Taki's Magazine

Child Sacrifice

2012-12-14T04:00:18Z

What do the government’s Equal Marriage Consultation 2012, the article “Same-sex marriage is a true Tory principle,” and the letter signed by 19 senior Tories launching their Freedom to Marry campaign have in common?

Answer: Not once in any of these documents are the words “child” or “children” mentioned. The “conservative” website also manages to neglect to mention the terms “father,” “mother,” “parent,” and “family” (here resembling the current French draft legislation for same-sex marriage where the terms “pere” and “mere” are consigned to oblivion).

One of the letter’s signatories, Matthew Parris, called earlier this year for the deletion of word “marriage” from legal language. (He has apparently come around to the view that marriage is so sacred it must not be abolished, but open to all.)

Redefining fundamental terms such as marriage and excluding from consideration vulnerable persons designated by other words (e.g., “child”) in the name of “equality” or “choice” is usually associated with totalitarians, revolutionaries, and abortionists.

“Marriage exists because some sexual acts between a man and a woman can produce biologically related offspring.”

When the consultation document came out, many people noted this extraordinary omission (presumably after they got over their surprise that the proposal had never been so much as mentioned in the coalition parties’ manifestos or in their postelection Coalition Agreement).

The assumption running throughout the documents is that marriage is only for couples—and not at all about raising the next generation and providing children with a committed mother and father.

Marriage is a pre-political institution. It comes before the state, and neither state nor church has the moral right to seek to redefine this basic natural institution.

Marriage exists because some sexual acts between a man and a woman can produce biologically related offspring. As an institution marriage is aimed at procreating and at educating children, even if this “fertile structure” does not always have a “fertile result.” Sexual fidelity is necessary not only because love, loyalty, and support are good things for any friendship, but because strict fidelity is necessary for fulfilling marriage’s specific nature for the procreation, protection, and maturation of children.

Sexual fidelity among homosexuals, even those in long-term relationships, is comparatively rare, and some conservative supporters of same-sex marriage such as Andrew Sullivan claim a “gay conception” of fidelity (i.e., tolerance of sexual encounters outside marriage) is something that can help heterosexuals improve their own marriages.

To denature marriage is to remove the idea that a child has a natural right to know and be cared by his/her biological parents. The unique relationship of marriage will no longer be especially recognized or honored as two (or more?) men or two women or some combination will be able to “marry.” In this way the vertical nature of marriage and familial relations is replaced with a horizontal “couple” (or group?) conception. If children are involved at all in these relationships, it may well be because the couple has intentionally created a rupture of the child’s biological ties even before the child’s deliberate conception via a sperm or ovum donor and/or surrogate mother. Supporters of gay marriage deny the meaning of those ties. Adult sexual rights therefore trump the rights and needs of children.

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Laughably our authors point to Canada as an example of same-sex marriage legislation’s success. Polygamists have sought to exploit same-sex marriage legislation on the grounds that it unjustly discriminates against them, there being no logical way of insisting on monogamy after reducing marriage to mere contractual cohabitation where there is no internal reason for lifelong cohabitation, let alone cohabitation between two people only.

Conservatism, if it means anything, means helping to ensure that the social order respects the moral order, which is universal and absolute and is the rock on which all talk of human rights is ultimately grounded. To allow civil marriage to be redefined in this way is to fail to recognize a natural and pre-political reality, which is the fundamental group unit of society and the common good. The hubris involved in this proposal is as momentous as that which would be involved in redefining ourselves as human beings.

The trouble is, this revolutionary move will harm our society’s most vulnerable members. It will make the breakdown or avoidance of marriage more likely by refusing to see the binding nature of marriage that can turn a person into a parent as opposed to a mere sperm or egg donor.

To those conservatives who wish to retreat to their churches and give up on civil marriage law, don’t think you can neglect it and stay safe in your churches. Aidan O’Neill QC, a leading authority on EU law, rightly warns us of what he believes will be the legislation’s devastating legal consequences. To those in doubt, look at what is happening in schools in Massachusetts or to the national Church in Denmark with regard to obliging bishops to accommodate same-sex marriages—something O’Neill thinks may be a consequence of our own proposed legislation. Already a registrar has lost her job for refusing to officiate at same-sex civil partnerships. Another man was demoted and—even after a tribunal found in his favor—impoverished merely for expressing mild opposition to same-sex marriages taking place in churches. It is the habit of governments to make guarantees that they have no right to make.

Supporters of same sex-marriage have lied again and again in attempts to reassure us, from the passage of the Civil Partnership Act all the way through to the Equal Marriage Consultation and Church weddings. Our views are sought via a public consultation whose outcome is preempted by a breezy government resolve to simply go ahead and do it anyway. Boris Johnson, hardly a great respecter of marriage, has said of the legislation that he wants to “whack it through” and then “we” can talk “about the real conservative things we want to do.”

Let us not be intimidated by those who seem to lack any gratitude for, or grasp of, a great communal blessing, but state the truth calmly and in so doing, give witness to that greatest of natural blessings—marriage. In so doing, we stand for true spousal love, and in solidarity with the most vulnerable human beings.

Anthony McCarthy can be contacted at asdmccarthy@hotmail.com.

