Needless to say, a man who takes advantage of a woman by having sexual intercourse with her while she doesn’t know what is happening is a rapist, and should be punished to the full extent of the law.  But let’s not talk about that.  Let’s talk about voluntary sex with voluntary drunkenness.

Most people who hook up with strangers – both men and women -- are buzzed when they do it.  In fact, they get buzzed because they intend to hook up. 

Why do they do this?  Does intoxication make sex better?  Of course not; it makes it worse.  So what are the reasons?  I can suggest a few.

One is that hooking up with strangers is actually rather hard to do.  It’s harder for women, but even for men it’s not as easy as one might think.  The truth of the matter is that we aren’t made for sex without relationship.  So you may have to be a little drunk to go through with it.

Another is that people tend to feel guilty about that kind of sex.  If you weren’t quite sober, you can pretend to yourself afterward, “I wasn’t myself.  I wasn’t responsible.”  So to prepare your excuse, you get a little drunk ahead of time.

Want confirmation?  In their study “Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right,” sociologists Norval Glenn and Elizabeth Marquardt write, “A notable feature of hook ups is that they almost always occur when both participants are drinking or drunk. … A number of students noted that being  drunk  could  later  serve  as  your  excuse  for  the  hook  up.  A  Yale University student said, ‘Some people like hook up because they’re drunk or use being drunk as an excuse to hook up.’

They continue, “A  New York University student observed, ‘[Alcohol is] just part of an excuse, so that you can say, oh, well, I was drinking.’  A Rutgers University student commented, ‘If you’re drinking a lot it’s easier to hook up with someone... [and] drugs, it’s kind of like a bonding thing ... and then if you hook up with them and you don’t want to speak to them again, you can always blame it on the drinking or the drugs.’”

People who really believe there is nothing wrong with how they live don’t need to make excuses for it.  Nor do they need to make their minds too foggy to think about it.  So-called liberation has tied us in knots. 

We should always reason logically, but right reason isn’t just about logical arguments.  The pain of growing up in a broken home deeply affects how some of my students think about the natural laws of marriage, family, and sexuality.  Sometimes they draw the wrong lessons.

One young man told me that he longed for a loving, faithful, and permanent marriage, but his own mother and father hadn’t managed it.  Since he loved them, he simply couldn’t bring himself to think that he would be able to do what they hadn’t been able to.  What he longed for, he concluded, was impossible.  Ironically, his very desire to follow the commandment to honor his parents made him despair of following the one about being faithful forever to his wife.

On the other hand, some of my students react strongly against the notion that honor really is owed to mothers and fathers.  Intensely and persistently, they ask what kind of honor could be owed to bad parents.  Their challenge doesn’t have the feel of a hypothetical thought experiment.  One cannot help but think that some of them are thinking of their own mothers or fathers, or perhaps about the parents of persons close to them.

At the other end of this spectrum of feelings, a young woman in one of my classes found it difficult to accept the ideal of marriage as an enduring union between the mother and father just because she was so fiercely protective of her own mother, who had raised her alone with no help.  It seemed to her that to say that a child needs both a Mom and a Dad was a slur on her own beloved Mom – until she talked with her Mom about it and discovered that Mom didn’t agree.  Yes, her mother told her, it would have been better and easier had her father had been there to help, but she had never before spoken with the girl about it.

And then there was the student who sadly wrote about being born out of wedlock, “I am just a product of a violation of the natural law.”  That kind of statement breaks my heart.

I answered her, “No natural law thinker would ever say that about you.  Every human being is a person, a who, not just a what.  Thomas Aquinas rightly said that the word person signifies ‘that which is most perfect in all nature.’  The value of a human person cannot be diminished by so much as a feather’s weight just because of the circumstances of his or her conception.”

Mothers and fathers, if you are having difficulties, I hope you will resist the temptation to think of divorce as an escape.  If only you close that door, it will be much easier to work things out.  One day your children will bless you for it.

And although, by itself, the natural law can’t help to follow the natural law, there is also the grace of God.

A reader sends this anecdote:

“My nephew and I talked last night about abortion.  I could tell that he was troubled by the fact that at the earliest stage in his or her development, the developing child looks like a glob of cells.  “‘Most people can’t connect that picture with a baby,’ I remarked, ‘because that’s not how babies look.’

“He looked at me and asked, ‘So what’s your answer?’

“I pulled out a picture of a little girl and asked, ’Do you know who this is?’

“‘No,’ he answered.

“‘It’s your grandmother when she was four years old.  Does she look like your Gramma?”

“’Not a bit.’

“‘And yet, they’re the same person.  So what the embryo, or the child, or the grandmother looks like doesn’t really help answer the question, ‘Who is this?’

“A lightbulb seemed to go off for him.  Just thought I would pass it on.”

Sanctuary cities have been much in the news lately.  The idea of cities of refuge is biblical, of course.  They were for those who were in danger of being killed in retaliation for an accidental death.  Far from being means of escaping from law, in fact they were established by law.  So what were then called sanctuary cities were refuges from private revenge -- but what we now call sanctuary cities are refuges from public authority.  These are very different things.

Related:

Civil Disobedience

I doubt that we give enough thought to what we mean by the common good, because a good may be common, or shared, in a number of different ways:

Type 1.  It may be like the good of conversation for those participating in it:  Unless they are competing for approval, if the conversation is better for some, it is better for all.

Type 2.  It may be like the good of a bridge:  This is a “public” good as economists use the term, so that if one has the benefit, all have it, unless access is artificially restricted.

Type 3.  It may be like the good of national security:  This is another public good in the economic sense, except in this case it is hard to see how access even could be restricted.  If invaders are kept out of the country for me, they are also kept out of the country for you.

Type 4.  It may be like the good of virtue:  You get one kind of benefit from having it, but I get another kind of benefit from the fact that you have it -- and if you have greater virtue than I do, you didn’t get it by taking it from me.

There are some things that are often called common goods, that aren’t.  For example, the so-called aggregate pleasure of which utilitarians speak is not a common good in any reasonable sense.  In the first place, pleasure can’t be aggregated.  But even if it could, some things that give one person pleasure may give other persons pain.

And then there some things that are often called common goods, but may or may not be.  For example, it’s not hard to see why the country’s prosperity is called a common good, because we do all share material needs.  But it is really a common good only if I can get more than I have without making you poorer; otherwise it isn’t.  Whether this is possible depends on our social arrangements.

Related:

Envy

Faith, Natural Law, and the Common Good