than Lust...that makes perfect sense.

"so that a man romantically languishing over"

Yes you keep using that word "languishing." It's funny how you mock and frame as negative experiences towards the same sex that you then romanticize among adolescents for the opposite sex. If it's "languishing" (and if "languishing" is as tragic as it sounds)...then it's languishing for everyone.

A Sinner said...

"Your analogies all show that you _literally_ do not get it when it comes to growing up as a normal heterosexual person. You literally do not see any connection between blushing, crushes, hat-tipping, dancing, and, ultimately, the unitive act of marriage."

The "connection" is that they've been connected! Of course they're "associated" with each other, inasmuch as they're all potential expressions of attraction.

But I think of it like, say, anger: yes I see the connection between getting red in the face, getting silent and moody, screaming and yelling, hitting someone, and murdering them. They're connected inasmuch as they're all expressions of anger. But just because murder is one bad expression of anger doesn't mean that all expressions of anger are "tainted" on account of that one "bad apple" in anger's repertoire.

"You therefore think that everything but actual sexual lust can, in a homosexual context, be separated and be just fine even if it is romantic! This makes me think that you don't really know what 'romantic' means."

I think I do. It's a concept that was only bootstrapped to sexual relationships in the 19th century. Before that, we had things like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_friendship

"Perhaps that is true. Perhaps you really don't understand the difference between utterly non-sexual friendship, including deep love for the friend, philia, and the partially erotic emotion (even if not involving lustful thoughts) that is romance."

Not sure what you mean by "partially erotic." In my Catholic faith, at least, our catechism says: "Sexuality affects all aspects of the human person in the unity of his body and soul. It especially concerns affectivity, the capacity to love and to procreate, and in a more general way the aptitude for forming bonds of communion with others."

Inasmuch as we never interact with "bare humans" but always with men or with women, human love and attraction are always "sexed." But that doesn't make them all genital or to be accused of aping marriage, just because one has a preference that happens to be for one sex over the other.

That's how I look at it: "in a more general way the aptitude for forming bonds of communion with others."

In fact I think maybe we agree here, secretly: such "friendships" or experiences would NOT be constructed as problematically similar to heterogenital relationships IF the "sexual orientation" construct did not exist. These friendships would not be problematically "associated with" sodomy, conceptually, if "homosexuality" hadn't brought all same-sex emotional experience under its aegis (and, likewise, if "heterosexuality" hadn't, originally, co-opted all attraction and "appreciation" of men or women and bootstrapped it to sex.)

A Sinner said...

"But, yes, I own the soft impeachment: I do indeed support a world in which the entirety of the heterosexual developmental experience is a part of God's good creation if rightly directed, in which this includes chivalry, appreciation of a woman's beauty *as* a man and of a man *as* a woman, a girl's or boy's gradual and innocent development of combined emotional and physical attraction, and ultimately marital sex."

Well if you want to believe that, you can. But better scholars than me can and have shown innumerable counter examples throughout different cultures (in the world today and throughout history) where THIS particular script of psychosexual development would be foreign. Doesn't mean people don't end up (usually) marrying in the end in all those cultures. But the particular collective bildungsroman of 1850-1950, that particular script of sexual awakening...is just not very universal.

You can nevertheless support it, say it's the best thing human civilization has ever created for navigating sexuality, etc etc. But it's certainly not eternal.

"You continue to insist, falsely, that anyone who believes in such a thing as heterosexual orientation must be *somehow* or to *some extent* endorsing sodomy between a man and a woman, but this is not true."

No, I don't insist on that, and if you think I do...you misunderstand how I (and Hannon) are using those examples in argument.

The point isn't that if you support "heterosexuality" you have to assert all those manifestations of it. The point is that there is a double-standard in not viewing those excesses as "tainting" ALL of heterosexuality, yet seemingly view the equivalent excesses of homosexuality as tainting all of it.

Further, the idea isn't that you must endorse the excesses of heterosexuality, but that you introduce an unnecessary axis of evaluation. Under your system: heterosexual sodomy is bad because it's unnatural, but homosexual sodomy is bad simply because it's homosexual. And yet there is no need to introduce that evaluation. Both acts are unnatural; that's sufficient for condemnation of both. Your system attempts to set up "homosexuality" as an independent species of defect in acts. When in reality, the defect in sodomitical acts, homo or hetero, is that they are unnatural.

