Here’s today’s condensed grab bag, concurrently Tweeted and Facebooked:
A Catholic lay religious scholar and a celibate Catholic lesbian exchange views on homosexuality and the Church at Commonweal, reversing the positions one might expect. This piece is a retread from 2007, but it had been a while since I read it and someone else dredged it up.
There’s much to agree with in Luke Timothy Johnson’s contribution — many who get overwrought at same-sex erotic relationships blithely accept the manifold transgression of Biblical norms by heterosexuals — but it seems to me that he really gives away his underlying sentimentalism, a common intellectual vice identified by The Anchoress, when he writes like this:
It is not difficult to understand these positions; indeed, they were probably held by many of us at some point until our lives and the lives of those we love made us begin to question them …
… We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us …
… In my case, I trusted that God was at work in the life of one of my four daughters, who struggled against bigotry to claim her sexual identity as a lesbian. I trusted God was at work in the life she shares with her partner—a long-lasting and fruitful marriage dedicated to the care of others ….
(Emphasis added) HT Russell Powell at Mirror of Justice.
I used to be annoyed by the condescension of people who said, of my opposition to abortion, “you’d feel differently if it were your daughter” (actually, they said “…if it was your daughter”). Apparently, sentimentalism passes for thoughtfulness on the left, as this is exactly the gist of Johnson’s position.
I’ll bet there are examples of sentimentalism on the right, too, but I can’t think of any at the moment. Any examples you care to offer?
I have resisted the urge to tear into some even worse intellectual vices of the Johnson piece.
Eve Tushet ably, and credibly given her own orientation, defends the Catholic Church’s position. It’s enough to turn me all sentimental over her courage.
And my own Church responds to New York’s legislation through one of the jurisdictions’ New York Bishop. After admonishing the Faithful with reminders of the Christian view of marriage and sexuality, he addresses deviations from that view:
Gay marriage or any other unblessed sexual activity is not the love that the Lord extols. Because “we have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16), no matter what the government or society may say, like St. Peter and the Apostles, “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). We need not be afraid to stand in opposition to prevailing trends, as the early Christians stood bravely and boldy, upholding heterosexual monogamous marriage in the non-Christian empire of their time.
Having said this, we must never forget the Lord’s greatest commandment of love, which includes, after loving God above all else, the imperative, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). This means we must never condemn anyone, but reach out to everyone with the living, healing, saving love of God in Christ Jesus. It means to walk in truth toward all, to do what is right for all, and to affirm what is good and holy on behalf of all.
As I said, it’s not frantic or despairing. We are living in a neo-pagan world. Get used to it.
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Two Chinese dissidents freed this week. Is something big afoot in China?
I’ve noted (and lamented) that we have more prisoners than any country in the world. I wonder if that would shift if we counted those not in prison, but in asylums, in other countries (we having “deinstitutionalized” on a massive scale during my adult life)? This is prompted by an article in the Atlantic on neuroscience’s insights into the brain’s influence on transgressive behavior. I’m far from fully “on board” with the author, but our jails do have a heckuva lot of of mentally ill people in them, whose volition in their acts was dubious.
“When your only tool’s a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” When your only tool is jail, every deviant behavior looks criminal.
Still, I’m mindful of C.S. Lewis’ insight that the humanitarian theory of justice can be scary. Punishment has limits; cure can take forever. Maybe that’s why communist countries loved the asylum model.
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I’m glad for this small indication that my reservations about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. are not totally idiosyncratic, and that the pedestal may topple. “Three generations of imbeciles is enough,” he wrote in an endorsement of eugenic sterilization. That’s always been my main reason for failure to venerate him.
Bon appetit!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 