Image of wedding bands courtesy of Shutterstock

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Have Condoms Penetrated the Catholic Church?

2010-12-04T09:30:29Z

The pope said that condom use to prevent the transmission of HIV is “a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more humane sexuality.” This admission is the Catholic hierarchy’s own first step in addressing the realities about sex and sexuality.
—Catholics for Choice press release, November 21, 2010

Pope Benedict’s latest statement on condoms has provoked a storm of different reactions. Orthodox Catholics have rushed to say that the media has gratuitously misrepresented the Pope’s words, and that what he has said is simply true and commendable and changes nothing. The Pope has done no wrong: it is all the fault of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano for premature and selective quoting from a mistranslated text. An orthodox ethics centre described the Pope’s comments as “significant and thoughtful” adding that “some theologians may well argue that this paves the way for a new Vatican policy of at least tolerating the distribution of condoms: which it may to some extent.” The Pope was not, however, justifying use of condoms.

In the1960s many Catholics expected that the Church would change her mind on the question of contraception. Sexual liberation and population control were two growth areas at the time, and a great deal of US elite Foundation money was pumped into promoting both worldwide and covertly inside the papal commission which urged the Church to change.

In 1968, Pope Paul VI definitively reiterated the Church’s traditional teaching by issuing the encyclical Humanae Vitae.

Why is the teaching of Humanae Vitae, whatever we might think of it, so important? Elizabeth Anscombe, the philosopher, bluntly pointed out that “If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be, after all, to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery…But, if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse for example…you will have no solid reason against these things.”

In 1930, at the 7th Lambeth Conference of the Church of England, approval was given to married couples for the use of birth control in hard cases. The current Archbishop of Canterbury recently admitted that this move did indeed open the way to acceptance of the very things Anscombe mentioned - something he, unlike her, appears to welcome.

“However fallible we may be when it comes to sexual matters, we should not have to accept the agenda of those neo-Malthusians who like to flood countries with condoms under the guise of healthcare while refusing to give real aid to those in need.”

Using a condom to prevent the transmission of disease is not contraception, if there is no intent to prevent conception. However, there is reason to see the Church’s teaching as applying to all condomistic sexual acts, regardless of whether there is any intent to contracept. For, on the Church’s view, the only morally good sexual acts are those of a married couple who are truly united, in a way that refers to conception even in the infertile. Sexual love is about a physical uniting: in the process of loving, procreation can occur and in the openness to procreation, love is expressed. By extension, a condom used for disease-prevention, even by a married couple, makes an act incapable of being a truly unifying act. The act, like an act of buggery, is no longer capable of expressing the unity that only an act open to procreation can achieve.

Condoms are not, the Pope says, “a real or moral solution” to the problem of AIDS. Nonetheless, there may be a “basis” (or persons may be ‘justified’ (begründete)) in the case of some individuals (male prostitutes, say), where using a condom “can be a first step in the direction of a moralisation” (though surely not sexual moralisation) even if “not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection”.

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Since “basis” or “justification” cannot mean objective moral justification of something (condom use) which the Pope appears here to condemn, it must mean some kind of grounding from the person’s own perspective and/or a factual basis for some process of ‘moral awakening’, due to the good motivations involved. Well, that wouldn’t directly contradict the prohibition of condoms. But why on earth say this?

The Pope seems to be recognising an element of concern for others which (necessarily wrongful) preparation for wrongful acts - e.g the homosexual prostitute donning a condom for sex, or the pilot dropping the less-than-effective radiation suits to the inhabitants of a city as a preparatory act for nuking it - may nonetheless involve. Such people may indeed be moving in the direction of greater humanity in the midst of very serious moral evil (but mightn’t that make them more morally culpable too?).

The Papal spokesman, Fr Lombardi, later claimed that Pope Benedict had said his comments also applied to female prostitutes. A man using a condom who has sex with a prostitute is showing some concern for her and his own health; he is also, on at least one view of Catholic teaching, engaged in perverse (as opposed to natural) sex – as is always the case with homosexual prostitutes. So while the heterosexual client’s choice to use a condom is better from one perspective, in that it shows a glimmering of concern for others, it is worse from another perspective.

Millions have, mistakenly but understandably, concluded that the Pope is recommending condoms – at least for male and female prostitutes. But in any case, Christian life is all about living a life of the theological and natural virtues, and virtue is all about the formation of good moral habits. Is the beginning of the virtue of chastity, in particular, to be found in preparing to engage in sex with a condom? To appear to suggest this seems a betrayal of prostitutes who need to be helped out of their bondage.

Why does all of this matter, especially to those who think the Church is not a little crazy on the subject of sex? Well, if we care about our civilization and about the institution of marriage, we need to be aware of those forces which seek to tear down the one institution that still propounds an exalted view of human sexuality, and for that reason says a firm ‘No’ to the many things that degrade our culture. However fallible we may be when it comes to sexual matters, we should not have to accept the agenda of those neo-Malthusians who like to flood countries with condoms under the guise of healthcare while refusing to give real aid to those in need. That they are hugging themselves with glee over the Pope’s remarks and subsequent silence is a reason to be worried. That they are praising him should make him sleep a little less easy at night.

Anthony McCarthy, an ethicist, can be contacted at asdmccarthy@hotmail.com

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