Again, it seems to me like you are doing something similar to what big anti-drug crusaders do in their double standard regarding alcohol: when someone gets drunk and kills a bunch of drivers from liquor...then the problem isn't the alcohol in itself, it's just the excess and immoderation. But when it is, say, marijuana, they'll judge the problem as inhering in the substance itself, not in irresponsible or excessive use. But that's just double standard.

"Yes _of course_ we take the "best case scenario" in heterosexuality (which is to say, the *type* of sex act between a man and a woman by which a child can be generated if other conditions are right), because that is the design of the world. That is indeed what is natural. That is, to put it no higher, what most of us are talking about when we talk about heterosexuality!"

Right. The double-standard comes in when homosexuality, conversely, is judged by its WORST case scenario.

A Sinner said...

"that romantic feelings between a boy and a girl are nothing particularly natural who has the burden of proof!"

They're not. The script of "romance" was invented sometime in the middle ages and has evolved ever since:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_%28love%29#Historical_definition

Indeed, it's arguable that "the rise of romantic love more or less coincided with the emergence of the novel" as a form of literature! Pretty recent!

As long as they are separated from specific sin, these different modes or scripts of human social relating and interaction...shouldn't be controversial.

Attraction is natural between humans. Particular cultural scripts or constructions OF attraction are not, they're historically contingent.

"What I think we can say is that Hannon and A.S. both join in trying to squelch any joy in or positive portrayal of heterosexual sexuality itself."

No. I have no idea what Hannon thinks of affection that happens to be homosexual, but I think we would both celebrate affection and relationships and emotional experiences that happen to be hetero-sexual. What I think we'd both oppose is constructing these good experiences into a narrative of "sexual orientation" that would constitute them as part of a sort of totalizing conceptual grouping of all experiences involving the opposite sex in general and in the abstract. As individual experiences they're perfectly good.

But, for example, if a man were attracted to a variety of people, males and females...but then noticed they were all red-heads...what should we conclude? That he's "bisexual"? Or rather that he has a thing for red-heads? Why make sex the salient characteristic when the common denominator was something else? But that all depends on cultural constructs of the significance of these experiences.

"no celebration of God's design of woman for man and man for woman."

I'm pretty sure marriage and the marriage act themselves, and the life with natural children that result...are enough of celebration of God's design of woman for man and man for woman.

This can be celebrated, most certainly, without celebrating "heterosexual psychological make-up" as such. That's a rather late narrative in history, and one that has become rather perverse.

Lydia McGrew said...

A.S. I don't have time to respond to all your comments. Here are just a few things:

1) I _knew_ that misconstrual would happen and even thought of preempting it, but one does have a life other than blogging, so I didn't, and now I have to respond to it: No, no, no, I am not saying that romance between the couple prior to marriage is a human universal. I know quite well that it is not. I am saying that _where_ such romance occurs in a heterosexual context, it is a positive thing in the sense that beautiful aspects of nature are positive things. But where romantic feelings (actual romantic feelings, not just strong friendship) between members of the same sex occur, they are not a positive thing but rather are an expression of a confused and disordered disposition.

2) Since my PhD is in English, with my dissertation on Edmund Spenser, and since one of my major areas of research was the courtly love tradition and the history of love between the sexes, I am well aware of the varying theses that a) love between the sexes is a very late development, and b) courtly love was per se a celebration of adultery. You apparently want to put the idea of romantic love between men and women (or just between husband and wife?) _very_ late (the invention of the novel!!), but that is easily refuted, with Spenser himself being just one data point. Those are long-running scholarly debates, but suffice it to say that your view is by no means historically tenable, and that precisely because it _does_ take such a late date.

3) You refer to strong friendship between two men as having been co-opted by the sexual orientation view regarding homosexuality, and you deplore that. Let's raise a glass to our one point of agreement. I also deplore it. But immediately thereafter I must destroy the harmony by disagreeing that this has *anything* to do with romance. Male *romantic* friendship is highly, highly problematic and not a good thing. To the extent that *strong feelings* of loyalty, admiration, being willing to die for the other person, and so forth, are being construed *as* romance, that is a serious confusion and hence a calumny on what are really non-romantic but emotionally powerful friendships. It is really part of the twistedness of our modern culture that a term like "bromance" exists and has been applied to high, serious, and wonderful male friendships in literature and even Scripture.

Lydia McGrew said...

Jeff,

That's an interesting piece by Denny Burk. I would tweak what it says in two directions--one making the perspective less severe and one making it more severe.

