For new readers:
Introduction to the blog (2013)
I would rather write about what sexuality is meant to be than about what can go wrong with it. But it isn’t always possible to make resolutions of one’s preferences. Sometimes one has to pause to blow away the smoke, or no one can see anything at all.
Perhaps this is one of those times. Important questions about law and disordered sexuality are about to come before the Supreme Court. Not coincidentally, editorialists and bloggers are getting into the act. An item in one of the New York newspaper blogs even asserts the paradoxical opinion that properly understood, natural law supports unnatural sexual acts.
Reduced to a near-syllogism, the argument runs like this:
1. Some homosexual writers say homosexual behavior fulfills them.
2. Therefore homosexual behavior fulfills them.
3. Natural law supports fulfillment.
4. Therefore natural law supports homosexual behavior.
Some people who suffer same-sex attractions disagree with what the activists say in their name, but let us not turn this into a you-say, I-say brawl. The greater problem is that fulfillment is not whatever someone says it is.
Some heterosexual men claim infidelity fulfills them; some even say bringing a third person into the bedroom deepens their intimacy with their wives. Would the author agree with them too?
Like everything else about us, genuine fulfillment has a pattern, one we defy at our peril. This pattern is embedded in our nature, in the kind of being that humans are. Yet the author -- a philosopher who ought to know better -- has nothing to say about our nature.
Let us leave his essay aside. Beginning tomorrow I will offer a few reflections about the broader topic.
This seven-part series is adapted from my chapter in a book to be published by Ignatius Press.