Since Denny Burk is a Calvinist and I'm not, he has no problem with saying that you can sin without any action of your will. I don't buy that. I think, however, that spontaneous feelings which are not (if not subsequently entertained) _acts of sin_ can nonetheless arise from our sin nature. In that sense they are in a sense "sinful" but not "sins." This applies to lots of things. Anger, for example, which is my own besetting sin. I may feel an unwilled surge of angry feeling. That is not in itself an act of sin. However, it arises from my sinful disposition. And immediately, within less than a second, I have a choice as to whether to entertain and hold onto it or reject it. Alas, I usually do the former, and that _is_ an act of sin.

A person who has a constant rather than transient homosexual disposition must be confronted with these kinds of struggles all the time with respect to sex. Of course, the same is true with a heterosexual man who struggles with heterosexual lust and also with our culture that confronts him with pics of scantily clad women every time he turns around! We all have our struggles with our sinful nature.

Denny and I would also no doubt agree that even less intense and seemingly more "innocent" feelings--of romance, for example, such as I have been arguing with A.S. about--arise *in all cases* from the sin nature in the case of a person with a homosexual orientation. They do not *in all cases* arise from the sin nature in the case of a heterosexual person, though of course they may in some individual case (e.g., if a man and woman who are married to other people have romantic feelings for each other).

I would probably be _more_ severe than Denny Burk w.r.t. his last paragraphs where he talks about welcoming homosexual people in our churches and making them feel like they can talk about their problem. This seems to me to encourage the "too much information" culture in the evangelical church. They should talk to a pastor or counselor but not to everybody.

In general, though, I think you're right to see that Denny Burk and I are both seeing the entirety of homosexual _feelings_ as arising out of the sin nature, out of the particular form that fallenness takes in that person.

Lydia McGrew said...

A couple of other points in response to A.S.:

1) Since you ask about "languishing" in relation to heterosexuals, yes, "languishing" heterosexual love and romance may be a sweet thing. (Though eventually even legitimate lovers have to get on with their lives.) Whether it is a good thing or not depends entirely on surrounding circumstances. See my example above concerning a man and woman who are married to others but have romantic feelings for one another. Such is not the case for homosexual romance.

2) The discussion of when specifically romantic heterosexual notions entered Western civilization, and whether or not it was connected with marriage, is a red herring. Hannon's thesis is much more sweeping and concerns heterosexual orientation uberhaupt. This obviously goes a lot farther than romance. Contra Hannon, heterosexual orientation _is_ present in all human cultures and time periods, because, despite the Fall, this divine design of manliness and womanliness and their relation to one another has persisted. And people, not being entirely blind as bats, have also _recognized_ masculinity and femininity and their connection with one another since time immemorial, including the way that this plays out in feelings of heterosexual attraction. Not all feelings of attraction are specifically romantic or chivalrous, but some are.

A Sinner said...

From your first comment:

1) if you admit the social script of "romance" is a historically/culturally contingent construct, it's unclear to me why you'd believe that when it DOES exist in a given culture, it's only valid purpose can be a sort of remote preparation for marriage. If the narrative of "romance" is not an eternal essence or feature of human nature, then it's a social construct, and constructs can surely be deconstructed, reconstructed, reinvented, and repurposed. Just because the adulated script and imagery got bootstrapped to sexual relationships in the late-Victorian, whereas previously it was broader than that in the realm of human friendships/relationships...it's unclear why you think it should remain so bootstrapped. If anything, that merely leads to the men we now call gay thinking that sex and marriage are the natural outcome of their love, when really that idea seems the result of a poverty of alternative models.

2) I have never taken a position on how late romantic love evolved. But I do think it was only bootstrapped to sexual expression more recently, and that it's possible that it was only "democratized" by the novel whereas previously it may have been a "luxury" or a refined idea that only the aristocracy could afford to entertain "realistically." Maybe that remains true today even...

3) I'm not sure how you are distinguishing "romance" then, other than by a question begging formulation that makes it include sexual desire and marriage by definition. But that's the very bootstrapping I'm questioning. Look at Newman's sermon on friendship: "What is Christian high-mindedness, generous self-denial, contempt of wealth, endurance of suffering, and earnest striving after perfection, but an improvement and transformation, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, of that natural character of mind which we call romantic?" The Phaedrus is pretty good, too.

From the second:

1) presumably the problem with languishing in marriage is that the couple already have a commitment of "maxima amicitia" to each other. Singles have no such prior commitment.

2) I don't think Hannon is saying get rid of all heterosexual attraction. He's saying get rid of the construction of identities and psychosocial narrative of attraction as "orientation," as a totalizing pattern defined by the predominant preference for this or that sex in the abstract and generic. Saying "let's get rid of race," doesn't mean we get rid of differences in skin color or somehow can naively "forget" obvious visual differences. It means deconstructing the social significance of that grouping and working to neutralize its baggage.

Lydia McGrew said...
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Lydia McGrew said...

You are using "romance" ambiguously. In the Newman quotation, it isn't directed towards an individual at all, nor does it occur specifically between individuals. One might in that sense say that climbing Mt. Everest is a romantic adventure. That is a much broader use of the term.

When, however, we speak of romantic affection towards another person or of romantic love, that is far more specific.

In the sense in which I am using that phrase, philia by itself should not be so designated. Romantic love is a form of eros as opposed to philia, though it may not be, to use C.S. Lewis's distinction, a form of "Venus." (Lewis uses "Venus" to designate, specifically, sexual desire.)

Now, this is neither question-begging, because I know what I mean by the word and what I mean to condemn between two men, nor is it individualized and made-up, as though I am using the word in some strange sense that others won't understand. On the contrary, when an English speaker says that there is romantic love between these two people or that one person feels romantic love for this other person, it is quite well understood to be *at a minimum* a sort of "crush," a _cousin_ to sexual feeling even if the person is too young, too innocent, or too high-minded to realize this consciously himself. It is you who are trying to use the term in a non-standard way by removing all _connection_ to sexual feeling from the term.

Now, I absolutely do not acknowledge that the connection of this feeling with a man and a woman *as opposed to* a man and a man as normative was a "Victorian construct." I acknowledge that there is a controversy among scholars as to when this feeling was considered important as a prerequisite *to marriage* in the Western world, as opposed to arranged marriages and the like. But that is unrelated to this point: When the feeling is/was on the scene, it was normally associated with a man and a woman *at least*, though (as in some courtly love documents) one of them might be married to someone else, raising interesting moral questions. Nor does Petrarch or Philip Sidney dodge these moral questions, though they don't always come to the same conclusion. In the King Arthur stories, of course romantic feeling leads to full-fledged adultery between Lancelot and Guinevere. But that is all quite different from taking it to be *normal* for such feeling to be associated with male-male or female-female relationships.

So that I bring it up before you do, the "lovely boy" Shakespearean sonnets are something of an anomaly, and prima facie I consider them unhealthily homosexual in tenor, though some of the greatest literature ever penned. But I find no convincing evidence that *romantic love* between persons was taken to have some meaning *utterly divorced* from sexual feeling, even indirectly. (Indeed, Shakespeare isn't entirely divorcing it from sexual feeling in the sonnets, as witness his jealousy on *both sides* in the latter sonnets when the "lovely boy" is evidently having sex with the "dark mistress.")

William Luse said...

Look at Newman's sermon on friendship

This has been happening a lot in recent years, but dragging Newman into service for the cause of abolishing essential distinctions is a perversion of everything he stood for.

Saying "let's get rid of race," doesn't mean we get rid of differences in skin color,etc..

Still trying to "bootstrap" the race disanalogy.

A Sinner said...

"Romance" means "a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life." In this sense it describes mountain-climbing adventures and high church liturgy as much as "romantic" love.

But that's just the point! It is this quality of mystery, excitement, and extraordinary "enthusiasm" which characterizes those loves we call romantic as "romantic."

In former times (and yes, now again perhaps with the "bromance" concept) this was not seen as excluded from friendships other than the marital friendship. For some reason it got bootstrapped exclusively to sexual relationships. But that's not a good thing, it's a sign or symptom of a sickness in our society surrounding sex/marriage.

I'm not really sure I buy the sort of "strict distinctions" between philia, eros, storge, etc. At the end of the day, love is love, and while we can distinguish between different social contexts for it and different modes or scripts for expressing it based on the specific nature of the relationship, trying to create some sort of taxonomy of private subjective emotional experiences seems a rather futile effort. My concern morally would be how the passions are utilized to motivate good or bad acts.

Furthermore, if you'd admit of a distinction between Eros and Venus, then it's unclear why you would bootstrap the one to the other. We know they're related, obviously. But when it comes to morality, I would think that only homosexual "Venus" would be problematic and intrinsically disordered. "Eros" in the broader sense invoked in the Symposium, in the Phaedrus, and even in Pope Benedict's recent encyclical Deus Caritas Est...is a love that is "attracted" and not merely disinterested, a love of beauty, and it is unclear what is problematic about that unless it becomes "Venus."

I am not at all trying to remove "all connection" of the term to sexual desire, because they are all love! But "cousins" are not the same thing at all, and I should not be condemned for my cousin's excesses.

Again, I would look at the experience of anger. Your argument would be like accusing the person who was arguing for the legitimacy of righteous or constructively-channeled anger (which is, after all, merely what we call the emotional state of perceived injustice) of "trying to remove all connection between that and Wrath."

But they wouldn't be trying to "remove all connection" at all. Wrath is an abuse of anger, an excessive expression of anger, a disordered anger inasmuch as it is invoked as a passion to motivate destruction rather than constructively rectifying injustice. But just because all Wrath is anger, doesn't mean all anger is Wrath. There is, I suppose, always the "danger" of anger becoming wrath so one must be careful but "An abuse does not nullify a proper use."

Anymouse said...

I hope I am not retreading A Sinner's points, but I do think you are potentially missing the significance of what happened at the middle part of the 19th century.

There was no mechanical devices and few surgeries intended for the prevention of masturbation before the middle part of the 19th century.

Modern theories of sexuality, hetero, homo, or pedophilic, had only just begun to emerge before the middle part of the 19th century. Things were simply not regulated or categorized that way in traditional and pre-modern societies.

I find it well within the purview of traditional Christian thought to aim for the extermination of both modern and postmodern view on life, women, adolescence, and human sexuality more broadly. I find it quite hard to see how that would make me a post-modernist.

Lydia McGrew said...

A.S.,let me try to be clear:

When I am talking about "romantic reelings," I am talking about a particular type of emotion. Sometimes we call it a crush, sometimes it is loftier, sometimes reciprocated and sometimes not. But it's a type of emotion. Now, some of us have had it and some of us, I suppose, haven't. It's a little bit like a taste. If you've never tasted an orange or a lemon and I tell you that they share a citrus-y quality, you will just keep telling me they have different DNA, so you can't understand why in the world I would categorize their flavors as similar. But someone who has tasted them both knows what a citrus-y quality is in a taste and knows that they both have it.

Now, perhaps you never have had what I am calling "romantic feelings." I really don't know. But if you have had such, then you are just deliberately obfuscating with your broader or more general terminology.

There is a particular quality to what I am referring to as romantic feelings which is related to sexual feelings *in a way that friendship by itself is not*. Again, either you've had the emotion or you haven't. Such a feeling isn't sexual per se but also shares something *beyond just being a species of affection or love* with sexual feelings. They are both on the erotic side as opposed to the friendship side. One might say that romance is to sexual desire as Mogen David is to whiskey. One is sweeter, more drinkable, perhaps even cloying to the palate. The other is harsher to the taste, stronger, gets you drunk a lot faster. But they are both alcoholic beverages and both will eventually get you drunk if taken in sufficient quantities.

In my opinion, anyone who has experienced both what I am calling romantic affection and sexual attraction will understand what I am getting at perfectly well and is being disingenuous if he denies it.

In charity, I will assume that the reason you keep talking as though you cannot figure out what I mean and insisting that I just must be wrong is because you haven't experienced one or the other of these feelings.

Admiration, even hero-worship, strong and constant friendship, willingness to sacrifice for the other. None of these encompass the entirety of what I am talking about in "romantic emotion."

Lydia McGrew said...

Anymouse, I'm afraid I just do not see *any* good to be gained by "deconstructing heterosexuality." None whatsoever. I don't really care of someone _calls_ it a "modernist construct." Any such statement, taken in any interesting sense, is just false. I haven't the slightest interest in 19th century theories of sexuality, but from the time I first heard the term "heterosexuality," I understood it merely to mean what mankind from the dawn of human history has thought of as normal attraction between the sexes. This has taken various legitimate forms in various cultural contexts. The most common and constant of these is plain or garden variety sexual desire of man to woman and woman to man. In some cultures there are also such things as chivalry, romance, and the like. It is simply invidious to load heterosexuality in this broad sense down with a bunch of weird Freudian baggage and then tell us we have to "deconstruct" _that_. Moreover, I have argued at some length that we lose a great deal in the raising of boys as men and girls as women if we try to do any such thing. To my mind, what Hannon is arguing for would result in the "extermination" of a lot that is important and _good_, not to mention necessary for understanding and properly channeling the psychology of normal people, and simply calling it "modern" doesn't make it so.

Lydia McGrew said...

Moreover, Hannon expressly argues from "queer theorists" and postmodernists. That's what he's using to make his post and his point. If he's going to lean on an intellectually bankrupt set of theories, then he has to take the consequences--viz., that the intellectual bankruptcy will be pointed out.

Lydia McGrew said...
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Lydia McGrew said...

Another point worth stressing: Because we aren't obligated to treat heterosexual inclinations and homosexual inclinations on a par, it is a completely consistent position to say that homosexuality should _not_ be treated as a part of identity and also should not readily be assumed to be immutable but that heterosexuality _should_ be treated as part of one's identity and should be readily assumed to be immutable.

It certainly has done a lot of harm to assume that a boy who, say, experiences some homosexual feelings when going through the emotional turmoil of adolescence must simply "be gay." Well _after_ the alleged development of homosexuality as a category, it was often assumed that such feelings were transient and that a man did not need to say, "Oh, then I must really _be_ bisexual" if he went through a homosexual stage or phase in, say, boarding school and then went on to have a happy marriage with a woman. Of course I'm not endorsing his adolescent homosexual behavior! Absolutely not. My point is simply that it was not until _quite_ recently (long, long after the 1860's) that it was assumed that any homosexual feelings or even actions were indications of an immutable sexual inclination. I think that holding open the possibility of a purely transient homosexual phase was a good thing. The psychological effects of telling young people that sexual feelings for the same sex are automatically an indication of immutable homosexual orientation are no doubt many cases of self-fulfilling prophecy.

But it doesn't follow that we should take heterosexual feelings to be similarly transient and fluid. This is because homosexual sexual urges are indeed unnatural and therefore are more likely to be part of a passing phase, perhaps arising from sexual confusion during one's youth. To be sure, there are people who report _constant_ and _unvarying_ struggles with same-sex attraction and who would insist that no such self-fulfilling prophecy has taken place in their case. I'm not saying that no such people exist, simply that our society jumps to that conclusion about anyone with SSA too readily. I'm also stressing that one need not "deconstruct" the constant nature and unvarying nature of _heterosexual_ desire and assume some kind of fluidity of all human sexuality in order to have doubts about the immutability of _homosexual_ desire. Again, this is because the former is according to nature, according to God's design for the human body, and the latter is not. It therefore stands to reason that the former would be more stubborn than the latter, and empirically that also appears to be so.

In general what we need to challenge and get rid of (the postmodernists would no doubt not be able to resist saying "deconstruct" if they happened to agree with me on this) is _not_ the "gay-straight binary" but rather the straitjacket of a false gay-straight symmetry. We simply don't have to say all the same things about heterosexuality that we say about homosexuality.

A Sinner said...

While I'm not going to get into my own personal life, I will say this: I've known gay men who have found themselves in love with a woman (but not sexually attracted), sexually attracted to a woman (but not in love), and both at once with a woman. I've known straight men who have found themselves unexpectedly in love with a man, sexually attracted to a man, and both at once.

Why/how is this possible? For one, because "sexual orientation" is an artificial construct and in that sense a lie. But two, because romance and sexual attraction, while related, are also separate, and indeed sometimes QUITE separate (read the journal article on the two separate sociobiological mechanisms for each).

Are they both the wine of eros? Sure, you can say that. But I don't really see why its a problem. Alcohol is not an issue as long as you don't "get drunk."

Lydia McGrew said...
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Lydia McGrew said...

I am going to take it, then, that by your ready use of phrases such as "in love with" and by your casual acceptance of the fact that being romantically in love with and sexually attracted to are both the "wine of eros," you and I do in fact both understand a relevantly similar idea by "romance." This, I would say, makes your talk of mountain climbing, adventure, and so forth, as if in contrast to what I would mean by erotic affection, irrelevant and, if I may say so, sophistical and misleading. As is your quite deliberate blurring of the lines between erotic affection and friendship. Given that we _do_ both know what we are talking about and that we _are_ talking about the same thing, then you _should_ know why it is a problem for, in that sense, a man to be "in love with" a man or a woman "in love with" a woman. It really just would be fruitless repetition for us to continue to debate the point.

c matt said...

it wasn't constructed as an expression of heterosexuality

So what? The thing - heterosexuality - existed. It just may not have been named, which is essentially all that "cosntructed" really means. You place far too much importance on the concept of "constructing" (a modernist failing among many).

James W Lung said...

The point of "Against Heterosexuality" is to challenge us to embrace a biblical, christian anthropology. We are man and woman. We ought to stop using terms that purport to describe something that does not exist.

Lydia McGrew said...

I completely disagree. Because we are man and woman, God's natural plan for mankind is for men and women to be sexually attracted to one another and for godly, fruitful marriages to be the result of this natural attraction. That we are man and woman means that God made man for woman and woman for man. This is what many of us mean by "heterosexuality," and the last thing our culture needs is for that natural binary to come under the knife of the destructive nihilism known as deconstruction.

Joan of Argghh! said...

"In Heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are as the angels."

The Church: postmodern before it was cool.

Lydia McGrew said...

Yeah, that must mean Jesus is on-board with "deconstructing heterosexuality." Pay no attention to that "male and female created he them" behind the curtain.

Sigh.

Joan of Argghh! said...

Oh, *sigh* yourself. No one is deconstructing biology, nature, or nature's God. The author is thinking of others, not you, thinking of ways to address this postmodern age and overcome the obstacles in speaking to a world that no longer even accepts the language of sexuality as valid. Or did you miss the whole subtitle about "Christian witness"? To whom are you witnessing besides the choir? You want to judge him from your keyboard, fine.

He is judo-ing the objections by overtaking them with something surprisingly engaging. He is opening up a pathway to the confused individual and making room for them to question their foundations: if they wish to cloak their sin in postmodern mutilations of language, he goes them one better.

I think it brilliant, but then, I am ever thinking of how to speak to a postmodern world, living as I do at ground-zero for well-heeled hipsters and precious snowflakes that have never been challenged to think outside the narratives.

Jesus famously crosses the decent cultural boundaries of racial and sexual interaction, and goes on to oppress the natural desires of the woman at the well. Even her natural desire for God is rebuffed as confused and ill-informed.

He didn't get into theology or natural affections with the Pharisees, He went them one better, a whole level of existence better. They thought they could trap this country bumpkin clinging to an after-life by holding him to THEIR interpretations of a life they couldn't imagine.

The point is, for all of our clinging to our sexuality, Jesus calls us higher. Hannon is about to answer that call in the priesthood. One can imagine that he has all the focus of a man resigned to his death. So should we all.

Lydia McGrew said...

Your most recent comment is more or less contentless, as is usually the case with vague comments about "speaking to a postmodern world." I have responded to Hannon in detail both in the post and in previous comments. The answer to postmodernism is not to be more postmodern than the postmoderns but rather to affirm the truth. The apostles and Our Lord never caused confusion about the truth by any of their methods. Yet that is what Hannon is doing. My own opinion is that Hannon himself does not understand heterosexual love, romance, and attraction or how those are an expression of God's good creative genius. Why or how it comes that he doesn't understand that, I don't know. But his entire approach indicates that lack of understanding, which brings about an extremely unfortunate attempt to equalize heterosexual and homosexual attraction. The same is evident in the commentator "a sinner" throughout this thread.

Now you are wasting further time with a lot of blah-blah about trying to reach a postmodern world which, in a weary pattern, attempts to invoke the practice of Jesus for "being edgy."

I am not minded to waste my time further with such contentless silliness, and am seriously disinclined to publish your further comments for that very reason.

Lydia McGrew said...

Sour grapes should never be mistaken for asceticism. True, right asceticism acknowledges and understands the goodness of what is given up. That is why giving it up is a gift to God--because it is a good.

Giving up sin and perversion is not asceticism, but giving up heterosexual marriage for the sake of Christ is asceticism, because the latter is a good created by God, but homosexuality is not. Again we have the fundamental asymmetry between homosexual orientation and heterosexual orientation which Hannon does not understand.

A man who tells you that it is prideful to be "food normative"--to say that a desire to eat food is normal but a desire to eat dirt is abnormal--is not pointing towards asceticism. Giving up food when one thinks that the desire for food is just as disordered as the desire for dirt and when one argues that both should be "deconstructed" is not asceticism. It is confusion and despising the good gifts of God. The true ascetic gives up but he does not despise.